Check out Muse fall courses here! The last day for the early bird price ($45) on the self-guided Approaching Mystery course is today (8/5)! Early bird prices on other courses end 8/13.
Dear everyone,
Here I sit on my couch, surrounded by books and notebooks, listening to the air conditioner drone, wanting more iced coffee even though afternoon coffee isn’t the best for my insomnia. Late summer has not historically been a great writing time for me. The heat gets to me, making me feel that my brain isn’t clicking along as it should, and the feeling of having been inside too much hiding from the heat doesn’t help. This summer has had its own specific challenges on top of the usual … hotness. (See what I mean? Words become difficult.) I don’t get outside as much as I should, which means that I don’t feel I have much to write about. I long for the feeling of newness and potential that fall brings. School supplies! Sweaters! Cool air stimulating your vagus nerve and reducing anxiety! (It’s a thing— look it up!) This is all to say that if your brain is also not clicking along as you might like, I empathize.
Despite all this, I’m doing my version of the Sealey Challenge, in which participants challenge themselves to read a book of poems a day in August. (Chapbooks count!) If you’d like to follow along with what I’m reading, you can follow my Muse Instagram account. I have some new-to-me poetry books from the library, and I’ve also been pulling books off my shelf, thinking about what I want to re-read. From the library stack, I just read The Carrying by our current U.S. Poet Laureate (!) Ada Limón. I love that someone whose career I’ve loosely followed from her early books is now our poet laureate, and I admire Limón’s commitment to a life of poetry. Her poems are skillful and varied, and there is always something “at stake” there. She reveals herself as a human with flaws and vulnerabilities and deep feelings, which I also admire. And like Mary Oliver, for example, she is a poet who is accessible to a wide audience and whose poems bring readers in to the world of contemporary poetry. She’s a poet’s poet and also a people’s poet. A great choice for poet laureate.
One of the poems in The Carrying, “Cargo,” is addressed to a “you” and is organized around the central image/memory of trains and their cargo. The poem is about, in a way, carrying a (social, psychological) load together. And it’s also about sharing one’s inner world with another.
Here’s an exercise: Write a letter piece in which you discuss a shared psychic load of some kind. How are you separate in your own private world, and how is it possible to reach out from that world and connect to another over shared or similar circumstances?
Possible ways in or elements to add: Can you organize the letter around a central memory or image? Pay attention to images and the concrete, and try to include something real and specific in each stanza or paragraph.
You might also examine Limón’s transitions between stanzas above. “I wish I could write to you …”; “Last night …”; “Before everything shifted …”Imitate them to some extent as you get started, if you like. Write in prose or using line breaks.
Early bird price on Approaching Mystery ends today
Are you interested in mystery, wonder, the uncanny, secrets, the unexplained? Consider taking the self-guided group course Approaching Mystery: Writing Flash Memoir about Wonder and the Unexplained, which opens August 14th. I designed this course for the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, and it is suitable for various levels of writer.
Here’s an episode of the podcast The Lit Fantastic in which I talk about my draw toward “secrets, silences, and unspoken legacies,” if you’d like to hear some of my ideas on that subject!
I love this one, Joanna. I love the poem. Intersections: I wrote an essay a decade ago called "Watching for Trains," and I'd like to think I was channeling bits from these verses without knowing it. It's in an older-me style, but it's funny how I think I've changed and then realize I'm still asking the same questions, though maybe with more nuance. Maybe shouting them, instead. Maybe less afraid.
https://www.curatormagazine.com/rebeccamartin/watching-for-trains/