WELCOMING WRITING AND ESSAYING

Writing comes
and I welcome it
grabbing it as it enters--
a passing phrase
a fleeting image
gossamer words
fashioned into
half-finished sentences
coming
as I wait
in the places
where writing
has visited me before.


 In Beyond Walls, Amy Frykolm describes poet William Stafford's habit of rising to write poetry each morning before dawn.

Stafford didn’t write before dawn only because it was quieter then. He wrote in the early morning because he had greater access at that time of day to the unknown. His method for writing poetry was based on something he called “welcoming.” He would sit and welcome the language that came to him. Once an interviewer challenged him on this practice. ‘Don’t you ever revise?’ the interviewer asked. I do, he said, but only by welcoming still further. “I drift back through the poem with something of the same welcoming feeling I had when I began it.” He didn’t set out with an idea. He set out with an intention to welcome whatever came, almost always something that hadn’t been known before.

I know this "welcoming"--this process of language that comes  unbidden, yet  indirectly invited, always. And, although, I do not intentionally arise early each morning to write,  I  remain in what Donald Graves calls a "constant state of composition."

I have always explored these "comings" in poetry, feeling free to wonder and wander as I write, exploring, expanding, and transforming ideas, language...  and myself.

I have found myself in the last few years, however, reading and writing more nonfiction, creative nonfiction..... essays, if you will.


I have become interested in this form as I continue to experiment, in general, with the many possibilities for blending genres.  This form seems most like poetry to me in its ability to build  and arrive where I may not have intended to go, but am so glad I did.

It was with great delight that I discovered Katherine Bomer's newest book, The Journey is Everything. about teaching essay writing.

Bomer also discusses the connection between poetry and essays, confirming my suspicions and intuitions:

To me, the essay is most like a poem in tone. Like poems, essays might focus on something minuscule and with luminous language, render it enormous; or they might find something considered ordinary and demonstrate how extrordinary it is.  Essays stun me the way poems do, inviting me to consider an aspect of the world that I did not  know about or to look with fresh eyes at something I thought I already knew. (page 18)

Both Bomer and Fryholm remind us of the origins of  the word essay, and of this literary form , as well as the role of Michel de Montaigne in the genre's creation.

Montaigne retired from his role as a French statesman and retreated to his estate around 1571.  There he began reading and writing and essaying--trying words, ideas, and language.  He wrote about his everyday world, philosophy, religion, politics, human nature, and more.  In Book 1, his essays included such titles as:  


On Sadness, 
On Idleness, 
On Liars,
Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us, 
On Punishing Cowardice, 
On the Power of Imagination.

His many essays ( 3 books) were ultimately published in a massive volume entitled Essais-translated Attempts or Trials.   Project Gutenberg offers  The  Complete Essays of Michel De Montaigne . 

For more on the background, context, intentions, and writing processes of Montaigne, you may find helpful this article, Me Myself and I by Jane Kramer from The New Yorker.

Amy Fryholm closes her article about the essay with an invitation to explore our own worlds in the manner of Montaigne :

Essay writing, in particular, is an invitation into the “not yet” of our own experience where the unknown has an opportunity to speak to and through us.

So I want to try--- I want to essay  my world, my memories, my experiences. I want to welcome  the inklings, the tiny thoughts that come  that lead to deeper writing.

As with any writing we are learning-- or trying,  it is useful to immerse ourselves in that form, to take time to notice and name what we see-- and to think about how we might, then, translate into our own writing what we have noticed.

 Several collections have been useful for me as models,  mentor texts, for exploring the form.....  for pushing me, pulling me toward welcoming, experimenting --- trying ---essaying.



  


 I also recommend  " The Best" Series published each year:

2015

2014

And finally,  I offer books  that give advice, suggest exercises, and other ways to practice as you grow in essaying.  The first I own, the other two are currently on my To Be Read Pile, ready to assist me in my latest  journey.


     

 Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

Select a topic to explore in the manner of Montaigne, starting with a title such as On___________.

In your writing explore what you know and what you don't know about this topic.  What is uncertain or troubling ?  Is there a call for change or growth for you or for your community? 

What do you discover as you write?

