by Mary Ann Moore | May 23, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
Nancy Slonim Aronie is the founder of the Chilmark Writing Workshop on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts where she lives. She’s been facilitating Writing from the Heart workshops for forty-five years at various venues such as Kripalu, Omega and Esalen. In her new book, Memoir as Medicine: The Healing Power of Writing Your Messy, Imperfect, Unruly (but Gorgeously Yours) Life Story, she shares her good advice about writing, essays she has written for various publications, and excerpts from a previously unpublished memoir about her son Dan.
In an interview with her publisher, New World Library, Nancy said: “Getting your rage on the page and getting to the truth of what shaped you instead of having those stories marinating in your body, that’s the medicine.” As for the benefits of telling your story, Nancy said: “Telling your story and getting it out of your body is the beginning of healing. You will get a new perspective, maybe new insights, a new way of seeing the whole picture instead of just that tiny thing that happened or even a big thing that happened.”
When asked about a spiritual component to memoir, Nancy said: “Spiritually, if you are willing to take the lessons from the information you’re accessing, because all you want to do is grow and be a more loving being on the planet, then of course there is a spiritual element.”
I appreciate what Nancy says about writing groups for writers: “Everyone needs a support system.” She recommends, as I do, that people don’t “criticize and destroy your voice.” Nancy said: “They can give you good advice, but to me, the most important part of that equation is that they find beauty in your work first.”
Where to start? Nancy said in her interview: “There are lots of beginnings. Chronology isn’t majorly important. Authenticity is. Storytelling is. Sounding like you, is. Connecting the dots, not only what happened but how it affected you, how it changed you, how it shaped you. Those are important. Not necessarily starting from when I was born and this happened and that happened and this happened.”
In an early chapter in the book, “You Don’t Have to Start at the Beginning of Your Life,” Nancy includes a few of her rejected beginnings and then the one she chose for a piece called “Rent-a-Mouth” previously published in Vineyard Gazette.
Nancy points out right at the beginning of Memoir as Medicine, that her one rule in her workshops is that when someone finishes reading, “tell her what you loved.”
This the approach, as referred to in her interview, I so appreciate. “When you are willing to take the chance of saying this is who I am, these are the things that shaped me, this is where I am now, magic happens, health happens, healing happens.”
“Say yes,” Nancy urges regarding the telling of your ongoing story. “Don’t worry about the ancestors. They’re dead. Don’t worry about the young ones. They can’t read yet. Don’t worry about your readers. You tell your truth, and they will turn the page.”
As poet Sean Thomas Dougherty says in answer to “Why bother?”: “Because right now there is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words.”
As for the excerpts from her previously unpublished memoir about her son Dan, Nancy says: “Writing about my experiences with this sick kid gave me exactly what I needed to see what I was doing. It didn’t happen overnight. It was a long trip from brutal awareness to actual change.”
Dan was diagnosed with diabetes at nine months old and at twenty-two, with multiple sclerosis. For sixteen years, Nancy and her husband took care of Dan until he died at age thirty-eight. What she realized in writing her memoir about him was that by trying to make life “easier” for him, “by reinforcing the message that he was handicapped in every way, I was actually crippling him more than the disease was.”
Each of the chapters ends with a writing prompt such as “Write your book jacket.” This is a good way to figure out what the book you say you are writing is actually about. In Nancy’s example, about her proposed book, says: “The things she tells participants in her renowned writing workshops, ‘Write the sorrow out of your body or the sorrow will find its way into you’ and ‘You cannot skip the pain part,’ become the very things Aronie needs to learn for herself.” [Photo of Nancy Slonim Aronie by Eli Dag.]
Besides being so honest in her memoir, Nancy shares her good humour. In the sample book jacket, she says of herself: “A control freak by nature. . . “
Later, when describing meeting her husband Joel in 1965, Nancy tells how her grandmother also fell in love with him. Gram would get Joel to fix the disposal in her sink and afterwards, in her Yiddish accent, say: “I hef two voids for dat boy: vunduh ful.”
As well as the humour, Nancy shares poignant pieces written about the days leading up to her sister’s death for instance. “Sisters” was previously published in Martha’s Vineyard Times and of the essay she says: “It was only by writing it that I was able to get in touch with what I really felt.”
“Don’t Shy Away from Taboo Topics” is one of the chapter titles and in this one, Nancy includes a piece about her son Dan’s constipation and how she helps out. In an earlier chapter, she receives a phone call from Dan about his impotence. Yes, Nancy took on the challenge of taboo topics.
Memoir as Medicine has chapters on Solitude, Grief, giving a story time to breathe, being an eavesdropper, using dialogue and “Read, Read, Read.”
