The End and the Beginning

July 1 marked the official end of my semester of leave. It is summer now, of course, so fortunately my return to my UNI work life will be gradual -- I need to go in to the graduate office one a week or so, but things won't get busier until August. And I still have one week-long writing workshop left this month!

I admit that I am struggling deeply with how little I want to go back, and how stressful the fall semester will be -- not so much the teaching part, but some big things related to the graduate program that got set in motion while I was gone I will need to attend to quickly, and the fact that (after much struggle and reluctance) I agreed to write the chapter on "Dissent" for a Cambridge UP volume, New Histories of Puritan American Literature, that colleagues are doing, and a draft of that is due by December 1. Going back to academic writing is going to be dreadfully distasteful, and this in particular involves a kind of general writing I have never done before (and know well is not my strong suit), plus refamiliarizing myself with both primary and secondary texts I haven't looked at for years. I am truly not sure whether I want to continue with any academic writing after this, though, so I am looking at it as a chance to spend conscious time with my feelings about such work, and to write a worthy "swan song" if in fact I don't continue.

I don't know how to describe how important and transformative the past six months have been for me. Or I could describe it, but it would involve writing at length, and what I have gone through feels personal and sacred and still tenderly new in ways that make me not want to spell it all out in detail. Anyone who has read this blog has a sense of it. My project idea fell apart (as a longer-form project), but it uncovered so much about what I do want to write about, and brought so many key pieces of my early adult past back with tremendous vividness. Poetry came back, of course, which matters even more. Something I had been intensely emotionally attached (addicted?) to collapsed and underneath that I found new ways of being, more vital and sustaining. Writing, yes, but I also realized I needed to re-embrace some kind of a spiritual life, although one that didn't force me to believe things I don't actually believe (the wonderful "Writing as a Spiritual Practice" workshop back in March with Lori Erickson, and the timing of it, had a big influence on that). In the time following I have discovered mindfulness and started a serious meditation practice, including doing one shorter and now another fuller online training. And I've been in therapy which has deepened and related to all of this as well. The work I discovered of meditation teacher and psychotherapist Tara Brach has also had a huge impact on me. And in all of this I have gained (or perhaps rather, regained and reacknowledged) so much clearer a sense than I have had for decades of who I am and what I am on earth to do.

I have to go back to work in the outward sense in August. But that is not the end of this journey I've been on, only a different way of being with it, for now at least. In no way can I possibly let myself go back to whatever my life was like before. I'm still figuring out what the concrete changes ahead will be. But there is nothing I care about more than ensuring the journey continues.

So strange, the way everything is terrible in the world -- and I am still overwhelmed by fear and paralysis at times -- and yet in this same period I am experiencing the unspeakable joy of recovering my voice, my sense of calling, my connection to presence, and so much. It is the strangest balance -- or not balance always, but coexistence.

I can tell that my renewed ability to write poetry and the sense of presence in meditation are deeply connected -- as I think they always were for me, when I look back to who I was and what I wrote when I was in college and (it seems in retrospect) living most authentically. That was the form of my Zen-influenced spiritual life before I shaped it into Quakerism for reasons I could delve into another time (and which I would have some trouble going back to, also a longish story, although obviously I like to write about it). This is quite clear in some of the poems I've written, and in the one I just wrote that is below.

Last week I attended the David R. Collins Writers' Conference at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, IA, in order to participate in a workshop with Lauren Haldeman over three days called "Mixology: Fresh Poetry from Source Material" -- it was great and gave me a lot of ideas and strategies I want to experiment more with in the next months, including as a means to bring my love of 17th-century texts into my writing more fully, and further integrate my academic and poetic worlds. This poem doesn't really follow what we were supposed to do in the particular exercise it originated from (a combination of "found text" and "field research" on the campus) but it grows from the core image that came to me then from seeing this quilt and the accompanying text. Anyway, that's the outer origin point -- the inner origin is everything I've been talking about above.

Quilt on display (with others) at the Rogalski Center, St. Ambrose University.

[poem taken down while submitting for publication, may be back later]

Poetry and Politics

Last week, like everyone I can imagine reading this, I struggled terribly with what is happening on the southern border -- and continue to do so, of course. One day it sent me into a dark place that reminded me of where I was in winter 2017, before the writing started. My writing and the journey I'm on felt so false then, the private realm of self-development possible only through my immense privilege (which is true) and through the cultivation of a space of denial or at least blocking out the political situation and the suffering of others, so that I am able to focus, to create.

But what can I do? I gave money, shared information, made a few (not enough) calls. Meanwhile, by the next day at least I could see clearly that if I don't write, don't follow what I care about, it feels like not wanting to live, and that's not helpful to anyone. And what I create might do something in the world someday, more than my tight nervous phone calls, anyway.

Anyway. I've written three poems since that day, and I can say that they all feel aware of the world, and not written from any kind of denial.  [poems taken down during submission for publication]

The third I just wrote last night, though the need to write a Mary Dyer poem about borders came to me last week. This was one thing that made me feel my writing is important. Because if up to now a key link between Dyer and the present has been the "nevertheless she persisted" idea, I suddenly realized that, my God and of course, the thing she determinedly did, the thing she died for, was crossing borders in defiance of anti-Quaker laws -- presenting herself as a banished "illegal" -- both out of love for Friends imprisoned on the other side, and to challenge the law through direct defiance.

So late last night the words and incantatory structure came to me, and I drafted this. And then I really couldn't sleep, I felt so charged up ("in me the afflatus surging and surging," as Whitman said, and that's what I felt). But I'm happy. This feels powerful to me, it feels like it matters.

[poem taken down during submission for publication]

It's a serious poem, but I found this bit amusing to include.

I don't think it detracts, though I'd have to hear from others.

"Bones," a poem from Newport

I hope more than one piece of writing will come out of my trip to Rhode Island, but something was definitely stirring about my attempt to stand near Mary (and William) Dyer's grave site, which I wrote about in my previous post.

