Pausing to See the View from Here

  • Pausing to See the View from Here

    Photo by Claudia Walen Larson

    Guest Blogger Rhonda Gerhard writes:

    Anniversaries are a time of reflection, whether it be for a celebration, like a wedding, or the loss of a loved one.

    We are now marking the anniversary of shutdown due to COVID.

    As we reflect back on this year, we can observe where we, both personally and as a people, are now, in this moment.

    Like many, I have observed myself navigate this past year on automatic pilot, at times not checking in, just marching ahead. Just marching is our need for survival.

    March is now here and time to reflect upon marching, right?

    With the availability now of the vaccine, and the possibilities for change ahead, we can pause. Take a deep breath and ask, “What is my deepest heartfelt prayer for myself at this time, right now?”

    “What do I really need for myself and how might I hold my life with compassion and awareness in this moment?”

    To honor our struggles and fortitude this past year, I am offering free weekly drop-in meditations from 4-4:50 (PST) on Wednesdays through March.

    This type of meditation is usually done in a lying down position, and is called Yoga Nidra. Nidra means sleep, and although we are not sleeping and dreaming, one goes into a deep state of relaxation in which brain waves slow down. This deep dive into our being produces a state of relaxation that many say feels like one has had a very refreshing nap. While in this deep state, we observe and inquire into the various layers of ourselves: physical, energetic, feelings and thoughts, and opening to a sense of peace and well-being.

    For more information and the zoom link, please contact Rhonda Gerhard to sign up through her email: helpmerhondanow@sbcglobal.net

    Rhonda Gerhard is a Certified Yoga Teacher, Licensed MFT psychotherapist, writer, and photographer. Since 1994 she has enjoyed guiding and teaching meditation, yoga and mindfulness practices and workshops with groups and individuals throughout the Bay Area. Her passion for Buddhist psychology and non-dualism has led her to study with several teachers including Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Daniel Siegel, M.D., the works of Adyashanti and many more.

    An iRest®/Yoga Nidra teacher, she has guided groups including the “At Home Within” program at COTS (Committee on the Shelterless) in Petaluma, Kaiser Permanente, Sonoma State University, and Integrative Yoga teacher training programs.

    She may also be seen playing tamboura accompanying sitar or sarode performances alongside her husband, Mark Gangadhar Gerhard, tabla musician.

    Blending psychology, meditation, mindfulness, and asana practice, Rhonda integrates mind, body, and spirit in her work with others.

    Marlene C

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  • Why not just get busy and write?

    I’ve been reading back issues of Tiny Lights and found this gem by Suzanne Byerley, published December 2000. Even though this was written twenty years ago, it’s a perfect piece to share with you in these days of restlessness, as we wade through difficult times to find inspiration and energy to write.—Marlene Cullen

    “Steps” by Suzanne Byerley.

    I find myself restless. I prowl about the house in my slippers making sure the cats are behaving themselves, sorely tempted to turn on CNN and see if Florida has picked the next president yet. Maybe I’ll lay out a game of solitaire or fumble through that little Bach prelude my daughter mastered when she was six. What is this wild drive to diversion? Why not just sit down and get at what makes me happy? Why not just get busy and write?

    Because the steps to the desk are like slogging bootless through the deepest muds of winter. It is only after the first sentence has made its way through the synapses, the words clicking into place like pictures in a one-armed bandit, that I can begin again.

    It’s always more daunting when life intervenes, as it has lately, when loss comes crashing in. I’m not sure how to climb up from long silence to sight and voice again. Was I ever a writer? I must once have known how to polish a paragraph. I have vague memories of once or twice finding just the right word. Maybe rereading the last poem or story somebody praised will bolster my confidence sufficiently, but today when I look, it seems obvious some alien being wrote those words, not me.

    Still, this is the day I’ve promised myself was mine, so I stumble to the bookshelf to search out some shred of insight. “The eye must be alert; must see the influence of one thing on another and bring all things into relation,” says Robert Henri in The Art Spirit. As if my eye could ever do that. “The background as put in in the beginning may have been excellent, but the work that has gone on I front of it may demand its total reconstruction.”

    That hits home, I feel like so much has gone on that I’m in need of total reconstruction. I think of the Henri paintings I saw last month at the tiny American Impressionist Museum in New Britain, Connecticut, when I sneaked a week away from teaching to visit my daughter, Tanya, and grandson, Andrew, and smell the leaves of a real autumn. I have always thought Henri’s book one of the best for artistic inspiration of any kind, and it was pure pleasure to look on his few paintings there in an old mansion with the October sun streaming through the window. How many times had he gone back to get a painting just right? Had he said to himself, “I like what’s in front but the background’s all wrong,” as I have often said of my own emerging story, “too much detail” or “not enough glue?”

    I slip Henri back into his place on the shelf and pick up the framed snapshot of my mother, my father, my brother, and me. I am three, smiling on the knee of my father, my legs crossed. I wear the wine-colored beret my grandmother has crocheted with a row of white angora around the edge. I remember the softness of the angora, the scratchiness of the wine-colored wool. On my feet are sandals, almost hidden in shadow.

