Category Archives: On writing

Quote from Burn this Book (Toni Morrison)

From Burn This Book (Edited by Toni Morrison):

“Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights—can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace; and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.”

Buy my books here.

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Day 4, Journey of the Heart, and lady friends

Carrie left this morning. So, now it’s just me and the dog here. One more day of writing and enjoying this protected creative space. I’m preparing now to write for as long as I can this morning and this evening I’ll take a drive out to Pacific Beach to have dinner with a long-time friend and her family. I finished Journey of the Heart this morning and want to share some of my thoughts on this book that truly came to me at just the right time.
There was a point in reading this book when I became so enthralled that my eyes followed one word to the next with eagerness. This was not at the beginning. I wonder in fact if the book should have started at Chapter 3. It’s a short book and can be read in a day if one was so inclined.
The gist of the book is revealed in the subtitle, “The Path of Conscious Love”. Wellwood proposes an eyes—and heart—wide open kind of love.
The last text my freshmen read this year was Romeo and Juliet. And in teaching this play, I am always surprised to realize both how much and how little things have changed. We are always wanting love to happen to us, to persist without our effort. Or, like Mercutio, we are skeptical of love at all, reducing it to the physical act of sex or scorning the idea of it at all. We are, as Wellwood writes, al of us wounded and wanting in love. The core of Wellwood’s idea is that love is Romeo’s heaven and Mercutio’s earth and that it doesn’t happen, but keeps happening, and can only reach it’s full potential with our open and honest participation. This resonates with me and in reading this work I both came across some new ways of looking at things as was reminded of some ideas that I have long held inside and were happy to be pulled to the surface in a new context.
I think this book may be a crucial text for our time. The state of relationships between men and women does not seem to me to be becoming more liberated as some would argue. There is a glaring imbalance that our current popular culture feeds and extends. I’m not sure how to quite put my finger on this, but I see the signs of it all around me. How many books are being published with titles resembling, “Women Who Do Too Much”? Many! And oh ladies, in our liberation and our obsession with being all we can be, what have we left for the men? At my son’s eighth grade graduation I could not help but notice that all the girls wore make-up, formal dresses—many in heels. Yet, I did not see one boy dressed up, and while the girls strutted confidently around, the boys slouched. The female ego has grown bold. And how will these two halves come together in love? How will they learn to find their own unique and diverse selves amidst all that they are told they can and should be?
Here are some of my favorite quotes from Wellwood’s book, which urges us to place all of our previous patterns and beliefs out on the proverbial table and to select with honesty and consciousness what aspects of ourselves will allow both individuals in a relationship to reach their full potential and experience a deeper connection to each other.
“Relating to passion in a sane and healthy way is one the first and one of the greatest challenges in a relationship” (58).
“The deeper a soul-connection goes, however, the more it brings our karmic patterns and personal neuroses to the surface” (89).
“Real intimacy, in short, brings upour unfinished business—all the rough spots in ourselves and our partner that still need to be polished, refined, and further developed” (90).
“Furthermore, we come to believe that our story accurately represents the way things really are. Yet in truth it is only a dream, a conditioned pattern of beliefs that keeps creating the kind of situation that wounded us in the first place” (109).
“No matter how close to another person we may be, part of us is radically and forever alone and, in its own way, wild and free” (116).
“That is where an awareness practice such as mindfulness or meditation pr present-centered psychotherapy can be particularly useful. These disciplines slow down the busy mind. By sharpening our awareness and discernment, they can help us separate our immediate experience from our stories” (126).
“If a couple is willing to let the patterns their relationship has settled into die, it can keep being reborn” (132).
“The love between man and woman can provide powerful glimpses of sacred vision” (139).
“The profound question love poses is, ‘Can you face your life as it is; can you look at all the pain and darkness as well as the power and light in the human soul, and still say yes?’” (140).
“tyranny of the orgasm” (175).

This is a book about acting out of our conscious mind, out of intention, an idea I’ve some across in my study and practice of yoga time and again. But to see it here in this new context—this more specific context—in this book that celebrates the paradoxes and the possibilities between us, that offers up the notion that love is something we cultivate and participate in—this–makes me happy it was passed on to me, that is now part of the pool of my experience.
All right, getting back to the novel now… 🙂

A few hours later…

This evening I went out to Sara’s place in Pacific Beach. I was able to see her beautiful family, home, and garden and see another old Friend (Jen). What a great way to end this trip. Love these two beautiful ladies!