Here's what I drafted last night. I like it, or at least it captures exactly what I was thinking at the time and throughout the trip, the meditation on past and present I was so caught up in. Somehow, so far at least, I needed to mark clearly thoughts I was having in that place as distinct from lines of the poem as I am writing it afterwards -- that these were in fact thoughts, not lines of poetry. We'll see.

Bones

Newport, 2018

I think, the past is a locked gate:

a rusty fence surrounds the derelict

brick boxes of the Naval Hospital.

Underneath its grassy grounds, or the blacktop

beneath my feet on ordinary Cypress Street

lie the bones of Mary Dyer, martyr.

A block away, unpaved Dyre’s Gate Road

leads to a puddle, a lost child’s bike,

a path between tall rushes, railroad tracks.

I think, time itself is violence:

a grave-spot locals once showed travelers

erased now, their knowing unknown.

At water’s edge I try to view this round

collar of shoreline with its island shelter

as it met her eyes, unseeing

four centuries of human clutter.

Your own death is the least of it;

nothing you loved will last.

This flat sheen to the horizon. This sound

of small waves shushing on the beach:

how many billion, uninterrupted, each

break like a rung on a ladder you could climb

back to a day she stood here living?

I breathe and center. Sun on my hands.

Loss and loss, everything vanishing

but the innocence of ground, wind, water;

and here we are now, licking our salty lips.

Here is the sight that triggered the thought "the past is a locked gate":

Here is a partial view of where Cypress Street dead-ends at the shoreline.

A view of the Naval Hospital found on Pinterest -- this is where the Dyer farm is likely to have stood. Most of the buildings are abandoned, though there are newer active ones to the north. The end of Cypress Street is at the far left. The search for an image led to my learning that (predictably enough) it is believed to be haunted -- though not necessarily by any Dyers.

A Mary Dyer Pilgrimage

Last week I went to Newport, Rhode Island for several days. It had been on my mind for months as a trip I intended to take as part of my project; when I was planning the book I envisioned the conclusion taking place there, featuring my pilgrimage and direct encounter with the past. I wanted to do it to include June 1, the date of Mary Dyer's execution, and also go to Boston to see her statue there (again, I've seen it in the past). Those parts didn't quite work out, but I went on June 5 so close enough; the season was still right (the light, the look of nature). Even though it is no longer the conclusion of a book, I still want to be able to write about Newport and what it was like to go there, to have actual images for my poetry or prose.

It was a wonderful trip. My most striking experience happened on the way down, however. My first stop was in the town of Portsmouth, to see a memorial herb garden that has been created to honor Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer, as well as the founders of the settlement who signed the Portsmouth Compact. It was a peaceful and lovely place, set beside Founder's Brook, with birds warbling overhead in the trees. But what was amazing was that as I sat taking notes, a truck pulled up and two men and a dog got out to do some pruning. I ended up talking with one, Michael S. Ford, and it turned out he is the person who largely created the garden and maintains it; he is a 12th-generation descendant of Anne Hutchinson and an 11th-generation descendant of Mary Dyer, and a master herbalist who feels that he may have inherited this calling from them, and an amazing visual artist as well. (Unfortunately he has recently had to close his business, Apollo Botanica.) He lives an hour away and can't get to the garden all that often, so that our time there coincided felt very meaningful to both of us. We have emailed each other since then and shared some of our creative work with one another, and I've sent him a donation to buy plants. There isn't a foundation or anything supporting the garden; he's basically doing it on his own, although there is a group of women in the area who are also involved in preserving these women's memories locally. They are evidently less known there than they are within academia. . . .

Garden sign (created by Michael); garden with midwifery herbs; Michael in his garden; one of the memorial benches -- it was arresting that the Hutchinson line inscribed here is one I used in my poem "May-shine."

The challenge in the trip was how to connect with the concrete, place-based memory of Mary Dyer when no real traces of her past there visibly survive. Reflecting back, the hunt to find connection, the need to engage my imagination in doing so, to make something out of next to nothing, was actually very enjoyable, and gave me a focused and imaginative sense of pilgrimage rather than a touristic one. I had to explore as a poet/writer, not (only) as a historian, although of course I was paying close attention to the documentation more research-minded folks have collected.

Here are some things that were meaningful to me, where I felt like I was touching the past as much as it was possible to:

Between Portsmouth and Newport, a view of Dyer Island, which was claimed by William Dyer on the way down. It has always been uninhabited. Sitting on a pier here with mostly nature in view I had my closest communion with the landscape as it would have been. They saw this. So flat, so much sky -- in that sense I connected it with the feeling I get in the midwest.

Dyer Island in the distance -- it's so low you can barely make it out in the picture.

Broader view of the bay from the same site.

A view from Battery Park in Newport, which is where a spot called "Dyer Point" is, and marks the south end of the Dyer property:

I came here twice at different times of day.

This is Cypress Street, just a bit north. Experts believe the Dyer family burial plot (and the house itself) was underneath this or in the grounds of the Naval Hospital you see to the right). In the nineteenth century, multiple Dyer graves were moved to Newport's Common Burying Ground -- where one of the lanes is a "Dyre Street" as are some other little lanes near Cypress -- but William's and Mary's unmarked graves were missed. In July the Dyers' biographer/historian, Johan Winsser, is hoping to do some underground surveying to see if he can find traces. So nothing old there at all, and yet I knew I was standing as close to her body as I possibly could, and then I went to the water and was seeing the shoreline and view (if you subtracted all the development) as she would have seen it from home. I actually got tears in my eyes.

No access to the naval grounds on the right. 

Looking at the rusted chain around the gate you see here I thought, the past is a locked gate, literally and figuratively.

I had lunch at the White Horse Tavern, perhaps America's oldest inn, which was a tavern since 1673 and a site for many public meetings -- after Mary's death, but William would have gone there. There was a house there before the tavern. The interior is amazingly intact in its seventeenth-century features throughout; you really felt you were in a period interior. I brought home a souvenir glass with their logo.

I was sitting by the enormous fireplace. There were multiple rooms much like this.