    And I think of the sandals I took with me from my mother’s house last year when she died. I had left my shoes in a motel by accident. A bit reluctantly, I picked up Mom’s from the floor of the closet I was emptying and put them on. I wore the sandals far into last winter, soothed by the contours of my mother’s feet cushioning my own. In this snapshot, though, her hair is black and thick and she is smiling, I notice, the same smile I thought I caught on the face of my grandson last month. My grandson, just the age I was in this photo, sitting on my father’s knee, sandals on my feet.

    I just told my students yesterday to contemplate shoes. Shoes of theirs or of someone they knew. A baby’s sneaker or a grandfather’s slipper. A shoe tossed a few feet from a body buried in an earthquake or twisted on a village road in Israel. An old man I know wears one shoe with a four-inch sole to try to even the discrepancy in the length of his legs. He walks with a great, rolling gait, his eyes full of secrets.

    How much for granted we take our locomotion, our ability to stroll or skip or dance through life. Andrew and I danced last month for the first time, wildly, in the preschool parking lot strewn with oak leaves. When my father broke his hip a year before he died he could not longer walk, let alone dance, but back in the Roaring Twenties when he was still in his teens he had been a dance instructor, and he began my lessons early. His shoes were always shined. When I close my eyes I can see the gleam and flash as he laughed at my bouncing and taught me a new step. As I stand here, I can hear the sweet and rhythmic “shuf, shuf, shuf” they made gliding across the room. I am shaken by the sound. And I see beyond the past to the joy of Andrew, so thrilled with music, so filled with movement that he can’t stand still.

    I put the snapshot back on the shelf, go into my closet and put on my mother’s sandals, marveling at the touch of them, warm as her hand. Then I come back to my study and turn to the desk, ready now to put my fingers to the keys. How do I begin again? With feeling. With love, or joy, or pain. Out of strong emotion the words begin to flow. Don’t interfere once they start. Don’t bring too much brain power to bear on them. Use that great rush which comes from sadness or surprise from memory, from what is real. That rush which clears our eyes just long enough to glimpse the connection between past and present, between longing and desire. All of us have experienced it. We writers lie in wait for it, not always patiently, not always willingly, never with the easy confidence that it will come again, always grateful when it does.

    “There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual,” Henri reminds me. “Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall those visions by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented.” Yes, that’s why we write, to capture those moments. And it’s in that first rush of feeling that the capturing is done.

    I’ll interfere with the word order later. I’ll clean up the background later. There is always plenty of time for rewrite, for perfecting. But not just now. Just now, I’ve conquered that aimless restlessness, taken those first trusting steps and begun again.

    Originally published in Vol. 6 No. 2 of Tiny Lights, A Journal of Personal Essay, Susan Bono, Editor-in-Chief.

    Suzanne Byerley (1937-2013)

    M. Suzanne Hartman-Byerley, beloved writing teacher, accomplished writer and unflappable co-director of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, influenced most of the writers living on the North Coast today. Recipient of a Hopwood Award and a Fulbright scholarship, her short stories and poems were published in magazines such as Woman’s Day, Family Circle and the Kansas Quarterly.


    After Suzanne and husband, Andrew, moved to the coast in l987 to run the Mendocino Gift Company, she taught writing at the Redwood Coast Senior Center and wrote for Coast and Valley and other publications. In 1996, she became co-director of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and an adjunct professor at College of the Redwoods. She founded the “Good Words” reading series and helped revive the Todd Point Review. When she and Andy moved back to Ohio in 2004, she continued to inspire writers at the Conneaut Community Center for the Arts and the Andover Public Library.

    Marlene C

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  • Calm Your Brain

    Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray has this to say:

    With anxiety and fear running high in the world these days, I wanted to share how we can make friends with these feelings and use them to our advantage. Anxiety and fear can prevent us from being creative or living a life we love. To live and create fully, we be must be willing again and again to step out of our old comfortable life and into unknown territory. This always feels scary.

    Many years ago I read the self-help book Feel the Fear, And Do It Anyway which presents the premise that just because we feel a sense of fear about a project or moving in a new direction in our lives doesn’t mean we are supposed to stop ourselves from proceeding.

    More recently I’ve been fine-tuning my understanding of what this really means and feels like, how to best use it in my life and creative work, and how it fits the idea of following my internal guidance of my intuition and heart to bring my soul and creative gifts into the world. Any time I stretch in a new direction in my writing or my personal and professional life I have to step out of my comfort zone which gives rise to a feeling of anxiety.

    I’ve found it’s important to learn to distinguish between the kind of anxiety that represents our bodily intuition signaling a real threat (like don’t walk down that dark alley or that new relationship really isn’t good for you or that’s really not the best art project for you to pursue) versus the kind of anxiety we feel when we step out of our comfort zone in a way that stretches our capacities, capabilities and sense of self. The anxiety that is genuinely trying to warn us off feels heavy with fear whereas the anxiety that simply marks stepping out of our comfort zone has a sense of exhilaration to it.

