Thank You, Rochelle

What does your writer/artist-community look like? This week, I’ve been thinking lots about my community, or communities to be specific, and find myself evermore grateful for all the support I’ve managed to find for my creativity over the years. This is not without effort, of course, because the world does not usually come crawling to kiss your feet. Maybe especially the writing world. In many ways, to be an artist is to go it alone – so to gather together, to create, a circle of like-minded or like-creative friends and acquaintances is not an abracadabra-it’s-here happening.

For me, first there was the group that poet-therapist Rochelle Brener led at the Capital District Psychiatric Center years ago, called Relatives Writing Workshop. These were the gatherings that brought me back to writing. To join, you had to have a relative or close friend with a mental illness. Finding this group – and Rochelle – in 1992 was a god(dess)-send, all the way through to its closure in 1995. It was Rochelle who handed me my first brochure for the International Women’s Writing Guild summer conference, which I finally attended in 1995 (and haven’t missed since). When I decided to create a writing group emulating the inspiring, supportive IWWG event’s atmosphere, it was at Rochelle Brener’s newly opened Mandala Center for Creative Wellness that WomanWords first came together. We continued to meet there for almost five years, until my friend moved to Sedona.

I think of all the networking – the communities – that have come out of that life-changing moment when I first saw the tiny blurb about Relatives Writing Workshop in some newsletter. IWWG led to WomanWords, WomanWords to meeting so many gifted women, who led me to the active open mic scene in the Upper Hudson/Mohawk River area of New York State, to the Hudson Valley Writing Guild. WomanWords also resulted in my organizing smaller writing groups- Wild Women Writing, Beach Writers, a 4-person poetry feedback group. Through writers and artists encountered in all these communities, I’ve gotten acquainted with others, attended workshops, friended folks on Facebook. The connections go on and on.

No wonder the WomanWords logo includes a spider web, symbolizing the ever-widening connections between women writers. It goes beyond women to ALL writers. Each thread affirms the spirit and enthusiasm with which we honor our words. Our stories are everyone’s stories, individualized and universal.

Rochelle passed away in Sedona two years ago this past March. How do you thank someone who gave you a gift you already possessed but needed to own? What do you say about a person who gave so much of herself to everyone she encountered, yet would tell you she received as much and more in return? You can’t “miss” an angel when you know she sits on your right shoulder always, and yet sometimes you’d love to hear her voice, get another e-mail from her with her latest poem or announcement about her activities.

Here’s a poem I wrote at a workshop with John Fox, author of Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making (http://www.poeticmedicine.com/), late last year. I believe the prompt was to write to someone asking their assistance with something, perhaps in letter or prayer form. For me, the result speaks to all Rochelle was, as much as it entreats her spirit for a little help in areas in which I could use it! (Still haven't figured out how to stop Blogger from destroying my poem's format, so this one's off too!)


INVOKING ROCHELLE*
by Marilyn Zembo Day

Teach me to listen, dear friend,
for the bubbling undercurrent,
the spring from which heart and soul
erupts, where words attempt to describe
a life, a vision, a world unseen by others
yet real in its gifts and inevitable losses.

Show me how to focus, to bring myself
inward, to scratch away unnecessary
scrabble that pulls me further from
streams of consciousness, threatening
to scatter me like white wisps of dandelion
to impotent corners far from my creative self.

Rochelle, bring me to your place of discovery,
shared with so many, that I might produce
even a fraction of what you imparted to a broken
weeping world: words, visions, confidence,
empathy, sympathy, joy — folded into star-studded
packets of poetry, prose, expressive arts.

Keep me from spilling into my tendencies toward
over-doing, spreading into multiple layers
of plans, workshops, appointments. Take me,
instead, into the silence I am learning
to cherish where you, my Muse, remind me

I am called
to create.

I ask this, my once and always friend,
in the names of all goddesses we invoked,
in honor of countless lives you enriched,
for warming light you brought to shadowed faces,

because your torch burns still, in our hearts.

Blessed Be.

*Rochelle Brener (1945-2008), writer, editor, poet-therapist, Senior Poet Laureate of Arizona, artist, photographer, mask maker.


Do I think this is the best of poems? No. But, for me, it is healing. It addresses the woman who showed me how to create real community and to sustain it. Remember that movie title, Pay It Forward? This is what I do, for Rochelle, for Judi Beach, for Hannelore Hahn, for every person (most of whom have been women) who inspired and supported me. And for myself, because my mentors have taught me that to nurture the world, one must first nurture and love one’s Self.