The other amazing thing happened on the last day of my trip. I went to the Newport Historical Society and asked if I could see Dyer-related holdings. I was nervous because Michael had said they were patriarchal and anti-Dyer there, but I found the people I dealt with perfectly friendly and very well-informed. A famous 1905 painting of Dyer going to the scaffold turned out to be up in Providence, so the one thing I could see was a 1644 land conveyance deed signed by William and Mary Dyer and Samuel, their nine-year-old son. So there I was gazing on (although not touching!) a paper that Mary had literally looked at, upon which her hand had rested. And seeing her signature, so literate and delicately feminine.

I purchased a quality scan of the entire deed, but this is the interesting part. 

"Dyre" was the more common spelling then, Dyre/Dire/Dyer all variants not standardized yet.

Newport has been a deeply resonant place imaginatively for me not only because of Dyer, but because Jews arrived there in 1658. Sephardic Jews, so not exactly my direct ancestors, but it still felt like the clearest place my genetic/actual inheritance and my chosen spiritual inheritance occupied the same ground in 17th-century New England, the place I study. Newport is the site of Touro Synagogue, the oldest standing synagogue in the New World, and the occasion for George Washington first issuing a letter declaring religious toleration as an integral principle of the United States. It turns out that a Quaker family was central to the preservation of the structure for the many decades between when the original congregation dispersed around the Revolutionary War and when a much later Jewish immigrant population began using it again in the late 1800s -- basically the last Jew out handed them the keys and asked them to take care of it, and they did, for generations. And the Jewish cemetery a couple of blocks away was the basis for Longfellow's famous poem, which I have read and taught for years (it's highly problematic, but also very lovely, especially in its handling of sound).

Touro interior.

Well, it wasn't all colonial history. I walked on the famous Cliff Walk some, got at a least a quick drive-by peek at the amazing mansions, ate a lot of fresh seafood, breathed ocean air, and spent some time on the beach. I would very happily go back!

At Sauchest Beach in Middletown, RI.

Hello again, Mistress Dyer

So, in an interesting turn of the wheel, I have just started writing poems about Mary Dyer. Seems inevitable, doesn't it? The immediate trigger was the weekend poetry workshop on Obsession I've signed up for later in June. We have to choose our obsession in advance and do some preparatory writing about it, and bring a poem we've written on it for distribution. There are other pieces of my life I feel more truly obsessed by than Dyer, but I discovered in the memoir workshop how their deeply interior quality and limited image-set could pose problems for extended writing. Dyer, I realized, will work better, because there is so much I want to reflect on with her but she is outside me and summons so many concrete referents to draw on.

The draft of the first Dyer poem I wrote, "May-shine" (which I assume is the one I'll copy for the workshop) jumped off from my own experience. I don't know that it's finished yet but I'm excited about its layers, and how writing it took me to an end I didn't plan out. But then I wrote another, and decided to do it as a persona poem, to see what happened if I took on her voice. And wow, it flowed and I enjoyed it.

Covent Garden. Much later than ca. 1620 when the memory is set, 

but I was looking for an evocative visual of a crowded market.

[poems taken down during submission for publication]

This offers a reading of the "primal scene" I endlessly come back to in my writing, when Mary Dyer followed Anne Hutchinson out of the church as Hutchinson left after being excommunicated, and how this drew public attention to Dyer and her monstrous birth.

But the childhood memory here is entirely fictional in origin. Frustratingly (or not), we know virtually nothing about Mary Barrett's childhood and family; she didn't even necessarily grow up in London although it is likely enough, since she was a young woman there. Good circumstantial evidence (the fact that she was literate and had excellent handwriting, a trace of an elaborate embroidered silk dress and, yes, a gold bodkin believed to have belonged to her that have survived) suggests she came from a very well-off family. Well, actually, the memory is my own, transposed to a market scene: once in a bus someone spoke rudely to my mother and and despite my shyness I whipped around in my seat and denounced him vehemently for daring to speak to her that way, and wanted to rip his eyeballs out.

I feel a bit guilty about how much I enjoyed doing this! I wrote a blog post early on about my ambivalent relationship to historical fiction, how people making things up makes me cringe. But I've gone and done exactly that, and it was so much fun, felt so freeing, I can tell I'm going to do more. Go figure. Maybe poetry, which is clearly an artifice, makes it less offensive? Readers are less likely to fall into thinking they are reading something historically factual.

What I really sense writing poems in Dyer's voice might offer me is not so much the freedom to render her experience imaginatively, but to use her to talk about pieces of my own experience in a distanced way, without being endlessly autobiographical regarding my less-than-exciting outer life. She offers an intense story through which to express intense feelings and internal perceptions, and to try out ways of speaking that I could not use myself. I'm going to keep going (not planning to write only Dyer poems, but to write as many of them as I want). Maybe the book I thought I was writing will be partly replaced by a suite of poems, as well as one or more lyric essays.

I am grateful to my friend Laura Helper-Ferris for her feedback on these drafts!


P.S.:  A question for any early modern people or language experts who might read this: formal "you" and familiar "thee." In this poem, Mary and her mother are of a higher class than the imaginary trader. Am I thinking correctly that Mary would say "thee" to the trader in her childhood memory, even though she is a child and he is an adult? (I do want to emphasize her sense of superiority; the fact that she grew up with considerable privilege is an important strand in all my thinking about her, and where she got her confidence from.) And would the trader say "you" to her mother, even though he was insulting her? (I am trying to get at a degree of class resentment here.)  And would it be "how durst thee" or "how durst thou" -- isn't what I have like later Quaker speech more than correct 17th-century English? As a Quaker Mary would have "thee'd" everyone, but that's not relevant to her earlier life. You'd think I'd know this, but the social nuances don't really come up in the early stuff I read, or I wasn't paying attention to this question when I did, and Quaker plain speech sounds correct to me so it's confusing.

I just realized today's date, June 1. June 1, 1660, was the date of Mary Dyer's execution. The poem "May-shine" that I linked above is partly about the last weeks of May that led up to that; looking at the northeastern landscape in May as I thought about that time so long ago, and how it resonates.

"Memoir as Bewilderment," or "I Hate That F**king Object!"

