How I Got a Life

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Cherise Wyneken
Guest Author

“If the circumstances are right, suffering can teach and lead to rebirth.”
—Anne  Morrow Lindbergh

We were standing in front of a large window at the Miami Airport watching a plane take off with our last child leaving home. Barely into adulthood, our other three children had been left behind in California when we moved to Florida. What am I going to do with my life now?  I thought. Should I cry or celebrate?  A big black hole had appeared ready to suck me in.

Eventually I realized that I was now free to pursue my long desire to be a writer of children’s stories. I began taking creative writing classes at nearby universities. In the process, I became hooked on poetry and writing stories from my life. In time I sent my work out for publication. Slowly it began to appear in various journals, periodicals, books, and anthologies. The black hole had disappeared – filled with friends and writing projects.

But one doesn’t need to write for publication. Computers make it easy to run off copies of our stories to give to our children. My husband, who grew up in South India, has many interesting tales to tell from his childhood. “Write them down for us, Dad,” our children say.  When our son was reading one of my childhood stories to his daughter, she stopped him and asked, “What’s Johnny cake?’’ She knows it as corn muffins or corn bread.

When we moved back to the San Francisco East Bay, I continued my involvement with writing. Recently I won a prize: the publication of a collection of my nonfiction articles, Stir-Fried Memories, from Whispering Angel Books – a kind of blue ribbon culmination of my years of writing. The black hole has been avoided. I’ve got a life!

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Cherise Wyneken, whose story “The Daughter-in-Law” appeared in When Last on the Mountain: The View from Writers over 50, began writing in her early fifties. Now at 83, she is still active with various writing projects, including a poetry column for the Oakland Examiner’s online edition at: www.examiner.com/poetry-in-oakland/cherise-wyneken  See also, http://www.authorsden.com/cherisewyneken & www.whisperingangelbooks.com.

The Never-ending Search

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I’m not sure that my mother trusted books, other than the Bible. The only books in our house were those given me by an aunt or an uncle. I handled them with the care due to rare and precious commodities. Although I love secondhand books that earlier readers have underlined meaningful passages, added notes, turned down corners, I’ve never been able to take pen or pencil to a book myself.

Imagine my shock when, after reading a few pages of Richard Powers’s The Time of our Singing, I threw it across the room. I still don’t know why. Envy because Powers writes so beautifully? Because he understands both music and physics in-depth, and how is that possible? Angry because, given my pathological parents, I’m afraid of any mind that’s incomprehensible to me?Steve Mitchell

I have the same reaction to Steve Mitchell’s work. I don’t throw it; but after one of his readings, we joke about the level of anger I experience – a 10? or merely a 9? When I first encountered his short stories, I told Steve that I didn’t understand his work, that I didn’t know how to dig out the theme that ran through them.

We have long discussions about the influence of memory. I can see that he’s experimenting with time. By the end of a recent story he has gradually collapsed the time between three discrete events until they’ve become entwined in the narrator’s memory. When I asked him the other day what one word he would use to describe his theme he said, “Intimacy. The search for connection, or the lack of it.”

Steve is a man who’s constantly searching for the interesting, the beautiful, some project that seems impossible. He moved his family to a commune where his “children could run through daffodils” and where he was in charge of the cows. He’s now a chef. He has studied with Thich Nhat Hanh and with a Jungian analyst, has written and performed multi-voiced poetry in a sculpture installation, has written and directed plays. He has now found his place in fiction, where the search is never-ending.

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Check our Steve’s website: www.thisisstevemitchell.com.

Write This: Mitchell and Webb

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Last week I talked about the video of the C. K. Williams lecture (“On Being Old”) and promised to lighten up in future blogs. So stay with me!

I’m interested in Williams’s comments about his reaction to criticism at the age of 75. He says that he is better able now than in his younger days to distance himself from “the theatrics of criticism.”  This made me wonder how true this is for other writers over 50. How do we deal with feedback, criticism, editorial suggestions, bad reviews, or even rejection? Is it different for us now that we are older?

Susan Bono’s  Tiny Lights

Not long ago, Susan Bono sent this short video of the British comedy duo, Mitchell and Webb, in her Sparks e-newsletter. (Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative www.tiny-lights.com).  Take a look for a fresh, funny look at “the theatrics of criticism.”  (See, I promised you I would lighten up.)