    When I’m at my desk writing and I start to feel a lot of resistance, if I make myself sit in the chair and keep writing, (even when I desperately want to get up and make phone calls or clean the refrigerator), I find that I will usually move through the anxiety into what I really want to say and find myself very excited by the work that results. The same is true every time I do anything new in my life that feels like a stretch. I feel nervous and excited whenever I push past the feeling of fear and take action to make the new idea or vision happen.

    When you are trying to decide what the fear or anxiety is trying to tell you, just take some deep breaths and get clear on the exact quality of the feeling in your body: whether you feel contracted or expanded by the thought of what you desire. If you feel expanded then you need to “feel the fear” that comes with it and begin to take action however small toward achieving your desire. Also new neuroscience shows that the simple act of naming or labeling a negative emotion like fear calms the brain which makes it easier to get clear on what to do.

    Wishing you many blessings and creative flow, Suzanne

    Check out Suzanne’s coaching opportunities:

    Creativity Coaching, Creative Life Coaching, Writing Process Coaching & EFT Sessions

    EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques)

    CREATIVE LIFE COACHING

    CREATIVITY COACHING

    Creativity Goes Wild Blog

    Marlene C

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  • Details Add Zing

    Guest Blogger Lisa Alpine shares tips to spice up your writing.

    I encourage you to infuse your writing with detailed imagery, passionate feeling, poetic depth and evocative sensual description. Here are some writing suggestions I use when teaching Spice Up Your Writing at workshops globally.

    These writing tips will show you how to weave poetic description into your prose; cultivate the five senses in describing a place or experience; and develop emotional imagery.

    1: Pick a scene from an event in your life that you know has a heart or seed of a story only you can write. Now blurt and spew! Messy is okay. You can clean it up later. Sometimes graceful, sometimes awkward, sometimes downright ugly. Tell the story. Understand what is really going on by exploring and uncovering the deeper currents of the river of life.

    2: Set the scene. Describe the weather, doors & windows, environment, horizon. God is in the details. What type of tree? What color the sea? Name everything.

    3: Sensual awakening using all six senses: smell, sight, taste, sound, touch, & intuition. Don’t ignore the 6th sense –even if it doesn’t make sense—it can lead into the heart of what is really going on.

    (See Note from Marlene for links to posts about using the sixth sense and intuition for writing inspiration.)

    How do you write about sensual interaction in a real way? It could describe the touch of a baby’s cheek against yours; or the physical sensation of your lover’s weight on you. It might be the reaction to the smell on a bus. By the way—smell is the hardest sense to describe accurately—yet the most evocative.

    4: Building tension. Like thunder in the distance, good suspense keeps us hanging on with tension and release, pain and epiphany. Not just emotional content, but placement and description of objects and sensations, even weather descriptions can lead into the deeper places by scene setting and nuance.

    A nerve is exposed and it hurts, it zings with sensation—it calls attention to it. Listen to these electrical zings. The story is there in the current lines that jolt you awake.

    5: Add emotional qualities. What is interesting about the word feeling is that it covers both the sensual and tactile experiences along with the gamut of emotions.

    6: Dig beyond generic descriptions so that your writing comes uniquely alive for readers and immerses them in the story.

    Give yourself an hour to work a scene with these suggestions and see if it opens up your writing and captures the essence of what flows underneath the obvious so that your story pops and zings, cries and sings.

    Lisa Alpine is a renowned dance teacher, travel writer, and author of Dance Life: Movin’ & Groovin’ Around the Globe, Wild Life: Travel Adventures of a Worldly Woman and Exotic Life: Travel Tales of an Adventurous Woman.

    Her award-winning, dynamically delicious stories grace the pages of many anthologies, including Travelers’ Tales Best Travel Writing.

    When not wrestling with words, exploring the ecstatic realms of dance, swimming with sea creatures, or waiting for a flight, Lisa divides her time between Mill Valley, California and the Big Island of Hawai’i, where Pele’s lava licks at the edges of her writing retreat.

    Note from Marlene:

    The Sixth Sense.

    Trust Your Intuition for Creative Writing

    Marlene C

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  • Innovative Technique for Creative Writing

    Today’s guest blogger, Mary Mackey, is a gem in a treasure chest filled with innovative inspiration for writers.

    Mary shares her unique perspective on accessing creative writing.

    Your unconscious is packed with ideas, metaphors, visions, plots, dreams, colors, characters, emotions—in short, everything you need to write a great visionary novel. But how do you get to it? How do you step out of the social agreement we call “reality,” and dip into this incredibly rich resource?