My five day workshop at the Omega Institute, "Memoir as Bewilderment," led by Nick Flynn, ended yesterday. It was on the whole a good experience, one I would consider repeating for its content (although probably ultimately not -- certain things in my feelings about men were triggered that I would choose not to reexperience, and I may not be going to more memoir workshops soon, as I explain below.). I definitely expect to come to Omega again in the future, and I wish I lived closer so I could go there more easily, although I constantly vibrated between loving it there and thinking oh my god some of this stuff is so totally weird. Ours was one of several workshops on campus; the others were a retreat for male veterans, and the largest was a training in past-life regression with someone named Brian Weiss who is apparently a huge guy in that field. Yikes. Pema Chödrön arrived to lead a weekend meditation retreat the day ours ended.

Front lawn of the Omega Institute

It was a generative workshop, designed to help us get beneath the surface of our story and in touch with our subconscious, unseen connections, etc. That is clearly very much how Nick composes (he talked about his process a fair bit, which was very interesting, and his works show it). In the first days we did lots of prompted writing, typically seven minutes of writing after sort of spiritual movement exercises led by JoJo Keane who was an attender (and the wife of a musician Nick collaborates with) and seven minutes of meditation. The prompts involved things like pulling a resonant sentence about writing we had brought in to start with, a sentence out of some material Nick randomly gave us (like a page from a 1981 encyclopedia on parapsychology, or a science article -- we each had to bring in one page of a science article we found bewildering/intriguing) and then having to write our way from the first sentence to the last. A lot of exercises involved responding to/interacting with a black and white mysterious postcard image we had been randomly assigned.

At any rate, for three days we generated material with these prompts designed to push us beyond what we might think, and then on the fourth day we had to mark off all the passages in our writing that felt "alive"; cut it out and sort it into categories; then figure out how to experiment with and sequence our cut up passages until they began to form a sequential piece, eventually adding in some "connective tissue" sentences or other writing as needed. At the end we had a very rough version of a piece, which we have been instructed to keep working on the for the next week (but he wants us to keep working on the white paper we finally were allowed to tape our cut passages to, working in longhand, before we transcribe them onto a computer -- alas, my water bottle leaked onto my pages as I was leaving and they're all ripply, so I may transcribe a little sooner!).

The cabin our workshop was mostly held in is the building to the left. This is across the large field at the center of the campus; there are many more buildings than appear here.

One of the movement exercises involved finding a spot in the room that represented the location we were born in, and then we had to move around the room towards a spot that represented a place in our adult life we were writing about. In that place, we had to find an object in our mind and bring it back to the present with us. We had to give it to a partner to carry and they gave us theirs. Then all of this had to make it into our writing. 

Well. The problem was that the spot I had gone to was Promontory Point, sticking into Lake Michigan off Hyde Park in Chicago. So other people were in meaningful houses or something and were able to pick up resonant objects out of their lives, or ones related to their families. But I was outdoors in a public place. What was I going to find, a discarded sandwich wrapper? A stick? So I had to very quickly invent an imaginary object to pick up. I imagined a gold heart pendant someone had left behind on the concrete blocks that lead down to the water, where I used to sit and sometimes to swim from when I felt daring. Okay, whatever.

I stayed in one of these dorms. They were up quite a hill!

The problem was that then for numerous exercises we had to keep writing and writing about that object in various ways. I had already been struggling that what I was trying to write about was more emotion than concrete memory -- more evocative than a story. I was noticing that I gravitate towards the lyric and symbolic, what Nick called the "sublime," and not to the concrete, what we called the "grounded," the world of image. And here I was with an unreal, symbolic, painfully allegorical object, that I had no grounded story about. Of course I knew that the heart was my heart, lost and hopefully found, but it seemed so corny, not the basis for good writing. Promontory Point was already more of an evocative, symbolic location to start with; I'm writing about Lake Michigan because of how it embodies feelings from that era of my life, not because anything much happened on the shore of it. It was just what I saw, what I looked out on when I wanted to look at space and nature. And even the postcard image I was randomly given seemed allegorical and overdetermined with relation to my core emotional issues. I was so frustrated and pissed. In a time of feedback after several of these exercises I burst out "I hate my fucking object!" and of course a number of the other students later told me they loved that honesty. 

Omega Institute garden entrance. Yes, those are Buddha heads.

What is pretty cool is that shortly after that -- and after a brief conversation with the partner I'd exchanged objects with earlier -- I had a kind of breakthrough. She said something that made me realize that hating the object might be all right, might be part of the point. I started to rewrite my last exercise while the rest of the group was talking about a passage by James Agee -- writing my way into my rejection of the heart. Over the rest of the afternoon, I began to realize what my week's writing was actually about, beyond the memories of loss that were my subject. I realized that my compulsion towards the sublime was part of the point. And then it hit me that a gold heart necklace was classically a keepsake, a sentimental object, and the meaning of keepsakes in the sentimental tradition, in nineteenth-century women's writing and culture, just roared into focus -- and I saw how that was immediately and profoundly related to the part of my life I was writing about. I had been separated from the person who meant everything to me, and I had longed for a keepsake, but hadn't had one -- or rather, I had been given one, but it was a book, not an object (and what book I was given was relevant to all of the meanings too).

Group photo on the last morning.

The tentative title for my draft piece is "The Keepsake." Go figure. It's about the time of grief in my twenties after the separation from a mother figure I could not get over. It's about looking at Lake Michigan then, or remembering it now. It's about the abstraction of water-gazing, and through that about Moby-Dick. It's about the gold heart and the keepsake tradition as classically embodied in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Topsy's grief over Eva's death. It's about the professor of the class I was a TA for in grad school who praised Melville and disparaged Stowe's sentimentality. It's about lyricism and the sickness of the sublime. It's about queer temporality and being stuck in the past. It's about a postcard photo image of a boy (whom I made into a girl) sitting alone in a chair in a poor house, with a life-size advertising cutout of a mother holding a baby on the wall, which I imagined as being in a house down by Gary, also looking out on the lake. It's about loss and maybe even the Buddhist teaching of the universality of suffering. 

Part of the entrance to the Sanctuary (meditation room). The inside was so beautiful but I never got there when it was empty and we weren't supposed to take pictures of other people without permission.