Buy my books here.

Everything to gain

Slept in til 6! The sun was persistent coming through the window, lighting on where I was sleeping on the couch. Ajax whined while I downed a cup of coffee, scratching at the door, gazing at me with his begging eyes.
We ran down to the water’s edge. The tide was way out. I collected three intact sand dollars, a sturdy, smooth black rock and half a large clam shell along the way. Ajax chased the birds and bathed in the water and I felt the gift of the moment. To be running along the ocean, the day mine to create.
I got little writing done hooked into the wireless at Cafe Amici, gave in to the distractions of email and Facebook, then strolled back to her our “home”.
I’ve been writing now for a couple of hours, have rewritten everything I lost due to a technology glitch yesterday, and am now moving forward again in this story. I’m cognizant today of how difficult it is sometimes to beat back the voices that keep us from believing in our stories and feeling I have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Happy summer y’all!
Back to the writing…

Buy my books here.

Day 2: Baby Feet

Strolling on the beach at 5:30 this morning with Ajax, ideas relevant to both my novel and my life came to me not by brain but by inspiration. Two walks on the beach now have left the skin on my feet more like the skin I was born in, more willing to ask the right questions without fear.
I was awfully hungry when I woke this morning, but had only a cup of coffee before heading out on the beach. It felt good to feel hungry and I was thinking then that I’d like to feel hungry more often. After an hour on the beach, I washed a bowl full of strawberries. Those may have been the sweetest strawberries I’ve ever eaten.
Getting down to writing now. Working on my blog first. Adding some fiction, which you should check out here.

Buy my books here.

Arriving at the Beach: Let the writing begin!

Friday night:
It seemed at one point today that I might never get out of my classroom and out of town. My son, who was supposed to catch a 7:30 flight to San Francisco missed his flight by three minutes because his aunt thought there was adequate time to stop to buy him a donut. Knowing that he was on his way, that by the time I checked out for the school year, he would have safely landed at the San Francisco International Airport and be spending time with his cherished grade school friends was something that I’d expected, depended on to relax into the long drive I had ahead of me to Ocean Shores. We worked it out. He finally did get on a flight, but only after I’d already made the long drive and settled in to my temporary home. He’s probably right now eating pizza, playing Xbox and catching up with his closest friends.
Long drive you say? Ocean Shores isn’t too far from Olympia. Ah, but I have a driving phobia that I have fed and affirmed for many years. The distance from Olympia to Ocean Shores seems vast when you are singing for your life, to fend off an anxiety attack, to will the calm, cool, collected person you long to be into being. I chanted mantras. I sang old folk songs. I mused poetic with Fiona Apple. And, I made it!
This is the second annual end of the school year beach writing retreat, and I am so thrilled to be here. Upon arriving in our cozy little chalet, complete with kitchen, living room, dining room, and wood stove, I immediately put all my stuff away, tucked my things into the right corners, in the right rooms—in short, nested. And this is a cozy little place, even if it looks like someone put the entire clearance bin from a pop art and frame store all over the walls. And I do mean all over. There are framed pictures of beaches, planes, bunnies on roller skates, travel ads, Disney characters, roses in a vase—I tried finding a theme to connect them all, but came up with only cheap art. After settling in and acclimating, I rolled out for a run on the beach with the dog to think about just what my writerly goals were going to be between now and Tuesday morning.
Improving and expanding my blog is part of the plan. After Ajax and I take a run on the beach in the morning each day, I’ll stroll on over to Café Amici to hook into their wireless: do some blogging, check my email, and pop on over and check on my peeps on Facebook. I want to add some more poetry to my poetry blog and set up a fiction blog, where I’ll post several short stories I’ve written.
After this warm-up, the real work begins. My primary goal here is to work on my novel. And I will do this for the rest of the day each day until I just can’t stand it. Then, I’ll take a walk and write some more. Eventually, I’ll have to sleep and start this process all over again. In there I’ll throw in some yoga sessions and some tinkering around on my guitar (I am a baby at guitar, but really enjoying the practice, particularly since it’s something I’ve aspired to for years, though I only ever started and then stopped after little progress).

Buy my books here.

Daydreaming of summer–need input!