    You could go to sleep and try to mine your dreams, but even if you dreamed an entire novel, the moment you woke up, you would forget most of it within seconds, because you hadn’t processed the ideas into your long-term memory. Worse yet, when you dream, you are not in control, so you can’t do specific things like talk to one of your characters or work out a specific plot problem. Granted, some people manage lucid dreaming, but lucid dreaming is not a practical writing technique for a number of reasons. For example, you cannot always go to sleep when you need to.

    Many years ago, I started looking for a technique that would allow me to be asleep and awake at the same time. What I came up with, after much trial and error, was a form of creative trance that allows me to delve into my unconscious whenever I want to, get the material I need for my poems and novels, bring that material up to my waking reality, remember it, and write it down.

    Developing this technique wasn’t easy. Besides relying on my own imagination, I drew on many sources such as self-hypnosis, theta cycle sessions, neurophysiology, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and the Surrealist technique of Automatic Writing.  As you might expect, I had many failures, but in the end I came up with a deceptively simple technique, which has proved extremely effective. Since I taught myself how to use creative trance, I have written many novels, collections of poetry, and screenplays. Better yet, I have avoided writers’ block.

    I’ve used my creative trance technique weekly, sometimes daily, for many years. As with all things that are visionary and out of the range of ordinary consciousness,  it can’t be completely described in words, only experienced. So, since I cannot sit down with you and personally guide you through the process step by step, I am going to give you a chance to get a feel for it by taking you into the heart of  my creative process as I worked on my most recent novel, The Village of Bones.

    The Village of Bones is Visionary Fiction, but even in my novels which are not visionary (such as my bestseller A Grand Passion, the story of three generations of women involved in ballet), I created most of the original storyline in a voluntarily induced creative trance.

    Unlike A Grand Passion, The Village of Bones presented a special problem. On one hand, it was meticulously researched historical fiction firmly based on archaeological evidence, yet at the same time, it was set in Prehistoric Europe in Goddess-worshiping cultures that were filled with myths, visions, and prophecies.

    With this contradiction in mind, I put my phone in Airplane Mode, sat down in a comfortable chair, picked up a pen (I find computers get in the way), opened my notebook, closed my eyes, took several deep breaths, and counted backwards to ten, imagining as I did so that I was walking down a flight of stairs. By the time I got to the bottom, I was in a light trance. The word “light” is important. I was neither awake nor asleep. Instead, I was poised on the threshold between my conscious mind and my unconscious mind, ready to move in either direction. 

    On this particular day, I had some work planned. Sabalah, my main character, was in big trouble. She was caught in a storm, her boat had turned over, and she was drowning. As she struggled to stay afloat, she going to have a vision of the Sea Goddess that might or might not be a hallucination. There were no surviving statues of this particular Neolithic Sea Goddesses as far as I knew, so my task for this afternoon was to envision the Sea Goddess so I could describe her.

    I started with the Goddess’ name which I had created the previous day: “Amonah, Amonah, Amonah,” I silently chanted. “Come to me.. A vague, shadowy form began to materialize behind my eyelids. 

    Before I go on, I want to be clear about what was happening. As I thought the word Amonah, I didn’t believe I was conjuring up a real spirit, channeling a mystical force, or having a religious experience. I believed, and still believe, that I was simply unlocking the resources of my own consciousness and my own imagination using the very practical tool of creative trance. I don’t claim to know where these visions come from, but I am convinced that under the right conditions, anyone can have them.

    The form grew brighter and more distinct. I saw a woman walking toward me across the waves. Walking on water. Interesting. Since question/answer is the key to this technique, I settled down and began to ask myself questions.

    “What color is her hair?” I asked myself. “Black, brown, blonde?” Suddenly the word “seaweed” came into my mind. Instantly, the woman’s hair turned green.

    “What kind of jewelry is she wearing? Diamonds, topaz, garnets?” No, she’s wearing pearls, and something else, something reddish, something like . . . coral!

    “What color are her eyes?” For a moment her eyes shifted back and forth between brown and green. Then, suddenly they glowed. “Skin color?” All colors. No colors. She’s a Goddess. She is all of us.

    “What’s she wearing?” Not skinny jeans for sure. (Odd thoughts sometimes interrupt the flow of the trance). Long dress. Yes. She’s wearing a long dress. Wave-like. Blue of course like the sea.

    “What does she smell like? Wind, salt, kelp?” Like flowers.  She smells like flowers. “What kind of flowers?” Roses.

     “How much does she weigh?” She weighs nothing. She’s a spirit.

    For a long time, I sat there asking specific questions and waiting for answers most of which came in the form of wordless images. For some reason, I never could figure out how tall She was. My unconscious wouldn’t give that one up. But by now the Sea Goddess Amonah looked real to me. I could see Her distinctly right down to the coral rings on Her toes.

    Slowly I began to count backwards from ten to one, moving out of the trance as I climbed back up the stairs toward waking consciousness. On every step, I paused and made myself visualize Amonah again, and I commanded myself: “Remember. Remember.”

    This final command to “remember,” is perhaps the most important part of a creative trance. If I couldn’t carry a complete image of Amonah back into the waking world, I’d have to start all over again.

