Category Archives: Challenges

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

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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.
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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.781sunderland_Janetheadshot

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.product_info

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

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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!

The Lost Umbrellas

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Martha Varzaly
Guest Author

It was pouring raining when I came home from school, and neither Truman, my pug/cairn, nor I cared to walk.  It was still raining in the morning, but Truman’s urgent bark sounds like “Up!”  I’m not sure where he learned that sound but it surely wakes me up.  This time I knew that going out was essential.

Truman with Martha’s Umbrella

I pulled on yesterday’s dirty clothes and reached for the flowered umbrella that wasn’t in the umbrella stand.  It wasn’t in the hall closet.  It wasn’t in the garage.  Nor was it in the car.  How can one lose a wet umbrella in a condo?  Surely other umbrellas were in the back of the hall closet . . . the big black one that can cover three people, another flowered one that I bought in Target during a thunderstorm, a red one that I’ve had for years, and a sky blue one that collapses. All the while Truman demanded that we go naked in the rain   By the time we’d chased the water down the street gutters, waited for Truman to sniff every bush and peed on most of them.  Eventually we meandered home, and I dried him off before he shook the water on the carpet.  Exchanging my soaking clothes and grabbing a cup of hot coffee helped my mood.

Losing umbrellas is not the only lost thing in my life. My life seems confused like my condo . . . junk mail has spilled from the file cabinet to floor.  One day, I’ll write an article about the unwanted stuff that fills my mail box.  The clock over my desk needs a battery.  I got it off the wall, but haven’t gotten the kitchen stool so I can put it back nor can I find a battery. I must have at least half-dozen pairs of cheap reading glasses, yet there’s never a pair to be found when I’m in a hurry. There are always dishes in the sink; although, I’m sure I cleaned the kitchen last night.

It’s even worse.  I can never remember whom I have told someone something.  It may be just a joke or something important.  My children give me that look that says, “Mom, you’ve told me that already.”  Isolation and silence seems the best since I can’t upset others by repetition. I help shuttle the grandchildren to and from all sorts of activities, and my daughter sends me a weekly calendar.  For her calendar, I am grateful.  Otherwise I never know where and when I am supposed to be.

A year ago when I went to the doctor looking for a solution to my losing memory, I saw my primary care physician and a neurologist.  I took all their tests and nothing showed up – or at least nothing bad showed up.  There was no indication of memory lost, but I couldn’t remember things. Last semester I had trouble remembering my students’ name. Now walking into classroom is frightening.  The doctors will most likely blame my confusion because my husband died this spring.

But this year, I’ve done my homework. I will fight to awaken my brain and find those umbrellas!

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About Martha Varzaly: “I teach Composition at Johnson County Community College, am a prose editor for Kansas City Voices, and have recently found a new voice for me – writing with a chuckle about serious things such as cataract surgery, encounter with a skunk, and memory loss. I wrote as stringer for the Lynchburg News in Virginia (and I got paid by the inch) when I was 16; and 50 years later, I’m having a ball. Just call me ‘Grandma Martha.'”

Piles and Files

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By Janet Sunderland, Guest Author

In a 21st century family saga too long to tell, amid economic ruin and children back home, my husband and I moved out of the large office we shared and into my small corner writing room. It’s been a process, as they say.

We cleaned out bookcases lining the walls of the big office (hereafter called BO) and got rid of books we no longer needed. We even ended up with empty shelf space, an early-in-this-move miracle.

What do you do with an empty shelf? I collected all my various completed projects, films I’d worked with and publications I’d published in, and put them together. They filled the shelf. I was amazed, since feeling failure is far more common than feeling success. The dates on said projects go back more than thirty years.

Janet’s Big Office (BO) before the move

Son and his wife moved into BO. It suits them. He constructed a wardrobe where there was none and utilized the room’s tiny closet for shelves. His very large desk is against the bookcases; so if I have to find a particular book on a non-visible shelf, I squeeze between desk layers.

However, what I also discovered in this gigantic move were files and files and stacks of papers.

We culled five file cabinets down to two, tossing and condensing partly empty drawers. My husband isn’t ready to part with notes from his graduate school days, but those are boxed in the basement for some other year.