The things we don’t get credit for, can’t measure or plan, the things that bubble up from our own heart’s desire, our own gratitude, our presence in the moment. Herein we find richness! Opulent. Affluent. Content. It’s not my habit to put these things off to a more convenient or less busy time, and what this means is that sometimes I get very little sleep.
And this year! Finally divorced. The only involved parent to a thirteen-year-old boy. Teaching yoga and high school. Reading and writing every day since September for the work I am doing to earn my MFA in fiction writing. Amazing! Exhausting! I’ve learned so much. More than I realize, I’m sure.
And now…summer! I can count the school days…there are 31. I look forward to sleeping in, to day-tripping, to reading whatever I want for whatever reason, for a pause to celebrate the steps I’ve taken this year toward honesty and intention. So, I’m sharing two unfinished lists here and I’d like to hear what you would put on your list, so that I might be inspired by your summer daydreams. I’ll do some of this and read some of this, but I will also stay open to suggestion, to change, to the unexpected.

Summer Dos:

-eat black licorice ice cream
-have picnics
-play kick-the-can
-day hikes!
-take Winston to see three movies in a row at the theater
-bike rides
-watch some movies that have been recommended to me lately
-barbecue corn and tofu steaks
-get Carrie drunk in New Mexico
-learn that flow sequence!
-see live music
-beach days
-river adventures
-camping
-Savasanah

Summer Reads:

-Lamb / Christopher Moore
-The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cover / Christopher Moore
-Fool / Christopher Moore

Recommended Books (I want to read mostly recommended books!):

-Are You There Vodka? It’s me Chelsea./ Chelsea Handler
-The River Why / David James Duncan
-The Glass Castle / Jeanette Walls
-American Home Life / David Barringer
-Twisted Fun /David Barringer

Buy my books here.

Writing in San Francisco

San Francisco has a reputation for being a writer’s city, as the home of the Beat Generation and many more writers now and over the years. Before traveling there this past week, I read A Writer’s Guide to San Francisco to get some ideas about where I should go/ what I should see. My home café was near where I was staying on Haight. A wonderful little café called The Bluefront. Free wireless. Lots of outlets. Super good hummus and dolmas. Free coffee refills. You see why I liked it there?
I also made it over to City Lights Books over in North Beach and sat in the Lady Psychiatrists Booth drinking beer and working on my novel at the famous Vessuvio’s Café (right next to Jack Kerouac Alley). I took a long walk to the beach one day and spent a lot of time exploring Golden Gate Park, breathing in the scent of Eucalyptus trees. I caught a yoga class at Yoga Tree and saw the Andy Warhol exhibit at the DeYoung. I went to a concert at The Great American Music Hall.
I spent my entire spring break in San Francisco. Though I primarily went there to see a friend, I did have a lot of time to kick around by myself, writing and exploring the city. Not everyone has the advantage teachers do of regularly scheduled breaks from the daily grind. Lucky me! ☺
Though the unique sites and sounds of San Francisco did inspire me to write more and take more risks, I could see how the same could be true of any unfamiliar place. I could see how it’s not so much about where you go, but that you go. To the beach for the weekend. On a hike. On a photo walk around town. I recently heard this process called “filling your artistic well”, and this made sense to me. It seems to me that as a writer it’s wonderful to get out of town whenever possible, but it’s also good to fill our every day lives with adventures that will force us into unfamiliar territory and that we journey their with our hearts and minds open to the possibility of inspiration. What will you do this week to open yourself to the inspiration that is waiting for you? What will you do today?

Buy my books here.