    When I got to ten, I opened my eyes just wide enough to see my notebook. Grabbing my pen before the last bits of trance faded away, I quickly wrote everything down paying no attention to grammar, spelling, or logic. I even wrote down the silly bit about the skinny jeans.

    The result was not something I could use immediately. What you get out of your own unconscious is raw material. After creativity comes craft. Over the course of the next year, I polished this description of Amonah. I worked wide-awake, using all the techniques of novel-writing that I had learned over the years. I read the passage out loud over and over again. Searched for better words. Took out commas and put them in again. Here is the result:

    A woman emerged from the wall of crashing waves and walked across the sea toward Sabalah. Sabalah abruptly stopped crying and stared at the woman, stunned. This was impossible! . . .The woman kept walking, stepping over the waves as if they were furrows in a field of wheat. Her flowing dress was blue as a summer sea; her hair long and green, twined with seaweed and pearls. Her skin was dark and light at the same time, her eyes so bright, they glowed like the last flash of the sun when it falls into the sea at midsummer. . .  A sweet scent suddenly filled the air like the perfume of roses blown across water.

    “Don’t be afraid,” the woman said. “I am Amonah, Goddess of the Sea,” and water is my path. I can walk above or beneath it as I wish.

    Sitting down beside Sabalah, Amonah let Her feet dangle in the water. They were bare except for toe rings of rose-colored coral. She must have weighed nothing, because the end of the mast didn’t tilt the way it would have it a flesh-and-blood human being had sat there.

     The Village of Bones was formed from scores of similar visions, as were all the poems I wrote that year, and even part of one of the screenplays which I co-wrote with director Renée de Palma.

    Using creative trance is a gentle, pleasant way to create the raw materials for a work of fiction. It is not like meditation because your goal is not transcendence. It is not like many forms of self-hypnosis because you are not trying to lose weight, stop smoking, or change your behavior in any way. It is not like prayer, because you are not seeking a closer relationship with God. Creative trance is a tool, a key if you will, that lets you unlock the riches you already have stored in your own unconscious.

    Yet its power should not be underestimated. So let me leave you with a warning: If you decide to go deeply into your own unconscious, you have to be ready to deal with what you find there. Creative trance is not therapy. If you are upset, unhappy, depressed, or anxious, wait until you have a calm mind and specific writing goals and can set firm limits on what you will accept from your unconscious.  

    When you are in a creative trance, you should always be in control. If your Goddess appears before you with a hairdo made of snakes, you should be able to instantly turn those vipers into cobwebs and seaweed. Nothing you experience should harm you, scare you, or make you uncomfortable for more than a few seconds. A creative trance should be enjoyable from start to finish.

    In The Village of Bones, the Goddess Earth gives Her people six commandments. The First Commandment is: “Live together in love and harmony.” The Sixth is: “Enjoy yourselves, for your joy is pleasing to Her.”

    Resources:

    Syllabi for courses in Women’s Visionary Fiction, Women’s Visionary Poetry, and Women’s Visionary Film can be found on Mary Mackey’s Educators Page.

    Mary Mackey, Ph.D. is a New York Time best-selling author who writes novels, poetry, and film scripts. A Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Sacramento, she is the author of fourteen novels and eight collections of poetry including The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, winner of the 2019 Erich Hoffer Award for Best Book Published by a Small Press and a 2018 Women’s Spirituality Book Award; and  Sugar Zone, winner of the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award.

    Garrison Keillor featured her poetry four times on The Writer’s Almanac. Her novels have made The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller Lists and been translated into twelve languages.

    Her visionary novel The Village of Bones: Sabalah’s Tale is a prequel to the three novels in her best-selling  Earthsong Series (The Year the Horses Came, The Horses at the Gate, and The Fires of Spring).

    Mary welcomes your questions and comments at www.marymackey.com  where, you can sample her work, read her interview series People Who Make Books Happen, learn more tricks for avoiding Writers Block, and sign up to get the latest news about her fiction and poetry.

    Mary’s literary papers are archived at the Sophia Smith Special Collections Library at Smith College in Northampton, MA.

    Note from Marlene: The creative trance that Mary describes might also be accessible with meditation. Katie Holmes, data scientist & chief editor for OutwitTrade has compiled stories on the benefits of meditation.

    Marlene C

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  • History Through The Lens of The Teller

    Guest Blogger, Bev Scott, has an interesting perspective on bias of our history. She brings up provocative questions.

    The following is based on a session Bev attended at the Historical Novel Society Conference in June 2017 by James J. Cotter, titled “The Lone Ranger was Black: Reintegrating Minority Viewpoints into Historical Fiction.”

    “The title intrigued me,” wrote Bev. “Was the Lone Ranger modeled after Bass Reeves, the first black U.S. deputy marshal who worked thirty-two years in the Arkansas and Oklahoma territories in the late 1800’s?  He may have been.”

