Another Fine Day in the Scriptorium

St Birgitta of Sweden

THE SCRIBE IN THE WOODS

A hedge of trees surrounds me, a blackbird’s lay sings to me, praise I shall not conceal,

Above my lined book the trilling of the birds sings to me.

A clear-voiced cuckoo sings to me in a gray cloak from the tops of bushes,

May the Lord save me from Judgement; well do I write under the greenwood.

Time to confess. I have been working on another writing blog.

It isn't meant to replace this one, exactly. The Den is still where I will post updates and so forth. But during a period when I was feeling out of sorts with the whole Promote Publish or Perish caterwaul, I realized I needed a peaceful place to take myself to think about writing, and to share writing, mine and others. It is still gestating, really, but I have a few elements there that I like, and I do, indeed, feel calm and happy when looking over the quite, lovely look of the place.

One thing I decided was that I wanted to share my stories rather than sell them—if not all, at least some. So one of the pages links to free fiction online, including to my first ebooks, both of which are short stories from Finding Creatures & Other Stories. Indeed, one of them, just published tonight, is "Finding Creatures" itself.

In addition there are woodcuts to admire and be inspired by, links to interviews of Eileen Kernaghan and Mike Coney, as well as interviews of me, reviews of some books I have read and loved, and a couple of peaceful poems.

I'm not sure where it will lead over time, but I do invite you to have a look and to say hello if you are so moved. Maybe there is a way that others can participate as well. I am interested in your suggestions.

I think we all need a peaceful place to retreat to at times, and the scriptorium is one that is filled with the love of the pen.

 Please Visit Another Fine Day in the Scriptorium by Following This Link.

 

Manuscript Book mural in Evolution of the Book series John White Alexander 1896

A Necessary Change

I’ve been quiet on this blog recently. Besides dealing with the death of my dad, a motley of illnesses, and difficult unplanned events, I’ve been thinking. About writing, about self-promotion, about blogging, and primarily about my life. Where I want to focus, how I want to carry on. A change is needed, and though this was evident before Dad died, I was managing okay and planned to finish up the projects I’d chosen to do before making any alterations to my lifestyle. Dad hastened all that along. With the bottoming out of my energy and the going to sleep of my work-related brain, I’ve been forced to do what I was able to more or less ignore before. Rest. Take care of my physical health. Lower the stress in my life. And ask myself what my priorities really are, because clearly, there isn’t enough of me to do the many things I want to do.

“Where I want to focus, how I want to carry on.” This question is different in weight than when I first asked it in my teens. I realized then I had to choose between a flood of interests, that I would benefit from narrowing in on and really exploring just a few of them. Years later, I wanted to focus still more tightly, to become adept at one or two things and let other activities—beloved or unfulfilling—go. Now, with chronic tiredness and pain, and a very slow thought turnover rate, I have to cull as never before. Yet after Finding Creatures & Other Stories* came out, I actually did the opposite. I opened up my sights and welcomed in the world.

Is it 19 months since my book came out? Something like that. With that event I no longer settled down to ponder stories and flesh them out. I waded into the world of self-promotion and social networking, and I began working on other people’s writing projects more. It was a lot of work, often fun, and I learned a great deal. I even got a few stories written and some of them published. I wrote the second draft of a novel I’d written the year before. All good. But all very wearing, as well, and instead of waking up and wondering what writing I’d do that day, I woke up wondering if I’d ever have time AND energy to write again. Not a good thing.

Writing is nothing new, and it’s not the only thing in my life that matters. But it is the lens through which I revisit and interpret and re-experience life, the way I return with heightened senses to matters that fly too quickly by, to realize and appreciate them deeply. You could say it's my meditation, or part of it—you could call it my prayer. When I'm worried about who I'm keeping waiting or whether I'm making sales or how to keep my profile up, when I'm digging in to help other people lift their careers and am investing too much time in that, I don't come back to that still place where I remember why I chose writing over singing and art, why I chose it over science and religion and all my early loves.

The nearest thing I can compare writing to is staring. Being a kid, and a young adult, with nothing I had to do and lots of time to do it, I would stare close up at a spider web, a slick of machine oil on dusty water, crumbs of cement, shadow on tile. I would notice precisely the air touching my skin. Would stare at an idea, a book, an animal, a friend. Stilling to wait for the next breath of an insect, the next turn of a leaf, I found something far more profound than I could guess at when headlong. In not rushing by, I was discovering some part of them, and in discovering, bringing them into myself.

When I write, I touch these things once more, bring them out of me again, hold them up, meld them with other ideas, beings, sensations, questionings, and offer them to the page, where with luck another person will pause some time, read, and see still more than I have seen.

It isn’t about producing something, but about making contact with what already is, with noticing and perhaps celebrating it; at the very least, whispering it aloud.

Last week for the first time in months I was able to start and complete a piece of creative writing. I had to give up the thought of writing a story I owe someone, or working on the novel, or any other such constructive thing. Instead, I just wrote like I used to, letting the words and images that needed to come, come, and welcoming them. Not surprisingly, it’s a three page observation of dying and death. It made me cry. It made several other people cry, too. And talk. And smile. Those are very great rewards.**

The last 19 months of producing and promoting have changed my life, and they have changed the way I write. Although the output has slowed, my writing has deepened, or at least my sense of things has done. Doors have opened in my mind and heart, I have greater expertise in bookish things, and my appreciation of my own and other people’s limits has sharpened accordingly.

