More of the Best-Ever Writing on Writing

"Ten of the greatest essays on writing ever written."

 A few days ago, Flavorwire published another of its infamous lists. With that title. I don’t disagree that the essays listed are brilliant. I admire them all. Return to many of them often. But the list irritated me for several reasons. Greatest essays on writing ever written. Ten white authors? Only three women? Nothing written more than ninety years ago? Nothing in translation?

So I decided to whip together my own list. It’s the Year of the List, apparently, so I’d better get mine out there before 2013 races off and leaves me brushing its dust off my coatsleeves. 

I welcome your additions to:  

Wendy's Top Ten: Some of the Best-Ever Writing on Writing ~

"Art Positions," Marco Rountree, from Madrid, 
Art Basel, Miami Beach, December 2011

 #1) Gloria Alzaldúa's  “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” or, even better, “Tlilli, Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink” 

These lovelies are back to back in Borderlands: La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Spinsters/Aunt Lute Press, 1987)

#2) Aristotle's Poetics 

Like the slogan for Goddard College’s low-residency creative writing programs: “the first and still the best.” Yes, Poetics is composed of incomplete lecture notes; it was never intended for publication. But it was definitely the first. And we’ve not lived it down yet, two-thousand-three-hundred years later....

#3) Toni Cade Bambara's “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow” (1980) 

This lovely, energetic essay contains one of my all-time favorite quotes on writing:

“The greatest challenge in writing, then, in the earlier stages, was to strike a balance between candor, honesty, integrity, and truth—terms that are fairly synonymous for crossword puzzlers and thesaurus ramblers but hard to equate as living actions.” 

You can find it, and many other lovely essays on writing, in Janet Sternberg’s The Writer on Her Work (Norton, 2000)

#4) Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's “Respuesta a Sor Filotea” (1691) 

In which sor Juana defends women’s write to study, write and teach, in a letter to her bishop, all the while addressing him as señora, as if he were a nun. A shortened version of this revolutionary essay, translated to English by Margaret Sayers Peyden, appears in Peyden’s anthology Mexican Writers on Writing (Trinity University Press, 2007).

#5) Gabriel García Márquez's brilliant 1981 interview with a (rather underinformed and badly outmatched) Paris Review interviewer

In spite of being asked terribly dull questions, with his then-teenaged son pressed into service as English-Spanish interpreter, García Márquez comes up with gems like this:

“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. Both are very hard work. Writing something is almost as hard as making a table. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood. Both are full of tricks and techniques. Basically very little magic and a lot of hard work are involved.”

"Art Positions," Marco Rountree, from Madrid,
Art Basel, Miami Beach, 2011

#6) Walt Harrington's recreation of Rita Dove creating a poem, published by the Washington Post in 1995 as “A Narrow World Made Wide” 

Later published in anthologies as “The Shape of Her Dreaming,” it’s one of the best evocations and explications of the creative writing process that I’ve encountered.

 #7) Audre Lorde's “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” 

This short-and-sweet essay began life as perhaps the only interesting presentation ever given the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual conference, in 1977.

#8) Lu Chi's The Art of Writing

This work in verse is as relevant today as when it was written seventeen hundred years ago. I wrote an essay inspired by it a few years ago, you can read it here.  

#9) Elena Poniatowska's introduction to Here’s to You, Jesusa!

This excellent exploration of the ethics and politics of immersion reporting appears only in the novel’s English version (published in 2001 and translated by Deanna Heikkenin).

#10) Luis Alberto Urrea's short essay about why he wrote his lovely 1999 book Wandering Time, titled “A Note from Luis” 

It is true that LAU could scribble driving directions on a cocktail napkin and I’d probably call it brilliant work, but this little ditty really is.

Post Art Basel, Miami, December 2011

It seems I'm always happy to fritter away my writing time reading essays on writing, so please send your suggestions along! 

 

Thanks for the Beauty, Poetry. Thanks even more for the Truth!

“There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what one has created. The other is to tell the truth.”
--  June Jordan

Poetry reminds me of what’s possible, rejuvenates my faith in myself and all the other selves that crowd this ravaged planet, in those times when my faith stretches thin. This month, I give thanks to poetry for all it has given me. Yes, I should give thanks every month, as Kwame Dawes so sagely reminds us, but there are so many things for which to give thanks in this life. 