    History Is Biased

    The conference session addressed the issue of bias in our history. That bias impacts authors of historical fiction. Today we no longer view history as “the truth.” Rather, history is a story told through the lens of the teller. Did you love the Lone Ranger when you were growing up? I did. Audiences assumed he was a courageous (and white) lawman.  That’s how the story was told.

    Readers of historical fiction express their fondness for this genre because they like a particular historical period. Plus, they enjoy learning from fiction set in an historical context. Readers also expect accurate history in the stories they read. So, historical fiction writers have a responsibility to the historical record. But what record?

    Finding Alternative Viewpoints

    And so arises the key question for authors of historical fiction. How do we tell stories and develop characters with lives extremely different from our own given the bias of historical sources? How do we find alternative viewpoints? And, how can we do justice to the painful experiences of non-dominant characters in our stories?

    Consider the story of Custer’s Last Stand or the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne people believed they were betrayed. The U.S. government ignored their treaty rights after gold was discovered on native lands. White Americans believed the Indians were wild, bloodthirsty and stubborn, refusing to move to the reservation. Many of us learned only the white American history version growing up.

    Bass Reeves and The Lone Ranger

    When we watched and admired the fictional Lone Ranger as children, we accepted how he was portrayed. Yet, he probably reflected the real-life story of Bass Reeves, a former slave. Reeves gained fame through his exploits and imposing stature of 6’2.” The first black lawman west of the Mississippi, he cut a striking figure on his large gray (almost white) horse. Reeves wore his trademark black hat and twin .45 Colt Peacemakers cross-draw style. Bullets never touched him, although he brought in 3000 criminals alive and 14 dead, whom he killed in self-defense. 

    Reeves earned the name “the Indomitable Marshall.” He left silver dollars behind as his calling card. Similar to the fictional Lone Ranger, Reeves developed friendships with Native Americans and learned their languages. He also used disguises to capture those he pursued. The racism in our culture probably prevented the Lone Ranger hero from being portrayed as a black lawman.

    “Who WAS that Masked Man?” Was it Bass Reeves?

    Multiple narratives combine to become a complete historical narrative. We often learn only one limited narrative part. For example, most stories about homesteaders portray them as white. They settle on the prairie, risk their lives and battle extreme conditions. Yet, in researching my historical novel, Sarah’s Secret, I discovered a little-known town in Kansas called Nicodemus. This town drew freed slaves to homestead in the surrounding area after the Civil War.

    Offering an Opposing Voice

    As writers of historical fiction, we have an obligation to readers to offer an accurate portrayal of both our characters and the historical context. Our discussion in this conference session emphasized the importance of deep knowledge and experience of the culture in which our story is set. And further, writers must recognize the historical biases of the sources we are using. This is especially important if the writer is writing in a cultural context other than her own.

    Writing historical fiction gives an opportunity to balance the bias of history by including an opposing voice of the non-dominant group in the story. Since my protagonist, Sarah was traveling north by wagon through Kansas to return to Nebraska and her family, I chose to add such voice. Thus, Sarah and her children unexpectedly encounter a black family in the middle of Kansas living near Nicodemus.

    Sarah follows a narrow path with her seriously ill daughter to find help. She discovers a welcoming family descended from former slaves. Luckily, the family shares their modest home for several days while Sarah nurses her daughter back to health. Her sons have fun with the son of the family. The plot gives an opportunity to include an opposing voice to traditional bias. Sarah tells her concerned son stories about her own and her father’s rejection of slavery. She tells of their support for the Union in the Civil War and her family’s generosity toward “Negro” families when she was a child.

    Originally posted on Bev Scott’s blog on July 11, 2017, with photos that are not included in this post.
    Bev Scott will be one of the Writers Forum‘s presenters on February 18, 2021.

    Marlene C

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  • Writer’s Block = Argh!

    Today’s Guest Blogger is Lisa Alpine.

    Originally published on her blog, Lisa Alpine, Dancing Through the World of Words, Lisa shares her thoughts about how to crawl out of the swamp of writer’s block.

    Stuck again in the swamp of writing defeat and word avoidance even though I love writing my stories. What’s up?  I’ve been a writer for 35 years. Holy moly. Can’t I just sit down and write? Why do silly menial chores seem suddenly inviting?

    But I have found, once I chain myself to the blank page and force words to be birthed, with a story in mind, I thrash but the engine thrums and starts. Those dang words begin to flow. I’m ready. I’m willing. I’m psyched. The story emerges—but only after a hell-of-a struggle.

    And I have a method:

    I make an agreement with myself that I will write for one hour with no interruption. I set a timer. I turn the phone off. I don’t check email.

    After the hour is up, I give myself the option to go outside in the garden and look at birds, bees, weeds, whatever. The important task is to move and get circulation back in my derriere.

    I allow myself 15 minutes of distraction then it is back to the chair for another hour commitment—still not checking email or voicemail. Both of those are alluring rabbit holes.

