Tony Morrison on Writing

Toni Morrison once said, “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” She points out that a writer writes not just for others, but for herself. But yet, in writing about her struggles with life, Morrison finds ways to connect with the reader, crafting her writing in such a way that it becomes something she would want to read. She's already stated that she's writing books that she wants to read. How does one find an objectivity, while writing, to create someone you would want to read? When the words flow from within you, you're writing about something you know, something that happened to you or something you can imagine happening, something about the human condition, a universal problem to be solved. I suspect that when Morrison's got it all down on paper, she looks at what she wrote to see if it did what she intended. She becomes her own critic. But what she's really doing is telling a story that needs to be told. She's reaching out to other people. The message I get from this is how important it is to pick the right projects. All our writing should be something that hasn't been written yet and it must be something we would want to read. If I don't like to read mysteries, why would I write a mystery? If I don't care about planes, why would I ghost write a book about planes? It comes down to the number one rule of writing--we must write what we know.

Exploring Costa Rica

Home from Costa Rica after a relaxing vacation to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary.

We were outdoors, even for meals, most of our days—hiking, sunbathing, swimming, or just taking in the scenery. The color of my skin shows it. The vacation came just in time to help me get well from the shingles, and I felt almost normal within two days of our arrival in the rejuvenating climate. Conditions were rugged on the trails and the roads going from place to place, but we were pampered with drivers picking us up, guides showing us the wildlife, spa hotels with great food and beautiful rooms and excellent service. It was relaxing even though we were up most mornings at six to eat breakfast so we could get on with the adventure of the day. During a night hike we saw viper snakes, several kinds of spiders including a tarantula, a scorpion, and a kinkajou. We saw many squirrel monkeys and white-faced monkeys and pacas right on the grounds of The Falls of Manuel Antonio. On our guided hikes we saw raccoons, their weird raccoon called a coatimundi, a wild boar, sloths, lizards, iguanas, crocodiles, blue morpho butterflies, and Costa Rican gray squirrels. We saw all kinds of birds, who were singing literally all night (also saw sleeping birds)--hummingbirds, parakeets, quetzels, turkey hawks, mockingbirds, egrets and herons, osprey and frigatebirds, a toucan, tanagers and the Montezuma Oropendola. On our bumpy dirt-road drives, we passed skinny-looking cattle, horses, and unchained and unfenced dogs, as well as mostly fenced-in houses. The landscape was filled with shimmering green hills, baron volcanos, strangler figs, lots of coconut trees, palm trees, huge ferns, waterfalls, and lots of flowers we don't get at home, like birds of paradise.

Paul and I can recommend the company that put together the package--Latin Destinations--and the outfit that coordinated all our ground travel--Swiss Travel. But Delta Airlines' delays in both directions for mechanical issues and our luggage being MIA for three days caused some unnecessary stress that could have been avoided if the airlines was better equipped to handle the out-of-ordinary.

Wisdom of the Jungle

You're reading this as I'm living in the jungles of Costa Rica. I'm writing this before Paul and I leave to explore ancient paths through heavy forests and immerse ourselves in a culture that has evolved on a strip of mountainous volcanic earth between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Eight nights and nine days of living in the jungle will surely teach us something new, and I'll emerge with stories to share with friends and family. Maya Angelou write that "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” That's what drives me to write. You may tell your stories out loud and repeat the same ones over and over again, and as you do that, as you wait for the right moment to say what comes to mind at a dinner table or while walking in the woods, you are letting that untold story out into the world. What is it about human nature that makes us want to tell others what we've learned, what we feel, what we've experienced? I'm intrigued by storytelling, that desire we have to get our stories out into the world. I suspect that part of what we're doing when we tell them is wishing for a response from those to whom we tell our tales. No writer wants to write in a vacuum--even if our stories are never published, we have a sense, while writing, that someone's listening, even if it's only our muse or the God that watches over us.

Growing Up in Lorain

In my unpublished book White Preacher's Kid (hopefully that will come out in 2015), I try to capture what it was like for a white girl to grow up in the black ghetto. In a lot of ways, it was what followed, the move to Lorain, that was hard. We moved to the suburban area of Lorain near Amherst when I was thirteen. All the rules that one lives by were already being questioned, but how does a young girl who feels like an urban black inside accept the invitation to be part of a clique or any offer of friendship from white kids whose parents are members of a country club and have pools in their back yards? You're probably surprised by my portrayal of blue-collar, rustbelt, dilapidated Lorain, Ohio, whose population has been halved in the last forty years. But for this thirteen-year-old girl, Lorain felt very foreign and intimidating. How I spent the next five years, growing up, is being handled with kid gloves in my book because I never figured out how to fit in and the ways I chose to acclimate were self-deprecating and tragic. Lorain's sex-and-drugs tough world revealed itself and it was just the thing for me to throw myself into. I became so deeply lost to who I was that I had what amounted to a nervous breakdown my first year in college. I think a lot, but back then, it seems to me I was avoiding thought. I didn't want to know right from wrong, yet I was trying to find what my life was meant to be. But I really thought I was just being a party girl, trying to capture as much of life as I could because I knew I'd be dead by the time I was thirty. If I kept up that lifestyle, I would have been. The story is one of survival, so treating it with kid gloves is probably the wrong approach. We'll see how I find a way to tell the story without doing too much damage.