++++++++++

YOUR TURN

• Make a list of your “communities” – groups of people in your life, however formalized or freeform they might be. Writing groups, co-workers, community action groups, art organizations, neighborhood friends, family, etc. Jot down notes about how each supports you. Note also if there are negatives, i.e., do they pull you down sometimes? call your goals pipedreams?
o Choose one group, one member of that group, and write a letter to her/him. Ask their help with something: a project, a personal matter, etc. (Note: all “letters” in this exercise are meant to be “Unsent Letters” although you could really mail them if you like.)
o Write a Thank You note to each community.
o Write a Letter to Self, promising that you will spend more time with the supportive community folks than those making you feel that you can’t write/create, that nothing you will do will ever be good enough, or that you should re-focus on the money-making side of life.

• I re-contacted my favorite high school English teacher years ago, after WomanWorder Judith Prest wrote about letters and meetings with her old English teacher at a WW session where our theme was “Mentors.” While Judy’s teacher has since passed away, I still occasionally have lunch with mine (she moved back to the Capital Region several years ago), often bringing books for the library in her community of Roman Catholic sisters.
o Write about someone who nurtured your desire to write or create art of any kind. Can you recall what s/he looked like? Her/his scent? Put it in the context of the period in time (what did the clothes look like? automobiles driven by this person, if any? anything that will put your mentor in a time and place). How were you mentored? Did this person have faith in your abilities when others didn’t, when you didn’t? Were you reluctant to accept help or encouragement? Do you know where your mentor is today?
o Write a letter to someone who nurtured your creativity. Thank them. Tell them how they did it and what you’re doing now with what s/he taught you. This person may not be alive today; or you might know where s/he lives.
o Write a letter to someone you think needs encouragement, especially in the realm of writing/creativity. Point out specific talents you’ve witnessed in her/her, and give them hope that they can enrich the world with their work. Make them want to make more art, to develop their talents. Tell them about what they may encounter on their artistic path and how to counter negativity.
o Often our mentors aren’t real people in our lives. They’re people in history or books, writers we’ve never met, subjects of news stories who’ve inspired. Write about someone you’ve admired from afar, real or unreal, living or dead—what they did/said that impressed you; how you might like to emulate her/him. This could be in letter form, if you like.

The Writer as MapMaker

The writer is an explorer.
Every step is an advance into new lands.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am thinking quite a lot about maps of late. Mostly, this is because the WomanWords 2009 Retreat is just around the corner (last weekend in April – see the program schedule at http://www.stillpointretreatcenter.com/) and I have many more “organizing” tasks to accomplish, as well as pulling together my workshop program and materials. Our theme is “Directions: Mapping a Woman’s Life.” The problem: the more I read, the more ideas bubble up; the more ideas, the more I wonder how I will boil it down to the couple of short hours and the few related handouts that will be mine to fill (I’ve invited two other writers as additional presenters for the weekend so the onus is not totally on me). It’s a daunting yet creativity-enhancing task in itself.

The seed planted for this theme came from a sister writer’s workshop at the International Women’s Writing Guild (http://www.iwwg.com/) summer conference, an event I attend every year. Colorado poet Marj Hahne (http://www.marjhahne.com/) has offered “Poem as Map” at the conference more than once and, as with all her sessions, it was crowded with participants last June. Over the years, Marj became so enamored with maps (and their potential as writing prompts) that she developed a weeklong set of classes that sparked many Creative Fires, leading to some fabulous poetry (and a few prose pieces as well, I’ll bet!). There is so much fodder for writing here—maps, plans, directions, signposts, geography, paths… the list goes on.

Think about it. The writer sets up a sort of road map for the reader. In a novel, it can be more extensive, taking that reader not only to myriad scenes in different locales, but possibly into other time periods, worlds or universes. What we do, as writers, is set up our piece so that we lead the reader (and ourselves, as we scribble words) into a world we are developing. Setting up a story (or any prose piece) usually demands a plot. A plot is a plan which gives you direction, tells you where you’re headed. Maybe you don’t stick with the original road map, but it’s a guide. As in life, we take side trips or veer off in a totally different direction—but the plan got us started.

The poet also creates a world, inviting readers in for a glimpse. Most poems, however, do not reach Homeric lengths (not novel-length) and so likely do not require elaborate planning. In fact, overplanning a short poem reeks of overkill, as in murdering your Muse. Still, we start off with a thought, a direction in which we expect our writing will proceed. Do we always wind up where we expected? Have you ever begun a poem you thought was about one topic and discovered that the finished work addressed a different one (maybe in conjunction with the starter thought, maybe not)? Ah, visions of “The Road Not Taken” (Robert Frost’s classic)—if you had not veered onto a different path than the original idea, would you ever have written on this theme? If you had forced yourself to stay with the first thought, would it have led to a better poem, a more publishable one, something more universal? Or would the original path have taken you to a dead end?

