This isn't the clearest picture, but it captures the sentiment of how we came to feel about each other after five days as student (me) and teacher (Dani Shapiro). It also comes close to capturing the messy nature of life and of the writing life. Dani's original title for this workshop of fiction and memoir was going to be Transforming Chaos into Art, but Liz Lesser (author and co-founder of Omega) thought that might be too dark.
Dani's humor, clarity, thoughtfulness, depth of experience with writing and teaching was a gift to all the writers who attended this week. In the last session today, she fielded questions regarding publishing, agents, editor, self-publishing, blogging and so on. It's unusual, I learned this week, that this little blog that gets the dregs of my attention has been viewed by 21,000 people from 21 different countries since January. Dani addressed all these "business" items and more from the list of questions that people had been saving up for the post "craft and cultivation" sessions.
We had a private talk about cultivating this little blogging habit of mine and of other ways to keep being as productive as I have this week. How to keep going with the memoir writing once I return home to the checklists, chores, children and general routine demands of regular life......and in just over two weeks time, teaching/grading/prepping for 130+- students 5 days a week/nights and weekends! Her suggestions were specific and strategic which is how I like to approach things. Pure intentions, plus hard work.
One of the definite things I'm going to do is add writing time each day, above and beyond the blogging. I'm going to tag it onto my daily meditation, as follows the seminar routine for how we started our days with Dani (quadrants, meta-meditation, master writing, writing exercise). Easy to keep going at home with the commitment of being in the now and sticking to it. Plus map out deadlines for workshops/applications and such as my stories become unpacked.
One thing I did not expect from this week was the amount of other writers, with whom I swapped contact info, and may now use as a virtual writing group. While I attempt to find or cultivate a trusted group of writers with whom to work, this could be a invaluable resource. The productivity of these writers, kindness and generosity was an added and suprising gift. I'd hoped for some structure and guidance from Dani, as several writers had recommended her to me as a master teacher/writer. I hadn't expected to find a tribe of like-minded people who may be willing to give as good as they get. Time will tell how real these impulses to continue working together will be, but, ever the Tigger, I'm hopeful.
Plus one writer, who has a blog with a large audience, wants to link our blogs as she thinks it will benefit and build our audience....funny how this little piece of digits, x's & o's, is growing, isn't it. So, that too, I'll see if and how it organically grows or not.
Mostly, as I stated yesterday, it's about getting the stories down, doing drafts and seeing what shape they take. It may be that in the telling I find something else that needs to be said that supersedes the the lesson laden stories I've been planning to share....stories of choices and how we are the choices we make and the stories we tell. How we must always be careful how we craft the stories of who we are when we carry them with us. How we are not the same people we were when we lived the stories. Time, distance, reflection, remembering (re-member-ing), forgiveness, experience and who we are now shape how we tell our stories. What we leave in, what we leave out. What will be of use and will have intentions that are true.....which is always hard, because life is messy and memory is too.
A sculpture I passed every morning, near the Ram Dass lotus-shaped library, seemed to me to be a metaphor for memoir. It was a metal outline of a human stuck in the ground, and then a few yards away another only slightly shorter, and so on until you reached the cut-out human at the end. The silhouettes stuck in the ground are like the various selves we all are at various stages of our lives.
I'm not the same person I was at 23 as I am now at 53, and hopefully won't be the same at 83! Nothing is constant but change and our soul/energy. In each moment we are ourselves, but we're also our choices . So I'm going to write about various points in my life where I made choices that lead to great changes, as that is what my students, friends and children seem to want to know. Transforming my Life into Art.......wish me luck!
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