But it isn’t the life for me. I would love to support all the inspired people I find around me, and to learn well the skills of layout, cover design, and editing. I’d love to hang out online regularly with all sorts of writers and readers, share ideas and promote our work. But what I need is a quiet life where I am rested and cared for enough that I end up moved and inspired to write a little, now and then, rather than dragging myself from commitment to commitment with the guilty feeling that I’m just not doing this right. That someone with more energy than I have should be taking these things on.

I’ve never, luckily, been interested in being famous. The idea scares the bejeezus out of me, actually. I’m unlikely ever to write anything that hits big in the popular canon, and I’m unlikely to fill a bookcase with publications before I die. But I can let writing be the essence that makes the details of life weave together for a moment, now and then, into a pattern I can recognize and delight in and not forget. I can let writing be an oar, not a compass. An awareness, a sensation, instead of a statement, a summing up, a pressing on. Something to rest in, in other words, rather than something to grapple with. And if my writing can offer the same for a reader, well—wonderful. I couldn’t ask any more.

* Finding Creatures & Other Stories, by C. June Wolf.

** The story is “The Corpse Pose”, and it will be published in Room Magazine’s “Women and Spirituality” issue in December 2010.

The Next Chapter: Thoughts About My Writing Life

Doesn't that image on the right bring back memories? Or does it?

I have a feeling that the majority of people who come to this blog once used a typewriter. I know I did, a manual one, and it had taken many years of determined longhand before I was able to reach that lofty economic and artistic goal. When I saw an ancient adding machine the other day it looked so like the old typewriters that I crossed over to it, oohing and awing, and ran my fingers over it.

Why? They weren't exactly fun to use. Pounding hard to get an even imprint, the type bars tangling together if I struck the keys incorrectly, spools of ribbon spilling out across the room when I tried to change them, the ink staining my fingers red and black...

Why does that make me nostalgic?

If you look at the previous post in this blog you will see three boys crowded together by a crumbling wall, looking at a book. This photo evokes a similar feeling for me.

It isn't a treacly nostalgia.

It isn't a treacly nostalgia. It's a blend of sorrow and joy, loss and awakening. I won't go into a long disclosure of why that is, but I will say that writing has been a rooting down for me, into the past, the present, and even the future, in terms of molding it in some small way - my own future, at least, if not the world's. It's been one of the often overlooked doors of perception that bring me out of my distracted state to fully notice existence - mine, ours - and my love for it. Writing is a link to times and people that I've known and loved, and others I can only imagine. It's a reminder of the brevity of life and the fact that I've caught up in one way to my grandparents and parents; I'm now one of the people who remembers a time that, for better and for worse, is gone.

Writing, reading, even typewriters, lead me to remember that I was a child just born, that I babbled at wallpaper, sat outside in a playpen and watched the world, was held by my parents, hit my head on the table when running underneath it. That I feared and was injured, loved and explored, hoped and despaired; that I fought, gave up, learned new ways. They remind me that some day my experiments will all be over, and I'll put my body into park, and turn off the engine. They prompt me to look around and see what is, instead of what I think I want to be, and to notice the wonder of it. And they cause me to consider others from the inside out, instead of staying lost in my own point of view.

I was listening to interviews today with Farley Mowat and Aleister MacLeod on The Next Chapter. (CBC Radio, rebroadcast from January 2009.) I love listening to writers talk about writing, and life, in a thoughtful way. It inspires me to write more, and to think about what I'm doing as a writer, and if it's what I want to be doing.

This last year, as the creation of Finding Creatures moved on to the publishing and promoting stages, has been an education, both exhausting and fun. I've spent more time trying in timid and often useless ways to promote the poor thing than I've spent writing anything new. (Yes, I've got some stories coming out, and have progressed a little on The Novel, but not as much as I would like.) I've helped other people with their books and writing and learned a ton more doing that. I read almost as much as when I was a child (and wasn't trying to be productive or useful). I've been connecting with writers and readers and LibraryThinging with gay abandon. This increased emphasis on every aspect of writing has been wonderful. My brain brims with bookishness.

My brain brims with bookishness.

It hasn't all been fun, of course. Sales are, well, teensy. That's okay. The point of publishing wasn't to make money (I'm not delusional), but to be read, even if only by a few people who get something out of what I've offered them. Most of the reviews, verbal or in writing, have been enthusiastic and that is rewarding. If you keep your thoughts and your writing to yourself for many years, as I have, you're never really sure if they would mean anything to anyone else.

Some of the reviews, though, have been less positive. The problem may be that the books went to readers who were hoping for desperate escapes, thrilling fights, worlds saved and destroyed, titillating sex scenes...and got quiet, thoughtful prose instead. As one nevertheless admiring reader said, "Your writing requires thinking" - not always a popular leisure activity for an over-busy and fatigued populace. A couple of people have said they felt distant from the characters - something others have strongly disagreed with. One young woman, who received a review copy through LibraryThing, said she couldn't get through a single story, that she wouldn't recommend them to anyone, that they completely sucked.