To celebrate poetry this month, my friend (a gifted poet) Susan Rich is curating the annual Big Poetry Giveaway. I’m happy to participate, giving away three books of poems that I love. All three tell the truth, and manage to be beautiful, too. (I think June would approve.) A few words about each one:

While I was in the MFA program in Bennington, Vermont, at one January residency, photographer and poet Star Black joined us. She documented several days of what is affectionately (and sometimes derisively) called “the vortex.” At the time, I knew nothing more about Star Black than this: she came from a military family (like me) and she wrote stellar sestinas (most decidedly not like me). On our last day together, she shared her visual documentation. In that vortex of sentences and fragments and punctuation marks (usually ?? or !!), Star created a (both beautiful and truthful) narrative and lyric representation of the place, without using a single word. And so, as part of the Big Poetry Giveaway, I want to share Star Black's 1995 book of poems, Waterworn.

One summer while I was in college, I fell in love with a boy from a small town near Ponce, Puerto Rico. In the dead of the following winter, I visited his island for the first (and, so far, only) time. Our romance disintegrated before winter had melted, but the visit stayed with me. During the 1990s, I devoted many hours to activism on behalf of Puerto Rican independentistas, honored to be part of a network that stretched from Chicago, Boston, and New York to San Juan. I thought a lot about the distance between Gringolandia y la isla. For these reasons, Naomi Ayala’s 1997 collection Wild Animals on the Moon & Other Poems spoke deeply to me. (You can read four poems from the collection at In Motion Magazine.) I hope her words might speak to you, too.

Yael Flusberg in Sarasota, Florida • WLC 2010

I was introduced to Naomi Ayala’s poetry by my dear friend Yael Flusberg, whose own 2010 collection, The Last of My Village, shows how love and wisdom can shimmer through pain. (You can read a poem from the collection and also see how beautifully she reads its title poem.) I’ve written about Yael’s poetry before. Twice I’ve invited her to come and share her poetry (and luminous self) with my students, once at New College of Florida and once at Pacific Lutheran University. Both times, the results were magical. I look forward to sending some magic in the mail, perhaps to you?

If you would like to be in the running to receive one of these gifts of poetry in the mail, please just leave a comment below, saying you'd like to be in the running for one, two or all three of the books. I'll pick from three hats at the end of the month, ask the winners for postal addresses, and send out the poetry books on May Day!  

Happy National Poetry Month!

Made in America: My Next Big Thing

Midge Raymond and me on our joint book tour, Portsmouth,
New Hampshire ~ September 2011

A month ago -- hmm, that would be last year -- my dear writer-friend Midge Raymond posted a Next Big (or Best) Thing Q & A about her novel-in-progress, My Last Continent, to her wonderful writing blog. She invited me to do the same. So, here I am, shyly hauling my current writing project out of the dark corners of my mind with answers to seven questions about Made in America. And when you’re done here, you can look forward to reading about the current book projects of four writers whose work I adore. (I adore the writers just as much.) Check out the blogs of Deborah Miranda, Donna Miscolta, Natalia Treviño, and Anastacia Tolbert to learn about their Next Big Things.


Ready? Here we go:

What is the working title of your book?
Made in America: Four Corners of Life. I feel skittish even calling it a “book,” at this point. I’m not quite sure what the word “book” means in 2013, so let’s just call it my current Big Writing Project, or if you prefer, my next big thing.

What is the origin of this book idea?

Call family on the National Parks Tour ~
Douglas Call, 1976

I grew up a Navy kid, never putting down roots because I knew we’d never stay anywhere long. My home zip code has started with every digit from zero to five, along with eight zip codes beginning with nine. (And for the past eight years, the fabulous 98118.) I’m a child of this country’s corners; born in Florida, I have spent a decade each in Southern California, New England, and the Pacific Northwest. One of the few constants in my itinerant life has been time spent in our natural places, from the Petrified Forest to Acadia, from the Olympics to Biscayne.

With Made in America, I want to explore how our national parks have influenced our sense of what it means to be “American”-- a term that both angers and fascinates me. (And on a practical note, I wanted to spend more time outside in beautiful places.)

What genre does your book fall under?
It’s a series of linked personal essays, some of which lean toward the historical and others toward the lyric.

If your book were transformed into another art form, what would it be? (OK, the original “Next Big Thing” question was: “Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?” But I’ve never aspired to have my writing adapted for the screen, so I’m bending the rules.)

