Literary Hub

My Essay on Literary Hub

I wrote a piece about what really happens while writing a book (especially fiction, but this can apply to memoir, as well), and Literary Hub—many thanks to them!—published it on the day that MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH came out. I think a lot about the impulse that many writers, especially beginning ones maybe, have toward ten-step lists and formulas, and what this says about how writing is taught. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with lists and trying to find a concrete pathway through the sometimes murky terrain of creating something, but rather that the fever to plan everything out and know in advance what is going to happen—either in terms of the trajectory of the narrative or even what will happen to the book itself—can indicate a desire to dominate a process that is only partly concrete; the rest is mysterious, thankfully, and often out of our control. This is excellent and good news. Click here to read the essay on LitHub.

Memoir Voice Class!

I’m giving a new GrubStreet class (which will be on-line), coming up on August 6th—a four week memoir workshop that focuses on voice, and I have to say I’m really stoked about it. I love talking with other writers about their process and with all the social distancing, etc., of these last few months, I’m looking especially forward to seeing people and getting to talk shop.

The idea for this class came directly out of the last two workshops I gave before COVID rolled into town. We had been talking about Mary Karr’s notion that the most central aspect of memoir—the one that counts the most—is voice, which led to fascinating investigations about what exactly voice is. We all know a great one when we read hear/read it. There are certain concrete elements to it; after all, the narrative voice only exists through the details we write down. But the most intriguing part of voice is the mystery and atmosphere of it, the workings that are harder to define, yet carry so much power.

At my last workshop I wrote The Right to Speak on the board and there was something like an electrical pulse that rippled through the room. The writers seemed to have instant recognition and connection around this idea, and their personal struggles with it: the right to tell their story, the right to be themselves, the right to make time to develop their project and the right to finish it. It’s interesting that in a part of the world where we have a certain amount of freedom with regard to what we can write (relative to other places where a writer might be routinely jailed, or worse), so many fully grown adults still feel a lot of hesitation in their work, sometimes even consciously or unconsciously wanting to be granted permission or a kind of passage.

So, this four week investigation will uncover what voice is and how to better connect with it (amplify it, play with it, really use it—because it’s there to be used). This is about courage, maybe, or understanding what makes a particular writer tick and how to allow that energy into memoir through the most natural conduit there is: voice. If you’re interested in taking this class, here is a link with additional information and registration at GrubStreet.  

Meditation & Writing (plus coronavirus, politics,...)

I just finished teaching a class at GrubStreet in Boston, a six-week course that combined meditation and memoir. I’ve rewritten this next sentence numerous times, trying to find the way to describe such an extraordinary experience. That’s the thing about creativity in general, though; so much of that energy lies beyond language, beyond our attempts to conceptualize. Suffice to say, the students showed up every Friday evening (!) and each time, we spent three hours exploring the foundations of meditation (vipassana specifically) and then weaving that in and through memoir, covering everything from voice to structure to managing the often unwieldy material of a writer’s life experience (which, after all, is the content of memoir, and which makes memoir workshops inherently different from ones that focus on fiction). As it turned out, this weaving was organic and intriguing—the two subjects “spoke” to each other almost effortlessly. It made so much sense.

Beginning the class with meditation (and a really close look at its components) had incredible effects, not the least of which was making a container for the rest of the course work and all those deeply personal stories. I’ve written across genre (one memoir, one story collection, one novel, and—in my twenties and thirties—poetry) and often talk about the illusion of boundaries between them and how fluidly the territories can blend if we open up to that. But there are, of course, some intrinsic differences, and I was reminded of some of these during the class, including the often tangled and oppressive spaces that a writer has to enter when they work with their own conflicts and obstacles as material; also how alive that material is, most especially when it rings true. And that that authenticity has so much to do with the writer’s willingness to bring awareness into their work.

