20/20 Revision: Re-learning to See

Vision.

A word of many meanings. It can be the act of seeing the physical world.

Or the ability to see into the future.  I usually can't predict what I'm having for lunch, let alone what's going to happen next year, or even next week.

Another definition, according to Webster's, is to imagine. My ability to imagine has been working at a slow speed lately. Sometimes it stops working altogether.

Then there is this, the last definition--"something seen; a lovely sight."

Rainbow--duh!

This is Maui, where my husband and I spent five days before Christmas, celebrating out 30th anniversary. Five days of "lovely sights." If you've never been, this place can be a shock to your senses. A carnival of color. Stark contrasts--lava fields and Jurassic Park lushness. Rainbows appearing from nowhere...then disappearing.
Perfect (for me) weather--75 degrees every day with soft breezes. Go to the top of a dead volcano, and it's 38 degrees and I don't even want to guess the wind chill.

We snorkeled. Getting up close and personal with the Yellow Tang and Rainbow Butterfly Fish is my idea of nirvana.

Under the sea--da-da-da-da-da!

 We lucked into arriving the first day of whale watching season. Our guide warned us that we might not see anything this so early, but we did!  Whales arcing over the ocean, slapping their mighty tails, the marine mammal mating call. Whale watching was Craig's idea; I was just along for the ride. But I'm so glad I did.

Whale watching with total strangers.

Maui is a great place to stargaze. The island tries to keep light pollution to a minimum. So much so, that driving unfamiliar roads at night is not a good idea, they are so sparsely lit. We signed on for a "star watch tour" at the top of Haleakala, the highest point on the island. We climbed into a van with six other tourists and our sprightly seventy-something ex-hippie guide and wound our way to the top of Haleakala, a dead volcano.

Talk about visions! The late afternoon lit up canyons and craters, a cross between the Grand Canyon in on direction, and the surface of the moon in the other. Gazing down to the ocean and small towns was the kind of view you get from a plane. A 10,000 ft elevation will do that. It's another world up there.

Me on the moon (Haleakala)

 Craig and I chuckled at the instructions to wear sweats and heavy socks and that we would be given wind suits.  We stopped laughing when we got out of the van at the summit, and were blasted with 30 mph winds. We jumped into those wind suits, gratefully accepted our guide's offer of hot chocolate and Christmas cookies, and snuggled into camp chairs to watch the sun slowly sink into the Pacific. We also snickered as other tourists pulled into the parking lot to take sunset pictures, only to discover that shorts and flip-flops really weren't a good idea. I wonder how their pictures turned out...people shivering, shoulders hunched to their ears, hair whipping their faces, screaming "Take the picture, I'm freezing!"

That's the Pacific at the top of the shot

Darkness fell. Even without the guide's huge portable telescope, the sky lit up with stars and planets. Who knew you could see Saturn without a telescope? And there were all the constellations I've read about, but could never pick out for myself. Despite the wind and the cold (and my wind pants that kept falling down) I could've stayed up there forever. But the clouds rolled in, above and below us. Time to go, while our driver could still negotiate the endless switchbacks. A fantasy ride through the clouds. The van's radio faded in and out of a classic rock station. Suddenly, The Beatles "Something" came through loud and clear, our senior ex-hippie driver singing harmony. We rolled down, down through the clouds in our warm magic bus, like a waking dream. Back to the meeting point where is was still 75 degrees, with gentle breezes and no clouds.

So you, you say, you had a nice vacation. So what does this have to do with writing.

Its the "vision thing" as a former president once said. All of these thing existed, but we had to choose to see them. We were with other tourists on all our excursions. While we were snorkeling, others chose to sit in the shade and bitch that there were no soft drinks, just water. On the whale watching cruise, people complained that it was overcast, and they couldn't take pictures of the sunset. And of course, there were those ill-prepared people at Haleakala, focused only getting a picture before they froze, not even looking at the sunset behind them.

There is always something to observe if we so choose.  No, I can't hop over to Maui when I want to refresh my vision. But I can choose to take a closer look, right where I am, even in suburban Atlanta. There are people to observe, flowers to discover, the variety of ways that rain can fall.

