Iowa Writing Coach: Poem in Your Pocket Day

Everyone should live in a neighborhood with a resident poet. My husband, sons, and I were lucky to have that privilege from 1990-1996, when we lived across the street from Robert Dana and his equally wonderful wife, Peg.

Originally from Massachusetts, Robert attended Drake University and the Iowa Writers Workshop after serving in the South Pacific at the end of World War II. He taught 40 years as Poet-in-Residence at Cornell College. I didn’t realize until recently that he was the founding editor of the revived North American Review, one of my favorite literary journals. He’s published many books of poetry and has also has served two terms as Poet Laureate of Iowa.

Here’s what I learned from Robert during the six years we lived in his vicinity: Gardening is serious business, as is good food. Neighbors are to be greeted enthusiastically – and maybe worked into a poem now and then. Cats make good fodder for poetry, too, and can shade a poem with humor, or lightness, or darkness, or all three. It is an honor to be invited to help proof a poet’s galleys while he reads them out loud, but you’ll be nervous as hell and will wonder if you’re doing it right. And…you don’t have to be religious to see the miracle in the everyday. In fact, too much looking for God can mean missing “air raw with rain” or “the dead blue crab in all its electric raiment.”

Cheers to Robert Dana on Poem in Your Pocket Day. When he read at Cornell College two nights ago, he told the audience that of all his lines of poetry, the last line in the following poem is his wife Peg’s favorite. I think it’s mine now, too.

“Chimes”

Mid-August. Evening. Rain falling.

Cold, bright silk where the street fronts the house.

Out back, it laves and slicks the parched leaves of the trees.
Ragged hang of summer’s end.

I lean against the doorway of the poem,
listening to old patter.

My cat, Zeke, lays himself out imperially.
Eleven pounds of grey smoke
with tufted ears and a curved plume of tail.

Now, a slight wind,
and The Emperor of Heaven’s chimes intone like distant bells,
his court musician’s 4000-year-old pentatonic scales
pealing in slow, clear ripples.

Occasionally, a chord.

Every day I live I live forever.

--From The Morning of the Red Admirals (Anhinga Press, 2004) by Robert Dana

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Creating and Mate-ing

I’ve always known that my husband Chuck and I are at our best when we’re doing something creative together. We especially enjoyed the creative project of raising our two sons together. Since they’ve grown up, however, Chuck and I have struggled to find another way to collaborate. He likes to cook but I would rather eat his delicacies than make them together. I like to draw; he appreciates visual art but doesn’t create it. We’re both writers but we work in very different genres.

After a few years of looking for the right avenue of co-expression, I think we may have found it: making podcasts for a blog we’re calling “foragers on the edge.” We’re just getting it up and running, but so far we’ve had great fun creating two short podcasts: one on our dance lessons at an Arthur Murray studio in the Quad Cities, and the other on a recent trip to the Quad City Botanical Center.

Here are some of the new things I’m learning and relearning from and about my mate of 33 years: 1) our peculiar qualities that can sometimes be considered flaws quickly turn into assets when we create together, such as his way of plunging ahead and my way of doing and re-doing until it feels closer to right; 2) there are some pretty cool (and free) services out there for creating podcasts, including Audacity (free audio editor and recorder) and Clickcaster (podcast storage site); and 3) damn, we have fun when we make things together!

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Talking Yourself into Creating

What do you do when an idea for a novel (or painting or other creative work) drops out of the sky, but after the first few flushes of loving the work, you stop believing that the work is valuable? What you do is you talk yourself into creating.

Here’s how my own talk-on-paper went this morning:

Why am I stalled after the fourth chapter of this novel? Well, first, there’s the nagging doubt that it will amount to anything. Then there’s the feeling that working on the novel is just a big excuse not to be doing the long list of things I should be doing, like prospecting for “real” writing work that pays the bills (like marketing publications).

And yet at the same time, when I think about my real desire in life, isn’t it to write books? And aren’t I lucky to have this idea for a book, the writing of which could mean joy and respite from a long cold winter – not to mention a tax deduction for dancing lessons AND a few trips to California, since both are needed for research?

At the very least, couldn’t this novel be a practice ground for future novels to come? I have one bad novel under my belt; why not two? Isn’t this idea for the novel actually a total gift?

As I talked to myself on paper, it became increasingly clear that with my drive to write the novel, I was being gifted with a classic “meaning adventure,” a phrase coined by Eric Maisel in The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person’s Path through Depression (New World Library, 2002). In this book, Maisel argues that creators tend to deal more often with existential questions about meaning because we are individualists who doubt traditional wisdom and insist on providing our own answers to questions of meaning. This quality, of course, leaves us vulnerable to meaning crises – even depression. However, because we are creative, we also have amazing opportunities for meaning adventures – such as I am experiencing by talking myself into continuing to work on the novel.

Sometimes you just have to remind yourself how lucky you are to be driven to create, and to have something in mind to create. Indeed, ideas for new projects are both a gift and an adventure.

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I Miss You, Office

Virginia Woolf told us that writers need a room of their own, but she didn't tell us what to do if we lost the perfect room. For five years because of my husband's job I lived in Ames, Iowa, in an older two-story house with perfect space for a writer: a room with two large windows and even a door to a second-floor deck that extended my work space in the summer. I loved this writing space. Large oak, basswood, and maple trees filtered the sun's glare in the summer and invited the warm rays in the winter.

And talk about room. There was space for my desk AND bookcases AND filing cabinets AND a large storage closet.

It was a writer's paradise. It was my first official room-of-my-own writing space. It was the place where I decided to throw out my shingle as a full-time freelance writer and editor, after keeping a day job in higher education for many years.

