Waterwheel Review publishes three pieces of writing each month, September through May, with accompanying companion pieces selected or solicited by the editors.
“We hope authors will take advantage of our refusal to define what we publish, and send us un-name-able bits and pieces. A fiction that has no shape but feels complete and leaves a hole in your stomach; a nonfiction layered in obvious lies; a recipe that works like a poem.
If you’re looking for a home for a sonnet or a realist short story, or any piece that happens to wear a traditional outfit, we want to see it.
If the writing is fresh, artful, and engaging, if we’re moved (to cry, to clench a fist, to laugh), we want it.”
We tell stories. But before we tell them, we hold them, think them, sometimes, we thank them. We recall and carry and live with them in our bodies. We embody them. Sometimes, they embody us.
Some of our stories are built from sandbox and rhyme-singing childhoods. Others, built from bullies beneath the monkey bars. Many are the stories told to us, about us, some true, though most are not. And still others, the most difficult ones, are born from experiences.
Someone one asked how long it took to write my memoir. 55 years. Yes. All of my years, because I lived through the experiences first. The truth is that we don’t just live through our experiences. We also don’t “get through” or “get over” the tough stuff—grief, loss, trauma.
They live in us.
If we’re lucky and wield pens, we push them out and onto the page. This might be why many of us write: Not with the goal of publishing, but to make sense of the past, to understand and know ourselves.
We live in flesh and filament built on our stories. Once written, the stories are not necessarily purged and all returns to normal. (What is normal after all?) Perhaps, our wound is re-opened and we’ve released a bit of poison or pleasure. And, much like caring for any opened gash, we should rinse, cleanse, and heal the body.
Sometimes the wound has lived so long, it’s layered in scar tissue: fibrous cells and collagen rushing to the injury—trauma, surgery, disease—building, no, over-building a thick wall of protection.
Some days I think I’m made only of scar tissue.
I try to remember that this tissue started as necessity, perhaps even survival.
Scar tissue forms in one direction, limiting movement, which, again, offers protection. After a time, joints and flesh stiffen, and now, on top of injury, there is new pain and discomfort. If left unattended, we wade through life much like mummies tightly swathed and cocooned, and, inaccessible. Inaccessible to rich experiences.
Scar tissue is not only a physical response. I believe scar tissue exists spiritually and emotionally too. Whether physical, emotional, or spiritual, the same principles apply. If we cannot move properly, we become a barrier in our own existence. We cannot extend, stretch, touch vulnerability and beauty. There comes the moment scar tissue no longer serves but hinders our human experience.
To heal, you need to work through scar tissue. If you’ve experienced the joy of breaking apart scar tissue with a physical therapist, you’ll respect the tearing it takes repairing, regaining adequate range of motion in the body. Or close to adequate.
My grandmother used to say, “The way in which you heal determines the quality of your future life.”
I should have listened to grandma more.
Writing is much like a physical therapist, breaking emotional scar tissue. The page offers safe and trusted space, (like a therapist’s office) taking us through our limited range, moving through stiffness and discomfort. Eventually we find ease. We also find that where there are wounds and scars, there is permanent alteration. In our joints. In our hearts.
We also become our own therapists in our writing practice and, because of this, we must approach our writing life with mindfulness. We must learn to care for the writer.
I combine at-desk rituals that I’ve woven into my writing life. Here’s a few you might consider, and remember, check with your doctor/therapist/guide. These are not meant as prescriptions nor replacements for medical or emotional treatment. Any type of wellness/fitness advice should be taken into consideration with your individual and medical/emotional limits:
STRETCH ten minutes every hour you sit at your desk.
STRETCH your neck and your piriformis. We carry tension in these two areas, and you can easily incorporate seated stretches. Find simple, kind movements and do them. Do them often.
NOTE: The piriformis is a flat gluteal muscle. Think where the thigh bone inserts into the hip bone. Many with piriformis flare ups experience sciatica as well.
SECOND NOTE: When we say something (or someone) is a pain in the neck or a pain in the butt, well, there’s much truth to this. If it (or they) bring you stress, it (or they) may also encourage physical pain in your body.
THIRD NOTE: It’s fun to say, “That’s (you’re) a pain in my piriformis.” Sometimes just saying that phrase relieves stress.
END ON A HIGH. Hemmingway offered this writing advice to avoid writing yourself out. Stop your writing at a place of high interest. My END ON A HIGH relates to writing something light, something easy on the heart towards the end of your practice. The deeper and darker you write, the more important this might become.
You can also END ON A HIGH listening to lovely music. (I prefer cellos). Or dancing. Or walking in nature. Or reading someone else’s lighter work. Or watching comedy. Or . . . you get the idea.
In Jewish culture, it is customary to place a bit of honey on the letters of the alef-bet when a child first learns Hebrew. The child licks the honey, associating the sweetness of letters with the delight of learning. As writers, we can model other cultural practices of gentleness and delightfulness in learning and rewarding.