Here's what I realized by the end, though, and also had affirmed for me by one of the participants who read the short complete piece I wrote out of the ruins of the main Mary Dyer material: I don't think I'm a memoir writer at all, although yes, I want to write about parts of my life and experience. But I don't, at this point anyway, want to tell stories of my past and people I knew; I have a lousy memory for detail. What I am trying to get at is inner experience, the truth of feelings, the patterns of meaning. And the writing has to be beautiful and lyrical or I'm just not interested; my gift is beauty, not storytelling. My form in prose is that new, hard-to-pin-down genre that I am just trying to get a handle on, the lyric essay. In which you can do pretty much anything. And in which fragmentation is almost part of the norm. 

Well, stay tuned for more. There's a lyric essay workshop in Iowa City in July and I'm going to sign up. And meanwhile I have a lot of work ahead on "The Keepsake."

From Memoir to Lyric

As I have been sharing in previous blog posts, I have started writing poetry again within the past two months. It feels fairly accurate if over-dramatic to say that poetry has been pouring out of me. And while it's hard to judge one's own work I think it's good -- or at least not bad, even if it probably needs more revision than I am aware of without workshopping.

Most immediately crafting poems feel absolutely wonderful, like better-than-anything-else-I-can-think-of wonderful, and it makes me amazed that I lost or gave it up for so long. The satisfactions of academic writing have been only the palest echo of this pleasure.

But what is happening is also confounding in ways: I wanted to be writing creative nonfiction, which lots of people read now, not poetry, which mostly only other poetry types read, and my desire has truly been to communicate about my life and perceptions to a potentially wider audience. I don't want to give up one overly limited readership (people who actually read literary scholarship) only to tie myself to another. And I wanted to be writing something solid, a book.

I haven't given up writing prose -- I am actively working on creating some shorter pieces out of what I've been drafting -- but I am also trying to attend to my authentic creative impulses, since that was the whole point in the first place. I struggle with some frustration over my writing plan having derailed, but then try to accept that a plan is one thing but what I am really engaged in is a deep journey, something that cannot be mapped in advance. My therapist keeps telling me that, and I hang on to it.

The two forms aren't separate, of course. Leaving aside any abstract literary reflections on their relationship (I'm sure they're out there, but I haven't looked for them so far), here are some thoughts I've been having recently:

• Working on the memoir/Mary Dyer project, I wrote my way into regaining a sense of my voice, and that voice gravitates towards poetry. And I recognize that the passages in the project where I was writing most lyrically felt the most alive to me. I write so much out of rhythm and sound, always. The parts that were more narrative/expository always felt a bit heavy and dull.

• Working on the project, I wrote deeply into key emotional areas of my past. I wrote the images that resonate for me. Some how that woke me up, reconnected me to my authentic self. And that self was a serious poet once, and seems to be announcing that she wants to be one again. I feel like I need to listen to her. And none of the writing I did is wasted: it just might turn into something else. 

• Many of my poems (now and earlier in my life) have an element of memoir -- they are about my past, as intertwined with the present. I don't consciously want to write autobiographical or confessional poetry (although, admittedly, I read it avidly from others), but I am also not especially drawn to poetry that is too abstract, divorced from recognizable lived experience -- just as, I realize, I am also now choosing to reject the disembodied quality of literary/cultural/gender theory. So I am still doing memoir, I see, just in a different way. 

• My relation to memory lends itself better to poetry than memoir: what stays with me are emotions, shards of scenes, resonant images, things that can be put together and built out through imagination in a lyric way. "These fragments have I shored against my ruins." I do not tend to remember larger scenes (what happened sequentially, who said what, what the setting was fully like, etc.), and I feel numb and blocked at the idea of recreating them imaginatively. When I read normal memoir and step back to think about the craft of it, the novelistic detail writers are able to recall or fabricate so that it sounds recalled amazes me. For better or worse I don't have that talent. I was never going to write a traditional memoir; I knew I couldn't.

I wrote a new poem yesterday that is the most complex one that has come since I re-started this. Although it is grounded in the present and recent past (a short visit to the Adirondacks a few weeks ago, echoing one last summer), it dives back into past memories I wrote about as part of the project this winter while I was in Mexico, excavating my emotional/relational life. With the associative freedom of lyric, I pulled in other things as well -- past and present juxtaposed in the historical/political realm. (My Dyer project was very much about that too.) I'm putting it in below.

Here is one image (not mine) of Fort Crown Point, the immediate setting of the poem below. The historic site is a much more expansive area with more structures than this limited view suggests. It is not far from Fort Ticonderoga, but in some ways more compelling because so untouched. Very Tintern Abbey -- I felt like I was in Britain or Europe more than in New York.

******************

[poem taken down during submission for publication]

******************

And one more photo, from the actual experience: my Cocoa (DC Chocolatedrop) and her famous daddy Cracker (Flupascrackerbox) in 2017. 

Of Open Mics and Mindfulness

I'm going to share a poem that comes from a deep place. I'm excited to have written it, not because I think it is a great achievement of craft, but it marks a new level of understanding that has been opening up for me over the last six weeks or so. This semester off has turned into as much a spiritual journey as a writing one.

Yes, I'm still writing poetry since what I think of as real, serious poems started coming out of me in March. This wasn't planned but it feels overwhelmingly like coming home to myself.

Anyway, I read two of my poems last week at the Final Thursday open mic. Such a sense of power and centeredness going through me as I heard my words coming from me. I do love to read aloud and know I do it extremely well. But then, as I discovered in the fall already, open mics seem so brutal emotionally to experience -- at least this one, at least for me. There was no response at the break or at the end (okay, one colleague briefly as I was going out the door), and the pain I experienced was intense. Some of it is bummedness and ego disappointment, I'm sure -- I so longed to have someone reassure me my poetry was good. So of course one fear that came up was that it was actually so awful no one had anything good to say. But I tried to stay with the feeling and not judge it, and I realized how deep it went; to such a primal sense of non-response and the pain of not being met. Offering all you are, letting your deepest self shine forth, and then nothing. (Blogging is rather like this too, I find, but this was more immediate and profound.) And I tried to be with myself in a compassionate way.

