Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within (17 page)

So go home. Not so you can boast, “My uncle was a colonel in World War II,” but so you can penetrate quietly and clearly into your own people and from that begin to understand all people and their struggles.

All writers, at some level, want to be known. That’s why they speak. Here is a chance to bring your reader deeper into your heart. You can explain with deep knowledge what it means to be a Catholic, a man, a southerner, a black person, a woman, a homosexual, a human being. You know it better than anyone else. In knowing who you are and writing from it, you will help the world by giving it understanding.

A Story Circle

T
HERE WERE SEVERAL
times in Taos that I called a story-telling circle. I invited friends from the surrounding hills of Talpa, Carson, Arroyo Hondo, and Arroyo Seco to gather in my home. We sat in a circle on the floor. Next door you could hear the bells on Shel’s goats, and I knew that Bill Montoyo was once again sneaking his sheep near our garden where they could graze on the unusually long pigweed that grew there.

I lit a candle in the middle of our circle of about ten people. Lighting a candle helps to create a sense of magic. Then I asked them, “Okay, tell me about a time you were really happy.” At other circles I’ve asked, “Tell us about a place you really love” or “a time you were really down,” or “Tell us the most extraordinary story you know” or “a story you love to tell,” or “Give us a magic moment that you remember from last week.”

We went around the circle. Stories stay with us. It is seven years later and I still remember them.

R
ICK
: There was a big elm in the backyard of my childhood home in Larchmont, New York. I was six and would climb to almost the top, to my favorite branch. It was late fall with no leaves on the trees. I lay down on my favorite branch and wrapped my arms around it. I closed my eyes and the wind blew and my branch, which was big, swayed and I swayed with it. I will always remember that feeling of being in love with that tree.

L
AUCHLAN
: There was one summer that I was a forest ranger in Oregon for four months. I was alone for that whole time and I hardly ever wore any clothes that summer, because there was no one around. I was deep in the woods. By the end of the summer I was very tan and very calm. It was late August and I was squatting, picking the berries off a berry bush and eating them. Suddenly I felt a tongue licking my shoulder and I slowly turned my head. There was a deer licking the sweat on my back! I didn’t move. Then she moved next to me and together we silently ate berries off the bush. I was stunned. An animal trusted me that much!

J
OSEPH
: This story isn’t directly about me. It’s about a friend of mine’s roommate. I’ll call him Bill. Bill was from France. He was a bit weird, definitely out of balance. He was working with dolphins in New York, really loved them. We called him the Scientist. It was the early days of LSD. We called it lysergic acid back then. Some of us were experimenting with it. We were careful not to do it around the Scientist, because we were afraid he would take it and really go off the edge.

Well, one time he took some, I don’t know how he got his hands on it, but anyway, he did take some. We all thought, “Uh-oh!” but we tried to relax. He put on his jacket—it was night—and left the apartment. He walked down to where he worked, went in, and stood watching the dolphins in the pool. He swears that the female started to look like Marilyn Monroe and grew breasts, had on lipstick, and beckoned him to join her in the pool. He said he took off all his clothes and dove in and made love with her. He swore he did. We were all very weirded out when we heard about it, and my friend who was his roommate soon moved out.

I think this could be really true because several years later I was living with friends on Venice Beach, California. We were taking acid all the time then. It was the middle sixties and we decorated our whole house in bright psychedelic colors. The bathroom was avocado green, and we had a fishbowl in there with two goldfish. One day I dropped some acid and was walking on the beach. I came back to the house and went into the bathroom and looked at the goldfish. One of them suddenly became Brigitte Bardot. Spontaneously, I stuck my hand in the bowl, grabbed the fish by the tail, and swallowed her whole before I even know what I was doing! I was amazed.

B
RETT
: I visited my grandmother Chloe in Kankakee, Illinois. She was eighty-two at the time and I hadn’t seen her in four years. I was crazy about her and was really excited to see her. The visit was going to be a surprise. I hitched down from Minnesota, where I was living then. When I got to her house, which was across the street from Dunkin’ Donuts, she was in the backyard leaning over some red snapdragons. I yelled, “Chloe!” She turned around and said, “Oh, Brett, come here a minute. I want to show you something.” I went over and she pressed a snapdragon together to show me how it could look like a bunny rabbit. Then she took my hand and led me over to her two peach trees. “I’m gonna make peach preserves outta these.” “Chloe, you haven’t seen me in four years.” She reached up and picked a peach off the tree and held it up so I could inspect it: “I know, honey. I’ve missed you.” Then we went in the house and she fed me some of her famous dumplings and talked to me about the neighbors and my father and how she wished he would go to church. She talked to me like I had never been gone.

These four stories I remember vividly. Our stories are important. Try calling a story circle with some friends. All you need is a candle. You don’t need drugs or alcohol. Once the stories begin, they are all the enchantment you would want. Then later, on your own, write your stories down. To begin with, write like you talk, nothing fancy. This will help you get started.

Writing Marathons

U
SUALLY AT THE
end of an eight-week writing workshop which meets once a week for two hours, we have a four-hour writing marathon. You don’t necessarily need a class to do a marathon. I have done it for a whole day with just one other person. This is how it works: Everyone in the group agrees to commit himself or herself for the full time. Then we make up a schedule. For example, a ten-minute writing session, another ten-minute session, a fifteen-minute session, two twenty-minute sessions, and then we finish with a half-hour round of writing. So for the first session we all write for ten minutes and then go around the room and read what we have written with no comments by anyone. If the class is too large and it will take up too much time, we alternate the people who will read after each round, so you might read every other time instead of every time. A pause naturally happens after each reader, but we do not say “That was great” or even “I know what you mean.” There is no good or bad, no praise or criticism. We read what we have written and go on to the next person. People are allowed to pass and not read twice during the marathon. Naturally there should be flexibility. If someone feels the need to pass more often or less often, that is fine. What usually happens is you stop thinking: you write; you read; you write; you become less and less self-conscious. Everyone is in the same boat, and because no comments are made, you feel freer and freer to write anything you want.