I also have too many journals, which I’m unwilling to part with, but I organized them, year by year, and numbered them. And thankfully, at least spacewise although not so lucky memorywise, in years past, I didn’t write every day. Now they grow exponentially because along with writing every day, I also save newspaper clippings. I’m becoming my mother. But I had an empty bookcase.

There are still stacks of paper. I can’t get to my writing desk, it’s covered; so I’m sitting here with the laptop on my lap, looking around our newly refurbished and painted little office (LO) and it’s “cozy” as my husband says.

In fact, it’s lovely. Jacaranda blue walls and lots of white trim. It’s a happy room. One thing about sons coming home to live is they know how to build and paint. I still have stacks of papers. And boxes of old family photographs in a closet. However, and this is the point, we’ve shed pounds and pounds of paper, and been forced to look though files.

And in the midst, a “duh!” moment arrived. I could scan and save. That’s my latest project.

I begin with the top page on a pile, scan it into the computer, and toss the paper. Now my files are digital and clearly labeled. I can add new ones without worrying about taking up space. It’ll take time, but it works.

I’m doing the same with photos. I can’t toss the old photos, but I can donate them to the historical society. Not all of them, but many. And I can, eventually, make online photo books for my children, using Shutterfly or Blurb, and then they are keepers of stuff rather than me.

A great anti-virus program and online backup are key to this endeavor. And flash drives. I’ve also saved the contents of flash drives to the computer desktop, which saves them to online backup. There may be an easier way, but I can only absorb so many learning curves, and saving them to the desktop is easy. The backup program does the rest.

And you know all those scraps of paper and Post-It notes? I gathered them, sat with a small flip notebook, looked at each one, and either transcribed or tossed. I’ve discovered Post-It tabs, so organizing the notebook into sections of ideas, books to read, stellar quotes, etc. was relatively simple, and I’ll find them when I need them.

I used to move every three years or so, and moving forced a clean-out, but then we settled into this old, big house, and stayed put. But this summer, chaotic as it is and not really allowing head space for writing in the usual way, I learned new skills as a writer.

One is to appreciate what I have accomplished in my mad dash through the years, but the other is to train a jaundiced eye on my research and re-evaluate what I need as hard-copy and what can be digital, including my own writing. I don’t need two, or three, copies of everything, and while hard-copy habits are hard to break, they are breakable.

You just need a nudge.

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Janet Sunderland is an actor, a writer, and with her husband, co-pastor of a progressive liturgical community. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications and venues, including, proudly, When Last on the Mountain. Her blog can be found at janetsunderland.wordpress.com.

 

Composting and Clearing the Way

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Granddaughter, Ella, in Ruth’s studio

On Monday, I return to North Carolina to begin the challenge of emptying out my mother’s home.  She lived at 5130 Oriole Drive in Wilmington, N. C. for 47 years. She is gone now, so it is up to my brother, sister-in-law, and me to begin to clear away all those objects that were a part of her long life.

She was an artist, so her studio alone could take months to go through. There are paints, brushes, canvases, papers for her collages, fabrics, books, notes, color charts, completed and uncompleted paintings, sketch books, art magazines—the list goes on.

So how does this relate to writing? If we write long enough and as diligently as my mother created her art, we too will amass piles of words. My office contains stacks of journals and old notebooks and files of stories and poems in various stages of completion. More files contain revisions—and revisions of the revisions. My computer holds documents that even the finder can’t find. I still have papers I wrote in college. Sometimes I wonder what is the point of all this.

My mother used to say, “I feel sorry for you and your brother when I’m gone. I can see you now wondering why in the world I kept all of this stuff. But I just never know what I might need.”

This is true of us writers too.

In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg uses composting as way to talk about this accumulation of writing. We throw all these words together and let them mix, mingle, and transform, until a new story evolves.  “We must continue to work the compost pile,” says Natalie, “enriching it and making it fertile so that something beautiful may bloom and so that our writing muscles are in good shape to ride the universe when it moves through us.”

