Never Too Late

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Vicky Lettmann

I’m back in Minnesota now for the arrival of spring. Spring is late coming here. We’ve had two snowfalls in the last couple of weeks. So finally. Spring.

Return to Minnesota

Today I walked and noticed the sky and the trees: how the clouds seem more open, how the trees are fresh and light today, how the dark ribbons of the branches are still visible. Like bones. As I walked farther along the path, I saw a huge tree branch that had broken off, and I thought I could see the dark outlines of a woman in its shape. Her head and arms were reaching down; her legs transformed below her into dozens of branching incarnations. It made me think of my mother who died last June. The green leaves of surrounding branches softened the dead branch. But still it looked strong and forthright, claiming its space.

Broken Branch

I soon came to a pond where three turtles sunned on a log. One jumped as I came closer and swam away. I remembered how I had promised myself a few weeks ago to observe and record one amazing moment every day.

Oh Turtles…

In all the busy-ness of returning to Minnesota (seeing family, getting the house in order, going to plays, dusting, catching up on dentist appointments), I haven’t noticed much.

But it’s never too late. It’s never too late to pick up a pen and begin. It’s never too late to notice the sky, the trees, the turtles. The bees. It’s never too late for spring.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Bee! I’m expecting you!

Bee! I’m expecting you!
Was saying Yesterday
To Somebody you know
That you were due—

The Frogs got Home last Week—
Are settled, and at work—
Birds, mostly back—
The Clover warm and thick—

You’ll get my Letter by
The seventeenth; Reply
Or better, be with me—
Yours, Fly.

Emily Dickinson

__________________________________________

Writing Jump Start: Write about coming home to spring. Or coming home. Or go for a walk, come home, and write about what you saw. Go for ten minutes. (I’m collecting these 10-minute writings. So feel free to send me yours. I’ll post a few along the way.)

The Real Me?

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Vicky Lettmann

A couple of days ago I decided that I needed an “About Me” page on the website. As most of you know, this is standard procedure for websites and blogs–a place for the creator of the site to say a little about him/herself and to state the purpose of the site. So I added one.

A Turtle Nobody

Now I’m having second thoughts. I need to clarify that what I wrote is not “the real me.” The real me is sitting here in her bathrobe trying to put thoughts together. The real me struggles every day to write. The real me spends an awful lot of time reading the paper in a comfy chair on the deck, where the real me stops reading to listen to the birds. (Today the real me is watching a stalwart swallow try to build a nest in the recessed light fixture.) The real me wastes a lot of time. But can I say this on my “About Me” page?

Several years ago when my friend Marge Barrett and I started teaching our classes at the Loft in Minneapolis, we decided not to spend the first class having folks go around saying their names and introducing themselves in the usual way because all of that ended up taking the entire first class period. In the long run, it isn’t that important what we did, or even wrote, before the class started. The main purpose is to get down to the business of writing.

By now, if we’ve lived long enough, we all have a lot to say about ourselves, and for the most part, much of it is in the past. So that is the reason I’ll probably take down the “About Me” page. It feels so past. It reveals such a fraction of who I am or even was. (“I’m Nobody,” says Emily Dickinson. “Then there are two of us./How dreary to be Somebody!/How public like a Frog….”)

The Real Me?

Oh, and in case you haven’t guessed, that photo on the “About Me” page isn’t the real me. Here’s a more recent one, which since I hardly ever fish, isn’t the real me either.

The point I’d like to make: Let’s not compare ourselves to others (including those writers we see on book jackets) or even to our alternate or past selves for that matter. Our time is better spent simply writing–or fishing (another metaphor for writing.) Maybe being a Nobody isn’t such a bad thing–it allows us so much more freedom.

The poet William Stafford (“A Ritual to Read to Each Other”) has said:

“If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.”
― William Edgar Stafford, The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems

____________________________

Writing Jumpstart: “The Real Me?” Go for ten minutes. Try this in your writer’s notebook for several days and see what happens. (I’ll continue to add these jumpstarts to the posts. What’s “ten minutes” in a whole day? If you feel so inclined, send me one of your ten-minute writings. See contact page of the site.)

Mingus and Matthews: A Moment in Time

Posted on April 6, 2013 by Vicky Lettmann

Since April is National Poetry Month, I want to honor poets and poetry. Particularly poets like William Matthews, who may have slipped from our memory.