As for Nancy’s stories about publishing her work, there are those too. I especially like the one about her experience working as an editor for Lear’s magazine and being fired by Frances Lear. She didn’t think she could write about the experience right away but an editor, Lary Bloom at Northeast Magazine, told her to write immediately. She later “realized how powerful it is to write when you’re in the middle of a tragedy.”
The piece was published in Northeast Magazine and is included in the chapter entitled “Write the Blood on the Page.” “Queen Lear” is a beautiful essay, full of dialogue, enthusiasm and Nancy’s good humour. She used what she calls the “Day 1, Day 2 . . . method” which got her started.
A good idea suggested by Nancy is serializing your memoir in a blog. In that particular chapter, Nancy says: “Write three titles for your blog.” There are real benefits to blogging as it keeps you writing, without outside pressure, and you have readers some of whom may even give you some positive comments to keep you going. You develop a writing community this way, maybe a following, and it could be “you might even catch the attention of a publisher so that the blog can turn into the book.”
Another good idea I’m realizing is that previously published pieces could be part of your memoir as Nancy has done. You could even include letters to the editor – if they tie into the theme of your memoir.
If you think you can “Just take all my journal entries and turn them in to a book,” Nancy says: “Good try, lazy bones.” With a journal, you’re usually writing about what happened. In a narrative, “you’re writing about what you learned from what happened.”
In a chapter near the end of Memoir as Medicine, Nancy advises choosing the best stories and omitting the ones that illustrate the same point. “We don’t need to hear how much you suffered. We need to know how much you survived.”
Nancy includes a poignant essay about her son Dan’s final days. Her final chapter, “Endings,” gives the advice she has followed herself: “You are not copying your journal entries. You are telling your story, showing your struggle, sharing your little victories and how you emerged out of the hole, only to be knocked back again, letting us climb out again and again with you. And ultimately giving us a map showing how you managed.”
There are many more examples to share with you but I think I’ll just suggest you buy the book and be inspired to find the medicine in the writing of your own stories.
by Mary Ann Moore | May 17, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
Artists in Residence (Chronicle Books, 2021) is a book that features the homes of seventeen artists “and their living spaces, from Giverny to Casa Azul.” I really appreciate Melissa Wyse’s writing with her enthusiasm for and fresh approach to her subjects. And the illustrations by Kate Lewis are delightful and enticing.
Melissa Wyse is an art writer, fiction writer, and essayist who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Kate Lewis is an artist whose paintings are in private collections around the world. She lives in Chicago. The two met in the summer of 2017 at the Ragdale Foundation and their continued connection, some serendipity, and a “strange alchemy” led to this engaging book. Melissa and Kate encourage readers to follow their own curiosities.
As their introduction says, “Some of the artists in this book used their homes as places where they explored materials, staged still lifes, or inhabited the aesthetic vocabularies that would inform their artistic production. Others experienced their homes as sites of divergence, places where they stepped away from the hallmarks of their artistic work to embrace radically different colors, patterns, or aesthetic experiences.”
I do love that term “aesthetic vocabularies”!
Georgia O’Keeffe is the first artist in the book. Her home, in the village of Abiquiu, New Mexico, is open to the public. I’ve seen the outside of O’Keeffe’s adobe house but hadn’t booked a tour which has to be done many months in advance. The illustration shown is of “a weathered wooden door” that leads into O’Keeffe’s living room. ”
Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and moved to New York City in 1938. “She worked as an artist for over seven decades, right until her death in 2010 at the age of ninety-eight.”
Bourgeois’ townhouse on West 20th Street was cluttered with stacks of paper, photos and articles pinned to the wall and English and French phrases as well as phone numbers written above her mantel. I appreciate Melissa’s take on the clutter:
“In our culture, with its stigmas against clutter and holding on to too much, we ignore the generative capacity of collecting and stacking up, all the pain and protection accumulation can hold. It can become a fortressing that keeps us safe – and a repository. All those books and papers allowed Bourgeois to live encompassed by the material traces of the past. Her archiving connected her with the seeds of memory that were such essential sources for her art.”
After her husband died in 1962 and after their three sons had grown, Bourgeois rearranged the rooms in her house, expanding her basement studio space into the ground floor living spaces. On Sundays she would open her home and host salons attended by various members of the community and especially “younger, emerging artists.”
Many of the homes described in the book have been preserved and the Louise Bourgeois home is one of them, by the Easton Foundation.
The cover of the book, on the left, has an illustration of Hassan Hajjaj’s home in Marrakech, Morocco which serves as his private home and studio: Riad Yima where there is also a tearoom and boutique.
Clementine Hunter’s house on the Melrose Plantation in Louisiana is preserved by the Association for the Preservation of Historic Natchitoches.
