Category Archives: writing

Can I Get a Witness?

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It’s not that I haven’t been writing at all. But it’s been a tentative gesture. The divorce was a sad hell. It roamed the hallways of my mind for months. Writing seemed inappropriate. I had nothing to say anyway. It was only over the holidays (away from my teaching job for two weeks and the beginning of the final ceasefire) that I heard it — the voice that once again stepped in to narrate events to me. I was on my way to go hiking. A near-suicidal depression had me in its morose grip when the voice began to speak: “I have joined a club of which I never wanted to be a member.” The voice narrated my situation to me. It described my depression with a clinician’s detachment. It described the Scriptural light pouring through the oaks, the Spanish moss like hundreds of flags streaming in the wind. My friend is back, I thought with relief, my old friend. And though I was still unutterably depressed, I was not alone.

The voice, to me, is crucial to writing — any kind of writing from a book review to a poem. But it’s more than that, too. I think being able to distinguish the voice is a spiritual activity. In his book Practicing the Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle brings up the idea of the “witness.” He says that when we are able to disassociate ourselves from the voice in our head, we are allowing a “new dimension of consciousness” to come in. As Tolle writes: “There is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.” Now, in Tolle’s version the voice is the busy activity of the mind or the ego and we are the ones who are the witnesses. But I think with the narrative voice — the one that gives writers their stories — it may be the reverse. That voice is the voice of the witness. Whichever it is, the effect is the same.

So how do we access the voice? Sometimes it shows up of its own accord. Other times it requires a pen and piece of paper to get it going. It may want to be coaxed. If there are other writers around all listening to their voices, then it usually finds that a conducive atmosphere. I find that my narrative voice likes nature with all her variety. So in January when I led a writers retreat at Sevenoaks Retreat Center in the Shenandoah Valley region, we gave it a try. It was chilly that weekend but no blizzard (like the one I’d encountered in 2012) forecast. We took our journals and our pens and went outside to observe our surroundings. We sat on benches and tree stumps in the midst of the seven oaks and watched and listened without judgment.

I haven’t yet collected the writings of the participants so I’ll share what I wrote:

A cardinal darts past, low. Farther away a crow caws. A woodpecker sounds like a machine gun. Above me, around me, the papery sound of leaves. A sky striated with clouds. So much ruckus. In the distance the low hum of the highway. A woman shuffles through the leaves. A blue jay heckles us. These birds who live in wild abandon. Is that a dog barking somewhere to the west?

 This resting spot, the base of a mighty oak that probably lived two or three times as long as I’ll live and is now only a base – cut at perfect sitting height, its progeny now sprouting at its heart.

 The wind stills and the cold dies for a moment, only to pick back up. The crows converse, not caring who overhears their unsavory remarks. I feel the afternoon sun on my fingers. For a moment everything seems a mere projection. A world I’ve created by my gaze. For a moment I feel so filled with light. As if the white sun and I are in cahoots, as if peace is a warm fire burning in my chest. 

If your voice has been quiet for a while, take it outside, observe everything that you see. Then listen. Without judgment. You are only taking dictation.

It oughta be fun!

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I’m still at it, slogging away at a freelance writing project. I’m about two-thirds of the way through but today my brain snatched up a grenade and threatened to blow us all to hell. You can’t do that, I told my brain. We have to finish. We’ve never missed a deadline — until now. But my brain was like Trumbo’s wounded soldier. It couldn’t communicate except by banging my poor skull against the wall.

Despite my brain’s act of rebellion today, I’m not complaining. There are worse things you can do in life than write for money from the comfort of your own home. And mostly I enjoy the work. But it is just that: work.  And today I couldn’t seem to make any progress no matter how bleary-eyed I got reading over the materials.

I was avoiding Facebook but it lured me like the false-hearted siren that it is, and I clicked on it out of habit, out of boredom, out of desperation, anything to distract my brain from the live grenade. And lo and behold, the lead “status” on my feed was from Frances Lefkowitz with a list of words that she used to create a short-short story. I am not sure if these were words Frances came up with or if they came from a friend of hers. I only know that Frances hones her writing skills and garners fame if not fortune, whipping up micro-fictions based on these word lists.

I usually look at the word list when she posts it and think that looks too hard. Not tonight. Tonight I glommed onto that list. I can do this, I thought, and bam in about five minutes I had a short-short story that delighted me. It made me laugh. It was fun, so much fun, and my brain set down the grenade and started dancing in joy. And then I remembered why I am here, why I do this — for the sheer unadulterated joy of it.

To paraphrase Bukowski, if it’s not fun, don’t do it. I’m not talking about the writing you do to pay your bills, I’m talking about the writing that feeds your hungry soul, the writing that shouts out the secrets of your heart, the writing that feels like a lover’s mouth against your bare shoulder.