2013 National Poetry Month
Poster

Matthews would have been my age had he not died of a fatal heart attack at age 55 just one year after winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for his collection of poetry, Time & Money, in 1996.

Why does April (“the cruelest month”) bring us face to face with our own mortality? Perhaps because everything around us is so full of life, we are reminded of the brevity of it all. Poetry because of its brevity seems especially good at capturing those moments that pass by so quickly.

In “Mingus at the Showplace,” Matthews harkens back to that time in 1960 when he was age seventeen. He was listening to the music of double bassist and jazz composer, Charles Mingus, at The Showplace in New York City. At that point in his life, Mingus was 48 years old and at the height of his career. He, himself, would be gone in 1979 at age 57.

William Matthews

So I’m struck by the perfection of this moment in time when young poet and gifted musician come together. I’m also struck by how generous Mingus was to the young poet. “There’s a lot of that going around,” he says to the young Matthews about the poem Matthews has asked him to read. Mingus certainly has standards because later that night Mingus, who was known for his temper, fired his pianist. Yet he is kind to the poet and continues to live in this poem. ”…and the band played on.”

(To hear the poem, click on this “listen” button.)

Mingus at the Showplace

BY WILLIAM MATTHEWS
I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,

and it was miserable, for that was how I thought

poetry worked: you digested experience and shat

literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since

defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar,

casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,

the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.

And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two

other things, but they were wrong, as it happened.

So I made him look at the poem.

“There’s a lot of that going around,” he said,

and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He laughed

amiably. He didn’t look as if he thought

bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.

If they were baseball executives they’d plot

to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game

could be saved from children. Of course later

that night he fired his pianist in mid-number

and flurried him from the stand.

“We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,”

he explained, and the band played on.

_________________________

You can order the free poster above by going to: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/98

_________________________

Writing Jumpstart: A brush with someone of genius. Or a time when you were young, and you had a chance to rub shoulders with someone like Mingus. Go for ten minutes.

Writing Stories: Michael Silverblatt with Jess Walter

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Vicky Lettmann

One of my favorite podcasts is Michael Silverblatt’s “Bookworm” from KCRW. These interviews with writers are about the right length for a thirty-minute walk around the neighborhood.

Silverblatt recently talked with Jess Walter, a novelist and short story writer, whose latest book is We Live in Water, a collection of short stories. Walter says he spent seven years trying to get his stories published, and they kept coming back. “Manilla boomerangs,” he called them.

Jess Walter

Lately we are seeing an increase in the popularity and publication of short story collections. George Saunders, Sam Lipsyte, and, of course, Alice Munro all have new collections of stories.

If you have a short story tucked away in the drawer, why not take another look at it? And then write a new one just for the heck of it. You’re on your way to a collection!

I’m going to uncover a few of my stories lurking in certain computer files, breathe some life into them, and send them out. Maybe they will be “manila boomerangs,” but at least they will be out of hiding.

Here’s the interview from “Bookworm” (3/21/13).

Click on the small blue (Listen) bar below. We’ll talk more about fiction writing in future blogs.

Jess Walter: We Live in Water

Listen to/Watch entire show:

____________________

Crow School

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Vicky Lettmann

Kay Ryan has a way of getting right to the point. I’ve been subscribing to Poetry Foundation’s Audio-Poem-of-the-Day. So each morning I get to hear a poem read to me. It’s a good way to start my writing time.

A Draft of a Kay Ryan Poem

This morning “Felix Crow” was in my ear. It made me think of my last post, “The Secret.” So far (it has been only a few days now), I’ve been good about looking for that moment during the day when I see something new or beautiful or amazing.

Kay Ryan’s “Felix Crow” calls attention to those things we don’t always see as beautiful, like crows. We tend to over-look certain creatures who don’t meet the standard definition of beauty. Here in Florida, we certainly ooh-and-aah when we see the roseate spoonbills or a tri-colored heron. Not so much, a crow or buzzard. imgres-1

“Felix Crow” called me up on that. So I’m opening my eyes a little wider today. Thanks to Kay Ryan.

Here’s the poem. Just click to hear the reading.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/audio/FelixCrow_byKay.mp3

P. S. For those of you following my earlier posts on writing prompts, the poem (and crows) made me think of another writing prompt. Today look for something others might not think of as beautiful. Later when you return to your notebook, write for ten minutes or more about what you saw.

Felix Crow

Crow school

is basic and

short as a rule—

just the rudiments

of quid pro crow

for most students.