Finding My Absolutes

What are the things that matter most in your life? Do you even know? My life often feels like I'm meandering along a river and wander into dead-end tributaries, all the while bringing up muck from the river's bottom. I focus on unnecessary things and am pulled in too many directions. The worst thing is that I ALLOW this to happen to me. So I spent some time looking at my life and how I spend my time and what paths I'm led down and came up with those things that are absolutely essential to me. The list was long and included the things in my life that really matter: family, nature, travel, yoga, writing, and art. It also included things that quiet the soul, those things that are more about an attitude towards living, the hazy but focused living-well reminders for everyday living like being present and living in the moment and living each day as a prayer. Those things mean different things to me than they do to you, and some of them may not be on your radar. I wrapped it all up in a neat little poster, and in the center were the words "Presence brings meaning, listening allows connection." As 2013 draws to an end and 2014 stretches out long and promising before us, I'm not making lists, because lists make life a drudgery. But I am thinking about my absolutes and living each day as if it really matters. Because it does.

Why Write a Book

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” ― Toni Morrison

Crafted at Word Lovers at River's Edge

BY A THREAD Clutching what we have hollows our words into platitudes, Empty promises cloud the connection between your eyes and mine. We are not sorry for anyone’s loss, nor will we miss each other, Our heavy black bags drag life from our souls until they are As cancelled as a life insurance policy, a corpse-like non-person. What I lost in that office that was my home for ten years Was the innocence of a child’s trust in her parent. I am forsaken, fearful, without an oar but in a kayak, Floating on striated rivers watched by white-headed eagles And shoreline totem poles that exude the voices of the Ancients. Lolled to comfort as the valley’s shadows move with the sun; The transient physical world is light and dark and gray, unfocused. While seeking that which cannot be seen, the flow of the river, the wind against my cheek, the rowing of our arms help me forget that office above Browns stadium with Lake Erie beyond, The place where belief was suspended, and I was dying. Beneath a wide open sky in a wall-less arena, First Peoples whisper what is required: to be present and connected and One. Mother Earth and the Holy Spirit gladden my expanded heart. I remember home: red maples over my head, buckeyes under foot, And paths winding along the Rocky River and the Crooked River Trampled by the Hopewell peoples and Western Reserve settlers. “Kum Ba Yah,” roof-shingling ghetto mission trips, hands in prayer, time spreads out before me, a person of worth and loved. Future possibilities tango with remembrances of the past. On our 35th wedding anniversary at a log cabin restaurant, my husband snuggles next to me instead of across from me. He leans over to kiss my cheek and erase my stunned pain that he sometimes views the world differently from me and happily-ever-after is a keen deception that brings tears to my eyes. We hold on by a tight and strong thread; gratitude confounds me. He travels with me to faraway places to help me know what’s real And walks with me along the rivers at home to keep me grounded. The scary stuff is torn away, dismantled, scourged.

Why We Must Write

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou

Revisioning

Oates:  The peasure is in the rewriting. The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written . . . the completion of any work automatically necessitates its revisioning.

A Story of Second Chances

What caught my eye when I picked up Andy Andrews’ The Heart Mender was the subtitle, “A Story of Second Chances.” The book’s background is a surprise—German submarines came right up to the Atlantic and Gulf Coast shores, and it was kept out of the media. It’s a tale woven around the main character finding personal items on a beach that were puzzling—buttons with anchors, a ring with German lettering, an anchor badge, a medal, and a few photographs. Andrews didn’t have to dig very far to weave together a story of a man who had to go to war and leave his family behind in Germany. The man, Josef, was shot at by an old enemy-turned Nazi on the deck of the submarine he was in and plunged into the Gulf. He surfaced on a beach in Alabama and was taken in by a young widow whose husband was killed by Germans. They’re unlikely friendship blossomed into love. But first they had to deal with Helen’s meanness, and Josef’s German background. And they have to discover the God of letting things go.

Open to the Words

You have to have some heroes who spark your confidence, who show you the way. One of mine is Anne Lamott, who wrote in Bird by Bird that “Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.  That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to the best part.” When we sit with a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen and are open to what will come, we get into the mode, the groove, and the writing comes about so naturally, so effortlessly, that I almost forget I’m writing. The words come into my head and onto the paper, and I find that what Lamott said about good writing is about telling the truth is a great way to describe it. As writers, we try to describe what’s going on inside us and outside us by using detailed writing to describe the emotions, and if we’re open to the words, they just come.

JOURNEYING

It's been a whirlwind year, starting with writing about having thirty perfect days and continuing with forty days of Lent, journaling, reading, and teaching what I know all along the way.  In the midst of the writing, I was in Disciple class, attending Artist's Way sessions, leading a retreat in Michigan, and preparing for Word Lovers.

Recently, I spent a weekend at a yoga retreat at a boy's camp. Six women spent time together in a park with a lodge, outhouse, cabins in the woods, and hiking trails.  We talked, meditated, lived in the moment, ate mostly vegetarian meals, envisioned ourselves in five years, sat around the campfire, got rid of the stuff we no longer need, made music together, and crafted together vision boards. There's nothing like being out in the wilderness with others on the journey to enlightenment and asking the questions that cannot be answered. 

In the end, all I can give you is this:  it's important to have a vision and some direction, but it's more important to let the path unfold while mindfully attending to the moments of ones' life. 

Namaste.