Forty-Year-Old Clues to the Muse

Recently, I unearthed a journal I kept long ago when I traveled alone with my dog Harry, across the country and into western states I wanted to explore. Today I think I was looking for clues to my author and my nature-writing self.

I’ve selected just a few bits here

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Sept 12, 1977

I should have taken off in the early seventies after college. After those four years (1967-1971) of prime Paul Harvey material: drugs, co-ed living, demonstrations against the war, student rights marches, the women’s movement.

I’m fairly sure that little can be said of those years. At least not precisely as I feel language did not function well during those years. It’s the revenge of that inarticulate and thrashing space. No one can adequately explain the first time you rolled on the grass in a wind of Mescaline energy, or the night of snow and wind when your roommate was gone and you finally got to wake up shyly with your first lover, or the rage of that one picture of a girl kneeling over a dead boy, her mouth stretched in a Kent State silent scream.

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Writing Is a Solitary Gig. Yes! Road Show! Maybe Give It a Bit More ‘Gas’

About library presentations . . .

I am busy getting ready to do a library presentation. I haven’t done one in a while and need to get reactivated after pandemic sloth. Writing is a solitary gig and being out with people who ask questions about the writing but also about subjects that crop up in it …is renewing.

I am experimenting with using a non-fiction partner, someone who won’t compete with my book sales, but one that will add interest and richness to the presentation as well as offer her or him good exposure. Michael Good is with me because I asked him to proof my draft of “Deadly Turn.” A bird naturalist with a guiding business, he’s also testified at wind power hearings about the core conservation issues I have in the mystery.

Here’s how I go about prepping for the day

I send out a press release blurb that is convenient for a library to use. I send it out in Word and encourage them to edit in any way that works for them. It should have something “sexy” . . .

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Risk Placing Real Emotion at the Center of Your Work

“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work.”  Author Anne Lamott

“Anne Lamott understands better than anyone that writers need help. . . She writes so well, in fact, that it’s hard to believe that she, too, has trouble with writing. That’s what’s so deeply comforting about this book.” The Wall Street Journal 

I am, lately, needing inspiration so I’m rereading “Bird by Bird” and now, sharing some with you! 

“Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”   

Listen to her, here.  And if you haven’t found this amazing interview series with “old ladies” interviewed by Julia Lewis-Dreyfus, here she interviews Anne Lamott. (Wow. Well, don’t miss the Jane Fonda one either.)

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”

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Welcome Yourself Back Into Your Writing

The challenge! After a long break, how to reenter a manuscript? (Or a report or anything that’s been sitting for a while.)

How to re-engage with the original urge to tell a particular story?

I use several devices to bring myself “home” to a manuscript. I read it out loud. Sometimes I have my computer’s read function read it to me. I call a friend and read over a passage and ask for feedback and then there’s my Essential Note Library.

When I have been away from writing for a while, I visit notes I left that are designed to bring me home to the writing. (I rework and update my library often and keep it on the first page of whatever I’m creating. If I have to leave the project for a while, I take some time to first leave a trail of engaging notes and questions to welcome me back.)

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