Writing about yourself ought to be easy, right?

Our first class with Steve Watkins filled me with ideas, and I couldn’t wait to get started. He asked us to turn in 5-7 pages by Sunday night. No problem, I thought.

First, I wrote about a memory I had at age 4 when I cut off all my sister’s hair. A couple of paragraphs in, I stopped abruptly. Nothing left to tell. Next I tried to write about an incident when we were 15 and 17. Many more details came to mind, but I wasn’t sure why I was writing it. The details were there but the reflection was not. I tried to write about my summers in RI, my travels as an Army brat, and my first days alone in Virginia. Nothing.

Finally Friday night around 10pm, I began to journal. And the topic came to me like a Rhode Island beach wave. My dad’s death. This was the one topic I didn’t want to write about. This is not because I didn’t want to share. No, I feel like I’ve written about it so much in poetry and blog posts, I wanted to tackle something new.

But there it was, so I wrote.

I’m looking forward to hearing what Steve has to say about everyone’s work. But I’m already thinking about next week’s piece. Hmmm, anxiety may be showing its ugly face.

When I decided to open a writing studio, I was led by a woman I’ve never met. I’d stumbled across her online, ordered her book, and devoured it.

Pat Schneider continues to speak to me in the decisions I make, in the way I work with other writers, and as the supportive coach I need when I am feeling like a failure. Her year-end post takes us back to her early days as a writer….

I was a young poet, published in a few small journals, but I didn’t yet have a book of poems, when another poet in my neighborhood who did have a book, suggested we exchange poems and give each other critical suggestions. I was flattered – after all, she was a published poet! We exchanged poems, wrote our comments on the pages, and when I read her comments, I was devastated. (read more here...)

Last year she wrote about fear…

The good news is, we are writers. The good news is, there are always more stories to tell, more songs to sing, more poems to give birth to. The good news is, we each one hold an immeasurable treasure of craft – the language that came down to us from our ancestors: ancient, beautiful, already ours in our unconscious minds. And the good news is, we have all of our lives practiced the language of our own contemporaries – all day every day as we talk in words, think in words, and at night when we dream in words.

The bad news is, if we are doing writing that matters deeply, it is much of the time going to be scary as hell. And every distraction will seem a better option than our art, our writing.

One of my goals is to be less distracted this year. Onward.