And on those days when nothing seems interesting, nothing sparks my eye, I can remember that the sun and moon and Venus are always in the sky, even when I can't see them.

And so aloha to our 50th state.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

3 Things I Am Doing Today...What's YOUR Fingerprint?

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Howdy, Campers, and Happy Poetry Friday! (The link to PF and my poem are below.)

Today's TeachingAuthor topic is "What are you working on now?" An alternate topic I could have chosen was: "Since the ALA awards were announced this week, what is your reaction as a writer to the success/acclaim for other writers. Does it inspire you, or make you envious?

All last year I was thinking about the fact that we are each a fingerprint. We can only help another so much. Ultimately, each person must discover what works in her life; what her fingerprint is.

So...what am I working on now? You mean, what am I doing today?

Well. 

That's a tough one.

To be honest...

I'm not sure.

I'm so tired of the dead bodies of stories that stretch back for decades. It's not that they are unfinished. Most of them are finished. The problem is that they're not quite right. I listen to my critique group or a workshop teacher or a mentor or my best friend but mostly myself...and know that I haven't quite touched the heart of the story; it doesn't yet move the reader. I haven't gone deep enough.

I hear their comments, each given kindly in the belief that I can fix the story and then--TA-DAH! I'll send it off with a note in its lunchbox to an editor and it will roll back to me on a rose covered float with a publishing contract in hand.

I hear them. I understand that I need to jump from this lily pad to that one, by the far edge of the pond... But I can't seem to make the changes. I don't know how.

photo by me

This is hard to admit!

In my over-thirty year career as a children's book author and poet, I've seriously considered leaving the profession once before.

I remember that I was driving two hours home from ALA in San Diego on a rainy night. I had just come from a private party, celebrating an award for the book of a dear friend. And I was sobbing.

I passed a billboard featuring a beautiful baby. Maybe I should quit writing and adopt a baby, I thought.

I didn't know if I could go to one more conference where there seemed to be so much success. It was if I had stepped into Facebook where only fabulous things happen to people. I couldn't stand it anymore.

That's not exactly how I feel now. I can celebrate other people's success today. I wish I were feeling anger or rage or defiance. I'm not. What I'm feeling is heart-sickness.

So, what am I working on now? Figuring it all out: who I want to be. What I want to do. Whether I ever want to write again. (That last sentence is not exactly true. Keep reading.)

Some of this upheaval is due to the current political landscape. Part of me feels I have to stop my life and help save the world. But maybe part of me wants to do this precisely because that would be easier than wading through my confusion and sadness. Hard to know.

So here's what I'm doing:

1) For today, I am writing one poem and also writing beside my sister TeachingAuthors. I love writing a poem a day, which I've done since April 1, 2010. I send them to my friend and he sends me his. I won't stop writing a poem a day, nor will I stop blogging, which has opened a door for me I didn't even know was down the hallway.

2) For today, I have not quit my verse novel...the one I wrote and which was accepted for publication by Dial Books for Young Readers over a decade ago and then cancelled, and which I've been writing and finishing and rewriting and rewriting and not writing and nearly setting fire to since 2002. It's bubbling just under my skin. For today I am letting it bubble.

3) For today, I am listening to my own fingerprint. Just for today I am not listening to mentors or workshop leaders or best-selling writing books or even my beloved fellow writers. Just for today, I am listening to what feels right for me, teaching what feels right for this class, for this poem, for this picture book, for this novel. Maybe what I write doesn't fit into today's publishing world. And I have zero desire to self-publish. But still I think about my verse novel almost every day. Mostly with sadness, but with a touch of desire. And some small hope that maybe I haven't yet lived the part of my life that needs to be added to it to complete this book. And others, too.

"I haven't yet lived the part of my life..." Yet is a powerful word.

A month after the election, I was reading about the eyes of flies, for reasons which escape me now:

"House fly eyes are compound organs that are comprised of thousands of individual lenses. Compound eyes are capable of detecting both the polarization of light and color spectrums unseen by humans.” http://www.orkin.com/flies/house-fly/house-fly-eyes/

Reading that triggered the poem I wrote that day, which even I don't understand:

WHAT KEEPS ME GOING
by April Halprin Wayland

"Why," asked Sir Spider, "are you an optimist, friend Fly?"