The miraculous thing is that over the last six weeks or so I have been been doing pretty dedicated meditation/mindfulness practice, and not only is that what is part of what has reopened my capacity and desire to write poetry, it has also begun to show me that I can be the one to attend to my feelings with kindness, rather than looking for that outside myself only. That practice is part of it; there have been some other outer and inner happenings that have contributed to the opening of this new perception as well, and it's still at an early stage. Yet I can feel it is deeply transformative. One thing that has had a tremendous impact that I should acknowledge is encountering the work of meditation teacher and psychotherapist Tara Brach and reading her book Radical Acceptance, which has hit me so very deeply (I'm on the second time through now).

At any rate, here is what I wrote. I think, hope, it explains itself. I don't think I'm as wise yet as it sounds; the words themselves carry me as I discover them to a place I am only beginning to touch in real life.


Reminder

When you stand in what you have become
trying to find your way back
to yourself and the wind that roars through everything
and you let that wind come through your mouth
in the words you have plucked from it
and they feel like burning
and they feel like an offering
and you feel yourself in and out of your body
doing what you came to do at last --
then, when no one speaks to you,
acknowledges what came from you at all
you bank the fire that you thought you were,
you walk out to the night, the car, the road.
The sound you hear is the ball that is your heart
rolling loudly around an empty room.
You remember all the times you longed
to give yourself, and no one saw you there;
and maybe your words are just pretension
and you alone have no purpose here on earth.
Stay with yourself then:
Sit down on the hard floor of the empty room
silent and listening, and you will hear the wind
that moves through everything come in the window
flowing into the room, and it is the room,
and you are the one speaking and seeing
you are the giver and the receiver
standing in the room saying I love you
standing in the fire saying thanks

The Night the Bats Came Out

I truly am not obsessed by bats. But having written a poem sorting through family memories and present feelings via an experience with bats, it triggered the thought of writing another one, which I wrote earlier this week.

I did a little background reading, and now realize that the image we had -- of the bats leaving the nest all at once, for good -- is not the reality. Did they really go out every night once the babies were old enough, until at some point later the "maternity colony" dispersed? That takes away from the story as we remembered it. But at any rate, none of us ever saw the sight described here again, despite my parents' many evening fishing expeditions on the lake.

I have now written five serious poems in the past month. I haven't even wanted to be writing poetry, but it seems to be what wants to be written. There is power and awe -- and bewilderment -- in realizing I still know how. The poems feel a little rusty but not bad; they feel (for better or worse, I can't tell) strangely recognizably akin to the poems I wrote in college or shortly after. I am aware I know what I am doing in terms of craft much more working with poetry than when I am trying to write creative prose.

I searched some possible bat colony pictures to share, but yikes. They are horrifically creepy looking, just as the experience was.

*******************************

[poem taken down during submission for publication]

Let go, go back.

Well. I drafted another poem, sitting in a hotel room in Saratoga Springs, NY, before going out to spend the rest of the day exploring. I want to share it because I am awed that poems are starting to come to me again after so many years; also it stands as a report on recent days. I did find my old college poetry again a couple of days ago, and I am awed by how good I really was. And, I think, how far I could have gone had anyone really taken me up and mentored me in those years -- I had good creative writing class experiences, a few (there wasn't the culture of it then there is now, at least where I went to college and then graduate school), but no one gave me a sense how to purse this as a calling. I am struggling with a tremendous sense of lost opportunity and power . . . but trying to hold onto the thought that maybe not everything is lost. I'm not sure where poetry fits given that I have been trying to write personal essay, but I don't see it as an either/or thing. As long as I write, it seems like a good thing.

Yesterday I left my family's home symbolically -- it probably isn't the last time I will be there before it is sold (the closing date of which is uncertain, although the contract is being drafted) but it might be the last time I have stayed there; if the closing comes fairly quickly (the purchasing family needs to sell their own house which should go on the market soon) it will probably be cleared out with an estate sale before I see it again. I don't even know how to process this -- it is probably impossible to do. But anyway, this poem tries to distill one experience of it.

***************************

Counting Breaths

Counting breaths in my family home
the morning before I leave it.
The thighs press against the woven seat.
The abdomen lifts and falls.

The lake glitters coldly past tall windows
in this belated spring.

In 1918 a family bought this house.
In 2018 a daughter of that family buys it back
after fifty years. And this daughter goes on
to what I don’t yet know.
to what I knew but somehow gave away,
hoping it is not too late to find again.

Counting breaths, each number rises and falls,
reaches ten to start over again.
Quieting the mind as a bird calls,
as the furnace cycles on, as the world
is lost and present, decades whirling round.

A day earlier in a box I found my writing
from college, when being a poet was all I wanted.
I tried not to scream for the lost power.
In those years too I tried to watch my mind,
counting breaths in a gabled dorm room
as a same spring moved trees beyond the window.

Thirty-five years later, I can see everything
I want and wonder about is much the same.
Trying to count and watch again.
Numbers ticking over, the same body breathing
though now a voice on my phone teaches me.
What is lost, found, possible
if everything is present?

Let go, go back. Let go, go back. Let go, go back.
At the edge of awareness
breath summons the whisper of a poem.
Breathe out. Open the eyes. Close the door.
A day later, count again and write it down.

The Bats

I am in New York state working on the sale of my family's home. I haven't been able to focus on writing until I made myself do some journaling last night. But this morning I drafted a poem that had been, um, battering around in my head since I got here as something I wanted to write while I was in this space. I just wrote it during the weekly Tuesday morning Shut Up and Write (#suaw) hour for academic women (and others) hosted by Lisa Munro on Twitter.

So, go me! I think it's a viable poem -- I do feel like I am regaining some ability to write poems. I'd love feedback for improvement though if anyone feels so moved. It is just a rough draft!

I can't put quite into non-literary words what I am trying to express here. Family memories, of course, but also something of what I am dealing with at this time of my life, reflections on who I am and what I have lost and might re-find inside myself. The scariness of otherness both outside and inside, but realizing that what is strange and scary is not actually bad.