The office even became a metaphor for the idea that life might pleasantly surprise me even though I may not want go where it wants to take me.

Now I'm in another house, in another town, again courtesy of my husband's job. I am not so friendly with my office, here. It is dark and cold, especially in the winter, and the windows are small and high. I don't yet know what this office has to teach me, don't yet know to fully trigger the muse. I'm trying hard to listen.

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When Writing Fails, Try Rocking

Don't call me Ishmael. Call me Nana Sue. Call me Happy Nana who has just spent eight lovely days with her new grandson who came to visit from half-way across the country. Call me a cliche of a grandmother who wonders how to describe in a new, fresh way this full feeling of love. How does a writer avoid cliches at a time like this?

Maybe she doesn't. Maybe she just enjoys without trying to describe. Maybe she takes off her writer's hat and puts it on the chair next to the baby blue fleece blanket and the tattered Dr. Seuss books, worn out from reading to her two sons a couple decades-and-a-half earlier. Maybe she just rocks a baby in a soft chair and pats his diapered bottom softly while he sleeps. Maybe she closes her eyes and savors the heft of a sleeping baby on her chest. Maybe some things are just beyond language.

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For Creative Energy, Get Moving

I’m guessing I’m not the only one right now who struggles this time of year with shorter days, lack of sunlight, and the impending cold. Every year I have to remind myself that to keep my creative spirit alive in November, I have to face the bogeyman. I’m talking about literally facing the monster by getting out into the cold, rain, and slush.

I’m talking about getting outside and moving around – vigorously, as in a half-hour jog or fast hike. And not just once in awhile. I’m talking six days a week. Getting outdoors, year round but especially in the winter, is my best protection against creative doldrums and the self-doubt that can accompany them.

For me, it’s not if I’ll exercise today; it’s when. Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge, MD, argue in Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy – Until You’re 80 and Beyond that as we hit middle age, our bodies will start to decay. Basically, our bodies start to go into hibernation unless we signal to them to keep growing. The signal? Vigorous exercise, six days a week. Exercising tells our bodies to keep repairing and renewing. It also releases chemicals that bathe our brains in positive feelings.

“Being sedentary is the most important signal for decay,” say Crowley and Lodge. Thus, “Decay is optional.” And since aging is largely about decaying, we can slow our aging process by being physically active. That’s why, as they say, “Exercise is magic.”

And as I have discovered, going outdoors for exercise is part of the magic – even in the cold, rain, slush, and snow. Getting out into the elements causes nature’s beauty to trump the cold, taming the face of the winter monster and minimizing self-doubt about creativity in the process. Plus there’s all that Vitamin D to soak up during the daylight.

“Exercise is the opposite of crazy. It is the thing you use to drive craziness away,” write Crowley and Lodge. I agree. And for extra protection from the creativity crazies, bundle up and get outside while you move your beautiful body.

Need extra motivation to get moving outdoors? Try listening to music on an Ipod. And check out my essay, "Running through Life," about the joys of jogging to music.

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Ode to Friendship

Five years have past; five summers with the length

Of five long winters! and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur.—Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

--from “Tintern Abbey,” by William Wordsworth

Yes, we were playing hooky on Monday when Wordsworth came to mind. My husband and I had made the two-hour drive to Pike’s Peak State Park in northeast Iowa. We knew the fall colors would be past their peak. It wasn’t really the color that we craved, anyway; it was the rolling terrain. Geologist Jean Prior wrote that “if you had to divide Iowa into two different regions, one would be the extreme northeast corner and the other would be the rest of the state.”

Pike’s Peak State Park is named for the same Lieutenant Zebulon Pike as the 14,110-foot peak in Colorado. Iowa’s Pike’s Peak, just 500 feet above the Mississippi River floodplain, happens to be the tallest bluff overlooking the entire length of the Mississippi. We drove into the park around 3:00 p.m. It was 70 degrees and sunny, with plenty of time to hike before an early sunset.

Unlike Wordsworth's poem, more than five years had passed since our prior trip to Pike’s Peak. But we too heard the inland waters rolling -- at Bridal Veil Falls, where a creek flows over a dolomite shelf and drops to the Mississippi -- and we saw the steep cliffs that connected the landscape with “the quiet of the sky.”

Except it wasn’t entirely quiet as we walked. In between the swishing of the dry leaves, I heard echoes of a friendship. About twenty-six years ago we’d hiked here with our young son and our friends Deb and Craig and their son.

I heard the chipmunk chatter of our two little boys – both three, one blonde, one dark-haired – while we hiked the bluffs and gazed at the panoramic view of the Mississippi. And I heard laughter, because that’s what inevitably happens when we’re with Deb and Craig.

And so it was Monday that while we listened to the murmur of the water fall, I had the pleasure of the present and the past – and not only the past, but also the sense of “life and food for future years,” as Wordsworth puts it later in “Tintern”:

With many recognitions dim and faint,

And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

The picture of the mind revives again:

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For future years.

As if I’d stepped into a time machine, other memories of times with Deb and Craig rose up and carried me to other natural places – camping at Yellow River Forest and Backbone State Park, not far north of here; canoeing the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota, a long way from here – and camping at Pine Lake State Park in central Iowa, three hours away.

After leaving Pike’s Peak we drove north into McGregor and wound up at Old Man River, a new brewery in town. We ordered beers and toasted to our long-time friendship with Craig, our master storyteller, and Deb, our generous friend with the tinkling laughter. All friendships ebb and flow, and ours is no exception; still, time has brought a depth to this good friendship that is not easily duplicated.

Here’s to nature, and to Deb and Craig, and to memories that have provided sustenance for yesterday, today, and tomorrow

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