Aside from the obvious mission of writer-as-explorer, there’s the simple fact that maps—cartography— offer plenty of great writing prompts. Years ago, at a women's spirituality conference, I attended a workshop led by Becky Holder, a popular storyteller in which participants drew maps of the inside of a house/building/flat where they had once lived, preferably in childhood, definitely removed from their present situation. Stories subsequently shared with the group came from that exercise. My friend Judith Prest wrote a wonderful piece from a writing prompt in a memoir session led by Hannelore Hahn, Founder and Director of IWWG, that suggested describing the entrance to a childhood home. That prompt led Judy back to her beloved home in Delaware, where she walked the path to her country home once again (a short essay which eventually aired on public radio).

Marj offered a few “structures” that were helpful too, along with plenty of examples of poems. Although I don’t usually write much during IWWG conference week (I'm there for networking and inspiration), except during classroom sessions, I took time to hone the following poem written in “Poem as Map” because it was the piece I wanted to read during the Evening Readings:


MY HOME TOWN
by Marilyn Zembo Day

If the Oscar-winning actor with the bulldog face
called it the armpit of the world;
if the governor of the state cannot see but has vision,
and the sense not to consort with high-end hookers
(but not sensitivity enough to keep personal affairs in his own pockets;
if you checked the mayor’s closets for a tanning machine
or his desk for Coppertone coupons;
if your car discovered potholes deep enough
to reach cobblestones and trolley tracks;
if film directors searching for early American architecture
drive north to squander cash on sweating thoroughbreds
under the unrelenting August sun;
if winding paths bring bikers past old locks of the Erie Canal
where picnickers toss neon Frisbees
along the muddy Hudson’s shoreline;
if the world can’t remember it exists
because downriver sits the shinier, busier Big Apple;
if every other street, park or landmark sports
a name more common to a tulip-toned country
dependent on dikes and dams for survival;
and if those tulips, early in May, adorn hundreds
of parks and gardens and walkways—
you’re in the only state capital in the country where
a government building masquerades as a giant egg
nesting in its cold, concrete coop.


Another IWWG workshop leader, Maryland poet Carol Peck, has inspired many a writer with an exercise designed to bring back childhood memories. While the specific workshop had nothing to do with maps, per se, it had everything to do with scanning your childhood for sites/sights that evoke memories. Memories of sounds, textures, and more—all of which enrich the writing. As Carol emphasizes, these writing exercises come from other sources and they are to be shared—and so Judy and I sometimes pull out this exercise when we co-lead a journal writing workshop. I often use the following poem as an example:


WHERE I COME FROM
by Marilyn Zembo Day

Where I come from
trees don’t touch the sky
they whither and sometimes die
set in impotent dirt squares
wired against the wind
roots searching for sustenance
slithering and gasping below concrete slab.
no catalytic converters controlled poisons
and the streams were those of Fords and Chevys
wending their way to offices, apartments
and perhaps, occasionally,
toward places where Tree Gods flourished.

Where I come from
huge plate glass windows
threw our reflections back at us
screaming our needs
transistor radios, Frigidaires,
Barbie dolls, G.I. Joes,
Playtex girdles, Timex watches
grab the newest technology
purchase the perfect fad
and your life won’t require
juicy shiny apples, budding green leaves
fresh living air

Where I come from
three dark flights of stairs brought visitors
to blue collar linoleum
cracked walls, cracked wallets
love silent but an undercurrent
flowing beneath poker games and bingo
soap operas and True Confessions
plaster-pitted walls and plastic dime store curtains
better than drafty castles and echoing mansions
bourgeois, lived-in

Where I come from
nature is a picture in National Geographic
or a visit to Aunt Naomi’s
a ride to Uncle Charlie’s camp
Tree Gods still play
where Uncle Charlie fished and rested
and they dawdle and dance yet at my aunt’s
although houses now encroach
not yet concrete graveyards
not like where I come from.


I am intrigued by the routes I might take as I journey toward the 2009 WomanWords Writing and Expressive Arts Retreat. The highway to Still Point is clear enough: I drive Route 9 north from Albany for maybe half-hour/45 minutes and it’s a few more turns and about 10 more minutes until I’m there. But the path to my workshop, to creating road maps for women who want to write that weekend, to making further connections on this short-lived roadtrip of life—these are all part of the mystery, the magic, that is Creativity.