*************************

[poem taken down during submission for publication]

Heading towards Bewilderment

A great deal has been stirring in my life in recent weeks. Not all easy, but things are happening that feel profound and momentous, and like they are moving me towards who I will become in the second part of my life. The sense of change after so many years of relative stasis, of having intense feelings after knowing I've been somewhat numb for quite a while, the feeling of wanting and realizing that I could in fact have some things in life I want, if I choose to move towards them, and not necessarily ten years from now -- all of this is overwhelming. And, well, bewildering, in a positive if scary way. I feel very grateful to be working with a therapist who is able to understand, honor, and support such a journey.

I undertook something big and risky and deep since returning from Mexico, involving contacting someone who has been at the center of my emotional world for thirty years, but with whom I have had no contact for twenty-five. I don't feel comfortable saying any more than that here. I did get a caring and considered response, but one that was quite painful to receive -- let us say this person was not able to receive my story in the way that I had intended it to be read or meet me in the way I longed to be met. Which means, ultimately, that to honor my own life I have to let go, to take the love and longing I placed there and find something else to do with it -- something worthy of the sacredness with which I invested it. I have done some intense work to process that, writing and writing in journal form, but it seems like the jarring disappointment is moving towards freeing up some key emotional energy that has been bound to the past and to a place of impossibility. Late one night it struck me: What had I been truly yearning for all these years, within my yearning for the idealized image of this person? What if part of it was for my own lost self?

I feel like through this whole writing and discovery process but especially now I am starting to contact my authentic self -- a self that has been largely suppressed for many, many years, at least since graduate school (though different parts were lost and found at different times). Probably this view takes things to an extreme, but I have been overcome by the thought that almost my entire academic career has been based on a desiccated, suppressed version of who I really am -- a big part of this has been channeling my desire for self-expression into "safe" academic writing (focused on the wildness and courage of seventeenth-century others), though it goes beyond that. So no wonder, I find myself reflecting, I have lacked confidence and an internal sense of authority as an academic writer, as a teacher, etc.; no wonder I have always felt a little disengaged, diffident, vaguely ashamed of myself. Always comparing myself, always unsure where I stood, secretly anxious and enraged.

What does this all mean for the future? I am pondering intensely. I am not sure I can recapture my authenticity within a context that has been an edifice of suppression, even if it doesn't pose any literal barriers. When I think what my real self wants, all I know is that it doesn't want continue the life I've been leading for the past twenty years at least, as I've been leading it.

One quite dismaying thing that has happened -- it would be more dismaying if the reasons didn't feel so compelling and positive -- is that my plan for the book as I was writing it has pretty much fallen apart. I don't know how well I can explain this, except to say that the structure I imagined examined my life in dialogue with the trajectory of Mary Dyer's. But as I am seeing new things about my life, and realizing my own story is not what I was thinking it was only a few weeks ago, I don't think I can follow that trajectory. Mary Dyer's story moves towards the courage of witness, self-sacrifice and death. It is the story that called to me when I was in a very dark place. I still admire courage and witness, but now I realize that what I desperately want is more life, richer life. And I cannot, in any case, move through the latter sections of the book I had planned until I know where my own story goes, can speak with understanding about my own experience. I cannot write what I have not yet lived. That was always an issue; when I conceived the project, I hoped I would be clearer by now, at least about what was happening in the world and what my role in it would be.

So what to write now? I was cranking along pretty well. But now I don't have a book that will be drafted by this summer. I have not been able to focus on writing during some of these very intense recent weeks of "life work" as my therapist calls it (and she reassures me that's okay). I still want to explore the same material, but it is going to look different. More fragmented, I think. And it's going to take longer to do. Which may be inevitable; more and more I realize I truly need to learn how to write, or how to write this material; having an idea does not mean I possess the craft. I do think the aesthetic vision I have for this work involves lyric fragmentation; the parts where I am telling narratively have always felt heavy, saggy, and the most lyric parts have felt the most vital. Evidently I really am a poet still, even if I am writing in prose for now.

One step I took in the past week is to sign up for a week-long writing workshop in May that might capture where I am right now, and something of what I want to write: "Memoir as Bewilderment," taught at the Omega Institute, a holistic learning and retreat center in the beautiful Hudson Valley, home of my heart, an area I have begun imagining what it might be like to return to to live. The description:

When first approaching the idea of writing our memoir, says acclaimed poet, memoirist, and playwright Nick Flynn, we often write what we believe is our unique autobiography—but as we press on, we discover that our story is connected to everyone’s story, and only then can we access the deeper mysteries of life. 

Under Flynn’s guidance, we look for those moments when we begin to stutter and stumble when talking about our projects, and push more deeply into the shadows, into the unknown of our misremembered past. We wrestle with these deeper mysteries as well as the concept of bewilderment, and how we can embody both in our memoirs—through syntax, our access to the duende, leaps into the unconscious, or simply circling around what is unsaid, unknown, and unrealized. 

Come with a willingness to push deeper into this shadow world, and an openness to question why you tell the particular stories about your life that you do.

I had not heard of Nick Flynn but his work sounds quite compelling, and along the lines of what I aspire to; I just received one of his books from Amazon. So we'll see. I think there will be mostly more developed writers there and I'm somewhat terrified; the workshop is also very risky and experiential from what I've read (I found a former participant's account here). And it makes me deeply uncomfortable to think of opening up in front of a male leader and mixed-gender participants; it's been many years since I can remember choosing to do that. But I think it is what I need.

So, bewilderment. I am trying to hold all the openness and strangeness and unknowing of that as I try to find what and how to write now, and move towards whatever new thing my life is becoming. And in a few days I will arrive in New York state to begin the process of selling my family's home, the absolute ending of everything past and known for me.

Long ago, this happened.

This is a self-exposing post, because it reveals an experience I really did have when I was eighteen that I virtually never talk about . . . . Also because it's a poem, and even though I am not focused on "writing poetry" at the moment, I find I still gravitate to it when I want intensity and compression and/or I have a short set time and/or I am not trying to "do my project." I feel verrry rusty, but I don't think this is too bad, although it's still an early draft. I suspect I will go back to poetry as a main form eventually, once I get past my current memoir drive. . . .