Then each lives out

his unenlightened

span, adding his

bit of blight

to the collected

history of pushing out

the sweeter species;

briefly swaggering the

swagger of his

aggravating ancestors

down my street.

And every time

I like him

when we meet.

________________

Kay Ryan

Source: Poetry (November 2004)

The Secret

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Vicky Lettmann

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could, once and for all, grab onto that one bit of advice that will make all the difference? In a recent New York Times essay, “The Art of Being Still,” Silas House writes:

02DRAFT-blog427

I was a young, naïve, foolish writer who was searching for my way. I swallowed hard and asked him [James Still] if he had any advice on how to be a better writer. He didn’t answer for a long minute, gazing off at the hills as if ignoring me.

But then he spoke, and I realized that he had taken that moment for quiet thought. “Discover something new every day,” he said. That advice changed me as a writer and as a person.”

The narrator Paul Chowder of Nicholson Baker’s novel, The Anthologist (one of my favorite novels), says:

And then a man of forty or so, with a French accent, asked, “How do you achieve the presence of mind to initiate the writing of a poem?” And something cracked open in me, and I finally stopped hoarding and told them my most useful secret. The only secret that has helped me consistently over all the years that I’ve written. I said, “Well, I’ll tell you how. I ask a simple question. I ask myself: What was the very best moment of your day?” The wonder of it was, I told them that this one question could lift out from my life exactly what I will want to write a poem about. Something I hadn’t known was important will leap out and hover there in front of me, saying I am—I am the best moment of the day. . . . Often, I went on, it’s a moment when you’re waiting for someone, or you’re driving somewhere, or maybe you’re just walking across a parking lot and admiring the oil stains and the dribbled tar patterns. One time it was when I was driving past a certain house that was screaming with sunlitness on its white clapboards, and then I plunged through tree shadows that splashed and splayed across the windshield. I thought, Ah, of course— I’d forgotten. You, windshield shadows, you are the best moment of the day. “And that’s my secret, such as it is,” I said.

― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

What’s your secret, such as it is? What advice would you give? Or what have you learned from someone else?

Let me know.

In the meantime, I’m going to try to write or photograph (or both) the best moment of each day. Or something new. Right now, it is this quiet moment before our house guests arrive. (We have a lot of them here in Florida.)

A Note in a Bottle: Sending Our Writing into the World

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Vicky Lettmann

During the last five weeks of our writing class (“Jumpstart Your Writing”) here on Sanibel, we’ve used the metaphor of a “note in a bottle” to talk about writing: the note as the words we write and the bottle as the container for the words. This bottle can come in many shapes. It could be in the shape of a single poem, story, or essay. It could be a collection of poems, stories, or essays. It could be a novel or a memoir. What about a blog entry? an editorial in a newspaper? a carefully constructed letter to a granddaughter? So the bottle is the shape we give to our writing.
images-2

When we’ve written and shaped our pieces into some sort of container, it is time to toss that note and bottle into the sea. (This is particularly apt because Sanibel is a slip of an island on the Gulf of Mexico.) In other words, it is time to send our writing out into the world.

The very act of bringing our shaped final piece to the class, then reading it, and passing out copies to each other is the simplest and most basic way of throwing our bottles into the sea. We’ve taken our words out of the notebooks, shaped them into some form, and sent them on their way.

Some of us may send our “notes in bottles” beyond a class or writers’ group. Maybe we’ll publish one of our poems or short essays in the local newspaper; maybe we’ll send a piece to our families; maybe we’ll submit our writing to a contest or a magazine. We don’t always know where our writing will end up, or who will read it, for that matter.

Janet Sunderland, one of the contributors to the anthology, When Last Mountain: The View from Writers over Fifty, is about to toss her note in a bottle into the sea. We’ve stayed in touch since the anthology was published, and she wrote to tell me that her chapbook of poems, At the Boundary, will be forthcoming from Finishing LIne Press. She writes: “That goal [of publishing a book] has been elusive to me and perhaps for a good reason. Perhaps I simply wasn’t ready to take on the daunting task of marketing and selling a book. As writers, we love to write. Marketing? Well, not so much.” So sometimes it takes a bit more of an effort to get that bottle out there. But Janet has done it.

And so have the writers in the class.

Getting our work out of notebooks and into the world isn’t always easy, but then we can move on to create more notes in more bottles for more people to discover.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” -Maya Angelou

__________________________________________
To find Janet’s book, go to Finishing Line Press, PREORDER FORTHCOMING TITLES. You can read her bio and reviews of her chapbook. Congratulations, Janet!

