Lakeside Retreat: the Photos

The road in:

The garden:







The lake:

Just that much more north to see hints of autumn:




Hope you can come!

Discovering What Everyone Probably Already Knows

Dave Sedaris is hilarious! Among the cds I got from the library before my drive on Friday was "Dave Sedaris: Live at Carnegie Hall." It's a taped "show" and get this, his show consists of reading his essays about his family aloud. And they're good. And funny. Like, I've been driving around today and wanting the light to turn red so I can be in the car longer because I was laughing so hard. Laughing out loud. In the car. Alone. I don't do that much. I brought it in the house and listened to it while I ate dinner (R is out of town, so I was eating alone).

So don't tell me: you know all about Dave Sedaris. You already knew how funny he is. You've been reading him for ages. Only someone who has been living in cave could not have read him before.

Yes, but have you heard the cd?

Turning Ideas into a Story: Help!

I've got pages and pages and pages of scenes and ideas and little jottings for my next piece and I am now at the part where I need to give it some structure. It's a piece of first person non-fiction in which I am supposed to be presenting a character profile of someone else, with myself as a subsidiary character.

I'm calling on your writerly wisdom to share with me your techniques for turning an unshaped mass of little bursts of this and that (some inspired, some not so much) into .... something ... anything ... that you might feel good enough about to turn in a submission.

TIA!

Recommendation: Mary Oliver Reading Mary Oliver

I am actually here, at the lake, and it's just as I described (but where are you guys?). It's a long drive and I was alone in the car. So last night I went to the library to pick up some audio books and some traditional gospel music (I love that stuff, but never know what to buy, so I borrow). When I have a long drive ahead of me and more cds than I can listen to and no one in the car to say "let's listen to something else," I am almost as content as when I have nothing to do for a few hours besides knitting (as rare an occasion, to be sure).

I began with Ekhart Tolle giving a lecture on "now" (my favourite time of day) on the cd "In the Presence of a Great Mystery." When I hit Toronto traffic and started thinking of alternative routes, he was at the part where he was saying that we need to "make friends with the present moment." We're always wanting it to be over, to be somewhere else, and so rarely satisfied with what's happening now, whatever that may be." So I stuck it out in the traffic without changing my route. At one point he said, if you can explain what I said you probably didn't get it. Well, I'm not sure I got it, but I can't explain what he said. His voice is as soothing as velvet and it's a wonder I didn't zone out into a meditative state right behind the wheel. If you like non-religious spirituality, I recommend this one. It's about 2 and half hours.

The old gospel music was a bit too much for me right after this, so I quickly switched to "At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads Mary Oliver." Can I be as inarticulate as to say, "WOW!" The woman writes the most lovely, inspiring poetry, perfect for the drive, which takes me further into nature with each kilometre. And more than that, she's a fabulous reader. I didn't realize how wonderful the poem "Beans" is! And also, I forgot that she can be funny, like in the poem about finding the bear footprint. And if there was a perfect choice for following up a lecture about the present moment, it's Mary Oliver. Her poems dive into the present and open it up to all of its detail, as if each slice of time and space contains an infinity of possibility. I mean, the first line of "Peonies" is one of those lines that make you think, how did she think of that? How does a poet think to start with:

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,

Okay. I'm still in training!

Lakeside Writers' Retreat

The house sits amidst the trees and looks southwest over the calm lake. Ample windows on both levels give a sense of space and contact with the wildness of the landscape. The wildness is cultivated, like an English cottage garden, strewn with huge boulders broken off from the granite slabs of the Canadian Shield, decorated with folk art, and covered underfoot with a soft, cool floor of creeping thyme growing over the stepping stones fashioned out of cut logs from the felled birch tree.

Each writer has her own bedroom and license to wander freely throughout the house and the property. She can find a quiet corner in the little nook off the dining room or recline in the la-z-boy with her laptop. Maybe there is some soft jazz grooving in the background. Or silence. She might meander along the road, seekng inspiration in the wild raspberries eaten straight from the bush. Or float along on her back in the lake, staring up at the cloud animals drifting by across the brilliant blue sky. And they write when they want to write, read when they want to read, do nothing when they want to do nothing, all day long. Help yourself to anything in the kitchen.