*****
For the folks who might be interested, here’s a list of some books I’ve acquired as I pull my workshop together:

Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer by Peter Turchi
You Are Here: Person Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon
Maps: Finding Our Place in the World edited by James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow Jr.
How to Lie with Maps by Mark Monmonier
Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon



YOUR TURN

1. Let my poem, “My Hometown,” inspire you. Marj Hahne suggested using the “If…” starter, leading to the “then…” conclusion (you don’t have to actually include the word “then” in the poem; I didn’t). What town/village/city do you consider to be your home base? You might make a list of specific memories, definite objects that you recall before starting out. Perhaps you’ll research poems written by others about place and, liking a particular format, you could style your poem similarly. Take your reader there. Make him see the space, feel the emotions, detect the scents. You might name the place or you might not.
2. Another possibility: start with “Where I come from…” and continue on. This works well for many people. Try to use specific images. Work with metaphor (your room was Nancy Drew, paper doll cutouts and dried up watercolor boxes…) and simile (your room was like the mother cave [warm? safe? welcoming?]) to enrich the writing.
3. Where do you go in your mind when the world becomes too chaotic or too wild? My husband was in the Air National Guard years ago with this muscular, seemingly down-to-earth guy who, when someone got bent out of shape about something or seemed sad, would say, “Now go to your happy place.” Maybe that’s a prompt too: who’s the most unlikely person to come out with such a statement? Is there a story in that? Imagine a top exec at a failing manufacturing company coming up with that statement in a strategy-planning meeting, or a terrorist toting a bomb. Write about your imaginary place, or your character’s.
4. Go to a store and buy a map— of a place some distance from you. Or pick up one of those tourist-type maps of an area while visiting a place other than where you live, the kind with cute little icons of houses and hotels and tourists-trap stores. Open the map and let your eyes wander the surface. Let something catch your eye: a name of a place, a river, a juncture of two roads, a continent. Let your imagination go. Write.
5. One of the essays in Chabon’s book (listed above) starts out with the sentence, “I write from the place I live: in exile.” Start an essay or poem with, “I write from the place I live…”
6. Consider the title of another book listed above: How to Lie with Maps. In his introduction, Monmonier states, “A book about how to lie with maps can be more useful than a book about how to lie with words. After all, everyone is familiar with verbal lies, nefarious as well as white, and is wary about how words can be manipulated… yet education in the use of maps and diagrams is spotty and limited, and many otherwise educated people are graphically and cartographically illiterate. Maps, like numbers, are often arcane images accorded undue respect and credibility.” When did you feel a map lied to you? Did you get lost? Was the mileage incorrectly represented? Or did you read the map incorrectly? Another prompt-- from the quote: tell about a white lie you told that backfired on you.
7. Tell a road trip story. Don’t name the places—just give the details about the places, using all, all most, of the senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste).

Getting to Know Me...

How much ego does it take to create a blog? I mean, one has to think, "I have something to say..." or, more to the point, something to say that someone else might want to read-- right? On the other hand, there are plenty of people in the world who seem to just talk (or write) to hear/see their own words. Most of us can make a short list of some of those acquaintances in the time it takes to start-up your computer. I don't think I fall into the latter category (?) and yet I still find myself cataloging the reasons why I'm clicking away at the keys on my laptop at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night-- when I could be delving further into the latest book that's caught my imagination or at least washing a few dishes lingering in the kitchen sink.

When I joined the cyber "poem" group started by local poets Carolee Sherwood and Jill Crammond Wickham and touted on Facebook, I read that poetry written from their prompts should be posted on our blogs or websites so members of the group could offer their feedback. Unfortunately, I had no blog (although I'd been saying I was going to start one for over a year) and my WomanWords website fell off the online wagon a few years ago for lack of time (both mine and my daughter's-- Kristen was doing the set-up for me). I sent a note to the FB group saying I wasn't sure what to do about this. Carolee assured me that I could post my poetry on FB in the Notes section. Given recent hype about FB in the press, I'd been careful NOT to post much there that hadn't already been published somewhere else. So this was the kick-in-the-butt I needed. Reason #1 for A Woman and Her Words.

