Thoughts Happen

Book giveaway and Facebook Fan-A-Thon

The time is finally right for the first ever Thoughts Happen Book Giveaway and Facebook Fan-A-Thon. I'm so appreciative of all my readers and glad that many of you have referred your friends to the blog, so here's your chance to get recognized and maybe win one of 4 very cool books (all of which I have of course read and recommend).  

Here's how it works. Every Facebook Fan of Thoughts Happen who posts to the wall asking to be entered into the giveaway will get one entry into a drawing for one of four books: Frank McCourt's Teacher Man, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, The Best of Creative Nonfiction Vol. I, edited by Lee Gutkind, and Moonshine Harvest, by Don Hayen (of The Trip Over blog, whom I wrote about in my post, Alzheimer's: It's a Trip). In addition, if a friend referred you to Thoughts Happen and that's why you became a fan, your friend can get an entry too.

All you have to do is post to the Thoughts Happen Wall and say, "I'm a fan of Thoughts Happen and my friend Alice in Wonderland referred me," and you will both get an entry into the drawing. The more entries, the more chances you have to win one of the books. The contest will go until noon Pacific Standard Time on January 15, 2011. After all the names have been entered, I will have Daughter randomly pick four names and I'll send you a message on Facebook letting you know you've won. I'll try to give you first pick at the book you want based on first come, first served, so keep an eye on your Facebook this weekend. 

Thanks and remember, the more friends you refer, the more entries you get.

 

Stuart Smalley and Bellatrix Lestrange arm-wrestle for my creative soul

If you’re a fan on Facebook or follow me on Twitter you might know by now that I received a copy of The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron, for Christmas and am diving into its 12-week program, subtitled “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.” I’d heard of the book before, but never really thought it was for me until Neil White highly recommended in his half-day workshop at the Oxford Creative Nonfiction Conference I attended in October. 

The first week of The Artist’s Way focuses on recovering a sense of safety in our creative lives, using affirmations as a tool. Oh, Brother, I thought. She’s probably going to  have me recite some stupid New-Age slogan about what a worthy person I am, like Stuart Smalley: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” 

Fortunately Cameron fully acknowledges that affirmations sound hokey and stupid when you start using them.

“... saying nice things about ourselves is notoriously hard to do. It feels pretty awful at first. Try these and see if they don’t sound hopelessly syrupy: ‘I deserve love.’ ‘I deserve a rewarding creative life.’ ‘I am a brilliant and successful artist.’ ‘I have rich creative talents.’”

Gag.

In the next exercise she asks me to pick an affirmation, for example, “I am a brilliant and prolific writer,”  and write it ten times in a row, paying attention to what my inner Censor says while I’m writing it. My inner Censor is someone I visualize as Bellatrix Lestrange — the Helena Bonham Carter version — with a sharp tongue and wicked sneer, who takes every chance to cut me down to size with a “Who do you think you are?” put-down.  

But this affirmation doesn’t trigger Bella too much. I mean, brilliant? Whatever. I’m not going for brilliant, so she can’t touch me there. And prolific? Well, I have about 50 published clips to my name over the past dozen years, not to mention over a hundred blog posts, so prolific isn’t that much of a stretch for me to believe. 

But what if I try a different tack? “I am a talented and creative artist.” Ooooh — Bella pricks up her ears at that one.  

“You? An artist? That’s rich! You haven’t had an art class since you were in junior high! Your degrees are in engineering, for Chrissakes. You never went to J-school, don’t want to get an MFA, and you don’t even like making things up! You hide behind nonfiction because you have no imagination. You’re a plodder and a hack. You’ll get paid, but nobody would ever believe you’re an artist.”  

Ouch.  

This is probably why I never thought a book called The Artist’s Way was for me. I don’t have a problem calling myself a writer. I mean, I write, and sometimes people actually pay me to do so. Ergo I’m a writer. But I’ve never thought of myself as an artist. A craftsperson, perhaps. A wordsmith, maybe. But an artist? That will be a stretch. But the whole purpose of this program is, as Neil White put it, to force you to find out what is making you unhappy in your creative life. So I don’t suppose it’s meant to be comfortable. And if the first step to higher creativity is to tell myself that I am an artist ten times a day, I guess I’d better get going. 

