writing skills/profession

First Day of the 2007/2008 School Year


Today is the first day of the school year back in Des Moines. Well, it is for the staff anyway. The majority of teachers reported back at 8 AM CST. There will be meetings. Some of interest but most are a waste of everyone’s time and patience. Cleaning and organizing and catching up with coworkers that you likely haven’t seen since the last day of school in June. Lesson plans need to be made and class lists beg for perusal. I would have had my room and lessons ready to go by today. It was my habit to spend several hours a morning getting ready starting at the first of the month. I didn’t like the rushed feeling that only three days of preparation gave me. There really are few things more conducive to productivity than an empty classroom and a near empty building.

I think it was harder a few weeks ago than it is today, wrapping my mind around the idea that I will not be teaching this year. That, in all likelihood, I will never teach again. Though education is a subject that is near to my heart and I can be very passionate about, it is no longer where my heart lies. I had a supervisor who would often remark that it takes less than a whole day to forget what it is like to be a classroom teacher. Once you have left the building, you have truly left. Like Elvis. I suppose I will see now how true that is.

Twenty years. Is it possible I spent that much of my life with other people’s children? Where has that 23 year old gone? She really believed that she was making a difference. Interesting that I don’t miss her.

Happy first day back to my friends and coworkers in the Des Moines Public Schools! Go get ‘em!

On Writing – again


NaNoWriMo applique

Image by Sean and Lauren via Flickr

November is National Novel Writing Month, and I have decided not to miss it this year by getting a jump-start on my novel now. So I visited the website to see what exactly writing a novel in the space of a month entails. As it turns out, there is surprisingly little too it. Simply an idea and the stamina and imagination necessary to churn out roughly 1500 words a day. The key to this is resisting the urge to revise as you write. A mighty urge in my case, as I revise with the same amount of thought I give breathing. Drafting and revision are nearly synonymous in my mind. Like twins conjoined at the chest, it would require a painstaking separation. Thoughts and emotions are tangled in sentences and paragraphs in my mind, and perhaps I am not up (or down) to the standards of the true novelist in training. So I googled up some random thoughts on writing to see what true writers think about the craft.

 

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” This is according to Anais Nin (1903-1977) the French born American novelist. To some extent I agree with that. Writers, good ones anyway, have the ability to make mental movies in the minds of their readers. Their words are like paint on a canvas. Their keyboard is akin to the keys on a piano. Letters to words to sentences and then suddenly paragraphs take shape and form a world in which the reader can live along side characters they will come to know as intimately as lovers. Fight Club author, Chuck Palahnuik (b.1961) described it best when he said, “The unreal is more powerful than the real because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.”

 

I wasn’t born knowing how to write. There was a time when I could not quite take thoughts and transport them to paper. I did arrive in this world with a natural affinity for words and a need for an inner-life rich with story, internally generated and externally fed. I wasn’t taught to write either though I have taken many creative, and not-so, writing courses on a variety of writing related topics. And, I can’t teach anyone to write, and this in spite of my twenty years as an English teacher. Doris Lessing (b.1919), the Persian born British novelist, said something interesting about learning to write that I had never really thought about before, “I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.” The hard work I agree with, most of the time, though there are those times when fingers fly and seem to almost be writing for you. The sacrifice of personal life I hope is not the norm. I have been captivated by the page, my own and that of another writer, but I am not certain that I would chose writing, or reading, over husband and family at this point in my life. As much as I long to be a writer professionally, there are things more important and more precious. I prefer the American feminist and author, Brenda Ueland’s(1891-1985), take on writing, “I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten, absorbed, happy, and quietly putting on one bead after another.” Can one write the great American novel, as a Canadian in training, this way? At a 1500 a word per day clip?

 

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), a New Zealander and a writer, is quoted as have said, or written, “Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.” I can relate to this because until Will’s illness, I was much the same way. I am rapidly returning to it, and much like the American writer/activist Gloria Steinem ( b.1935) who has said, “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else,” I also feel that writing is the only thing I do over the course of a day or week that is not a waste of my time or an imposition on it.