Hardwood Hammock, Everglades National Park ~ WLC 2013

In the Ernest Coe Visitor Center at Everglades National Park, there is a huge mosaic in the floor: a map showing the park’s eight ecological habitats -- hardwood hammock to mangrove swamp -- in vividly tinted ceramic tile. I sometimes imagine my book in mosaic form, but instead of nicely glazed and fired clay, its pieces would be broken bits of my grandmother’s china, mismatched plates from Goodwill, seaglass, a shell collection from four decades of beach visits, and small stones unearthed by spring digging in the garden.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
A lapsed student of biology sets out to explore the natural world in the four corners of the continental U.S., becoming enmeshed in the complex tangle of patriotism, environmentalism and imperialism that characterizes our national parks. 

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Studio at Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller
National Historical Park, Vermont ~
WLC, 2011

I’ll tell you when I’m finished. I have spent about half my time over the last eighteen months in the “information gathering” stage: reading, researching, talking to people, mulling things over. During that time, I’ve spent a total of seven months living and working in four national parks (Everglades, Joshua Tree, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller, and North Cascades­­) as an Artist in Residence. When I get home to Seattle in February, I’ll start working on a first draft.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
My parents, who packed my brother and me into our ‘68 Chevy Malibu in the summer of 1976 and drove us over 7,000 miles from our home on the California-Mexico border northeast to Zion, then north to Yellowstone, then Mt. Rushmore, then to the east coast, then south and west all the way back to the Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest. Thirty days of cheap motels, friends’ hideaway sofas, and hotpot-and-cooler meals, so that my brother and I could have the gift of the National Parks Tour. This book is my thank-you note.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
It will have pictures! And audio! And perhaps maps. Maybe even video. I don’t have the details worked out yet (I’m a hopelessly analog person, pushing a handcart down the information superhighway), but I envision Made in America as a digital book that actually takes advantage of the great opportunities this technology offers us as readers – and as writers. (Unlike the digital version of my 2011 book, No Word for Welcome, which is less visual than the print version, which simply shouldn’t be….)

Another tidbit to pique your interest: a chapbook! The first national park where I was Artist in Residence published a lovely, 24-page, single-essay “chapbook.” (No video or audio, but it does have photos.) You can order Tilled Paths Through Wilds of Thought right here at my blog -- see the link to the right. You can read an excerpt from the chapbook at the online magazine Guernica – but the real thing is much cuter. And I’ll sign it for you. All for the price of a latte. Get yours today! And, as always, thanks for reading.

Four Years, Two Inaugurations, and Richard Blanco’s “One Today”

“The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains / mingled by one wind—our breath. Breathe. Hear it…”

-- Richard Blanco, January 21, 2013

As I tuned in the presidential inauguration today, I was most looking forward to the poem. 

At Othello Station, Southeast Seattle, 2012

It is the only part of today’s event about which I could feel unequivocally optimistic. I’m not a fan of winner-takes-all voting and I realize that President Obama never promised to be anything but a centrist (those who felt disappointed by his first term perhaps weren’t truly listening to him during his campaign).

But I was thrilled to hear that Richard Blanco would be the inaugural poet. Richard and I are both members of the Macondo Writers’  Workshop, have many mutual friends, and are the same age. Hearing that he had been chosen as the inaugural poet felt like a sweet success for several interwoven movements for social justice, movements that have defined my generation. And the simple brush with fame amazed me: I knew (ever so slightly) someone who was now a member of a very small club that included Robert Frost and Maya Angelou.

President Obama's speech was an excellent warm-up act for the inaugural poem. For the first time in my life, I actually agreed with more than a few words of an inaugural speech. I felt the hard work of so many, who have struggled for so long, acknowledged in the President’s words:

“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began.  For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts.  Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”

Our journey will not be anywhere near complete then, but we will be a bit farther down the path.

I held my breath as Richard Blanco took his place behind the podium. He opened and closed his mouth twice before he began speaking. I imagined all that might tumble from his mouth: a scream, a sob, a shout of victory. A second of silence and then his poem: a gift of collective images and private moments, a mirror held up to reflect many of us, lines of simple elegance:

One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes
tired from work: some days guessing at the weather
of our lives, some days giving thanks for a love

Fir forest, Whiteley Center, San Juan Island,
January 2009

Four years ago, I sat in a forest cottage at an island writers’ residency, watched President Obama’s first inauguration on my laptop, and traded FaceBook notes with high school classmates I’d not seen in two decades and would likely never see again. Most of them, like me, had not voted for Obama. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for a candidate who supported two unconscionable wars, rather than universal health care and marriage rights. I’d gone Green while my long-ago classmates had gone to the elephants. But on that day, for a few minutes, we all felt proud of our country.