This is just one more way that transformative writing transforms: it makes you happy. What more could you want?

Some games for you to play:

  1. Here are some words to play with: time, milky, uncle, hey, fancy, coping, necktie, bent, bookcase, cat’s paw, sweat, choir, lake, white, childish, magnetic, forgotten, breath. Can you come up with a short-short story (say 300 words or less) around these words?
  2. Write a nonsense poem. Out Jaberwock the Jaberwocky.
  3. Write a funny sex scene! Let there be wardrobe malfunctions or . . . well, I’m going to leave it to your imagination.

Turn on Your Flashlight

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My friend Becky recently said to me, “The thing about writing is that all the things you don’t know about yourself come out.” This is one of the reasons I think of writing as spiritual exploration. We are like spelunkers going into caves with our flashlights piercing the depths as we gaze in astonishment. We discover our fears, our secret joys, our hidden longings, our obsessions, and a host of forgotten moments. This sense of the unexpected is also why I enjoy our transformative writing workshops so much: because even though I have done all the exercises I am going to be presenting, I have no idea what will come out when I do them. Every time it is something different.

This weekend my daughter accidentally set our house on fire. She’d left a candle burning by the bathtub. By six a.m. the fiberglass bathtub was in flames and we were standing outside in the cold, waiting for the fire department to arrive. So I knew what I was going to write about when I went to my TW workshop that day. I had to write about the fire. But I didn’t know I was going to write about my house and how I had fallen in love with it the first time I saw it. I didn’t know I was going to write a love letter to my house.

I have lived in this house for nearly thirteen years, longer than I have ever lived in one place. Now I am getting ready to put it on the market. In the piece I wrote during the workshop I focused on the memory of the pack of neighborhood girls tromping through on a snowy day with a fire in the fireplace as I poured hot chocolate and marshmallows into ceramic cups. In all my preparations for moving on to the next phase of my life, I had not stopped to think about everything living in this house had meant for me: the sense of family, the sense of normality, the love.

So that was the gift my explorations brought me that day, or one of them. Through the explorations of the other writers I experienced the strangeness of a panic attack, the joy of discovering you’re pregnant, the fear and rage you feel when you’re attacked in a dark parking lot by four men for your sexuality, the satisfaction of taking your life back and deciding to live for yourself. And underneath those feelings was a pervasive sense of strength. We were conquerors recounting our battles.

Here are some prompts to help you in your explorations this week:

What is home to you? Where do you feel a sense of home? What are the physical manifestations of home? Conversely, are you still looking for home?

What is the very first place you can remember? What details stand out to you? What is an incident that happened there? Draw a map or a blueprint of the place. What happened there that still somehow affects you today?

Have you ever felt fear or panic? What did it feel like inside the body, in your bones, your organs, your muscles?

What about joy or even contentment? Describe a time you felt either. Use as many metaphors as you can.

P.S. We’ll be having a Winter Writing Retreat on Feb. 18 & 19 at Sevenoaks Retreat Center near Charlottesville VA. Email me at pat@patmacenulty.com for details.

Your Best Audience Ever

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A couple of weekends ago I spent two blissful days with five guys and assorted other friends and family members at a beach house in Alligator Point. The five guys were members of a writing workshop I was in during grad school. I’ve been in a number of writing groups over the past thirty or so years. Each one has its own personality. Each one has its own history. But in those writing groups I have found my deepest moments of intimacy — while still being fully clothed.

This writing group was called the Wings Workshop because we met every Thursday night at a restaurant called Wings N Things. We had our own table that the waitress kept clear for us on Thursday nights. The guys would drink beer and eat wings. I would drink a near-beer (since I’d damaged my liver in my misguided youth) and eat the carrot sticks (since I’m a vegetarian). We would laugh, tell stories, talk about writing and sometimes get into heated debates. Sometimes we’d argue about politics but we only got mad when the arguing was about writing. We were ferocious in our opinions.

Each summer we’d rent a beach house for a couple of days and play guitars and drums and sing old Neil Young songs. Spouses and children would come along. Substances might have been consumed in the wee hours. We’d laugh ourselves silly. On Friday nights one of our group would often have a pool party. Again, the tequila and the guitars and the drums were present.

The spouses weren’t always comfortable around us. We had a reputation for being elitist, insular, a clique. We couldn’t help ourselves. We were a band of brothers (in spite of the fact that I’m a female). We had our in-jokes and our shared heartaches. We all had friends and lives outside the group but when we were together we were like those twins who grow up speaking a separate language.