 

It was the American playwright, Lillian Hellman (1905-1984), who provided me with the most useful tips. The first being this, “If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.”

 

And the more useful still, despite her own admonishment, “Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.” A reminder to tape to the side of the screen as I prepare for November at a probably more modest pace than 1500 words, but six months is a decent amount of training time for any type of marathon.

 

 

High End Pens


Parker Duofold pens from a 1920s magazine adve...

Image via Wikipedia

“None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness; but we can try” – Mark Twain

 

There was a small article on fountain pens on page 194 of the September 2006 issue of Oprah Magazine. I saved it because it reminded me of my late husband. Will loved pens. In general he hated shopping unless it was for a new pen or Pittsburgh Steelers paraphernalia. He would tease me about my Target addiction and only reluctantly would he actually accompany me, but he rarely left there without a new pen.

 

He didn’t write much in his line of work. Mainly he took orders and filled out inventory files, but he insisted on having a good pen with which to do these things. Before his illness took its vicious hold of him, he had printer perfect block letter penmanship, and his cursive was small and impossibly neat. He would leave yellow post-it notes for me on the kitchen table with short utilitarian messages and “I Love You’s” whenever he left the house and knew I would get home before he could get back.

 

But he did write once upon a time. There are three or four pieces of lined notebook paper with poems he wrote when he was just starting college that I have saved. They reflect a rough time in his life. A good friend of his had just committed suicide and the younger brother of one of his close friends had killed himself around the same time as well. The poems are dark and painful. He shared them with me one day not long after we were married. He had been to his mom’s to clean out his old room and discovered them in an notebook. He had wanted to throw them away. He didn’t think they were very good, and they reminded him of the day when he had almost committed suicide himself. I convinced him to save them. I am not yet sure if I am glad I did. I don’t know much about that time of his life beyond what he told me. But right now I am not able to throw away anything I come across that he wrote.

 

I even saved a letter that former girlfriend wrote him a few months before we were married. She was a foreign exchange student he met in high school and their correspondence spanned about 7 or eight years. He stopped writing to her after we became a couple. Not because I asked him to but because he considered her a chapter in his life that was closed. She wrote a few more times before she reappeared about two months before our wedding expecting him to be free to pick up their on/off more romantic on his side than hers relationship. I think something about seeing she and I together made him finally realize that he had been used. I don’t know what she thought. The letter represents another time in his life I don’t know much about either. I realize now that there were a lot of things about him I didn’t know.

 

Periodically Will would initiate a shopping trip strictly for the purpose of acquiring new pens. He would normally purchase several at a time because as a route salesman he knew that they would eventually be left at a stop, lost in the seat of the truck, or drop from his pocket as he loaded and unloaded his cube van. I still have his favorite one. It’s maroon and black and though it doesn’t work very well anymore, I can’t throw it away. Like the poems and that stupid letter from the spoiled little Dutch girl.

 

Our daughter seems to have inherited his love of writing utensils though she loves mechanical pencils just as much as she loves pens. Will didn’t like pencils at all. He even balanced his checkbook in ink. We are forever collecting pencils and pens now. Her favorites tend to be girly with sparkles and feathers. It never ceases to amaze me how much she is like him when she never really knew the man that I fell in love with. He was long gone by the time she was born. She only ever knew her father as a sick man. Confused. Frail. And then wheelchair and bed-bound. Finally unable to talk, see, feed himself. “Daddy never talks to me,” she would say when I asked her if she would like to visit him in the nursing home where he spent over a year of the last fifteen months of his life.

 

The pen I saved is one she uses sometimes though often she will decline to use it because “that’s Daddy’s.” It’s funny the little things that pull up memories you forgot you even remembered. Articles in Oprah, god would he have laughed about that, and fountain pens.