Hmmm. While this saddens me, I'm less stung by it than I would have been eight months ago. But I do wonder. Is it just a marketing problem? Should I be sending review copies to literary magazines - which I have assumed wouldn't be interested in the stories because of the speculative element - and forgetting about most genre sources? Am I painting myself into a corner by writing literary speculative fiction? Is there something I'm just not getting?

I do know that I miss working on my novel. I miss being immersed in that story and I want at the same time to finish it so that I can let my writing-brain rove to the next place it wants to go. Despite the occasional story and essay I've written in the last year, I miss having writing, not promoting and networking and other writing-related projects, as my primary focus.

In my interview with Irma Arkus last October I said that since I was beginning my writing career so late I didn't want to spend the time I had allotted to me in writing strictly genre fiction, which isn't my forte, but instead wanted to write what meant the most to me.

Of course, I could write what that reader above was looking for. I read it myself, when I want entertainment rather than something to Think about. But what most grounds me in the world? What is the juice in writing for me?

It's what I said above. Small and subtle things. The recognition of a leaf turning in quiet air. The song and flitting smallness of a chickadee. A tiny golden spider spinning down from my hat brim. The release of tension in a lonely human. Imagining some new way. The awakening of kindness. The softening of rage.

I love the earth and its people, be they spiders or mud or sunlight or child or wicked old man. These are the ordinary things I want to touch when I write, not the dramas of world-saving and gallant heroism. I'd have to refer to someone else's sensibilities to create action fiction. And I would have to remove myself from my own experience of life to do it, snapping the root hairs that anchor me to my work. What would be the point?

Or is that even true? What am I missing here? What am I asking?

I guess that partly I'm wrestling over whether I'm doing the right thing by writing as I do, or whether I'm being self-indulgent. And I'm remembering what it's like to be a writer just in order to write, not to try to figure out marketing or worry about reviews or wonder if I'm doing the right thing. I'm thinking how lovely it is to just pull out my notebook and open the tap and let the words run over the ground and sink into the earth, nourishing my heart and the worms beneath me, if no one else.

Maybe I would be happier as an unpublished poet than a person who struggles to tweet...

Maybe I would be happier as an unpublished poet than a person who struggles to tweet when she'd rather roll over dead than blat out 140 character flashes every day in the hope of selling a book. (I only lasted on Twitter for a week, for that reason.) If I have only a few years left to read and write, do I want to spend them fruitlessly marketing my poor book, or should I let it take care of itself and go on to whatever's next?

This isn't really a new question in a way. I have a tendency to get caught up in jobs and leave living behind. So there may be no dichotomy at all. No conflict between writing as and what I want and attempting to get published, reviewed, and read. Maybe it's just that same old cycle again. Time to lighten the overcommitments, spend a few days smiling at leaves and insects and cats as I have been today, remember why I write...and to do it.

I went to a friend's book launch a couple of days ago. (I should really write about that...) It was wonderful. And yet, I felt tired. Who'd know that "being" a writer could be so much work?

On the other hand...yes, on the other hand...

Though there is something blissful about walking on a beach alone, thinking only your own thoughts and responding to the cries of birds, the drag-marks of crabs, the smell of brine, there is more to the story than that. I heard an interview with a man who went to the ends of the earth to be alone for many months so that he could delve into the spirit and come away enlightened. He was made to take a cat with him so that he could test for red tide by feeding the cat any shellfish he harvested. But the cat cried so much that the man became violent with him, emotionally at least, and still at the end of his time away he hated the cat and the feelings it brought up in him and the fact that the cat disrupted his trek to enlightenment.

While I was sweeping the floor this morning, noting the abundance of fluffy white cat hair and the very little else that was in my sweepings, and stopping to pet the perpetrator of that fluff from time to time, I remembered with irritation that man who thought he could run away from the world to find enlightenment, and who was so divorced from his surroundings that he showed only hatred to this cat.

My cats cry a lot, too. In my younger days I reacted to that with anger as this fellow did. Eventually I learned to pay attention to the cats. To show them affection instead of irritation and try to understand why they cried. The results have been fascinating and rewarding, and if ever I have had great spiritual teachers, these cats have been among them. To myself I lectured, while petting and sweeping, and sweeping the pettings, and then creating more, "If you want enlightenment, if you really want enlightenment, stay in the world, don't try to run out of it. It's in rubbing up against the things that make life difficult that you are shaped into something wiser, kinder, more generous than you were before."

The answer, as always, is to relax.

I hear an echo of that admonishment when I suggest that what I might want to do is move away from the fray of published life and write silent lines to myself and the trees. I'm just rubbing up against a new and rough-surfaced thing. It isn't a right, a wrong, a this way, or a that way. It just is, like everything else. The answer, as always, is to relax. And enjoy. And what I can't enjoy, forgive.

(Okay, computer. That's it for you today. Time to go out to enjoy the lanterns under the stars.)

Hugs,
Casey