Tag: art

Part One: non-writing (ish) tools for a writer’s toolbox

Suzanne Biro1 Comment

I read a lot of scientific papers for my day job. I also keep up (read: try to keep up, it’s impossible) with a mish mash of related current events (politics, economics, social issues, social media, etc.).  It’s a lot of information to synthesize; bits and pieces overlap and often contradict one another. I use drawing to help me see patterns and connections better. Drawing also helps me untangle processes or ideas.

When I say drawing, I mean I’m creating a picture, a figure, a graphic (or a combination of all three) to simplify a complex concept as a snapshot. When you’re given five minutes and four slides in a PowerPoint presentation to explain a sweeping history, a body of conflicting evidence, and a suite of recommendations for how to move forward, you get pretty good at honing essentials.

But I’ve oversimplified how this is done.

Getting to essentials is a process of creating a lot of different graphical (and text) forms so that each time I work through it, I’m understanding my material differently, more deeply…and, I think, most importantly, for me, I begin to understand the material enough to communicate it to another person (an audience, a reader).

 I have found similar methods helpful for creative writing projects, assisting me to see patterns and connections, but also, generating new ideas, connections, or images when I’m stuck.

I’m still in the beginning phase of creative writing, so my skill level remains stubbornly low—the raw materials and meanings I’ve generated in my own writings…well, I haven’t developed an ability to understand what it is I want to say, well enough, to be able to communicate it clearly to a reader. Practice. Practice.

But the following “drawing” methods help…drawing as in drawing out (of chaos, a fog, or confusion).

Here is the first in a series of posts outlining non-writer (ish) methods to see and arrange text differently (for deeper meaning making, understanding, to provoke variations in perspective, draw connections from disparate elements, and generate new thinking about your own writing or another’s).

  1. Colour-coding

One way to do this is by highlighting, using a variety of colours, different aspects of written text to chunk out various elements of craft: dialogue, emotions or mood, word repetitions, abstract words, metaphors, back story, etc.  I was introduced to this technique in a workshop with Rachel Thompson and I have also written about how Douglas Glover applies this technique to analyze craft styles. When you hold the text away from you, squinting your eyes to blur the words and looking only at the splotches of colour and how they hang together (or not), you can see how the various components relate to one another in a piece, whether any patterns are illuminated, or any other resonances. 

I’m still at the stage of learning to do this in other writers’ texts so I can teach myself how to do this better in my own work. It is a slow, but gratifying, endeavour.  

To take this idea into a less two-dimensional space and enable working with aspects of text more physically, consider using coloured index cards on which to jot down quick summaries of different structural elements of a larger work, for example: cultural references; reflections; speculative projections; historical references; theme elements, etc. These are examples of higher-level structural elements; of course, one could drill down to more detailed craft levels like those listed above, especially in a shorter work.  The idea here is to arrange the coloured cards on a wall (I use the floor) in the order they have been created or written (or the order you think they should go in), and then start to shift them around. Arrange and rearrange and ask yourself these questions:

  • How does meaning change when the patterns of coloured index cards change? 
  • What vibrations start to hum when certain elements are placed side by side – does a different meaning emerge from the space between?
  • When does a repeated pattern start to become boring? When does predictable become uninteresting? Or, at what point will a reader drop this and go find something more exciting to do?

…one must be able to find a plot, a route, a “solution”.

Italo Calvino on Invisible Cities, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art No. 8 (Spring/Summer 1983), pp. 37-42.

This method helps “see” a path, a solution. Or it can open a door into creating something else.

I started this latter technique for a writing project, a longer form CNF work I’m working on now, thinking it would help me to uncover a structure or a pattern I could use to write into (ha ha fast track my writing, no dice).  But I implemented it too soon (always jumping ahead of myself).  Instead, I’m challenging myself to generate more foundational material before I launch into this bird’s eye view and structural playfulness.

Next up in this series (next month): Mind Maps

Oh, there you are…

Suzanne Biro

I pulled out a piece of creative nonfiction I submitted for publication a few months ago and scanned the first few paragraphs. I was horrified by what I had written.  More accurately, I was appalled at what I had left out and embarrassed by how I had written what I had written.

To be specific, because abstractions really are the issue here, what I had not written were (and here’s a list – insert eye roll- and, I think this is becoming repetitive – a theme of these posts?):

  • my inner thoughts
  • a lot (all?) of my emotions
  • how I felt about the experiences when they happened in the past
  • how I feel about the experiences, looking back on them now, from my current vantage point (a point of missed wisdom, learning and reflection? Evidently).  

Actually, it’s not really a list is it?  It’s deepening layers of specificity of the same thing. 

And the way I had written that CNF piece: with a lot of poetic flourishes (think feather boas, purple lipstick and high scissor kicks) as well as insertions of scientific facts harvested from an eclectic shelf of show off curiosities I seem to trot out when I feel cornered. The vocabulary I used was high and abstract; the syntactical maneuvers a bit somersault-roundoff-backflip-like, or, at least attempting to be….more of a trip and fall on my ass performance. [btw: click that David Lee Roth scissor kick compilation link, it’s hilarious.]

But here’s a positive discovery: I suddenly “see” this in my own writing (at least, tentatively…I remain a neophyte in this regard, but one must acknowledge even the smallest of progressions on this writing journey…there I go again, the inner scientist taking over with her mastered objective distance). 

The thing is, for quite a while now, I’ve thought my lack of depth and insight in my writing has been a technical issue. So, I’ve busied myself studying sentence structure, syntax, hybrid compositions, and I’ve practiced with a super focused commitment to the craft of writing and my work just kept getting worse. I’ve been frustrated …bordering on hopeless (is it that I can’t do this writing thing?) and I wondered whether to quit.

I did quit for a month or two or three over the summer. I was miserable. 

Sure, I could quit. 

But then what?   

So, not a technical issue. 

I have other writers (alive and dead) (and artists) (and, in the spirit of full transparency, my therapist) to thank for gently nudging and supporting me to progress my learning these recent weeks to discover (and be able to “see” in my own writing what I haven’t been able to before): I’ve been withholding my self from the page (my thoughts, my feelings, my reflections, my values, my beliefs, my opinions…). The painful truth is that I haven’t believed what I have to offer is of value….so I play dress up instead.  

It’s my own voice I must nurture. And accept.  

In a truly wonderful November workshop, facilitated by Steve Edwards, through Larksong Writer’s Place, I wrote the following words in response to a prompt about what knowledge I would want to impart to my younger writer self (or a writer just starting out): 

“…write with abandon. That is, not to censor yourself and to let the inner critic hold sway. And give yourself permission to question—interrogate—the reasons you think a certain way. And if the inner critic remains too loud—ask the inner critic what it needs to be quiet? What nurturing is it missing? What voice is it afraid of? Can you work together instead of pulling one another apart?”

Recently, Steve Edwards tweeted “Reminder to my fellow teachers who already know this but tend to forget: learning doesn’t always look like learning; growth doesn’t always look like growth. Your attention & care is a powerful force.”  Thank you, Steve. This is exactly how I felt in your class: held and seen and cared for.  I also sent this quote to my sister, also a teacher, who lives and works in a small Indigenous community north of the arctic circle. 

And to my many friends and writer friends and loved ones (for I am blessed with so many of you), thank you for continuing to read me, lifting me up when I am down, and waiting, patiently, for my own words…in my own emerging voice.  

Seeing my Writing Mistakes

Suzanne Biro

Reading a book earlier this month, I failed to get past the third chapter. To me, the writing…well, sucked.  

The book, a national bestseller, nominated to a national “must read” list, was published by one of “the big three” publishers. A work of creative nonfiction, a memoir, I wanted to like the book, I wanted to learn from it. I was fascinated by the book’s subject. I wanted to follow the narrator’s journey, proclaimed and promised on the cover. I wanted to experience the narrator’s challenges surmounted, the accomplishments reached, but every time I tried to read the sentences, my mind lifted from the page. I couldn’t connect. 

Recognising I was going to give up on the book (always a sad moment of relinquishment, disappointment, even a sense of failure on my part, I know, dramatic, but true), instead of tossing it aside, I thought, why can’t I connect? What is it about the writing—specifically—that prevents me, the reader, from following the narrator on their journey?

Reading with these questions in mind I discovered a few issues:

  • The scenes were rendered swiftly – yes, with sensory details (check), but significant events were introduced but never elaborated, never opened or expanded.  As a reader, I craved knowing more. How could I relate without being given the opportunity to experience those events?
  • The story felt one-dimensional. The scenes, the events, the descriptions, the temporal and geographic aspects of the writing, were all there. The grammar was sound. The language was logical. Missing were the narrator’s thoughts and reflections.  I couldn’t feel or know the narrator on the page because they weren’t there.  It was as if the narrator stood off to the side and, like a zombie, or a robot, recounted the events without feelings or emotion.
  • The worst and best ah ha moment: I make these mistakes in my own writing.  

Reading bad (okay bad isn’t the right word – shallow? simple?) writing I recognized: 

  1. I summarise instead of expand action. This deprives a reader from moving through the experience with the writer. I realise too, that this type of writing is exactly the opposite of what I’m required to do in my day job. I’ve been trained to remove myself from reports, research papers, briefing notes, etc. to focus the scientific evidence and let “it” speak from a perspective of unquestioned authority. Note the disembodied sense of that approach to writing (objective, not subjective). 
  2. When I write “myself” onto the page, I’m like a paper cut-out of myself – my thoughts, reflections, ideas, interpretations are often omitted – there is a lot of action and description and even dialogue of others, but I am missing myself – why can’t I drag myself into my creative writing? Aside: – interestingly, I presented my thoughts and scathing reflections when I used to write an earlier blog complaining about marriage. So….I can do it, but, why don’t I?
  3. Answer: I’m trapped in the “seriousness” [mis] conception of art making. I’m working to develop confidence to express myself freely in “real” creative writing.

Serendipitously, I read a craft essay written by Karen Babine in Craft Literary Magazine this week that elegantly explains why some nonfiction writing fails to connect and how a writer might work to engage their reader better. I find books or essays or podcasts land in my lap exactly when I need them, or, as with Karen Babine’s essay, I can absorb them for the wisdom they convey. I recommend reading her whole essay (it is excellent!!), with fantastic links for further reading. Karen Babine also edits Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, another excellent learning resource.

Here is a sketch I made for myself, words copied from Karen Babine’s essay, to help me “see” and guide my own writing. 

Creating Observations

Suzanne Biro

I’m in the middle of a 4-week human figure sculpture class. I love the way the cool clay yields to my fingers, the weight of it.  I love the way it feels wet, but dries to a chalky powder on my hands, leaving prints against my thighs when I accidentally wipe them there. I like to challenge my creativity using different mediums; I always discover deeper awareness for my writing practice this way. 

This is a class in observation.  We are creating “a study” of the human figure, in clay, using an armature (a stick like human figure made of bendy wires). There is a nude model instructed to maintain the “study posture”, but to rotate every 7-10 minutes.  The study pose is a contrapposto, or counterpose, where the body appears to be in mid-step with a slight twist of the torso that signals a certain vitality to a finished sculpture. The model’s timed rotations mean students never stick to rendering one view but must rotate armatures to match the model’s stance, building out only the three-dimensional form from their unique viewpoint in the room.  

At the end of this class (which, due to covid-19 has been a bit bumpy with some classes cancelled and rescheduled), we will destroy our works by pulling the clay from the armature to be stored in a plastic bagged blob. The forced breaks, shifting viewpoints, and the fact that the finished product is nothing more than the end of a “study” process, has made me feel a light creative freedom.  

I’m delighted working in the small class, listening to the murmurings of conversation, the shushing hiss of spray bottles and overplayed classical tunes.  To be in the moment of “trying” for no other joy but to try. It is a focused peace.    

In sculpting, I’m working to render gesture, observing the live, three-dimensional form, and attempting to replicate a scaled down version with my hands. I’m assessing volume and shape, curves and hollows, the points of bones and how the softness of body, muscles, skin, drapes over them. Expression is captured in the stance and gesture of how the body stands in place. 

In drawings, gesture is captured in the line. A move from rendering “the study” from three-dimensions to two. A line can capture energy, a subject’s vitality, by how it is it rendered on paper – thin and fast, thick and slow, etc. 

But the experience of observation captured on the page through writing transfers the three-dimensional world (even four or five dimensional if we start to add things like emotion and interior thoughts) into flat words on a blank page. Words are abstract symbols of representation.  Each word sparks connotations and connections unique to our own experiences and interpretations.  I guess this is why reading another’s words can feel so magically transportive. Just as my viewpoint of the art class model rotates on a platform in the middle of the sculpture class, my experiential viewpoint alters the interpretation of words. I witness – eyewitness – the object or the sensory experience – I interpret it (my own way) and render it into words to be able to convey my interpretative experience through writing.  And if that sensory experience, imagery, or idea is understood and resonates with the reader, there is a frisson of recognition and pleasure in sharing these experiences and thoughts across time and space. 

But getting the words to come through…not so easy.

Some observations from the last week:

I saw a porcupine. I thought it was a beaver at first because the animal was so round with a paddle like tail but as I passed (quickly – I was road cycling) – I realised the tail was not so big but rather narrow and flat– the animal was approaching the base of a large old oak with, I believed, an intention to climb it.  It was mid-day. The sun was high and bright but the wind, blowing east, blew strong against my direction of travel, stole the warm huffing of my exhalations fast past my ears. But how to describe the porcupine’s unrushed perambulation?  Its roly-poly demeanor? The animal wobbled. 

And a swan, bending its neck, s-like, to its back, its wings, still folded, raised and what?  Trembling? Quivering?  Shivering…yes, shivered and fluffed. 

A friend’s high-pitched reaction to one of my questions. A squeak. 

The dairy farm’s manure and powdered milk smell that makes me want to gag. 

The scent of pine sap needling the shade when I passed beneath their feathery boughs. 

The friendly waves from motorcyclists as they passed me cycling.  Is this a thing?  Are we in solidarity somehow, riding through the fresh air with bodies exposed to the spring? Not just one, but three different motorcyclists at different points along my route. One even when they must have seen me gagging for breath on a long uphill. Maybe that is why they waved.  For encouragement?  I waved back regardless.

This is the process of art making: observing the world with loving attention, transferring that loving view as a gift for the viewer/reader to share in that joy and delight.   

A poke in the wound

Suzanne Biro
WordPress will not allow this image to be the right way up…perhaps it’s better posted this way …moving against gravity.

Making art when there is war. It feels wrong. Or useless. Selfish. I spiral into guilt and shame about my privilege, my luck. In the boundaries of my skin, my brain, the sorrow seeps. 

There are mountains of sorrow at the heart of all conflicts. The fired heat of hurts hoisted through generations, coded, we now know, in our DNA, and patterned far too comfortably in memory. 

Russia and the Ukraine, China and Taiwan, the continued killing in the Middle East, too many countries in Africa, we speak of warring geographies as if they are sentient beings themselves rather than the individual people, plants, animals, collected and hurting beneath? Behind? Within? the skins of borders. 

Bodies of power in the shape of countries, in the shape of cities, in lake shaped wounds, in fist shaped educations, in the curved shape of a parent’s spine twisting from a child’s longing for love. 

This is a habit of mine: to speak in abstractions, to hide behind the illusions of words, to climb my mountain of sorrow instead of burying deep within it to try and understand. 

What is it I’m trying to say? 

That I feel so very sad.  That I wish humans could be better. That I wish I would do better. That I could truly believe that making art, which is to say making love, creating love, holding love, sharing love, could save us.    

Even if it is so hard to believe when fire rains down from the skies, I must.

Being Seen

Suzanne Biro

I have not written this last week or so. 

Feeling not up to it following intense preparation and performance for in interview related to my day job. 

The self-loathing that accompanies not writing creeps in fast.  And I know there will be difficulty getting back into writing practice the longer I put it off.  It’s exactly the same as working to maintain some level of physical activity…as soon as you ease off, skip a few workouts or runs, your muscles start to soften.  Getting back to the practiced level is going to hurt, there’s no way round it.  

Reading helps.  So, I am reading.  

I’ve been wrestling with writing. I’ve been trying to write a piece about marriage.  How I feel about it.  What erupts on the page is hard for me to face: grief.  Alongside love, yes. These two emotions cradle beside one another and I don’t know how to rock them. In the writing, I start to shoehorn the paragraphs (long before they are ready) into a from that shows off my humour or intelligence.  I am hiding.  A tactic that works to control and manipulate and keep my softer self from being seen. Dazzling with language and laughter, I am skimming the surface again. 

I read. 

In an essay by Chloe Caldwell, The Red Zone: A Love Story, I copy down this line about her relationship with her partner in my notebook:

“I have never felt more seen-through, more transparent…”

On Facebook a friend comments in a thread,

“Dickinson is right, being seen is the heaven of heavens…”

In an interview between Leslie Jamison and Sarah Sentilles in Orion Magazine, How to Write Love, I read,

“Stranger Care [book written by Sentilles]is a tale not just of love but of grief, as if we could ever tell one of those stories without the other. That’s where I wanted to start, with the question of love and how many different strands any love holds. How do you write love? Whenever I try, it feels like staring straight at the sun.”

And I read a most beautiful essay about poppies written by Katrina Vandenberg, also in Orion [print Autumn 2021 edition] , a paragraph that steals my breath away,

“Perhaps the poppy itself is a door.  It swings open-closed, life-death, pleasure-pain, freedom-slavery, remember-forget, suffer-release, and when not swinging, it lives on its threshold, ready.  It knows how to be more than one thing at a time, even when those things contradict one another. It knows everything about living and dying that we struggle to understand.”

I love this paragraph.  I love how the second sentence is gorgeous but doesn’t quite make sense.  And yet, makes so much sense.  Reading it, on the heels of the other fragmented gifts that have floated my way, I realise I am withholding my self in my writing. I am not writing enough of my own thoughts and worries and joys on the page…I am simply trotting out the scenes and stitching them together with wit.  I am not sharing my self with my reader.  In short, I am not loving.  Too afraid of ridicule…too afraid of being seen and not being loved.  Isn’t that it?  

The reading helps me see that I must open myself up to be seen, as Leonard Cohen’s Anthem: 

“Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in”

And as I practice writing and work to gift my self on the page: trying, failing, trying, failing, I am comforted knowing that reading will always hold me, rock me with the lullabied lessons I long for.  

With Gratitude

Suzanne Biro
Hmmm…so many things wrong with this rendering. But I guess, also, so many things right.

On this day of (Canadian) thanksgiving, I want to acknowledge and extend my gratitude to all of you, the readers of my creative work.  Especially here, on this blog, this teensy tiny corner of the digital universe, a place where I slowly work out my thoughts about creative process. You are patient and kind and giving of your time and attention.  You make my writing a conversation. You are the connection I crave. Thank you. 

I have been writing down glimmer dumps, a practice of attention and sensory writing advocated by writer, Pam Houston, and described in detail by Maxima Kahn here.    

I leave two with you here, from the last week, small offerings of gratitude.  

One: 

Driving the rural roads round my place, the trees remain in full leaf but glowing yellow and red in the warm light of mid-afternoon.  With all the rain we’ve had, the lawns and livestock fields shine bright green. Cows in a clumped white herd (Belgian Blues? Charolais? Murray Greys? I wish I knew) on an emerald hillside, but one cow, off in the field on its own, jumped up, rocking in the air, its tail curved up in a smile. It leapt like a young puppy dancing, and I delighted I’d caught a cow mid-joy. 

Two:

As I write, the rain tinkles in the eavestroughs and a whole lot (a flock?) of starlings are singing from their perch atop the pine trees in the backyard…sometimes the song drops suddenly into silence and the whole lot of them lift off, rising through the air, each one morphing into a whole, a murmuration, and I am reminded again how magical the moments in this world can be. 

Celebrating you and your reading!  Cin-cin!

Crack(s)

Suzanne Biro

I am a month or so out from completing a six-week online writing course. Another one. 

I attend a couple of writing courses each year. A friend quips I’m addicted to them…as if they are a bad habit, or a catchy disease. 

I do love them.  

But my friend’s analogy is not far from the mark.  It needles. 

The weeks following a class are rough. I feel hung over. The sudden loss of structured deadlines induces the same vertigo one gets at the midpoint of a swing bridge…petrified by the choice of moving forward or going back, with all the freedom to simply tumble sideways and fall, fall fall.  

The classes inject fresh creativity. My own writing spools effortlessly from the instructor’s prompts and exercises, surprising me always, pleasing me frequently. I love reading the diverse interpretations of the prompts, and the variety of voices from other writers in the class. 

The act of reading to comment on other people’s writing forces me to engage intimately with their words, their sentences, their paragraphs, their structures. It’s an intellectual exercise that teaches me a lot about my own writing (and thinking) and how it might be improved. It also challenges me to use a framework of positivity, consciously eschewing the traditional critique approach that points out all the wrongs or picks apart a piece error by error.   

But most enslaving—and this is where the shame seeps in—I crave the focused feedback about my own writing from my peers. I long for their comments. I’m curious about the phrases they are drawn to, about the places they feel stuck, about learning how I might improve my language, pacing, punctuation, structure, atmosphere, metaphors. This level of scrutiny detects and signals what may be missing. 

So why the shame? 

I’m addicted to the feeling of confirmation. I have such a hot desire to be seen, to be heard. To be loved? I’m supposed to be writing simply for the joy of writing, without any need for validation. The art ought be an end unto itself.  

But that’s not right either is it? 

Writing is communication.  One does not write simply to put words on a page, fold the notebook closed and shove it in the back of a drawer.  Though, most (all?) of my own writing suffers this fate.   

Writing to share becomes a dialogue with the power to transcend time and space.  Writing stuff down transforms thoughts to an object I can hold in my fist, paper or book, and hand it over to others. Here, I’ve dumped this beautiful tangle of words on this paper, what do you think?  The difference is that the reader has no obligation to the writer.  The reader may take and walk away.  The reader must only feel entertained, provoked, and, one hopes, inspired.  There is no contract a reader must respond. 

So, the writer must learn to create in isolation. Must learn to dialogue with oneself.  And this ought to be enough.  For an addict, enough never is.   

Go Deeper

Suzanne Biro

Last week, writer Lauren Groff tweeted this: “Recently, at every single class visit, some new writer asks me why short stories are so depressing and I usually just fumble an answer about how stories need conflict and tend to be written in a minor key (as opposed to the novel’s span of keys). But honestly, I don’t know.”

This intrigued me.  Of course, twitter is not the right medium for a conversation…it can’t contain the nuance, gesture and tone tools enacted through speech.  These tools we use (and need) to properly grasp and share meaning. Short stories incorporate these tools through craft. And though twitter can promote expansion by provoking further questions: what does depressing mean? Do students ask this question implying depressing stories are no good?  What does Lauren Groff mean by minor key? And, how lovely is that, describing a novel as a span of keys? But on twitter, debate is polarised, appreciation of nuance is non-existent, and rhetoric lands heavy.   

Lauren Groff’s recent story Wind, published in the New Yorker, is a stunning short story that is most definitely “not happy”. The story could serve as the very definition of “not happy”. But I would not call it depressing. The story holds a horrible truth up to the light and makes us (the reader) see and experience its facets of terror and violence and love. (And yes, these constructs frequently share the same bed.) Calling it depressing is an indication the reader has not engaged in the deeper work of questioning our reactions to the story. For stories, written as works of art, are tiny calls to action. Even if that action is a way to tip our minds toward different ways of thinking. Or feeling. Even for a moment.

Lauren Groff’s story Wind is a call to action: to be an active witness to violence against women. The story provokes the question: is witnessing enough?  And goes on to answer that question: absolutely not. The story raises a mirror to show us our participation as simple witness: participation through non action; participation through acceptance. And yes, that makes us feel depressed. But here’s the thing, the story is told through the eyes of a child. This ratchets up the emotional tone, and the fear is visceral. But this point of view does more work: it forces the reader into an innocent perspective…signalling a chance to learn, to experience—to change our minds. And the brilliance of this short story (although, like a diamond, her story’s brilliance has so many facets), is that the narrator begins from the point of view of an adult remembering an episode in her childhood…so…the story is inviting us, as adults, to engage deeper consideration, but from a compassionate stance…an understanding that even as adults, our knowledge in this issue is underdeveloped. We are given a chance to expand our thinking.  And this may never be named “depressing”.  

Narratively, stories do need conflict. Otherwise, they don’t really move and might be better represented as a sculpture. Or a photograph.  I believe Lauren Groff hit upon the answer herself by inserting a music analogy. Think of how many sad songs (lyrics) are layered over beautiful music?  This is what art is.  And what it does.  It uses a medium to move us. To tilt our minds. To help us experience a point of view outside our own. It becomes so much more satisfying when it explores complexity by creating a “thing” that we too can explore and experience a symphony of meaning. 

Like Lauren Groff’s students, I am learning. And when a story strikes us as depressing, it is a little poke of a reminder to ask ourselves why we react this way? Deeper reading of “depressing” short stories helps us hear that minor key. Helps us understand how it fits into the larger song of our lives. And love.   

Beginning. Again.

Suzanne Biro

Always, when I have taken a break from creative writing, no matter how short, the doubt creeps in and halts my hand.  No, that’s not what I meant to write; it halts my mind.  

The act of putting words to paper is not the challenge.  Rather, it’s the practice of reflection–of asking myself questions as I write, the practice of opening up the writing itself to its umpteen possibilities–that is so difficult to recover. It’s like any other muscle flaccid with underuse…asking questions and allowing the words to appear and be transcribed as they arise from the mind’s eye, must be practiced to make it strong. To make it responsive.

I am learning that to write well is to propel myself on a journey of discovery, to mine my own mind for what I think and why I think this way and how that way of thinking might have come to be.  It is about taking the tangents, following the diversions, trusting, as the cliche goes, a leap into the dark.  

I am learning to query the shimmering in-betweens. 

I am learning to trust that the metaphors that appear are really way finders to what lies buried beneath.  Beneath what?  The usual, the expected, the mundane, or that dreaded and most accurate of descriptions: mediocrity. Too often I’m in a rush…I want to get to the end…but this process of unfolding, engaging, unknowing (yes, this is exactly it), is slow.  

So, onwards with deliberate plodding.  Query.  Expand. 

Feels like the first day at the gym. Again.  

But the music is playing. The sun is shining. I am warm on the heated side of this window. Blue shadows stretch along the snow blanketing the fields. The cardinal’s feathers glow by the feeders.  Juncos press tiny prints into the white.  Sunflower seeds pepper the ground beside a mourning dove and a clutch of hopping chickadees. A nuthatch and a downy headed woodpecker swing from opposite poles of the suet cage. The paper in my notebook is cream, the ink in my pen is teal, and I am ready to begin.  Again.  And again.