After a while your voice begins to feel disembodied; you are not sure if you said something or someone across the room said it. Because there are no comments, if someone writes something you want to respond to, you can address that person in the next writing round: “Bev, I know what you mean. My parents argued too under the kitchen lights with the dinner half eaten and the green linoleum spread out across the floor.” Not commenting on another person’s work builds up a healthy desire to speak. You can pour that energy into your next round of writing. Write, read, write, read. It is an excellent way to cut through the internal censor and to give yourself tremendous space to write whatever’s on your mind.

We also have a box in the center of the room where people put in topic suggestions folded on pieces of paper. At the beginning of each round of writing, someone pulls out a slip of paper and reads the topic. You don’t necessarily have to write on it, but if you are stuck you can begin from there. You’ll be surprised that once you are in that automatic state, you can write on any topic. Or you might use the topic as a jumping-off place to get your hand moving: “‘Swimming.’ I am a great swimmer and very confident. There. Now what I really want to write about is how I will turn into white light someday. . . .” Or you can think there is nothing to say about swimming, begin to write, and remember how you adored Esther Williams when you were very young, sitting next to your father in the movie theater, hand dripping with the butter from your popcorn.

People are nervous the first time they do a marathon. They fear they won’t have anything to say or can’t keep writing for that long. They are amazed when it is done that the time went so quickly—“I could have written all day!” Once, at a week-long workshop for the University of Minnesota, I had twelve students try a marathon the first morning. In the beginning they were resistant and sneered at me. When it was finished, one man chimed in, “Let’s have lunch and then do another marathon in the afternoon.” For the entire week we did nothing else. We tried beginning some rounds at ten at night and writing until one in the morning or starting at seven in the morning and writing until noon.

During that week someone pulled “Your first sexual experience” out of the topic box. That topic set up one woman for the rest of the week. She wrote about her first sexual experience, her second, her third, and so on. I believe she is still in Hill City, Minnesota, at the Rainbow Tavern writing about her 708th sexual experience. The high school students are playing pool nearby, and she continues to order Pepsi so she can hold her booth in the tavern. She doesn’t know whether it is night or day, and her hand keeps moving across the page. Surely she will become enlightened any time now, and we wonder, “Will she ever return, will she ever return . . . ?”

Marathons are very opening experiences. Right after one there is a tendency to feel naked, out of control. I sometimes feel slightly angry, but I have no reason for it. It is as though some big hole had been blasted in the belly of your self-defenses and suddenly you are standing naked as who you really are. After a marathon you try to make normal conversation with the other marathoners about the weather and how lovely it is to be a writer, but you feel as though you just lost your face. Don’t worry, the state does pass and you become guarded and ornery again.

It is important to spend at least a half hour alone afterward. Doing something physical and concrete is helpful. Suddenly after a marathon I become an avid dishwasher or I madly plant twelve extra rows of bean plants where the grass seed was supposed to be planted. Just last week there was a marathon at my house, and before the last student left I had the vacuum cleaner out, vacuuming rugs in the living room where we had all just been sitting.

That naked feeling after a marathon is the same one I have felt often after a sesshin, a meditation retreat. After seven days of sitting meditation, we bow for the final time to Buddha and to the other Zen students, and then we usually have tea and cake treats in another room. After long periods of silence during the retreat, we can finally talk to each other. I always feel as though I want to smear the cake over my face so no one can see me. Once a close friend who visited with me on my porch right after a sesshin said, “You know, I feel like I’m sitting with a Cubist portrait of a woman by Picasso—all your dimensions are flashing at once!”

When I spend several hours alone writing, I have also felt this way. Do not worry about it. We are not used to being so open. It’s fine, accept it; it is a good state to be in.

Claim Your Writing

T
IME AND TIME
again, I have experienced a peculiar phenomena in writing groups. Someone will write something extraordinary and then have no idea about its quality. It doesn’t matter how much I may rave about it or the other people in the group give positive feedback; the writer cannot connect with the fact that it is good writing. He doesn’t deny it; he just sits there bewildered and later, through the grapevine, I hear that he never believed a word of what was said. It’s been over years that I have observed this; it isn’t just one downtrodden, insecure character in one writing group that has not been awake to his own good writing.

We have trouble connecting with our own confident writing voice that is inside all of us, and even when we do connect and write well, we don’t claim it. I am not saying that everyone is Shakespeare, but I am saying everyone has a genuine voice that can express his or her life with honest dignity and detail. There seems to be a gap between the greatness we are capable of and the way we see ourselves and, therefore, see our work.

The first time I became deeply aware of this was six years ago in a writing group I taught for eight weeks as a benefit for the Minnesota Zen Center. We all wrote about our family in simple, childlike terms—that was the assignment. We had fifteen minutes to write. There were twelve of us. When the time was up, we went around and each read what we had just written. I was the last one to read. The piece I read I later typed up and entitled “Slow Seeing the World Go Round,” about my grandmother drinking water, raising children, and leaving the world without socks, salamis, or salt. After I read, there was silence for a long time.

Everything I say as a teacher is ultimately aimed at people trusting their own voice and writing from it. I try different angles and tricks. Once they do break through, all I teach is dressing on a turkey. The turkey is already roasting. I felt peaceful and happy; each student in the group had broken through resistance to a genuine, deeply felt piece of writing. There was nothing more I could say.