New Year Reflections

Every single year I write a New Year letter outlining my goals and desires for the coming year. You can be sure that this year, I have them. I have become adept over the years at setting and achieving goals. Life is about the digging in, the uncovering, and the reshaping of our selves. I do not want to write about those things this year. I will try to do them all. I will keep running, and writing, and trying to be a better parent and teacher. I will do and be all that I can, because those things bring me joy and are part of who I am.
So what will I write about then?
I will write about love, because this is the thing that I want more than anything, really, and that I’d like to cultivate more of in my life. The novel I’m writing now is about a young man who is rather inhabited with the idea of love and who finds it where he didn’t expect or want to.
Some months ago, my husband and I split, a rather drawn out break-up. However unhappy I was in the last years of our marriage, and I was desperately unhappy, I have not been able to shake this gaping whole left in his absence, that I used to fill with love songs: when you’re lost and look, you will find me…you do something to me…whatever words I say…we had a love, a love, a love you can’t find every day…and you give yourself way, and you give yourself away.
I do want to cultivate the love relationships I have in my life: many beautiful friendships, a wonderfully mouthy teenage son, family that is always, always there when I need them, and gratitude [perhaps the greatest love of all? (allusion to Whitney intended, tongue-in-cheek)] for life and all that is life. I do absolutely want THAT love too, the one you can’t find every day. However, I do not need it. This is, I think, what I need to cultivate. It’s a paradox, I know. To cultivate not needed the thing you most want. But life is a paradox in so many ways—does it surprise you?
We live in a culture of instant everything. Browsing the ads on CraigsList, I’d say we want that in love too. The result is we lie to ourselves to make it happen, we persist when we should recover ourselves. There are lots of possibilities for all of us out there in love, and to unravel oneself entirely for one—however radiant and certain it seems—is foolishness. Not surprisingly, we confuse sex with love. Sex can be quite wonderful without love and love defined mostly through sex is likely to be a love in which one partner is submerged, enslaved. You should give yourself away when the love fits the vision you’ve cultivated.
This empty space in my life has left me remarkably off-kilter. In one moment, I’m soaring, riding a long lost freedom to think and be that I’d forgotten were even there. In another, I’m frightened, alone, balling at the intensity of the loneliness I feel.
In this New Year, I want to cultivate patience and vision, because I know precisely what I want in love. The intention of that has got to be strong enough to carry me through the wonderfully human feelings of impulsivity and desire. I want to jump into to life, not retreat from it for fear of losing my vision, my patience. I want to act with impulse and desire, remembering always the sacredness of that vision.

I want more of all of these things too:
–margins of good books to write in
–kisses
–arguments for the sake of argument (thanks Winston for fulfilling this for me lately)
–words written
–coffee conversations
–lunch-time walks
–great movies
–laughter
–more laughter 😉
–Illuminated moments—ah-ha!
–walks/runs with the dog
–random encounters with new people including spontaneous conversations (like with the guy in the sauna the other day)

I will state one specific goal for the New Year: I want to be able to perform the advanced yoga flow sequence I’ve been working on. That will be a feat indeed!

Happy New Year to all! May you do and be your vision for 2009.

Buy my books here.

An orgy of writers?

“Overcapacity has been something generally acknowledged across the writing industry for at least 10 years. In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, the onetime best-selling novelist and story writer Ann Beattie mourned the situation of the modern writer, living in a world where people are more interested in “being a writer” than in writing itself. “There are too many of us, and M.F.A. programs graduate more every year, causing publishers to suffer snow-blindness, which has resulted in everyone getting lost,” she lamented. That Ann Beattie must now compete on Amazon with a self-published author named Ann Rothrock Beattie is proof of how enormous the blizzard has become.”
From “Bail Out the Writers!” by Paul Greenberg, published in the NY Times 12/9/2008

Comment: So what! In reading this article, I had to remind myself why I write in the first place. I write, as many writers do, out of a freakin’ unstoppable inner drive to understand. Would it be such a bad thing if every single one of us tried our hand at being a “writer”? I don’t think so. In fact, it could be something resembling utopian. The idea of making money off writing is a potential perk so far away from the heart of why I write in the first place, that I can only bring myself to attempt entering the strange and complicated world that is publishing in short-lived bursts of oh, what the hell energy. I feel about that endeavor the same way I feel about the fact that as a high school English teacher I have to assign my students letter grades and participate in team-building activities in which I am encouraged to “cross-pollinate” with other teachers, but during which the entire time is spent musing on why in the hell we are doing that particular thing anyway. Since we could die at any moment, shouldn’t we spend as much time as possible doing what is meaningful? I prefer to work for a living and write to see.

Buy my books here.

NanoWrMo is at an end for 2008.

Only 40,000 words for me this year, but I’m happy with most of them.
I’m back and planning to pay more attention to this neglected blog. I’m also combining my What I’m Reading Now blog with this one because the subject matter seem to go so well together. So, from here on, I’ll be writing on this blog about both what I’m writing or thinking about writing and what I’m reading. 🙂

Buy my books here.

Make Time.

Liz Shine: Author, Editor.

Category Archives: On writing

Quote from Burn this Book (Toni Morrison)

Day 4, Journey of the Heart, and lady friends

Everything to gain

Day 2: Baby Feet

Arriving at the Beach: Let the writing begin!

Daydreaming of summer–need input!

Writing in San Francisco

New Year Reflections

An orgy of writers?

NanoWrMo is at an end for 2008.