In the evening, they come together for a sundowner -- cosmopolitan's perhaps? And then they all chip in to prepare a simple meal (why am I imagining baguettes and cheese, olives and fresh field tomatoes?). It's time for wine, each has brought her favourite bottle. And for readings -- they take turns reading -- from the day's production or from something special that they chose just for this occasion, to share with the women who understand what they are trying to do and why they want this so much.

And then maybe they play Scattergories.

And in the night sky the stars twinkle more brightly than they ever have and the moon hangs large and smiling over the lake.

Reverse Schedule

Following Bug, I am posting a reverse schedule for the next submission. D-day for the submission is September 10, so the schedule, as recommended in The Now Habit, moves backwards from the 10th.

September 10 -- Final touches on cover letter; e-mail package to my mentor.
September 7-9 -- Final touches on new writing for submission; draft cover letter.
September 3-6 -- Craft essay: draft of section 1 (of three sections)
September 1-2 -- Labour Day weekend -- have low expectations but set aside 1 hour per day for polishing writing and 1 hour per day to work on craft essay.
August 25-31 -- Deepening new writing; mapping out section 1 of craft essay.
August 22-24 -- Complete draft of new writing; finish Jade Peony if not done yet.
August 17-20 (travelling) -- Read Jade Peony by Wayson Choy (a fictional work written as a memoir, for craft essay). Start each morning with one hour on new writing.
August 13-17 -- Start each morning at 6 a.m. with one hour on the new writing; find another hour (at least) later in the day to work on it again.
August 11-12 -- Knit. The well is empty. This is my restorative weekend.

I have another major project going at work, but I don't like to post about the day job.

Next post: my fantasy idea for a writing retreat at the lake.

Revising...Again!

I feel as if I have done nothing since the residency, which is, of course, not true but for some reason this revision is crawling along. You know what they say about 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration. Well, I'm sweating, that's for sure.

So I'm back to empathetic questioning. I've written about this before and it really helps me when I go to revise. Personally, I think that the main revision goal for me is deepening, which is why I like Carol Bly's chapter about empathetic questioning so much (see her Beyond the Writers' Workshop). So this is not for the time when you want to polish up the craft aspect of your piece. This is for moving further into the emotional heart of the piece. As Bly puts it, it is "a kind, cool-handed tool, not just to encourage our imagination, but to fend off all enemies of our deeper selves, enemies that include our shallow selves" (BWW, 51).

Here are the five steps for engaging in this form of deepening, according to Carol Bly:
1. Decide to hear your own or others' (perhaps your characters') thoughts without challenging them.
2. Empty yourself of your own point of view or any association of yours that comes to mind as the speaker speaks (even if the speaker is you -- this process is non-judgmental).
3. Ask the person who just spoke (or yourself, if it’s you) some open-ended questions (not yes-or-no questions) about what he or she just said. The goal here is to bring the speaker closer to herself or himself, not to slide them into agreement with you or anyone else.
4. In your own words, paraphrase what the person has just said, as you understand it.
5. Help the person look forward and plan ahead free-spiritedly. “Okay. Given those data, feelings, and meanings you’ve just reported, what do you see as a good direction to take from here? What might some of your goals be for now and for the future?”

That's how it would look if it were an interaction. So to use this as a revision tool, you approach the work as if you are interacting. "In writing creative nonfiction, we ask these questions of our various selves," says Bly. For fiction writers, "we would ask these questions of our characters" (50).

The questions are meant to move us not only deeper, but more to the particular. As AJ also suggested (see Bug's account of the revision workshop), we need to get more concrete, less abstract. Bly suggests changing plurals and generics to singulars and specifics.

And finally, a question for memoir writers to ask themselves: "Here I have written this bit of memoir. Which value of mine does it come from?" (BWW, 58).

Thanks, Carol Bly.