"I've iridescent eyes," said the ever watchful fly...

and then she said, "Good-bye!"

poem (c) 2017 by April Halprin Wayland. All rights reserved.

For today, those are three things I am doing and an odd poem. That's my fingerprint. What's yours?

Thank you, Beyond LiteracyLink for hosting today ~

Posted by April Halprin Wayland with the help of Eli, who slept quietly on his doggy couch while I wrote.

Gathering Story Seeds: Part Two

"Gathering Story Seeds," my last post, was about finding story ideas. I spent the summer showing my Young Writers group how to keep their "writer's brain" open and alert for those little nuggets that stick in your head.  Or as I explained to the students, "Things that make you go 'huh?'"

image courtesy of Morguefile

Like finding seeds in nature, finding story seeds can be hard work. It's not so much a matter of concentration, but of awareness..  "Don't think too hard," I tell my students.  "Keep your Writer Brain open."  A Writer Brain uses all the senses to observe. If you think about it, most of what you think of as "observation" is what you see.  Wake up hearing, smell, touch and taste. (Be cautious with taste!)

Every writer goes through a time of story drought, where your Writer Brain becomes distracted by the minutiae of life, and eventually become dormant. That's been me for the past year. A whirlwind of family situations, caused my Writer Brain to check out as the rest of the mind skittered here and there with a thousand decisions and deadlines.

This summer, the pace slowed down. I had the luxury of focusing on my young writers and their progress. Talking about using all your senses and staying alert for six straight weeks must have imprinted on my Writer Brain.

No sooner had the Young Writers summer program finished than it seemed as if Story Seeds were cascading from the heavens. Even in the best of the staying-focused-and-alert times, Story Seeds are scarce.  Filling a page in "Seeds" notebook in a month is a huge deal. (Yes, I'm Old School; I still use a notebook.") This August, the notebook is half-filled...and there is still another week in the month!   Out of seemingly nowhere, Seeds have been falling in my lap, tapping me on my shoulder, being handed to me in the supermarket checkout along with my change. Seriously.

For example...

I was skedaddling through the "10-Items-or-Less" line at Publix, with four cups of Greek yogurt...and a hammer.  The checker (her name tag said "Rebecca") scanned the hammer. I am not a chatty person by nature, so it was out of complete silence that Rebecca hefted my new hammer, and with a gleam in her eye, said, "You know, when I was a little tyke, I wanted nothing more than a bright red tool box and hammer. And my mama and daddy got me one for my birthday."

Bzzzzap!  Writer Brain shocked to life, neurons firing rapidly. "How old were you?" asked Writer Brain, which is considerably more nosy and sociable than Mary Ann's brain.

"Two, three." Rebecca said carelessly, bagging the hammer and yogurt separately. "Guess that wouldn't happen in today's world, would it?"

Mary Ann's brain agreed that no, it probably wouldn't. I had a quick mental image of my own daughter at two, armed with a hammer.  Writer's Brain leaped into action to quash the silliness. Writer's Brain hurled down the words, "Becky's Toolbox." I scribbled that down on the back of the receipt as soon as I was out the sliding doors. (I know, I know..where was my notebook?) Unlike a lot seeds that seem interesting, but will need germination time, this one had sprung roots and was pushing through the dirt by the time I hit my driveway.

image courtesy of Morguefile

The wealth of ideas grew and multiplied. Family stories from my dad, an anecdote on Facebook, a surprise cache of Kodachrome taken by parents early in their marriage...all of these things have given my Writer's Brain more than enough to process, mull and squirrel away for future use.

My antennae are up, my ear cocked, nose ready.  Don't stand within my energy field, or you will wind up in my next story! Let those Story Seeds rain down on me.


Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

P.S. Don’t forget to join the fun! Enter (HERE)  to win an autographed copy of Amy Cattapan's middle-grade mystery Seven Riddles to Nowhere (Vinspire Publishing). The giveaway is open to U.S. residents only and ends August 31. That happens to also be the day of Amy’s Facebook Launch Party, where you can win lots of other great prizes, including a copy of Carmela's own book, Rosa, Sola.