Janet Sunderland, whose prose poem (“News of My Death”) appears in the anthology When Last on the Mountain, is our guest blogger this week. In a recent note, she said, “This morning I wrote a blog post from a free writing piece I found layered into a yellow legal pad from—oh, eleven years ago or so. There are rewards for clearing and tossing.” (See her blog at janetsunderland.wordpress.com.)

So I’m taking my writing notebook to North Carolina. It will be hard to take apart and clear out my mother’s home, but I plan to spend some time documenting my discoveries. And I do believe that something beautiful will bloom from what she left behind.

Stay tuned.

In the meantime, read the next post, “Piles and Files,” about Janet’s discoveries while clearing out her office to make room for the return home of her son and his wife.

Tell Me More

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If I had to choose one book for my desert island writing retreat, it would be Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write. Fear and laziness are sent packing when I read her words.

Brenda Ueland

“Everybody Is Talented, Original, and Has Something Important To Say,” she announces right off as the headliner title of Chapter One. She goes on to say how this originality, talent, and truth comes out when each of us pays careful attention to the world around us and writes from that unique perspective.

Brenda Ueland was born in Minneapolis in 1891 in a home overlooking Lake Calhoun. She returned to Minneapolis after a sojourn in New York where she worked as a journalist and was part of the Greenwich Village bohemian crowd (John Reed, Louise Bryant, Eugene O’Neill).  She continued her work as a writer, editor, and teacher of writing. I remember seeing her feeding the geese around Lake Harriet, another Minneapolis city lake. She was a swimmer and an avid walker, sometimes walking nine miles a day. She died at age 93, in 1985.

About her classes at the Minneapolis YWCA, she writes in the preface to the second edition: “I think I was a splendid teacher, and so did they.”  Her words capture her spirit and honesty. She is captivated by the unique lives of her students. She listens and encourages them to keep writing.  “The only good teachers are those who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny, whose attitude is: ‘Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out.’ ”

I remember a Vietnam vet in one of my classes many years ago. He stopped by my office to ask if I would read a poem he had written. “I carried this around with me all during the war,” he said. He took out his billfold and unfolded a single sheet of paper that had been folded and re-folded so many times it almost fluttered away in the air.

He read this poem that compressed all his feelings, everything about the war and loss, into a few lines. Then he folded and re-folded it and put it back in his billfold. The poem contained all his anguish, pain, love. We talked about his poem, and I told him how amazing it was. “Now write more,” I said. “Tell me as much as you can remember.” His poem contained more than any one poem could contain. It was breaking at its seams for all the power it held in its folds.

Sometimes this happens to us as writers.

We write one story, one poem, one essay, and then carry it around with us.  We take it to every writer’s group or class we join. Maybe we change or add a few words here and there.  What would happen if we said to ourselves, Yes, I wrote that. Good. Now I’m going to write more? Imagine someone who wants to hear it all. Sure, we can go back and revise, but don’t get stuck in that one place.  Keep pushing out, taking risks, Write about the day you are living in. Tell me how the fish darted away when you swam in the lake with your eight-year-old granddaughter. Tell me about your friend who is dying. Tell me about what it’s like to go bald or to let your hair go silver. I want to know.

I started off this entry talking about a desert island. Sometimes I do feel as if I’m stranded on such an island of my own making. I question how I got there and why I ever wanted to write anyway.  Brenda Ueland finds inspiration from many great writers, artists, and composers (Blake, Chekhov, Van Gogh, Mozart) as she makes her case: we are not alone. And if we look around, it isn’t a desert island—more an oasis.

One of the reasons Carol and I are creating this website and writing blogs together is because we believe we writers need each other.

Carol and I could never have done the anthology alone. When one of us would be ready to throw in the towel, the other would be all happy and up beat. When one was busy, the other one took up the slack. We have done all this through writing. We have only seen each other in person twice: once when we met in Russia and once when we met in North Carolina. Carol’s blogs inspire me; she inspires me. I hope together, with other writers (Brenda Ueland, Susan Surman, Molly Peacock, Shirley Deane), our students, and other creative people (Mrs. Delany, Ruth Hodges, Lenore Latimer), we can create an oasis.  We can say to at least one other person, “Tell me more.”

(In my next blog, I’ll talk about what we do after we’ve written pages and pages. Where does all that writing go? But first we have to write!)