Reason #2 is simply that I love to write. At times I'm driven to tell a short tale or two about growing up, about something I heard, about something too good not to share. I have a friend in California, Pat G., who says she loves it when I "go into story mode." According to Pat, there's a distinct change in tone in my e-mails when this happens, which is when her eyes open wide and she pays close attention. Lots of times this is when I tell a story about growing up in a large family-- not of siblings but of a multitude of aunts, uncles and cousins. Pat and I have been friends since my first attendance at the International Women's Writing Guild summer conference in 1995, when she was housed for the week in a room next to mine. She's only been able to attend that event perhaps two or three times since then (once my husband Bill and I picked her up at the airport and drove her to the campus), and yet I'd bet she knows me better than many of the people with whom I worked for years in a state agency. Stories do that. Shared words can create bonds.

Under other circumstances, I would say that #3 Reason had something to do with my love affair with paper. I love the look and feel of paper. Paper entices me to do something with it. Fill it with words. Cover it with images, color. Tear it up for collage. It's probably why I started writing. I can remember long afternoons as a kid, no one to play with (my brother was off somewhere, most likely), when I'd open a black-and-white composition book and fill its pages with "lesson plans" and lists of imaginary students. Once I walked the block to Woolworth's, a crisp dollar bill rolled up in the palm of my hand, and bought-- instead of a few comic books or something "normal"-- a rent receipt book. It just called out to be purchased and filled with imaginary tenants. More recently, on vacation in the Maryland/ D.C./ Virginia area, I kept my husband, daughter and two friends waiting while I drooled over tons of items in a "paper" store in Old Town Alexandria (I wound up buying four large, and not cheap, sheets for collage). But certainly blogging isn't about paper, not unless I print my entries and put them into a binder. Hmmm... maybe...

This blog is about Expression. Mine and my readers (I'm assuming I'll have a few). My WomanWords E-Newsletter seems to have been well-received since Day 1, with its Quote, Writing Prompt, list of Books I've read and copious suggestions for submitting work, creative events and other possibilities. Some of that is likely to find its way into A Woman and Her Words, but I'm thinking this is more than a newsletter. The plan is to not have a plan. In the beginning, it will be more like the freewrites we writers should be allowing ourselves to do: it will be allowed to evolve. Especially, it will be about my creative process and I'll be interested in hearing how my process resonates and/or differs from others'.

As an opening, I posting (below) a poem written at the IWWG conference several years ago in a class called "Writing from Our Religious Pasts." The workshop leader was Kathleen O'Shea, a former nun and a writer previously nominated for a Pulitzer for her nonfiction book, Women on the Row. The crux of this class was that so much of our religious past forms us. During the week we wrote from childhood and other "religious" experiences, but our final assignment was to write about what we currently believe. As an introduction to Marilynology (I stole that term from a fun exercise currently going around Facebook-- using your name and adding the "-ology" after it is part of the game), here's the result of Kathleen's final writing prompt-- for me-- at that summer conference:


BELIEF STATEMENT, 6/24/04
by Marilyn Zembo Day

I believe the Divine
is Within and Without
but that those who do not seek Her
Within
will find it difficult to experience Her
Without.

That sometimes the answer
is a question
and the question may lead
to more puzzles
the complexities of which
in themselves
might be answers.

That knowing that I will never know
with absolute certainty
all of the answers
or even a considerable amount of the questions
adds to the mystery and affirms
that life is deep and changing
and linked to something greater than ourselves.

I believe that I can name
my Inner Divinity as I choose
but that She is really nameless and genderless
balanced in her love for humanity;
I picture her saddened, tearful
at the violence done in her various names
wanting to pull all men and women to her breast,
to comfort, reintegrate us into her womb
that we might re-learn our Oneness.

I believe that all life is a circle
and that we return, return, return
that, as science informs us,
our energies, atoms, do not dissipate;
all energy in the Universe continues to exist,
simply evolving into different forms
just as all of our stories
shapeshift in our many voices.

I believe in the Soul
insofar as it is somehow linked to our own Divinity
and in that it speaks to us through our creative urges
and that if our creativity is stifled
we become as broken bits of glass tossed aside by the Creator
when we might have been a stained glass window
reflecting back to the world
all that we have become and
all that we leave behind.


Now here's what YOU, reader/writer, can do. You can pick up your pen and start with "I believe..." and just let go. If you get stuck, start again with "I believe..." or try "I don't believe..." This doesn't have to be spiritual or intellectual or anything at all. It only has to flow from your pen (or through your keyboard). It could be that, at the moment, all you can believe in is the t.v. remote and its ability to take your mind off the crappy job or the possibility that your husband is having an affair or your empty nest. Don't judge what you're writing. Writer Emily Hanlon says you get it down and then you pick out the jewels later on. And if there are not jewels this time, there will be eventually. If you don't write at all, there will never be jewels. Write.