Gathering Story Seeds

Summertime.  Iced-tea-sipping, rock-skipping, ice-cream-dripping summertime, when everything and everyone moves at half speed. The leisurely pace allows time to notice lacy tree shadows on a bright green lawn.  To inhale the perfume of fresh-cut grass (smells like watermelon to me.)  Find a shady spot to do a little people watching.

Summer is a time to slow down and observe.

Summer also means the Young Writer's Camps I conduct in June and July. If there is one thing I hope my students take away from their week with me, it's the ability to observe.

"I don't know what to write about," kids complain. I understand.  When I was their age, I thought the Story Fairy delivered characters and plot to "Real Writers" (the published ones) in a neat package. I wrote for thirty years before I realized stories come in dribs and drabs...a bit from here, a bit from there, a sort of mental chemistry I can't explain.

I tell my students that like any living thing, stories come from seeds.  Seeds that the writer has to gather and store (preferably in a notebook.)

What is a story seed? they ask.

Anything you see or hear that makes you go "Hunh?  That makes you ask "What is that? What happened?  Why?"

Discovering a "fairy house" on camp property. How did it get there?

Observing at the park.

My favorite example is the clown I once saw at an Atlanta bus stop.  In the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, a clown in full makeup and costume (clown shoes included!) stood waiting for the bus.  He carried a Macy's shopping bag.  Where was the clown going? Why was he taking the bus?  What was in the Macy's bag?

Another of my favorite observation activities is eavesdropping on total strangers. The odd random comment can rev my imagination like nothing else.

Example: Two teenage girls in a jewelry store.  Salesclerk: "May I help you?"

Girl One:  "Yeah, we're buying a birthday present for a friend."

Girl Two.  "Yeah, but we don't like her very much.  You got something cheap?"

My campers have a daily "homework" assignment: write down five things that make you go "Hunh?" I give each student five index cards. They write one observation per card.  I collect the cards, shuffle through them, then pick the most evocative to share with the group. This weeds out the silly/potentially inappropriate items, and allows the shyest group members to contribute to the discussion.

I don't have to ask for feedback.  Even the quietest group will burst into spontaneous comment, brainstorming the myriad of ways they would use those things in a story. I love watching them add detail and action, building and building until someone shouts, "I've got it!" and starts scratching away in their notebook.  A story is born.

No amount of "explaining" how stories come from the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life illustrates this concept better than young writers discovering this for themselves.

Brainstorming!

 The camps are over for this summer. My souvenir of those five fun-filled weeks is a notebook of my own observations.  Some of those seeds are already germinating. Some of them are tucked away, literary acorns for a cold, winter day when the brain is dull and the computer screen blank.

The poet Robert Herrick was not talking about harvesting story ideas when he wrote"gather ye rosebuds while ye may," but let's make it our summer slogan.  Gather ye story seeds? Why not?

It's summertime.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

Wednesday Writing Workout: Drawing Inspiration from poet Amy Ludwig VanDerwater

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Howdy, Campers!

Lucky you!  It's time for another...

Today's WWW comes from Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, whose debut poetry collection, Forest Has A Song illustrated by Robbin Gourley, was just published by Clarion.  I talked about it in my April 5th post and included one of the poems.

Amy calls her project for Poetry Month 2013 "Drawing Into Poems" and explains it this way:

Each day of this month, I will slow myself down, look closely at something, draw it, and take notes around my drawing. I'll photograph and share the drawing and notes here each day. From time-to-time, at least on Fridays, I'll share a poem inspired by my drawings and notes. The purpose of this project is to help me see more clearly and to help me linger on images.  My goal is not to become a great artist, but rather to become more in tune with my sight, more deeply connected with the world, more slow, more thoughtful.

Here is her first sketch and accompanying notes:

drawing (c) 2013 Amy Ludwig VanDerwater.  All rights reserved.

Isn't this cool?  I'll bet you're salivating to begin your own drawing now, right?  Right!

So, Campers, Be Amy. 
Slow down. 
Go outside or look around the room. 
Find an object. 
Settle. 
Breathe.
Sketch.

This process may or may not trigger a poem or a story...try it and see.  Stay in the process, don't worry about the product.

Ready?  Begin.