Hunter’s home was owned by her employer for whom she worked as a servant in the plantation house starting when she was fifty years old. Before that, she had worked for decades as a field hand. She salvaged leftover paints from the artists who stayed at Melrose, painting scenes from life on the plantation and the surrounding community.
Her work was exhibited in gallery shows and Hunter “often sold her paintings herself from her home’s screened front porch.” In 1977, the Melrose Plantation was sold and the Cane River flooded, “sending water under Hunter’s house.” She moved into a house trailer at the age of ninety.
The old tin-roofed cabin was moved to the heart of the plantation grounds where it has been preserved and visitors can take a tour. The whole house hasn’t been preserved though. As Melissa points out, it’s “strangely pulled apart; the kitchen and the bathroom shorn off the back of the building, the wall paper removed, the linoleum peeled off , the house stripped down to its floorboards and wood wall planks.”
Melissa goes on to say about the preservation: “It blurs the temporal realities of her life and denies the specifics of her experience . . . In an area dotted with restored plantation houses, in a country that continues to enact its racism in overt and subtle ways, Hunter’s stripped-down house feels symptomatic of a larger problem in how we tell and what we omit from history.”
Clementine Hunter would wallpaper her walls and onto the ceiling. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, at their home in Charleston, East Sussex, England, painted on all its surfaces including walls, mantels, doors and doorframes, and furniture.
If you’ve read about Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister, you may know she was married to art critic Clive Bell and they had two sons, Julian and Quentin. The couple had an “open marriage” with Clive moving into the Charleston house (with Vanessa and Duncan Grant) in 1939, living in his own “suite of rooms.”
Duncan Grant had several romantic relationships with men and with Vanessa Bell with whom he had a daughter Angelica in 1918. After their physical relationship ended, Bell and Grant remained close friends and lived together for most of their lives. “At Charleston, they enjoyed a harmonious and egalitarian approach to domestic living.”
As directors of Omega, an artists’ design collective, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant “crafted a philosophical framework that informed their approach to their own home at Charleston. They saw their rigorous practice of painting their home’s surfaces as a part of, and equal to, their artistic expression elsewhere . . . at Omega they had asserted the idea that decorative arts and interior decoration possessed intrinsic artistic value. In keeping with this philosophy, they transformed Charleston into a house-sized painting, a piece of art in its own right.”
Theirs was not a “traditional domestic experience” and Bell and Grant “painted an entirely new way to experience the space of home.”
And wouldn’t it be good if we aspired to the qualities Melissa describes of the Bell-Grant home, in our own homes: ““The inventiveness of their interior decoration mirrored the environment they fostered for the people within it: one that embraced tolerance, open-mindedness, creative and intellectual engagement, and personal freedom.”
Claude Monet’s house in Giverny, France is wild Melissa says. “Each room is an experiment in color, an invitation to the limits of how saturation shapes space.”
One of the illustrations in the Claude Monet chapter of the book is the yellow dining room where nearly everything is painted yellow. “Yellow even checkers the brightly tiled floor.” The illustration to the left is of the “enormous oven” in the kitchen where the walls are blue and tiled “with a constellation of organic blue and white starbursts and fleur-de-lis patterns.”
“When I think about Monet’s house at Giverny,” Melissa writes, “I think about how it feels to be submerged in color and space. His home aligns with my sense that aesthetic choices can be not just decorative, but also experiential, and that our experience of interior spaces can shape the way we feel. And while Monet’s interiors didn’t adopt his art’s content or style they do share his heightened awareness of color’s impact . . . In his home, he stepped easily between two worlds: the gardens that served as his core artistic subject and inspiration and the centering aesthetic experience of his house’s interiors.”
If I ever travel to Mexico City, I’ll certainly want to see the homes of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. There is the Kahlo home, Casa Azul, in Coyoacan, on the outskirts of Mexico City, and the two adjoining houses Rivera had built for himself and Kahlo in the San Angel neighbourhood of Mexico City.
“As her physical health worsened, Kahlo’s home became even more important for her as a source of creative stimulation and engagement,“ Melissa writes. The kitchen at Casa Azul has yellow floors and table with the lower portion of the walls painted bright blue. Most of the kitchenware is visible along with wooden spoons on the wall and painted pottery dishes on open shelves.
“Kahlo’s home feels like a distinct work of art, separate from her paintings. It has its own vocabulary of shape and form, color and line, its own aesthetic preoccupations and interests. It serves its own purpose, not as a staging ground or sketch or backdrop for her art.”
Vincent van Gogh, a Dutch painter, in May 1889, “voluntarily admitted himself to Saint Paul de Mausole, a psychiatric asylum in Saint-Remy, France. His former home in Arles, France and his room at the Saint-Remy asylum “served as places in which to paint and also as subjects of his paintings.”
