Category Archives: A Room Of Your Own

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).

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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

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

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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?

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Fiction Excercise: Pick an object you’ve encountered today and write a piece of short fiction that includes that object.

What Liz wrote:

Dry-mouth, her neck in a knot, she kicked her foot a little to the right to check. Was he still there? Shit. He was.

She stretched her arms and legs out wide, rolled over and pulled him toward her until she was cradling him against her belly. She pressed her breasts against his back and nibbled his ear. When she was sure he was awake, she rolled him over, climbing on to him.

Two hours later, the Zen alarm clock began it’s slow chiming them back to consciousness. They’d both fallen back to sleep. They’d both orgasmed. This time when she rolled over, he was already on the edge of the bed, sliding his leg into his worn out jeans.

“You going so soon?” She didn’t mean it.

“Yeah. I’ve got an interview today. Need to go get cleaned up. It’ll probably be nothing.”

“Well, good luck. Who does interviews on a Saturday anyway?” She hadn’t meant to ask out loud. She was just making conversation.

“Not everyone works an easy Monday through Friday, nine to five, you know.” He was buckling his belt.

She tried to remember what he’d said the carving on his belt buckle signified. Something about willing his own destiny. The contradiction had occurred to her at the time, but sitting in the pulsing light of the dance club, she’d chosen to hold it back. It didn’t matter anyway. She knew what he’d meant. She’d taken another drink of her gin and tonic, said, “That’s cool. Means something. I respect that.” Then he’d looked at her like he wanted to devour her and she imagined undoing that buckle, sliding the leather belt through the belt loops of his jeans, dropping the belt to the floor. In that way, she supposed, she had willed her own destiny. She’d wanted to be devoured.

Now, having kissed him at the door, each pair of eyes running from the other, she pulled the pot of fresh coffee, brewed at just the time the machine’s computer was programmed to, off the burner. She filled a periwinkle blue mug. She read the inscription, “Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became the butterfly.”

She remembered the day she bought it and why. She couldn’t will herself to face her two teenage girls just yet, not after all those hours spent waiting on a hard wood bench to be the last couple of the morning to ask the judge to please allow a divorce, to provide evidence that they’d signed all the forms, completed the necessary parenting plan.

She’d felt like an empty shoebox sitting there staring at the back of her husband’s head, watching the way his arm draped over Becky’s shoulders. She knew just the one. The one at the top of her closet filled with love letters and their secret photos. Nothing had been added to it for years. It may as well be empty now. Becky was just a friend, a colleague, a damn good broker. That’s what he’d said.

It was raining. The girls were at their father’s for the weekend. She stirred the creamer around and around with her spoon until the coffee was just the right shade of light brown. She’d have left him years ago if she’d had the nerve. But she hadn’t and so she’d gotten left.

She remembered now that she’d also bought a book that day. A hard-bound book of poetry on transformation from a series she’d read some others from and liked a lot. One collection of love. One on Joy.

When she’d arrived home from the bookstore, she’d placed it on the shelf immediately. It was dinner time, she had thought. I have to keep some semblance of order around here. For the girls.

She pulled it off the shelf now, six weeks after purchasing it, for the first time. She opened it delicately, feeling the spine bend and change in her hands. She pulled the afghan her mother had made her for her sixteenth birthday, blues, purples and greens, from the top of the hall closet and wrapped it around her. She settled onto the couch, propped her feet onto the teak ottoman, and began to read one poem after the next.

When the ring of the telephone woke her three hours later, she was on page thirty-seven.

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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.

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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.

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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. 🙂

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What can I say? It’s National Novel Writing Month…

This is my fourth year and going into the second week, I think I have the lowest word count ever. Do you think it’s a coincidence that it also might be the best story? Might be.
Just keep writing folks. Don’t worry about anything. Don’t hesitate for a moment. This is what you are supposed to be writing. Write it.

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Copyright News

NY Times article on Google’s book scanning settlement.

Diet, exercise, and writing

The idea that food and activity level effect our writing is not new. I recently read Julia Cameron’s The Writing Diet, which addresses how to eat well and feed our cravings with words, not foods that trigger binging, lethargy, and self-doubt. Joyce Carol Oates, in The Faith of A Writer wrote at some length about the impressive history of writers who find inspiration when on long reflective walks or heart-stirring runs.
My experience has crystallized this idea into what looks to me now like obvious truth. I am most inspired and productive when I adhere to the aryuvedic principles that I’ve found work for me, when my yoga practice is regular and engaged, and when I’m walking or running most days.
Food can be an immense comfort for a stuck writer, a source of celebration for a job well done. We crave the same richness in our diet that we crave in our words. We want the thing that appeals to the senses to such a degree that it engages us entirely.
The trouble is, traditional “rich” foods have a short lasting satisfaction, make us too tired to keep writing and are usually not so good for our overall health. This is where the ayurvedic principles of diversity and intention come in.
Eating foods that span the range of the six qualities and six tastes of food and that are chosen for your personal energy needs leads to long lasting satisfaction and greater creative stamina. This flies in the face of the idea that a person should avoid certain “trigger foods” and argues that a craving for chips or chocolate or ice cream is indicative of a greater sensory deprivation that can be addressed by adding spices to your diet and eating so called trigger foods in small, wisely chosen amounts daily, such as a square of dark chocolate, a couple of slices of candied ginger, and the right amounts of good fats throughout the day. These cravings are also indicative of a larger kind of deprivation in which in the course of our busy lives, we often eat food that is bland and nutrient-deficient, which will eventually make us ravenous even when it’s not calories that we lack.
Poor personal food choices and lack of exercise scatter and stall my creative energies more than anything else. Building good habits around this and forgiving my shortcomings in this is something that I’ve been actively working on for some years now. The thing I find most difficult is not multi-tasking while eating. I know that the experience of the food, the texture, the flavor, and all the subtly is part of the nourishment we crave. Yet, I have trouble slowing down to do just this one thing.
I’ll keep refining these habits for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that when I eat better and exercise, I write more and more often. I’ll begin by forcing myself to sit down at the table to eat dinner tonight and then again breakfast tomorrow morning, which I usually eat while putting on my shoes for work. ☺

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Make Time.

Liz Shine: Author, Editor.

Category Archives: A Room Of Your Own

Arriving at the Beach: Let the writing begin!

Daydreaming of summer–need input!

Writing in San Francisco

Fiction Excercise: Pick an object you’ve encountered today and write a piece of short fiction that includes that object.

New Year Reflections

An orgy of writers?

NanoWrMo is at an end for 2008.

What can I say? It’s National Novel Writing Month…

Copyright News

Diet, exercise, and writing