Let us know what you discover. 

posted by April Halprin Wayland with a little bit of mischief

Priming the Writing Pump

    As long as I have lived in Georgia, (eleven years now), the state has suffered from drought. I don't remember what a green lawn looks like.  My yard (and everyone else's) has turned cornflake brown, with lots of bald spots. Lake levels have dropped until people with "lakefront homes" now have "mud front homes." Fourth of July often includes a ban on fireworks.  Even sparklers feel hazardous when everything around you has turned to kindling.

    The writing life has it's dry spells, too.  We all have them, even though we don't like to admit it.  After all, we are writers. This is what we do.We are supposed to be endless founts of creativity. We are "supposed" to write every day. When we don't, we feel guilty. OK, I feel guilty.  For me, not writing is in the same league with not working out and eating junk food.  A few days of not writing and I come down with a bad case of brain fog.

    My first experience with a dry writing well came at the end of my MFA program at Vermont College. After two years and four drafts,  I thought I had finished Yankee Girl. (Wrong. I had another two years and three drafts to go.) Feeling very pleased with myself I jumped right into a new novel.  I had a setting and some characters so I thought I was good to go.  I wrote the first couple of chapters and sent them off to my faculty mentor, Randy Powell for critique.

   Randy made his usual cogent comments on the writing, but ended his last letter with a comment I thought odd at the time. Sometimes, after a big project like Yankee Girl, he wrote, it's good to let the creative well refill. What was he talking about?

   A year and another "finished" novel later, I figured out what he meant.  I had three hundred pages of writing; I didn't have three hundred pages of a novel.  I'd pushed myself to write a novel, when I really didn't have a novel in me at the time.  Sigh. Fortunately, by then I was working with an editor on yet another revision of Yankee Girl. From those three hundred pages (which are still lurking in  my hard drive) I learned to let a story simmer on a back burner awhile. Writing Yankee Girl drained me, emotionally and creatively. I should have given myself some time off. I should have let my well refill, as Randy had suggested.

    However, time off can turn into goofing off.  You can't just sit around waiting for rain to refill your well.  The trick is to keep writing, keep priming the pump until you get your mojo back.

    I should know. I am halfway through my current work-in-progress.  For a variety of reasons, I am too creatively pooped out to do the story justice, right now.  So what am I doing?

   Writing this blog, for one thing. Knowing that I will be talking to you all every other Monday has kept me going.  I am also lucky enough to have a series of Young Writer's Workshops lined up for this school year.  Working with students always energizes me.

   But what if you don't write a blog or have a continuous supply of workshops and school visits to keep you sharp?   What if you don't have the time or energy to journal for even fifteen minutes?

   Writer's Workout I try to find at least three things every day that I want to write in my journal. Three things that make me stop and think, or that bring back specific memories. If I am not writing, at least I'm keeping my observation skills sharp.  At the same time, I am adding "water" to the well. Priming the pump. (I promise that is the last time I will use that expression in this post!)

     Here are some of random entries in the "three things" section of my journal:

     Adult in a clown suit and full make-up, waiting for a city bus at eight in the morning

    A butterfly garden

    Sisters nine months apart who quarrel constantly

    "Take the Long Way Home" by Supertramp

     Canine siblings

     What is it like to be an Olympic athlete at the closing ceremony?

     All of these things triggered my curiosity.  Will I remember them if I don't jot them down in my journal?  Of course not.  Do I have time to write a full journal entry about them? No.  But making myself observe three things a day, keeps my writer's sensory circuits open. It's the writer's equivalent of taking a ten minute walk in place of a full work out.  This daily exercise keeps me from drying up and giving up. I will continue to write down my "three things a day."  Eventually I will discover that drop by drop, my well has refilled.

   Here's to ending the drought!