    Oh boy—another hour of diligent word-sculpting achieved! The carrot of the garden or yoga—some form of movement—is grabbed for another 15 minutes.

    The intrigue of my story—as it comes into focus on the page—draws me back. I’m over the hump and the opposite effect takes place. I need to force myself to walk away from the page(s) and keep my life rolling forward.

    Try this daily—or a few times a week. Your writer brain will hum with activity and the story will call you back to complete it.

    Give it a try and see what happens for you.

    Note from Marlene:

    Lisa Alpine will be a Writers Forum presenter, along with Kate Farrell and Mary Mackey, on February 10, talking about “Storytelling for the Armchair Traveler.”

    Please join us for this free Zoom event.

    Lisa is a contributor to Story Power. A copy of Story Power will be given away at both the February 10 and the February 18 Writers Forum events.

    Lisa Alpine is a renowned dance teacher, travel writer, and author of Dance Life: Movin’ & Groovin’ Around the Globe, Wild Life: Travel Adventures of a Worldly Woman and Exotic Life: Travel Tales of an Adventurous Woman.

    Her award-winning, dynamically delicious stories grace the pages of many anthologies, including Travelers’ Tales Best Travel Writing.

    When not wrestling with words, exploring the ecstatic realms of dance, swimming with sea creatures, or waiting for a flight, Lisa divides her time between Mill Valley, California and the Big Island of Hawai’i, where Pele’s lava licks at the edges of her writing retreat. Read her timely posts about travel, dance, writing, culture, and inspiration.

    Marlene C

  • Sankalpa

    It’s so easy to get caught up in our day-to-day busyness that we forget we have an inner spiritual core that is the basic strength for everything we do. What do you do to support this core?

    I recently learned about Sankalpa when experiencing a guided meditation class called Yoga Nidra/iRest with my friend and meditation/yoga instructor, Rhonda Gerhard.

    Guest Blogger Rhonda writes:

    Yoga Nidra is a meditation of self-inquiry. In the beginning of this practice, we ask ourselves: What is my Sankalpa (a heartfelt desire or intention) towards healing, strength, and wholeness?

    We welcome our unique Inner Resources—calling up peaceful places or protective and nurturing beings—so that we can draw on our deep inner knowing and loving-kindness. With continued practice, we build our resilience.

    Sankalpa means an intention formed by the heart and mind—a solemn vow, determination, or will.

    A Sankalpa is a way to refine the will, and to focus and harmonize mind and body. 

    Sankalpa is your heartfelt mission, said in a short phrase or sentence, clearly and concisely expressed, using a present tense “I” statement. It is said to ourselves in the present tense because it is in the now, as it is really only now all the time. This sustains your inner felt sense of purpose, meaning, and value.

    Note from Marlene: What is your Sankalpa? Can you form a Sankalpa to sustain your writing life?

    Marlene C

  • Choices

    Guest Blogger Nancy Julien Kopp wrote about choosing a path and exploring your choice. It seems like a perfect writing prompt for the start of a new year.

    Nancy wrote on her blog:

    Life is full of choices. I think often of Robert Frost’s poem that tells us of two roads diverging in a yellow wood, and the poet said he took the one less traveled by. But don’t we always wonder if this choice would be better than that choice or another one?  

    For a writing exercise today, look at the four photos. Each of them is somewhere you can walk. Two have water while the others are filled with green trees. What is your choice? Where would you prefer to walk? A, B, C or D? 

    Choose one and write a paragraph or several paragraphs about the photo you liked best. Study the photo and ask yourself a few questions. What sounds are there? What is the weather like; air temp? Are you going to meet someone? Does a person appear coming toward you? Does the weather make a distinct change? Can you smell anything? Are you happy on this walk? Or are you despondent? Do you have a destination in mind? Or are you walking aimlessly? Are you hungry? Thirsty? Barefoot or wearing shoes? 

    Think about all those questions before you begin to write. Hopefully, you’ll end up with the beginning of a story, or even a piece of flash fiction. Or a bit of memoir. There is no limit to where you can go with this exercise. 

    If you enjoyed one, try another with the same questions and see what happens. Remember that writing exercises allow you to flex your writing muscles in any way you like. Let your creativity flow.

    Original post on Writer Granny’s World by Nancy Julien Kopp.

    Nancy Julien Kopp lives in Manhattan, KS where she writes creative non-fiction, fiction for children, personal essays, articles on the craft of writing, and poetry. She has been published in 22 Chicken Soup for the Soul books, newspapers, magazines, and ezines, and several anthologies including The Write Spot: Possibilities and The Write Spot: Writing as a Path to Healing (available in both print and as an ebook at Amazon).

    Nancy was the Kansas Authors Club Prose Writer of the Year in 2013.