Part of it was because we had been through so much together. One of our more athletic members (a man who loved to sail and to hunt) developed Guillian-Barre disease and was effectively paralyzed for six months. It took him another six months to recover. A beloved writing professor we had all studied with died of cancer. Then a terrible blow struck when our Harley-riding golden boy died of heart failure at the age of 39. We were devastated by the loss and clung to each other for weeks.

My ex-husband used to call us “the body” after a Star Trek episode in which a particular society is so in tune with each other that they are almost one person and they refer to themselves collectively as the body. There was a certain accuracy to his observation. It wasn’t just the things we’d all been through together that bound us. What really tightened the knots that have not been loosened to this day was the fact we knew each other through our writing. We had read our worst stories and our best stories. We had revealed ourselves through our words in ways we could not do otherwise.

A writing group is more than just some people who critique your work. They are your source of inspiration and encouragement. They become your community. They are your comrades-in-words. And they are your audience. You will never have a better one.

Write From the Heart

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Last night I went to a book club meeting in High Point, North Carolina, to talk with some readers about my book From May to December. The book has been out for a couple of years, and it was a pleasure to remember the events and the emotions that inspired it.

The writing of this particular book had been driven by my love for my dear friend, Kitty Gretsch, who died in December, 2001, of breast cancer. She was only 32 years old. I based the character Lolly on Kitty and found the story flowed easily as I described Lolly’s battle with cancer and her compassion for others. One of the members of the book club said that if Lolly hadn’t had to go through so many hardships, she would not have been a believable character because she was so good. I tend to write about troubled characters who have difficulty doing the right thing (and there are several of those in this book) but I enjoyed writing about someone of integrity and kindness. Kitty gave me the inspiration — and the permission — to do so.

Whenever our writing is fueled by strong emotions whether those emotions are of love or grief or anger, the writing comes easier. Those emotions help us bypass the inner censors and get to the core of what we want to write. (Most of us have written at least one love poem in our lives!) But of course, when writing about emotions that is when we most need to adhere to that old injunction of showing rather than telling. Images and other sensory details help bring those emotions out of us and onto the page.

Here are a couple exercises that will help you get an emotional jumpstart to your writing:

Journal Exercise 1: Choose an emotion (love, hate, fear, etc) and write a prose poem that conveys that emotion without ever using the word for the emotion or using a synonym. For example, if you are writing about anger, don’t switch up and use the word “mad.” Use images, sounds, smells, actions, colors, bodily sensations and whatever else you can think of so that your reader will not just understand the emotion but also feel it.

Journal Exercise 2: Take a sniff of cinnamon or bite a strawberry. Write about the memories and associations that come with the scent and/or taste.

Play: The Ultimate Block Dissolver

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A lot of writers wonder what to do about “writer’s block.” Some people think there’s no such thing. Others swear that it’s their own personal demon, sitting on their chest like a sumo wrestler and laughing at their helplessness. “What do I do when I’m staring at a blank screen and nothing comes out?” they wail.

Well, my first piece of advice is turn off the computer. The computer is a tool for — profanity alert! — work!! How often do you use that four-letter word “work” when you’re talking about writing? A lot, probably. You tell people that you’re working on a novel, a short story, a blog, whatever. You might refer to a piece of writing as “a work of literature.” And the truth is that there is a lot of work involved in writing. (Not to mention all the stuff that comes after it — submitting, publishing, promoting, etc.) But if you’re feeling blocked, then it’s time to reframe the activity. Don’t think of your writing as work. Think of it as play!

When you were a kid, did you ever get “play block”? No, of course not. You went outside and you made up a game. You didn’t care if it was stupid or if it wouldn’t satisfy the critics. You just played. You didn’t even need fancy toys. A couple of sticks and you were ready to do battle. A tree became a house. Your little sister became the customer at the store where you sold snails for pebbles. There was no internal censor telling you: “No one will like this game. It’s not very original. What are you thinking?”

See, that’s why you get writer’s block. There’s a snooty little censor in your head, looking down her nose at you and telling you that you’re not good, so why do you bother. Or else she’s saying, everyone will hate you if you write that. Or else she’s telling you that you’re a bad husband, wife, mother, father or whatever because you’re indulging in this selfish activity. She knows your weakness. But the censor doesn’t have anything much to say if you’re just playing.

So turn off your computer. Pick up a colored marker and some blank sheets of paper. Draw, color, write a ridiculous poem. Come up with the most absurd metaphors you can think of. Write a rap. Write haiku. Give yourself a prompt and write for ten minutes. For example, for the next ten minutes I will write about insects, couches, my garden — let it be anything. Write with a friend. Trade lines of poetry. Playing gets you up on the carousel horse. Before you know it, the horse will become real and take off with you. The censor will have become bored, put her head down on her desk and be quietly snoring while you’re doing what you love: writing.