   Don't forget about our current Mystery Guest Teaching Author Book Giveaway

   Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

   

The Five Minute Journal

       I've kept diaries/journals since third grade.  Decades of journaling has left me with more notebooks and journals than I can count.  As a third grader, I figured out writers have to practice, like I had to practice piano. Unlike piano practice, which felt like an hour chained to the piano bench, writing practice was nothing but fun.  I wrote morning, noon and night, when I wasn't doing other things like oh, say, going to school, or later, going to work.
     I got married.  I kept journaling. I worked two jobs. I wrote during lunch and work breaks. Going a day without writing was like forgetting to brush your teeth. The world didn't end, but you had this feeling that something wasn't quite right.
     Then I had a baby, and my world did cartwheels. Now I had a baby, two jobs and a husband who traveled. A lot.  I was tired. A lot. I had read A Writer's Way.  Julia Cameron's voice whispered in my ear
You're not journaling. Writers journal.  Oh great. In addition to all the other things I fretted about, I coud add the voice of a woman I'd never met, nagging me to write.
      I wanted to write. But now, even when I had a spare ten minutes, the words didn't come. My words were like stale bread; dry, tasteless, crumbling. No wait. Make that  crummy. See, said my imaginary Julia, what happens if you don't journal.
      But I couldn't do everything.  If I only had an hour a day to write, I didn't want to spend it writing "Morning Pages." But I couldn't just sit down and write without some sort of warm-up.  And without my journal I was finding it hard to generate new ideas, stay enthused about writing. I was a Writing Burnout, and I hadn't sold a single sentence.  That was just sad.
      When I began working with young writers, we discovered we had a mutual problem;  journals. Me, because I had no time. The students were "victims" of a well-intentioned local curriculum that requires ten minutes of journaling first thing every morning, second through eighth grades. My students blanched at just the word journal.
      So we stopped journaling.  Now we observe and report.
     We keep a large notebook, which is our log, but we carry with us a pocket size notebook for reporting.  We have a standing assignment. Each day, my students and I record these three things.
       1. Something that makes you stop and go "Hunh?  I wonder what's up with that?"
       2.  An overheard piece of conversation that catches your ear. Yes, I encourage eavesdropping, but only in public places.
       3. Something that makes a strong sensory impression.
       That's it.  They aren't supposed to do anything with it. They don't draw story webs or brainstorms ten ideas they write about. Just the facts ma'am.
        Here are some examples of my students observations: a bright yellow Porsche parked in the driveway of a small shabby house with an unkempt yard.  A person (sex undetermined) in full clownsuit mode---red wig, floppy shoes and all---waiting at bus stop in the middle of a weekday afternoon. An unused baby swimming pool, now swarming with tadpoles.
      Overheard conversation include such memorable quotes as "Hey, you wanna piece of me?" "I am not leaving this bathroom until I find some mascara." "Peas do not belong in ears."
      Strong sensory impressions ranged from "the pain of having your braces adjusted" to "our neighbors' noisy parties" to "the taste of Grandma's Pizza Potpie.
      At the beginning of each session, I ask if anyone would like to share their observations. I never insist that someone share, but after hearing their friends observations, nearly everyone wants to share.

      Sometimes, the image is so thought-provoking that the group will spontaneously brainstorm on their own. If it happens, cool. If it doesn't, see the five exercises below.

                                                                    Writing Workout

  1.  Have the student choose one of their observations for a five-minute free write.

   2. Using one of the observations, the student will write about it, using all five senses in the description.

   3.  Have the students choose one of their five senses. and write using only that sense. They are not allowed to choose sight as their sense.

   4.  The students write from their observations, this time using all the senses except sight.

   5. Ninety-nine per cent of the time students write first person personal narratives. It's easier (I do it, too!)  Assign each student a particular character (the snob, the mom, the little sister, etc) and have them write the piece again, this time from the point of view of their new character. They can still write in first person, but now they are writing as mom, or an orthodontist, or an older brother.

     After each exercise, the students are then encouraged to share. When sharing generates enthusiasm resembling a pep rally. ("Hey why don't do you this?" "What if..." "And then he could..."), it's time to turn the hounds loose.

     Typically, I only need to use one or two of these exercises before students leap from straight description, to a story or a poem.

     My students come to a session, notebooks in hand, dying to "share."  Little do they know that "share time" is a spring board to writing in their logs." I call it "expanding your observation."You could also call it journaling.  I don't.

    This process has also worked for me, the writer. Jotting down a couple of things to expand on later takes the pressure (and guilt) away.  Julia Cameron is where she should be; between the covers of her books, and not in my head.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman