I’m happy to announce that I’m offering my self-guided course on Speculative Nonfiction starting 4/17. In this self-guided course, students go through the lessons as a group, having conversations on the material and giving each other feedback. This class is only $45 with the early bird price through 4/1! More information can be found here.
Our other upcoming spring courses at Muse include Thirty-Minute Memoir with Joelle Fraser and Shapes of Stories with Nancy Baxter, both beloved teachers and authors. The early bird price for Nancy’s class ends 3/20. Also, check out Joelle’s recent craft essay at the Brevity blog!
Finally, my drop-in Generative Writing Workshops continue through June. The next one is coming up on Saturday March 25th, and the cost is $75 per session. These sessions tend to be refreshing and enlivening, both!
Some Thoughts on Color and Scraps
Here in Durham, North Carolina, spring is gusting its way into town. One day it will be in the 40s and the next in the 70s. My child leaves home wearing layers and comes home without them. Yesterday was beautiful. I went to my writing group in the morning, a bit weighed down by the heavy topic I had finally found a way to write about, and I left feeling buoyed by the encouragement and useful feedback I received. I felt a lightness that I hadn’t felt in a long while.
My other big achievement of the day was cleaning off my dining room table and buying myself flowers to celebrate (both the table and the essay I’d finally been able to write). I cleared the table of my work papers and notebooks, of my son’s LEGO Hogwarts and school papers, then I became hypnotized by the colors of the flowers I’d bought, and set about gathering the colorful items to play off the flowers. Pictured are a too-nice Hilma af Klint notebook I bought at the New Museum the last time I was in New York and an egg-shaped porcelain box from a flea market, among other items. (Sunny days make me happy and energetic in a way that feels slightly manic. But I think it’s more just that happy and energetic feel extreme when winter starts to subside.)
As I played with color and material objects, I thought about the place of play and interaction with the material world that becomes so necessary in between periods of burying our heads in books and writing (and cyberspace). When I was getting my doctorate in English in Philadelphia, and I’d gotten to the point where I was making my way through the reading lists for my comprehensive exams, I remember longing for something to do with my hands. Though I only dabbled in visual art, I kept imagining myself painting, playing with great globs of color. One night I dreamed that I was with a black dog at the edge of a city, a place where lapping water met concrete steps. The dog was part of me, my animal body and a nonverbal part of my soul. And it needed to let me know something. It walked to the edge of the water and began vomiting up chewed up newsprint. I could see all the chewed up words that we had swallowed, and I knew then it was too much. Something else was needed. Too many words. I ended up (in waking life) going to CVS and buying Crayola watercolors and paper, so I could give myself as rest from taking in all those words, and deal with color and image for a while, as my body and unconscious had instructed. It helped.
So, what does this have to do with the craft of writing? Sometimes we need to make a space for other parts of our minds to come to the forefront and to find that psyche-soma connection. (By the way, Nancy Reddy wrote an essay for Electric Literature recently on making space for doing nothing that dovetails usefully with some of the ideas that have been knocking around in my mind this week.)
Related to the need for breaks and play and space to feed us as artists and writers (and even souls, ok?), play can be a way back into a project. In summer of 2021, I finished a draft of a collection of flash memoir pieces, and after receiving some nice feedback saying, essentially, “This is good. Keep going,” I found myself at an impasse. I’d pushed myself to finish an entire draft (because I had an opportunity to tag along on a friend’s writing retreat), and I felt blank and empty. I had nothing left to give. I sent the project aside for a few months, and when I tried to tiptoe back to it, I couldn’t figure out how to enter back into the project. So I decided to play. I took printed copies of some of the pieces that I liked but which weren’t quite gelling, cut them up and made them into collages to glue into my Hilma af Klint notebook. (I couldn’t bring myself to directly mark in the notebook, but I found I could collage bits of my writing onto another piece and paper and glue THAT into the notebook.) This play helped me. It was color and material and movement and space, and slowly I found my way back in.
Two collage pages from my notebook:
Prompt:
Read this piece of mine called “How the Sausage Is Made,” and think about how the use of collage, the pasted together sections, might be useful for ideas of your own. Look through old writing or a notebook you’ve kept, and literally cut and paste the bits of text into a different formation. Maybe add some color! (If you don’t have any writing you want to do that with, keep a notebook on sensory details of your day for two weeks, then go back through and do it.)