Melissa says of Van Gogh: “He did not create his art in the thrall of mental illness; during and immediately after episodes, he was unable to create at all. He created his immense body of work through the diligent daily painting practice he adopted during the lucid months between attacks, when he saw his creative work as a way to maintain his sanity, to save his mind, to keep some traction on his own well-being.”
Other artists in the collection include Donald Judd, Claude Monet, Less Krasner & Jackson Pollock, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Zaria Forman and Henri Matisse.
It’s touching to read of Jean-Michel Basquiat, born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian father and a mother of Puerto Rican descent. He had a loft on Crosby Street and then a two-storey building at 57 Jones Street in New York’s SoHo. He died at the age of twenty-seven at the Jones Street location in 1988. The illustrations in the chapter are of suits, bicycles, audio and video cassettes. “He had always been interested in the creative potential of objects, from his teenage days of making assemblages from found objects on the street,” Melissa says.
Visitors are not able to visit Basquiat’s former home but admirers do travel on pilgrimages to 57 Great Jones Street and have left graffiti on the outside of the building. “It is an evolving, unofficial exhibit – the outside walls of his home transmuted into a living site of art.” There is also a plaque for Basquiat installed by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.
“Sometimes houses are preserved. Sometimes they endure,” Melissa says.
I can understand how Melissa Wyse and Kate Lewis felt a “new intimacy with the creative life of each artist” as they visited, painted, wrote about, imagined the homes of the visual artists included in Artists in Residence. Readers get to experience that too. I think we’re always fascinated to see where artists and writers create their work, how their homes influenced and supported their work and how their homes so often were and are living works of art.
Excerpted from Artists in Residence: Seventeen Artists and Their Living Spaces, from Giverny to Casa Azul Hardcover © 2021 by author Melissa Wyse and Illustrator Kate Lewis. Reproduced by permission of Chronicle Books. All rights reserved.
by Mary Ann Moore | May 1, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
Patrick Lane often greeted poets in the reception area of Honeymoon Bay Lodge on Lake Cowichan, Vancouver Island, when he led poetry retreats there. He’d also help carry our luggage to our rooms. I was remembering that about Patrick, who died in March 2019, when I went to a retreat with Lorna Crozier earlier in April 2022.
Patrick Lane was born in Nelson, B.C. in 1939 and grew up in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC interior, primarily in Vernon. He won nearly every literary prize in Canada, received several honorary degrees, and in 2014 became an Officer of the Order of Canada.
When Lorna did a reading on one of the evenings at the retreat in April, she had a few of us read poems from Patrick’s posthumous collection, The Quiet in Me, which she compiled following his death.
Lorna said when putting the poems together for the book, she chose the first and last poems and then figured out, by putting them on the living room floor, which poems belonged beside one another in the collection. It was an intuitive process as she chose poems “that want to slide between the sheets together.”
The first poem in the book is “Living in a Phantom Hut” which begins: “A wolf-hair brush in a yellow jar, a pool at dawn, / Basho on the road to the deep north.”
The speaker in the poem reflects on the Japanese haiku master Basho and notes the Barriere River, one of the main tributaries of the Fraser River in British Columbia. The classic poets and northern B.C. were significant to Patrick’s life and his poetry. And Basho is the name of one of his cats still living as far as I know. (Basho was eighteen in 2017 which is the year noted at the beginning of Lorna’s memoir Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats).)
Each line of “Living in a Phantom Hut” says so much about the end of one’s life and the peace that may be found there. “Old misfortunes can bring an old man peace,” the narrator says.
“There is nowhere I can go where I haven’t been” is the second to last line. The poem closes with “when I hold the brush to my ear I hear the moon,” referring back to the master poet Basho.
In the copy of Patrick’s memoir, There is a Season, that he inscribed for me, he has written an inscription to include the last half of a Basho haiku: “We are all the bamboo’s children in the end.”
In the last poem of The Quiet in Me, “Fragments,” the speaker is referring to “woodshed litter, / bits of bark and dust, fragments of fir and hemlock” and then, in the heart of the poem: “a barefoot child lights a fold of paper.”
“Seventy-three years will come to add to his seven,” the speaker says of the boy and he wonders what he can tell him.
In her introduction to The Quiet in Me, Lorna wrote about Patrick’s love of “the creatures and flora of the world.” She said, “as he lay dying, he ached not for himself but for the loss of caribou and whales and owls and salmon. He bemoaned the clearcuts and the forests burning in his home province.”
Patrick wrote of hummingbirds, “bees and the fat birds calling,” cherry blossoms, elephant seals, geese and beetles and eagles mating. A special tree for him was “The Elder Tree” where, as he wrote, “ I come to pray.”
The narrator notes the turtle that “rose/ from the pond’s heavy dark to heal her winter shell” and remembers his father planting trees. “How long ago the fathers, their stories another kind of cure.”
The Quiet in Me was launched on Zoom on April 22, 2022, with Patrick’s long time friend and publisher, Howard White, hosting. The event was organized by ZG Stories and sponsored by Munro’s Books in Victoria.
Friends of Patrick’s read poems and Rhonda Ganz, designer of the magnificent cover of the book, read “The Elder Tree.” She said “I wouldn’t be a poet if it weren’t for Patrick Lane . . . “ She mentioned Lorna Crozier too, with gratitude. Rhonda knew about the particular tree in the poem and Patrick did set out to show her where it was one day but then changed his mind.
Patrick Lane was one of hundreds of writers Howard White published at Harbour Publishing he said in his opening remarks. Howie knew “more of the guy he hung out with” than the poet who he first met in 1974 or thereabouts. He remembers going to the Cecil Hotel bar in Vancouver (demolished in 2011) after one of Patrick’s readings.
Pat, as he was known in those days, moved to Pender Harbour with his partner Carol. Howie and Patrick shot pool, drank together and “got be good friends.” Pat was an easy going guy, Howie said, and an enthusiastic storyteller.
Patrick apparently made some money as a handyman, “slamming together some rough back steps.” After a few years he was building houses. He “packed in the cozy scene in Pender and went on the road again,” Howie said. “Poetry was Patrick’s battleground.”
When I attended poetry retreats with Patrick, I don’t remember him saying: “If you’re going to write, there can’t be a safety net.” That’s what Howie remembers Patrick saying and I appreciate hearing it now. It doesn’t mean he didn’t make money in ways other than publishing his poetry but when he heard that someone he knew was going to get a law degree to support their writing financially, he said, “That’s bullshit.”
Steven Price was nineteen when he met Patrick Lane at the University of Victoria. At that time, Steven thought poetry had to rhyme. He said of Patrick: “He terrified me and electrified me.”
Patrick became a mentor and a friend to Steven who said Patrick Lane was one of the finest human begins he’s ever known. Steven read “Slick” which contains the line: “How hard it is to remember I forget, to forget I remember.” Patrick describes a knife blade as “a sigh, a trout caught in the mountains,/ the flight of willow leaves.”
He was a master of metaphor and a master teacher. So often with we poets at retreats, Patrick would suggest taking out the first few lines of a poem we had written. Or a whole stanza. If we happened to sit with him in the late afternoon, he’d have the typed version in front of him and would draw a pen through the first lines, draw arrows where other lines ought to go and take out most “ofs” and “ands.” At times he had us counting syllables and he always had us listening to the cadence and rhythm of a poem. Our ordinary speech is full of poetry Patrick said. No one talks in sentences.
Esi Edugyan said Patrick was her first teacher when she was seventeen at the University of Victoria. She remembered that in her second year her mother had suddenly passed away and Patrick gave her a bear hug. Esi read “Icebergs off Fogo Island.”
It is the quiet we love, the way water touches us,
the iceberg an animal gone astray in search of time.
The poet reminds us: “The water that is ice is ten thousand years old.”
One of Patrick’s sons, Michael Lane who was born in Vernon, B.C. and lived in Pender Harbour as a young child, chose “Om” to read as he felt it was his father in his final days.
I feel my brittle bones and smile. I am as fragile as winter grass.
I think of leaping to the floor and don’t.
Like my old cat I climb down slowly, accept
the smile of my woman who gives me coffee in the morning.
From “Om” by Patrick Lane
It’s such a gorgeous poem with a mole’s cry, memories of “when we moved / naked in a summer far away” and the Buddhist writing that was a literary influence: “and so the prince set out on the road to discover suffering / and gave his self up at the last.”
Esi Edugyan and Steven Price are both writers and partners and Steven commented on the example of Patrick and Lorna who “believed in each other.”
Patrick’s son, Richard Lane, said his relationship with his dad “didn’t stretch too deeply into poetry.” They spoke about trucks, football and hammers. Patrick’s choice was hammering by hand not with a pneumatic hammer. They talked of hummingbirds a lot so Richard read “Hummingbirds,” the second poem in The Quiet in Me.
Richard also read an except from “Wild Birds” written in the seventies and included in The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane (Harbour Publishing, 2011).
Because the light has paled and the moon
has wandered west and left the night
to the receding sea, we turn into ourselves
and count our solitudes. The change
we might have wished for had we time
To wish is gone. . . .
From “Wild Birds” by Patrick Lane
Later at the Zoom launch, Richard said he could hear his father’s voice in his poetry.
Lorna Crozier said he loved “all of you who are reading tonight.” For the people reading, Patrick was their first teacher. In a way, she said, she had to “channel” Patrick to make a change, delete a poem, add a poem” for The Quiet in Me.
In an article in the Toronto Star (Sat. April 9, 2020, “Celebrating a life of poetry together”), the Books Editor, Deborah Dundas, recounts a conversation she had with Lorna via telephone. Although he had been ill for three years, an illness that went undiagnosed, Lorna said, in the article” “Neither of us knew he was dying.”
In the introduction to The Quiet in Me, Lorna writes: “His calling to poetry began when he was a young man working in the mill towns of British Columbia, and it never left him. About a month before he died, he gave me a folder of poems he’d been working on in the rare moments of grace he found in the midst of an enervating illness. ‘Take a look,’ he said. ‘I think I have a small book here.’ I thought so, too, and as we always did for one another, I made a few editing notes on the pages. He never felt well enough to return to these poems and though most of my comments consisted of one word, ‘Wonderful,” it fell to me after his death to pull the manuscript together and make the final cuts and edits.”
“My heart is close to breaking,” Lorna said following the reading of Patrick’s poems at the Zoom launch . She read “Kinttsugi” meaning “golden repair” which is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mixing lacquer with powdered gold. Lorna said Patrick’s “golden repair was poetry.” And she read “Carefully.”
Carefully
The mole in his small room
moves a small stone
and waits out the rain.
Patrick Lane, The Quiet in Me
Howie read the title poem of the book: “The Quiet in Me.” In the poem, the speaker lifts a man who has fallen to the pavement from his wheelchair and recalls a friend, from “long ago,” a prospector he had lifted to his bed “and dead, / and dead.”
. . . . . . . . . . . the lovers too I laid to rest
in the sleep that follows love, all the arms I’ve held, such arms as will hold me.
from “The Quiet in Me” by Patrick Lane
Lorna wrote in the introduction to The Quiet in Me: “A poet who sang the darkness, he also found music for the enlightened moment in the garden, the turtle in the mud, the cat presenting to his master the body of a mole. In wonder and wisdom, he found the notes and language of love and the deep quiet that he came to in himself.”
As Lorna said at the Zoom launch, the god of Patrick’s understanding was an old tree. The Quiet in Me is dedicated to his children and grandchildren, his beloved students and his life-long friend and poetry publisher Howie White. I’m very grateful to have been one of those students.
Select poems excerpted from The Quiet in Me by Patrick Lane (Lorna Crozier, ed.) 2022, with permission from Harbour Publishing.
Things Will Come to You
The song your grandmother taught you,
the beautiful, the beautiful river
gather with the saints at the river, smooth stones
instruments of silence. Hold one to your temple.
Remember. Hear your true name. Moon, sea,
stone: always listen from the quiet part of you.
Mary Ann Moore
by Mary Ann Moore | Apr 15, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
“I feel unmoored when I’m not writing. Incomplete. Not quite myself.” Those are the words of Elise Valmorbida, author of The Happy Writing Book: Discovering the Positive Power of Creative Writing (Laurence King, 2021).
I definitely relate to what Valmorbida says above, included in her book that is the result of “decades of deliberation and discovery about the art, craft and positive experience of creative writing.”
Valmorbida, who grew up Italian in Australia and lives in London, has been a designer and creative director as well as the author of several books. She continues to teach Creative Writing through various organizations, at literary festivals and community-building organizations.
The Happy Writing Book (not designed by Valmorbida) has a very cheerful design with its orange cover and the large orange numbers that introduce each chapter.
In “Write What You Know?” Valmorbida says “your own experience will inform your work” but points out that authors do research. In the case of Annie Proulx, she “writes what she knows, but she didn’t know it before she started delving.” That delving sounds fun as Proulx “takes herself to new places, haunts little stores and buys heaps of second-hand books about farming, local history, auction records, hunting tackle, whatever. She transcribes wording from street signs and menus and advertising. She hangs about and absorbs conversations, noting the speech patterns, the vernacular, topics of concern.”
“Write to discover what you want to know, Valmorbida says. I like that approach and find it much more fascinating to learn as you go rather than to describe something you already know. Of course, you can write what you remember and approach it in an inventive way. There are many fine examples of doing that including a couple of memoirs I’ve read recently: Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas (considered a “fractured” memoir due to its short chapters written as vignettes from a life) and a more recent book, Persephone’s Children by Rowan McCandless (considered a “mosaic” memoir with the various forms of personal essays used by the author).
In a chapter about procrastination, Valmorbida suggests joining a class or making a circle. Circles can take different forms such as one to share work and get some feedback on your work from fellow writers. (Thank you Easy Writers with whom I worked for years.) You can form a circle where you get together to write and share your work, focusing on what most resonates with each listener. If you need some confidence building and aren’t out for impressing publishers, this is the way to go. (This is the approach taken in the Writing Life women’s writing circles I lead.)