Something that came up repeatedly was the appearance of the Jungian notion of persona and shadow and this was so fascinating to witness. I hadn’t really considered, prior to this, the extent to which the ability to see one’s shadow (or at least some part of it) and invite it into the writing is so wildly important to memoir. I understood this in my heart, but wouldn’t have phrased it this way. I know how much meditation has made a difference in my life, and my writing life, and I could see how it made a difference in the way the students approached their work, how they were able to look at all aspects of themselves, including their shadow, even in the small time-frame of those six short weeks. And it was short—time flew, as they say, and yet the hours we spent tending to this work were so full. Each week, three hours didn’t seem to be enough. There was so much to talk about, and so much energy in the class and in the ideas.

I started meditating nine years ago, and even though my approach to it is mostly “goal-less” (or as without a goal as I can make it), I can see, looking back, that there has been a palpable energy in those nine years, an increasing, alive one that has shown itself in all areas of my life. In particular I can see its movement through my writing and the three books I’ve published while parenting a child (now a 22-year-old man) with Down syndrome and autism. Meditation, and extending the awareness developed on the cushion into the experience of each day, has transformed me, bit by bit, and my relationship to my writing and creativity.

The biggest changes occurred when I started looking into Buddhist meditation and vipassana (and I’m now in a teacher-training program) specifically and becoming better able to sit with the narrative that the mind produces, to see it more clearly. Writing a book-length manuscript requires the ability to sit not only with the narrative on the page but also the stories we tell ourselves about writing, how we’re doing, when we’ll reach the end, if we’ll have the stamina. Meditation also deepened my appreciation for some of the mechanical aspects, including getting up at 4:30 a.m. to write (happily, I might add; not happily every single day but happily on more days than you might guess), and it’s helped me handle self-doubt and periods of low energy. I already had a good respect for process, but my appreciation has deepened radically and it’s possible to see that the ups and downs of writing are just that: an undulating pattern that can just be, instead of being an obstacle.

Then there is the business of the exterior world right now (or the imagined exterior, since, at the end of everything, there are no real distinctions) and the various (perceived) marauding energies of the coronavirus and politics and the financial world and the intersections of these things. I felt my energy get low, in spite of going out on the trails as much as possible to recharge, and some constrictions in my body due to anxiety, and here again meditation and awareness have helped me navigate. We’ve been so trained to see viruses as our enemy, unseen forces that we long to corral and control with warfare and money. It’s easy enough to see that our treatment of the natural world—because we perceive ourselves to be apart from it—is the source of our on-going problems. We made an inflamed world and now we live in it.

Being here in New England, I see that while meditation is popular, it’s also equally scoffed at; meditation and mindfulness received a whole lotta press a few years back, and the cover of Time, even, and an entire industry has grown around it in terms of books and apps and cushions and retreats. Which is maybe not a bad thing, necessarily, but it seems that whenever we get our hands on an idea we make it so ubiquitous and watered-down that we end up drowning it. There are always polar ideologies: the nefarious forces in politics that are against civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, etc. are met on the other side with people who advocate for the vulnerable. Unfortunately, many of those latter people mistakenly believe that meditation equals passivity and not taking action to correct the mistreatment of the environment and certain portions of the human and animal population. My experience of meditation is that it is necessary for living and for making change, that it is an alive process, one that gets taught and handed from person to person in an enormous and complex web of vitality. It seems to me that meditation and the awareness that it enables are at the heart of any really creative endeavour, any good doing, that non-doing and just being is vital to doing something well and with integrity and longevity. Meditation is this very simple thing (made complicated by some) that should be ubiquitous, because it’s our essence. It’s amazing to me how many people effectively argue themselves out of being fully themselves. “I don’t have time to meditate,” they say, “or just don’t want to.” And at one time, prior to nine years ago, I was one of them.

Many people who have heard about my class express surprise at the combination, and even my students and I laughed several times about the “weirdness,” though I can see it isn’t weird at all. After spending weeks preparing for the class and then more weeks actually teaching it, I feel that the whole idea of weaving meditation into writing makes so much sense that I’m only sorry I didn’t think of it sooner.