Rock pineland forest, Everglades National Park,
January 2013

Today, I sat at a picnic table in a pineland forest of the Everglades, watching the inauguration on my phone. We are closer to some of us having access to health care. We are closer to equal love under the eyes of the law. Civilians are still dying from the wars we wage. I yearn for Maya Angelou’s riverside.

Yet, today I call you to my riverside,

If you will study war no more. Come,

I can see Richard Blanco, and so many others, yearning for the riverside. I hear our collective breath, as expressed by our Inaugural Poet:

All of us as vital as the one light we move through,

the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:

equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,

the “I have a dream”we keep dreaming,

We will keep dreaming, imagining, questioning, solving.

Writers in Unexpected Places

"Our being in the world is subtly influenced by all the people, creatures, landscapes, climates, luxuries and deprivations that surround us."

-- From my writer's notebook, September 2011, while at a national park

 

At the Associated Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference last week, I had the pleasure of talking about non-traditional writers' residencies with two literary lights who deeply inspire me: Stephanie Elizondo Griest and Henry Reese. To read how a truly inspired writer finds her writing room, read this interview with Stephanie. To learn about a truly inspired residency program, read about Henry's City of Asylum / Pittsburgh. In fact, they both inspired me so much that I decided to bring my blog out of the deep-freeze that began with phase two of my No Word for Welcome book tour (a fifteen-state, five-month, thirty-event Atlantic-to-Pacific road trip) and seems to have continued into phase three (scattered events across the country).

Here's the short version of my presentation in Chicago last week:

Ragdale's garden, WLC, 2009

Traditional writers residencies (the perfection of the cottages at Hedgebrook, of the lake by Blue Mountain Center, of the sculpture garden at Anderson Center, of the  sleeping porches by the Prairie at Ragdale) have made my writing possible – especially beginning and ending huge projects. For that I'm eternally grateful. But these traditional retreats don’t necessarily feed my writing. My nonfiction is rooted in the real world, not in the cloister of an artist colony or retreat center. 

There are two kinds of writers’ residences: those that take you out of your daily world and those that immerse you in a different daily world. The latter is a form of “immersion journalism.” For a working immersion-writer like me, non-traditional residencies expand and deepen my understanding of my chosen topics.

American Antiquarian Society Reading Room, WLC, 2010

When I began writing about my experiences with grief and loss, after my mother died of cancer, I spent a month in residence at a historical archive in Massachusetts to learn about how our society dealt with death and loss early in our nation’s history. I learned about the role that the Civil War played in changing our death rituals. I also spent six weeks as Writer in Residence at Seattle’s public hospital, Harborview Medical Center, to spend time with people who were facing terminal illnesses. Harborview didn’t have a Writer in Residence program – I cajoled the hospital's art program manager for a year for the chance to spend time there. 

Though most of my writing about grief and loss is based on my family’s experience, my time at Harborview gave me a better sense of what was typical about my family’s story and what was atypical. I also found stories at Harborview that will become separate essays – stories more powerful than anything I could have imagined, than anything I've experienced in my own life. 

Writing in situ, WLC, Vermont, 2011

Right now, I’m in the midst of a new writing project that includes serving as Writer in Residence at national parks in all four corners of the United States.There are at least forty National Parks around the country that host Artists in Residence.

Going to a non-traditional residency is not the same as packing off for a month at Ragdale or Hedgebrook. Here are seven (for good luck) things to keep in mind as you consider a non-traditional residency:    

#1: When you apply (or propose – you can make up your own adventure), think very carefully about how the host organization will benefit. If it’s an established program, they will probably want you to include an outreach project in your application. This is really important. If you are making up your own project, as I did with Harborview, think through what the host organization might find useful. I did a series of writing workshops for patients on the locked psychiatric ward. Those workshops were not connected to my writing project, but met a need at the hospital. 

#2: Plan on a lot of communication with the host organization before you begin your residency. Your host may have little or no idea what you need to work effectively. There’s often an assumption that visual and performing artists have specific work needs, but a writer has none. Things I’ve had to specifically ask for include a desk (not a kitchen table or a dressing table), an office chair (not an easy chair), and an electrical outlet that won’t fry my computer (make sure to take a good surge protector). 