In her chapter entitled, “Keep A Diary,” Valmorbida says “Don’t attempt to write out your entire day, every day.” I do, especially lately, as it’s a grounding exercise for me. I like her suggestion though of choosing a theme – “just one strand of experience – say, the music you’ve been listening to, where and how you heard it, what effects it has on you. Or you could focus on the places you’ve been to, physically and imaginatively, and see what thoughts take shape in your writing.”
That approach sounds like you could end up with some prose poems or short pieces of life writing that describe a year in your life. Recently I picked up a copy of The Book of Delights by Ross Gay in which in wrote about delights or “small joys we often overlook” each day for a year beginning with his 42nd birthday.
Valmormida says: “If you do only one thing in the diary department, I urge you to try your hand at this: gratitude. Make a regular record of the day’s blessings: a pleasure experience, a kind gesture, an accomplishment, a loved one, a smile, a gift, a moment of beauty.”
It’s a grand way to sleep at night “with a smile in your mind, and your dormant body will be suffused with benevolence.”
Studies show that, over time, this positive writing ritual can lower stress and anxiety levels, while boosting self-confidence, clarity of thought and resilience. In other words, you could be writing yourself happy.”
While publication can be a thrill, Valmorda says, “If you want to be published, you’ll be happier if your desire to write is greater than your desire to be published.”
I agree with that. “The point is to write,” Valmorida says. “The joy is in the doing. Discovering yourself, word by word. Unearthing ideas, word by word. Try creating without regard to result. Enjoy the process, how the practice of writing subtly makes its way into how you’re living. Your writing, like your life, is a work in progress.”
And you can always re-envision a situation as you write. In her chapter entitled “Invent an Alternative Present,” Valmorbida says: “You can rewrite the present with the hope of making things better. And – who knows ? – such action may even succeed in making things better.“
I believe that what we write can draw situations to us. Writing can be powerful. People have said they wrote in their journals about situations they’d like to improve and without realizing until some time later, they drew to themselves the home, the relationship, the job they were desiring. There’s also prescience in writing so that we write about a situation long before it comes to pass. I even did that in a collage (done in about 2015) with an image of a house that looks very much like the one we live in now.
Valmorbida says in her chapter, “Write the Future,” that John Updike “commented on the frequently prophetic quality of his fiction, to the point where people would appear in his life who’d started out as fictional characters. Reality eventually acts out our imaginings: when we write, we do so out of latency, not just memory.”
A good suggestion in the book is to write out the negative and positive. The “negative” could be the emotions related to traumatic events. Valmorbida notes the work of James Pennebaker who investigated the effects of “expressive writing” and found that it led to an improvement in various physical symptoms and immune function. So writing about your “deepest thoughts and feelings can lead to better health – and notably fewer visits to the doctor.”
As Valmorbida says, writing about negative experiences or “vexing” people “doesn’t take the vexations away, but it does take away some of the sting.”
Virginia Woolf, in her autobiographical essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” referring to a “shock,” wrote: “It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together.”
Woolf has connected the pleasures of writing therapeutically and writing artistically. Valborbida says of her own fiction writing that while writing her last novel, “I felt a general sense of satisfaction, commitment and purpose, a quiet inner anchoring – even during difficult times.”
I appreciate the term “inner anchoring” which I find applies to writing in a journal every day and in writing a poem about what one observes in the moment.
Elise Valmorbida says “Be interested in everything, Read everything. Learn something from everything.”
Number 100 in her book is “Write Now.” “ Now is the beginning of the future. The quality of your now affects the quality of all your future nows. Now is the most important time of all.”
by Mary Ann Moore | Mar 25, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
I asked the women in the Writing Life circle, what’s in the middle? It was the first writing circle of a six-week series with the theme of “Piecing Our Stories from Life.” I had quilts in mind when I came up with the theme of “piecing” and quilts always start in the middle.
The women in the Writing Life circle have written together, in the past, for weeks and some for years. I wondered what they thought was in the middle of the writing they had done in the past. What did they think was a recurring theme.
As I write along with the other writers, I thought of the “middle” of my own writing. It’s interesting to approach the question by answering it in the third person as then you can have some distance and some insight about this particular writer whose work you have read (who just happens to be you).
I wrote: Mary Ann Moore writes about peonies in her grandparents’ garden, her first grade school teacher, a fresh radish from the vegetable patch. It’s life’s ordinary pleasures that appear to bring her joy. Even while travelling in Greece or Turkey, Mary Ann notes the oregano on feta, a circle of women telling stories. There is a spiritual aspect – the muezzin’s call to prayer, the sanctity of the Hagia Sophia, the sarcophagus of the poet Rumi with its gold Arabic calligraphy. [Photo of crewel work by my mother, Billie, with cover of poem called “Women’s Hands.”]