 

I am a talented and creative artist. (gag)

I am a talented and creative artist. (do I really have to?)

I am a talented and creative artist. (squirm)

I am a talented and creative artist. (yeah, whatever)

I am a talented and creative artist. (oh, god)

I am a talented and creative artist. (okay, okay)

 

To be continued ...

 

Part of This Writer's Life, an occasional series on my life as a writer.

All book links are to independent bookstores. This week, Warwick's online store. Not an affiliate. 

Brevity: The Palm Reader and the Poet

This happened a couple decades ago, and here is how I remember it:  I meet a girl, a young woman, maybe eighteen, at a poetry reading.  She says she can read my palm.  My lifeline is broken—she noticed as she sat behind me and I rubbed my hand through my hair—so maybe she'd better see, meaning see what’s in store for me.

Today's Saturday Morning Surf comes from Issue 34 of the online journal Brevity, which publishes well-known and emerging writers working in the "extremely brief" essay form (750 words or fewer). 

Short pieces appeal to me. I like to think it's not because I am a lazy reader or a lazy writer, but because I enjoy an experience distilled down to its essence, and appreciate the challenge of creativity within strict boundaries.

I loved this piece by Greg Bottoms because of the way he paints so much detail with so few words. I can taste the awkwardness of the poetry reading crowd "studiously not buying the author's book," and smell the acrid sweat from the palm reader, "a decade of pain that smells like cigarettes."

The beauty of well-written short essays such as this are that, iceberg-like, what is said only hints at what is beneath. For a writer to successfully craft a complete story in so few words it takes dedication, perseverance and a willingness to trust what you leave in to convey what you leave out.

Yet they read deceptively easily. I enjoy that challenge, which is probably why I've taken to the blog format, and aspire to write essays as good as The Palm Reader and the Poet of my own. 

While you're at Brevity, check out a few more of these brief pieces by clicking the Next Essay link at the bottom of each page. After all, they're like potato chips — you can't stop at just one. 

via www.creativenonfiction.org

In every Saturday Morning Surf I highlight a link that I think is worth sharing. I hope you find them intriguing and thought provoking. Please leave your comments here or on the Thoughts Happen Facebook page.

Faulkner's Brother and the Pregnant Pixie

She approaches the podium gracefully, embraced in a moss-green dress of crushed velvet, despite a protruding belly throwing her center of gravity forward. Wavy red hair that seemingly exudes its own light source falls past her shoulders, framing delicate, milky-white features. A red-headed Tinkerbell with a bun in the oven.  

I am in Oxford, Mississippi, stomping grounds of Faulkner and Michael Oher (“The Blind Side”) and home to the University of Mississippi, a.k.a. Ole Miss, at my first writers conference ever, perched in my seat in the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics on a crisp Friday evening, ready for the Conference opener entitled, “Curiosity as a Narrative Force in Creative Nonfiction.” The pixie is Beth Ann Fennelly, an Associate Professor at the University, published author of poetry and nonfiction, and tonight’s speaker at the Oxford Creative Nonfiction Writers Conference. 

“A writer should be as serious as a child at play,” she quotes from Nietzsche. “When we stumble over the truth,” she tells us, “as writers our role is to circle back and ask, ‘Why?’” and to use curiosity as the driving force to create a narrative that gives life meaning. 

Anxiety is fear or uneasiness without a source, she tells us, but a writer’s job is to find the source, and as a short exercise asks us to write a list of things that illicit bizarre emotions in us, the kind that are way out of proportion to how a normal person would react.  

At the top of my list is turtles.  

On Mother’s Day three and a half years ago, my daughter and I walked the half block home from the big house at the end of our cul-de-sac with Littlefoot, a fist-sized box turtle who had outlasted his college-bound first owner. An expressionless reptile that spends half the year underground in his backyard enclosure and most of the rest of the year lurking under a palm trimming, he and his turtle brethren have for some reason loomed large in my subconscious ever since. 