What questions arise, suggesting further exploration and writing?

Or spend some intentional time attentively observing your surroundings, encounters and conversations as you go about your day.  Write an essay about one observation, exploring why this particular observation is important to you.

 

THREADS IN THE CHANGES

Everything in life is changing.
Change is a constant companion-- a traveler in life's journey with me.

Do you feel that way too?

If you are a teacher, I know you must.
Common Core. Teacher Evaluation. Merit Pay. Tenure. Health Care Insurance. Accountability.  The list of ever-changing realities for teachers goes on and on.

But I am not just talking about education and teaching.
If you are human, I know you  feel it.

Everything changes.

This year began with me taking my father to the emergency room on January 2 .  He died later in that same month on January 29.

These are the posts that I wrote in the midst of this difficult time.

The Waiting Place                                                              

Breathing: Inhalation and Inspiration

The Measure of the Man: Tribute to My Father       

Change--big changes in my family, in my life.

My church does not have a priest right now.  Our regular priest had a stroke two years ago and retired.  Our interim priest who has been with us these past two years has now retired, as well.  And although our search committee is working hard and reports positive progress, there will be an undefined gap before the new priest comes.  In the meantime we will float in the supply priest pool.

Change--big changes in my place of worship and my spiritual community.

The Benefit Bank  at my church (a program through the Mid-Ohio Foodbank), with which I am a trained counselor, is also in a state of  uncertainty, in an effort to figure out how to better serve our community.

Change-- necessary changes in how we most effectively reach folks most in need..

The Columbus Area Writing Project, of which I am one of the co-directors, is reconsidering and reformulating how we can best operate and serve our teachers.

And that is just a sampling of changes in my personal world.

I haven't included the obvious changes that affect all of us and our communities locally and globally-- politics, climate,  economy,  foreign relations, wars ... and more.

Each of us could make a list and keep adding ... and adding.

Change is happening all around us


As I ponder all the changes taking place in my own life, I can't help but think about all the changes taking place in the lives of students this summer and as they return to school.

Their families may have changed-- a new sibling added, a parent leaving, a pet dying.
They may have moved to a new house, a new neighborhood, a new school.
Their bodies are changing, growing, developing--naturally.
Or there may be an illness--their own or someone close.

Changes--big and small.  Students will bring them into the school, into the classroom, into their processes of learning and discovering and interacting with others.

Where in the curriculum and in our classrooms is there place and space for acknowledging changes-- positive or negative?

How do we present changes to our own children, to our students, to our writers?

What good can come of acknowledging, thinking and talking about change, and writing about change?


As we consider all the changes we are encountering, we just may be surprised to find an unchanging element or two.

No matter how many changes are taking place in our lives and in the world, if we look carefully, we can find a  constant. It may be a person, a place, an activity, an object--- a thread that we can follow through the modifications and alterations, reformations,  transitions and transformations,  shifts, and  turns of life.

William Stafford writes about this thread in his poem The Way It Is

There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change.  But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.

What is is the thread you follow?

For me, I think that thread, that constant is writing and poetry, reading and books.

It is also my best friend, who has been with me for every major and minor event in my life for the past forty years.

And it is my family and their unwavering love and loyalty.


What do you hold onto in the midst of change?


Jacqueline Woodson tells of two things to which her family held onto through generations.

In Show Way,  the thread is a quilt, each square stitched by Woodson's ancestor with love, to show the way to freedom, to show the way out of slavery.

The quilt, passed down, to each new generation, passed on this thread of love, of persistence, of skill, of pride to each new girl-child until it was given to Woodson.





In This Is the Rope: A Story From the Great Migration, her family also  held onto a rope-- the rope her grandmother found beneath an old tree-- a rope she skipped, the rope that tied the few things they owned to the top of a car as they migrated north from South Carolina-- a rope that continued to weave its way through the life in her family... as each new generation found new uses for the rope.


To what does you family hold onto, during times of movement and transition and change?

What thread do you follow?

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

Reflect on recent or ongoing changes in your life.

What constant thread weaves through those changes?

To what are you holding onto in your time of change?

Write a poem or personal narrative about the changes in your life and the threads that are woven through your life that are sustaining you.