(Click below to see video.)

http://youtu.be/sifESist1KY

British Comedy Duo: Mitchell and Webb

 

In this sketch, the writer (Mitchell) sits meekly while the critic (Webb) begins a barrage of suggestions about his novel.  Webb tries to be supportive (“It’s all great.”) But it’s clear that his random jabs aren’t well thought out. He knows that something needs to be done to improve the writing, but he isn’t sure exactly what. “What if Sarah falls in love with…not that, but something like that,” he says to the writer, Mitchell. “You’re the author,” he says. But Webb is actually making himself the author as he tries to re-write the opening of the novel; and Mitchell, as the writer, is completely confused.

Does this bring back any memories of your own experience giving and receiving feedback on your writing? Have you changed over the years? If you’re just beginning to write or to return to writing, how do you feel about this topic?  We’d love to hear from you.

In my next blog, we’ll continue this conversation.

Onward!

 

More on C. K. Williams: “On Being Old”

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C. K. Williams, who is now 75, has been writing poetry since his twenties. Along the way, he has published eighteen books of poetry and has won almost every prize out there, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

I’ve read and admired many of his poems because of his willingness to take the plunge and stay with the long line. He holds an idea or an image and doesn’t let it go, wringing everything out of the language he pours upon the page.  (You can hear this in the poem “Whacked,” which he reads in the video, “On Being Old,” linked to my last blog.)

Courtesy of Jesse Nemerofsky
C. K. Williams: His collection “Repair” won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for poetry

I enjoyed watching Williams in the video, sitting there in his corduroy jacket behind the podium, reflecting “On Being Old.”  I liked looking into his lined face and hearing his voice.  Sure, we can read the essay (The American Poetry Review, July-August 2012), but how much better to see him before us, talking straight out about being old.

Most of us are in a state of denial about being old. One friend responded to my last post: “You’re not old.” Well, I’m certainly not young, so what do you call me? I’ll turn seventy this month. True, most of us don’t feel old. So what is it we feel? Let’s hear from those of us who stand at this end of life.

C. K. Williams speaks out from age 75.

He begins by making some funny comments about his sagging body when glimpsed in a mirror, naked, late at night, after a few glasses of wine. ‘’The body,” he says, “doesn’t seem to realize what an important person it is carrying around.” He tells us about trying to imagine his literary heroes, like Robert Frost in his 80’s, whose “face was like a sculpture,” in such a state.

We can’t avoid the subject of our bodies. We live in them after all. Now at almost 70, mine is beginning to show signs of wear. Yet it was able to take me to see the vistas of Machu Picchu, and for that, I am thankful. After the trip, it let me know that such climbing wasn’t as easy as it would have been in my thirties.  Yet how pleasing that my body is giving me this extra time to do the things I was too busy for when we (body and spirit) both were much younger.

Williams covers many topics in his talk: taste and how it changes over one’s lifetime, critics, the depression that comes from not writing, the changes in his own poetry, his past and the “stupid things” he said and did, his obsession with a future that terrifies him, his thoughts on death (“It doesn’t hang around the way it did when I was in my twenties”), and the gratitude he feels for the beauty and miracles of the present.  Finally he ends his talk by reading a poem entitled “Writers Writing Dying.” The final line: “Keep dying, keep writing it down.”

In The Art of Growing Old: Aging with Grace, Marie de Hennezel quotes Hermann Hesse in her chapter entitled “The Fecundity of Time.” “We who have white hair derive strength, patience, and joy from sources the young know nothing about,” says Hesse. “Watching, observing, and contemplating gradually become habits and exercises, and imperceptibly all our behavior begins to be influenced by this state of mind and the attitude to which it leads.” And I would add writing to those habits and exercises.

We are living—and dying—every day; we will keep writing it down, at every age.

 

C. K. Williams: On Being Old

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I’m feeling my age today. After a wonderful trip to Peru, I’ve returned home to Minnesota. While in Peru, my husband and I climbed Machu Picchu and visited the Peruvian rainforest. I felt downright young. We were on the go everyday. We were at the top of the world where matters of age and one’s aching bones were forgotten in the glory of the vistas.

On top of the world at Machu Picchu

But now back at home, I’ve come down with a nasty head cold–and well, I’m definitely in the valley today. But being laid low has given me a chance to watch this amazing lecture by C. K. Williams, “On Being Old.” I invite you to make yourself a cup of tea and spend an hour listening to C. K. Williams talk about what it’s like from the vantage point of an old poet.

Just click on this link:

After you’ve had a chance to watch, we’ll talk about his ideas in my next blog. I’ll be back to my old self then, and I’d like to know what you think.

Enjoy.