    Marlene C

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  • Help Your Creativity Blossom

    Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray shares why freewrites inspire writing:
    I have taught the creative writing process for more than twenty years, working in part with a technique known as “freewriting” where I encourage participants to “just let it rip”. We don’t worry about punctuation, spelling, grammar or whether it is good. We suspend the censor and let our first thoughts spill out onto the page. People new to the class are always nervous about this kind of letting go. Since I write and share my own raw writing with the group, I was rather nervous when I first started teaching the classes but found that by maintaining a safe and sacred atmosphere of unconditional acceptance for whatever wanted to come forth it really calmed the fear for everyone.

    We learn quite early to fear making mistakes. We all have a well-developed censor that confines us within the limiting parameters of being socially acceptable. Neuroscientists have identified a part of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) that is closely associated with impulse control. It keeps us from embarrassing ourselves or saying the wrong thing to our boss or spouse.

    Young children create so naturally because their censors don’t yet exist. The DLPFC is the last part of the brain to fully develop. Around 4th grade it engages and children lose interest in making art in the classroom. If we are worried about making a mistake, saying the wrong thing or doing something poorly we often end up doing nothing at all. The censor has us holding back our latent talent.

    In a study by a neuroscientist looking at brain activity in jazz musicians engaged in improvisation, research subjects showed increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with self-expression, while at the same time the DLPFC or censor appeared to deactivate. At this point there is a surge of raw material coming forth but rather than being random or chaotic it is organized or structured by the rules of the form. In the case of jazz musicians, they naturally improvised in the right key and tempo.

    I have noticed this tendency in my freewriting workshops. Students bypass the censor yet they also naturally wrote in the form that seemed to most call or appeal to them. Individuals drawn to poetry and who read a lot of poetry had the raw writing take on a poetic quality.

    The same was true with fiction, memoir or non-fiction. It’s why I always tell people that reading the kind of writing you want to do is one of the best things you can do to improve your work because when you let go and let the creativity flow, your brain then has a sense of how to organize it. When we let go, we have access to the vast storehouse of the unconscious mind.

    I really encourage creative play and practice, free from the expectation that we have to produce something, as a way to opening up to our creative gifts and talents. Learning to let go and create an atmosphere of inner permission, acceptance and allowance can really help us more fully express ourselves creatively.

    Now in the time to really let our creativity fly in our own live and the world.

    Wishing you all well. Sending you all lots of love and inspiration,
    Suzanne

    Suzanne Murray is a gifted creativity and writing coach, soul-based life coach, writer, poet, EFT practitioner and intuitive healer committed to empowering others to find the freedom to ignite their creative fire, unleash their imagination and engage their creative expression in every area of their lives.
    Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)
    Combining Western psychology with Chinese acupressure, it works to actually rewrite subconscious patterns and limiting beliefs that keep us stuck. I’ve had miraculous results and have been working with EFT in new ways that allow us to laser in on the issue and shift it at the core and change your life from the inside out. We often make significant shifts in a single session. Sessions are available by phone and Skype.

    CREATIVE LIFE COACHING Would you like to live from an expanded place of grace, ease and flow? Would you like to tap the wisdom and power of your heart and soul? We work with soul based ways to let go of limitation and gain clarity of the next steps to living a more joyful, authentic life.

    CREATIVITY COACHING
    Do you want to experience the pleasure and joy that comes from adding satisfaction and meaning and a sense of well being to your life through creative expression. I will offer practical, emotional and soulful strategies to help you fully uncover your creative gifts and support yourself in expressing them. I will provide encouragement and support in understanding of the creative process and its stages and exercises for accessing the wisdom of your imagination. I’ll help you set realistic goals and support you in achieving them. We will work with tools for coaching yourself through the issues that get in the way of your creativity including career concerns, blocks, limiting beliefs, relationship issues and the existential and spiritual questions that can arise from wanting and needing to create. 

    THE HEART OF WRITING COACHING
    Do you want to ignite your creativity and show up to your writing on a regular basis or go deeper into the process and craft? I  offer online coaching to support you and coach you through any resistance or problems along the way. I can send you daily lessons and assignments that cover important aspects of the writing process and information on craft. I hold the space of unconditional acceptance and support to nurturing your unique voice  and work on the stories that are really important to you.  

    The Heart of Writing eBook

    Jumpstart  the Process, Find Your Voice, Calm the Inner Critic and Tap the Creative Flow

    I have been working an exercise a day through your The Heart of Writing eBook. I love it! It’s like being in class again. – Tonya Osinkosky
    Now available on Amazon Kindle! http://amzn.to/1d7oe60
      or still available is a pdf download from my website
    (includes a one hour mp3 interview about writing process)
    https://www.creativitygoeswild.com/the-heart-of-writing/  

    For more detailed information on all my offerings check web site at  https://www.creativitygoeswild.com  or call Suzanne Murray at  707.360.7776  or email  creativitygoeswild@gmail.com . Also check out my Blog at  https://www.creativitygoeswild.com/blog-1/  for ideas on writing, creativity and life coaching.  Follow me on Twitter at @wildcreativity where I tweet inspirational quotes for creativity and life.

    Marlene C

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