 I have recurring dreams about turtles multiplying and coming out of the ground, turtles having baby turtles no bigger than a quarter and overrunning the enclosure. 

Why the hell why? 

Fennelly next tells us to use the items on our list as cues for what to write about — the things that itch in the back of our minds that we didn’t even really know we were thinking about. “Why am I troubled about this?” she advises us to ask, and to keep refining the question until it moves from the personal to the sociological to the universal.  

But I can’t think why anyone else would care that I dream about turtles.

Afterwards we amble en masse over to a reception at Memory House, the former home of William Faulkner’s brother, John. A pre-reception directive from the conference co-director for us to mingle with everyone, combined with the open bar, emboldens me to introduce myself to any presenters I see. I am hoping I run into Fennelly when I nearly do, literally, as she is heading from the reception room to the back porch and I the reverse. 

“I really loved your talk,” I blurt spontaneously.  

“Why, thank you,” is the gracious response, lilting in the ever-present Mississippi cadence I will be immersed in the entire four days.

While I have her in front of me I must ask. “You said we should write about things that trouble us, and what I put on my list is my unexplainable recurring dreams about turtles. But I don’t know that anyone else would find that interesting.”  

Without missing a beat, she tells me, “You’ve got to have the confidence as a writer that you can make it interesting.” And suddenly I am buoyed. And I remember the New Yorker piece I read for my workshop earlier in the day by John McPhee about a long-haul trucker, how the narrative pulled me, fascinated, through a 14-page piece on a subject I would never have normally read. And I have hope, and a mission. 

It’s my job to make people interested in my turtle dreams. 

 

This is the first in a periodic series about my life as a writer. I have so far avoided posting much about my writing life, for two reasons: I don't want Thoughts Happen to appeal only to writers, and I thought it might be a bit self-indulgent. But the act of writing is such a big part of my life that I was starting to feel self-conscious about not including it on the site. All posts will fall under the category This Writer's Life, as a blog-within-a-blog on Thoughts Happen. 

 

Finding My Birth Family

My pulse quickens as I turn the pages of my book, one of several I brought along for a laid-back week in Santa Barbara. It’s not a mystery novel, crime thriller or the latest bloodsucking romance, yet it grabs my imagination like no other.

When we arrived at the vacation rental I promptly staked out the corner of the cream-colored, L-shaped sectional as my spot for reading, and I’m currently sitting with my legs stretched out, draped in a sage green throw on the short leg of the L in the sunny living room with the object of my fascination. The title? “The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 1.”

 I bought it eight months earlier on vacation in New York at a huge Barnes & Noble on the Upper East Side. Standing in front of an entire section titled, “Essays and Nonfiction,” I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, and snatched up this anthology along with Annie Dillard’s “The Writing Life,” and Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” both of which I’ve since read.

This decidedly un-sexily titled book fills me with tingles of excitement with each new essay. That there’s a Thing called Creative Nonfiction, and that people do this makes my creative fibers vibrate like crazy, the way a string vibrates when it’s exposed to the right frequency. I get this.

Creative nonfiction is succinctly described as, “True stories, well told.” “I could do this,” I think. In some ways, I’ve been doing it all my life, I just didn’t know what it was called — I didn’t know there was a Thing, I thought it was just the stuff I liked.

It’s like finding you were adopted and have relatives you never knew about, who share your deviated septum, sandpaper-dry sense of humor and tendency to chew an equal number of times on both sides of your mouth.

That’s how I feel reading “The Best Creative Nonfiction” — as if I’ve found a clan of relatives I never knew I had, my literary birth family who share my creative DNA. Every essay in the collection, edited by the founder of a journal also called Creative Nonfiction, prompts giddy pangs of recognition.

This explains my fascination with memoirs, documentaries and the black-and-white photography of Edward Weston and Robert Frank.

This is why as a kid I read biography after biography and wanted to be Harriet the Spy when I was 10 years old. I didn’t want to break my classmate’s little finger or cut a rival’s hair — I wanted to sneak around with a pen and notebook, spying on my neighbors and writing about them in a secret journal, wondering what their lives were like during the other 23-and-a-half hours of the day.

I’ve found My People, and I didn’t even know I was looking for them.