Jumpstart Your Writing: Valentine’s Day Prompts

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Vicky Lettmann

We’re headed into the third week of our “Jumpstart Your Writing” workshop here on Sanibel. It is going well. Nine of us are writing like crazy. For each class, I’ve created an envelope of “jumpstarts.” The first week the ten-minute prompts were adapted from Natalie Goldberg’s Old Friend from Faraway. I typed and printed out a couple of sheets of Natalie’s ten-minute writing prompts and then cut the paper into slips, which I placed in an envelope for each person. The idea is to draw one or two slips from the envelope and, without pausing to think too much, plunge in and write for at least ten-minutes. The second week’s envelope included prompts based on stories and people. The third week’s collection was from the prompts we each created during the first class meeting. Other strategies have included story-telling (comparing oral and written versions of the same story) and writing from photographs. We’re using In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction for inspiration and as models for our own writing. Next week we focus on words. We’ll each bring in a piece of writing that we love because of the words.

images Since tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, here are two poems: one by Tony Hoagland, one by Gertrude Stein (which I like because of the sound of the words.)

The prompt (Hoagland): Pick a simple object (like a windchime) and pair that object with a person you love or loved. (It doesn’t have to be romantic love. Any kind of love will do just fine.) Write for ten minutes.

The prompt (Stein): “Twinkling with delight…” Use this phrase as a start. Go for ten minutes. (Note: If you click on the high-lighted word burr in Stein’s poem, you will find a page that talks about Stein,Toklas, and this poem. You’ll also see that Stein’s poem was a kind of “note in a bottle.” I’ll say more about this in my next blog.)

Windchime

BY TONY HOAGLAND

She goes out to hang the windchime

in her nightie and her work boots.

It’s six-thirty in the morning

and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest

tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch,

windchime in her left hand,

hammer in her right, the nail

gripped tight between her teeth

but nothing happens next because

she’s trying to figure out

how to switch #1 with #3.

She must have been standing in the kitchen,

coffee in her hand, asleep,

when she heard it—the wind blowing

through the sound the windchime

wasn’t making

because it wasn’t there.

No one, including me, especially anymore believes

till death do us part,

but I can see what I would miss in leaving—

the way her ankles go into the work boots

as she stands upon the ice chest;

the problem scrunched into her forehead;

the little kissable mouth

with the nail in it.

___________________________________________

[The house was just twinkling in the moon light]

BY GERTRUDE STEIN

The house was just twinkling in the moon light,

And inside it twinkling with delight,

Is my baby bright.

Twinkling with delight in the house twinkling

with the moonlight,

Bless my baby bless my baby bright,

Bless my baby twinkling with delight,

In the house twinkling in the moon light,

Her hubby dear loves to cheer when he thinks

and he always thinks when he knows and he always

knows that his blessed baby wifey is all here and he

is all hers, and sticks to her like burrs, blessed baby

Gertrude Stein, “[The house was twinkling in the moon light]” from Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (St. Martin’s Press, 1999). Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.

These poems (and thousands more) can be found on the Poetry Foundation website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org.

Li-Young Lee’s “The Gift”

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Vicky Lettmann

images As I prepare for a writing workshop here at BIG Arts in Sanibel, I’ve been looking for poems to use as inspiration and a source for writing ideas. “The Gift” by Li-Young Lee seems like a good choice, especially for focusing on writing about family.

Here’s the poem and a video of Li-Young Lee reading and discussing the poem. If you’re looking for writing ideas today, try a line or two from the poem and go for ten minutes.

The class (“Jumpstart Your Writing”) will meet for the next five weeks. I’ll be posting some of our readings and writings. If you write something (poem, short nonfiction, fiction) inspired by the readings, send your work my way (vlettmann@mac.com). I’d love to hear what you’re doing and will post some of the writing on this site.

Click the link below to hear Li-Young Lee reading “The Gift.”

http://vimeo.com/36988030

“The Gift” by LI-YOUNG LEE

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

_________________

Source: Rose (BOA Editions Ltd., 1986)

Turtle House Ink: A Home for Writers

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Vicky Lettmann

As the new year begins, I’d like to let you all know that Turtle House Ink is moving away from its focus on writers over 50.

Turtle House Ink is simply a home for writers. I hope you will continue to come here and read the blog as we talk about the concerns of all writers–not just those over 50.

Stay tuned!