Planting seeds in the field of a Turkish eco-farm takes her back to sitting by the cucumber patch with her grandfather, his cutting of a fresh cucumber slice with his pocket knife.
Mary Ann links the Ottawa Valley to Turkey and includes the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo at times perhaps for her determination to create despite the physical odds against her. Or it may have been her painting that kept Kahlo alive and Mary Ann reflects on the creativity of women with her grandmother’s quilt, her crocheted doilies and the work of other women whether in a traditional Greek cloth bag woven in patterns of red or a killim created by village women. [Photo of cloth bags made with images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Frida Kahlo.]
The fact that certain languages don’t have a word for “art” fascinates Mary Ann and is at the middle of her explorations.
The people of ancient Crete made pithos jars to hold olive oil, decorated them with carved flowers and leaves.
In a jam jar on the oil cloth covered kitchen table of her childhood was a bouquet of buttercups and daisies.
The beauty of everyday objects, her relationship with the plant world and to her ancestors, connects this writer to a magnificent spiritual system. [Photo of detail of Turkish, hand painted plate.]
Does the “spiritual system” have a name?
God?
Goddess?
Tea cup?
Peony?
Prayer?
by Mary Ann Moore | Mar 15, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
It’s spring here on Vancouver Island with crocus, daffodils, primulas, hellebores and other colourful flowers in bloom. Winter was a challenge as we had more snow than usual (and we’re not prepared for that out here) and Sarah and I learned in December that the house in which we’d rented the upper level for seventeen years was being sold.
Packing is tiresome on its own and to that, I decided to go through everything, letting go of books, many journals, notes, and other papers filling files. There are still photo albums to pare down which I’ve inherited from my great aunt, aunt and uncle, and father. I’m now at the stage of putting things away in a beautiful home, also a rental and all to ourselves, about fifteen minutes south of Nanaimo. [The photo shows the end of the house where Sarah has her studio and she and our younger cat, Izzy, can go out on the deck.]
Sarah and I are very grateful to have found such an amazing place. We thought we had to seriously “downsize” and this place is bigger. We’re appreciating the quiet of being out in the country and the space around us. We’re on five acres along with the owners’ house and we’re feeling expansive in various ways. We’re also feeling the challenges of an adjustment and look forward to the days when our surroundings feel comfortable and familiar. It’s getting like that more and more every day. (We’ve been here two weeks now.)
As I unpacked the linen closet items, I came across a quilt my grandmother made with other quilters in the 1950s. They sat around a quilting frame, sharing stories as they pieced and stitched.
The quilts became stories too as fabric, ribbon, and other fragments turned into works of art and of practicality. The pieces creating the pattern of hearts in my grandmother’s quilt are from her cotton housedresses, already faded. The backing is made of bleached flour sacks. I have always loved quilts and this particular one is full of the memories of my early life with my grandparents in Eganville, in the Ottawa Valley, Ontario. I expect I used it on my bed when I was a kid and here we are sixty-five or so years later.
The women quilters were “piecing” which is similar to what we do when we write, stitching scenes from memory that may become part of a larger work. I think it is a good metaphor for the next six-week Writing Life circle which will begin on Wednesday, March 23. We’ll gather in person at my home in Nanaimo as if around the quilting frame, in a circle to write and share with the theme of “Piecing Our Stories From Life.” You’ll find further info here.
Writing was the healing place where I could collect the bits and pieces, where I could put them together again. It was the sanctuary, the safe place.
from Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work by bell hooks (1952 – 2021)
As several of us have discovered, we can connect to one another by sharing our stories by email. For those of you not able to attend a Nanaimo writing circle, I’m offering a circle “from away” via email called “Our Stories and How They Connect Us.” It begins Thursday, March 24.
For some, it’s actually more comfortable to express themselves through the written word only. You may have discovered that through writing letters to someone and finding out more about yourself and your pen pal as you do so. Several women were part of the circle “from away” in the past and I hope we can rekindle those connections. You’ll find more information here.
On occasion, I’ll offer individual writing circles via Zoom. Back in the spring of 2020, I didn’t think offering women’s writing circles via Zoom would work or offer the same depth of writing and sharing experience. As it turns out, Zoom has been a very helpful partner in offering circles so that we can stay connected by following the same guidelines we follow in the in-person circles.
I wish you a Happy Spring, clearing away what no longer serves you which may include, as the days go by, an easing of restrictions imposed during the pandemic. Think of the babies and toddlers who won’t have seen many faces and will now be able to see us un-masked. So many stories to share of our experiences of the last two years, the hardships, disappointments and the many gifts.