#3: If you are going someplace remote, be ready for anything. I take a sponge, paper towels and some cleaning supplies in a small plastic container. I have a tiny laser printer that fits in a carry-on bag. Preparing my workspace has included removing dead mice, covering furnishings with Mylar,  washing windows, and wiping dead bugs out of the fridge. (And that was just at one residency!)  

Apothecary's notebook at the American Antiquarian Society, WLC, 2010

#4: Make sure your hosts understand how much time you will need in a particular space, or with a particular person, or using a particular document, artifact, etc. I once spent a month convincing an art museum to let me see several items that were not on display. After finally getting the right person to pull the right string, I made the two-hour trip and showed up shortly after the museum opened in the morning. I planning to spend all day looking at and writing about the objects. I found a fabulous display of a dozen items -- prints, jewelry, items of clothing -- all carefully laid out in a gorgeous room. But it turned out the curator had scheduled a meeting in the space, so I had only had forty minutes with the items.

#5: Think carefully about how you will talk about your work to everyone you meet during your residency. People sometimes have weird ideas about writers; this is your chance to dispel them. Take examples of your writing, but make sure not to promise anything. Make it clear that you might use anything you see / experience, but you might not use any of it – at least, not in a way that’s recognizable (or, perhaps, pleasing) to those involved. 

#6: Develop a short writing workshop that you can offer at the drop of a hat. I have 15-minute, 30-minute and 60-minute series of free-writing exercises that I’m always ready to give, in case someone is curious. These exercises require only index cards and a pen, which I always carry with me. Many non-traditional artist residencies want the artist to share their process with the public. Watching someone paint or weave is far more interesting than watching someone write. Getting members of the public to write is usually far more effective than reading them some of your work.   

#7: Be thankful, thankful, thankful to your hosts. My richest and my most frustrating writing experiences have been at non-traditional residencies. Regardless, I have thanked people profusely, for reasons both practical and political. When people you encounter at these residencies show up in your writing, you want them to approach that work with a positive mindset. In the current publishing environment, we must do everything possible to encourage reading – whether of hardcover books or on smart phones. Giving a non-reader a positive experience with a writer is one of the best ways we can nurture a culture of reading.

Forests, Once and Future

"Between 1850 and 1900, 85% of Vermont's land was deforested."
-- Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller NHP Park Ranger

As July turned to August, I began a new writing project – spending time in, ruminating on, and writing about our National Parks. I’m taking advantage of the travel required for my No Word for Welcome book tour to explore our national parks and our relationships to them. Like many American childhoods, mine included a string of visits to national park service sites, from Sequoia to the Lincoln Memorial. Growing up in a military family and moving every few years, the National Parks were one of the few constants for my itinerant family.

I’m spending two months as Writer in Residence at Vermont’s only national park, a hilly woodland that is only slightly larger than two urban parks close to my heart: Seattle’s Discovery Park and Boston’s Franklin Park. At the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park (NHP), I’m beginning to seek answers to a question that has been knocking around my head and heart all my life: What does it mean to come from a place? As a military kid (a Navy Junior, to be precise) the idea of having a hometown has always been enormously foreign--and enormously attractive. Related to that question are two others:

What does it mean to be native to a place?  What does it mean to care for a place?



This historic bungalow where I work  at the Marsh-
Billings-Rockefeller NHP was built as the woodland
retreat of another woman writer in 1917.  

I spent much of the last dozen years exploring those questions in southern Mexico. The result of that exploration is No Word for Welcome. As I’ve settled into life here in Woodstock, Vermont, I’ve learned (to my surprise) that this area has quite a bit in common with Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Both regions are primarily rural; both regions were deeply changed by the construction of railroads and highways in the 1800s; both regions have suffered terrible deforestation. (You can read more about nineteenth-century isthmus history in this essay I wrote for the early American history journal Common-Place.) Vermont has passed through many economic eras: timber-cutting to clear land for farming, sheep-ranching to feed the textile industry of the Industrial Revolution, then skiing to feed the tourist economy. Through it all, Vermonters have struggled to maintain their homeplace’s rural character and restore its ecological health--after saws, sheep, and ski-lifts have destroyed it. 

It is somehow both inspiring and disheartening to find the same cycles everywhere: We arrive; we wreak havoc; we realize our mistakes; we endeavor to repair. Between 1850 and 1900, eighty-five percent of Vermont’s land was deforested. Now, the once-again green hills of Vermont give me hope for the increasingly bare hills of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

(And speaking of hope, I must give deep thanks to the K2 Family Foundation in Maine and 4Culture in King County, Washington, for making my new writing adventure possible.)