How this arose: Last night I went to The Cedar Room writer's group in Cedar Rapids. After a discussion period there was enough time left to do a writing prompt. Someone offered a prompt from a book he was working with, but my immediate reaction was refusal and ire: it asked us to imagine and describe a fantastic world (I forget the further details). I can think of nothing I am less interested in; the very thought was like stabbing my eyes with a fork. (Can I just bitch that it is a real problem to have clearly fiction-oriented, to say nothing of fantasy-fiction oriented, prompts in a group that is explicitly billed as all-genre?? This has happened both times I have attended.) But, I did want to write. So I took up something I had been writing in prose the day before and turned it into a poem written against the idea of the prompt. I do actually like it, so I came away from the group feeling pretty good. I kind of wanted to share it, but didn't get a chance, so I thought I'd post it into the ether here.

[poem taken down during submission for publication]

(Note for the literary types: if you detect an echo of William Carlos Williams's "Spring and All" in the description, you would be correct. I have taught that poem so many times and it is deep in my psyche . . . especially as I am drawn to the whole idea of finding spiritual beauty in "waste lands" and have often imagined that if I were to write a book of poems that would be the focus.)

Coming up: "Writing as a Spiritual Practice"

Well, yikes. A couple of days ago I grabbed one of the last available spots for a weekend workshop March 2-4 at the Iowa Writers' House in Iowa City, "Writing as a Spiritual Practice." I'd been seeing ads and felt drawn towards it but had thought I might be traveling somewhere; I haven't made plans to do so, though, and when I saw the announcement that there were a couple of spots left I decided to leap.

The description of the workshop attracts me:  

Writing is inherently lonely, as anyone who’s sat staring at a page (or a computer screen) waiting for inspiration can corroborate. But that solitude also has great spiritual potential. In this course, we’ll explore ways to stay spiritually centered as a writer, regardless of your subject matter. You’ll be asked to share a piece of writing that’s on a spiritual topic or relates in some way to your spiritual path. During the weekend we’ll try out some mindfulness techniques that can prepare us for writing and share stories about how the creative process is intertwined with questions of meaning and purpose. You don’t have to be a member of a faith community to participate—all seekers are welcome.

I'm pretty nervous about a full weekend surrounded by people I will think of as "real writers." And I am not without ambivalence about spiritual practice and talking about writing publicly in those terms, since I am not "practicing" anything outwardly in recent years, although I certainly don't resist diving deep into my psyche and profound questions of meaning. I'm worried I will feel like a faker in multiple different ways. But I do regard my project as deeply spiritual, both in terms of its obvious historical subject matter, its engagement with my own history of religious involvement and how that influenced what I chose to study, and how it records my attempt to grapple with the deepest truths in my own life. I find I am often thinking about and sometimes mentioning "the sacred" in what I am writing, though I don't mean it in a theistic or doctrinaire sense, and I'm not always sure I can define how I mean it. Deep down I do think I belong in whatever will happen in that workshop. I am writing about conversion, and courage, and martyrdom, and devotion, and loss, and female life journeys, and the whole question of what one chooses to live for and to love in extreme situations. And I am a published writer, right? Even if only an academic one.

And yes, when I am engaged in working on this project, it does feel like spiritual practice of some kind -- to write creatively/personally is a spiritual reclamation. I was trying to draft something while I was in Mexico about how I silence myself and listen to the language coming through me in order to write, and how this feels like it has a connection to silent worship and the flow of language in 17th-century Quaker ministry and discourse. All writing feels that way to me to some degree, when it feels authentic at all. There is a rhythm I hear that is both lyrical and a kind of prophetic chant. But clearly I am choosing to write in a way that unleashes this flow in a freedom is directly spiritual for me, rather than constraining that dimension within writing that is "appropriate" and "professional."

No, I don't know much about the leader, beyond what I've read on her website. That she's a woman makes me more interested in going. Female mentors are such a prominent theme in my own life as sacred story.

So we'll see what happens. So grateful that a greyhound friend in Coralville is willing to dog-sit for me during the sessions, and then I'll take Cocoa to a dog-friendly motel for the overnights (not optimal for socializing with workshop participants if that happens, and I do wonder eagerly about the "kindred spirits" I might be able to meet, but you do what you have to, especially with short notice).

I am waiting for more information about the workshop and how to prepare for it, but the description says we will be asked to share a piece of writing. So of course I am thinking about what to share out of the mass of roughly-drafted material I am accumulating. My thought so far is that I will share this piece from the first section, as I think it pulls together various dimensions in an inception moment that won't require too much advance explaining -- I think I can establish the essential context in a sentence or two.  It talks about the moment when Mary Dyer followed Anne Hutchinson out of the church upon Anne's excommunication, which is when attention was drawn to Mary being "the woman who had the monster." This is also the moment which, when it first registered on me in the 1990s, began my particular interest in Mary Dyer.  So it is kind of a balance point between the "other" and "self" material in the project.

*********************************

As I realize more about what it is doing, I am getting quite excited about the Iowa Writers' House as a resource. It was only founded in 2014, out of the recognition that for all Iowa City's prominence as a place for creative writing, there really weren't many opportunities for people not connected with the official MFA Writers' Workshop. So the founder took it upon herself to create a center for writing community.

It makes me think more about Iowa City as I place I might want to move if I change my life from what it has been -- I am drawn towards places with landscapes that are more exciting to me, like South Dakota, but then I reflect on my friends in and around eastern Iowa, my deep love for old houses which are plentiful there, the existence of a queer community, access to greyhound people and events, and then the idea that if I want to become more of a writer there might be opportunities there that otherwise would be mostly limited to larger cities (and I don't want to live in a big city, I'm pretty sure, even if it would increase my social opportunities). No answers yet, but I do think about this place issue almost daily.

Well, even while I am here in Waterloo, I'm still excited that this new resource exists and glad I'm diving in quickly to experience something there. Of all their winter and spring workshops I have been reading notices for, this feels like the one most suited to me at this stage. I have already dipped a toe into the Writers' Rooms, subcommunities that the Writer's House set up, and hope to explore further.