I’m aware these ideas push against the more frequent writerly advice, “Sit. Write. And write some more.” For many writers, the process might be more than producing a poem, an essay, a book. Writing sometimes feels like birthing or surgery. So caring for oneself as if recovering becomes critical if we want to continue writing (and healing).
This is no easy feat for many of us. I’m no different. For the last twenty-plus years, I’ve been a decent caretaker, just not for myself. I’ve spent most of my life punishing my body—starvation, extreme fitness, binging, purging, and other forms of subtle torture. Maybe this was my attempt to release my most haunting stories. Maybe I thought I could starve out my memories. Or beat them down.
Even as I offer writer-care suggestions, I should add, go gentle on yourself as you discover how to do this. The harder you’ve lived, perhaps the nicer you must be. I’m not sure. I’m still learning.
I’m a memoirist, poet, and essayist. In addition to writing, I mentor high school girls in the juvenile system and teach poetry for those in recovery.
In my spare time, I co-host a radio program, Writer to Writer, offering a space for writers with tips on craft and life.
I’m also a decorated and disabled War Veteran, a Jew, a gardener, a mother, a worrier, and more.
I have a passion for sharing difficult stories about vulnerability woven with mysticism.
I’ve earned two MFAs, one in creative nonfiction, the other in poetry. I live in Idaho with my sons, my Newfie, and my Calico.
My poems and essays have appeared in Narratively, The Rumpus, Entropy Literary Magazine, War, Literature & the Arts, The Limberlost Review, and a handful of anthologies. I’ve co-edited a forthcoming anthology of poems, when there are nine, a tribute to the life and achievements of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Moon Tide Press, June 2022).
I’ll be offering free workshops that revolve around caring for the writer. These will begin in July. Find out more at my website, Rebecca Evans, Writer, in the Musings and Movement section.
Note from Marlene:
“The Write Spot: Writing as a Path to Healing” offers more ideas for self-care when writing about difficult topics. Available at your local bookseller and as both paperback and ebooks from Amazon.
Rebecca Evans taught an amazing class about writing monologues, which sent me on a search for “monologue submissions.” Scroll down for information on Rebecca’s June 16, 2022 writing workshop.
“The detour that leads to an unexpected adventure. The vacation where everything goes wrong. The annoying stranger who turns into an amazing guide. Forward Theater is looking for original scripts about travel, whether to places far away or destinations close to home. Even a trip across the street can expand your horizons.
Here is your chance to create a tale of the connection, joy, fear, beauty, exploration, and discovery that can only happen when you get out in this world.
As you consider what to write, please be as creative as possible. It can take the form of comedy, spoken word, drama, farce, autobiography, or pure fiction. Our goal is to produce a wildly diverse evening of theater, so let your imagination run free!”
Deadline: October 1, 2022.
Guidelines for 2023 Monologue Festival Out in This World
THE ROSETHEATRE COMPANYseeks short comedic monologues for the creation of a curated digital film & audio series titled IN CHARACTER.
Selected monologues will be produced and released by The Rose for use across digital platforms, including audible, Instagram, and You Tube channels.
We’re looking for compelling, well-told and entertaining first-person stories. Non-traditional pieces (stand-up, literary, poems, music, sketch, spoken-word) are welcome provided they meet The GUIDELINES.
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. —Anatole France
Western culture divides life into three stages: birth/student, work/family, and retirement/death. My husband and I, moving into our retirement years and building a new house, borrowed the Hindu concept of four stages, adding a time of spiritual growth and reconnection between retirement and death.
The third stage of life, Vanaprastha, the name we chose for our mountain home, means retreat to the forest. Not retirement but time to learn, reflect, and grow. Time to take the internal journey and heal past wounds from loss, rejection, and inexplicable disruptions. Time to explore, discover, seek meaning, share wisdom, and serve others. Time to become our truer selves.
As it turned out, I became a writer.
While overseeing the construction of our mountain retreat, I read the books I’d promised myself I’d get to but never had time, walked the dog, and tried new recipes. I wrote about my husband’s daughter, lost to suicide at age twenty-four, a girl I’d never met and wanted to know about as part of my husband’s past. But while reading her journals, hearing her father’s stories, and writing, I found my story bleeding through the pages into hers, because of connections I never expected. Disruptions from when we were five: her parents’ divorce and a home-invader assaulting my mother; mental illness episodes starting at sixteen; troubles in college; rejection in love—stories begging to be written, hiding in our closets. After the house was built, I signed up for writing classes.
Being a novice was humbling after a long and successful career, teaching, designing curriculum, and publishing technical articles. I was no longer a sage on the stage or guide on the side. My teachers were often the same age as my students—my recent students. More to the point, my wants and path-to-purpose had changed. After years of forward motion, raising children, earning money to pay the bills, pursuing success and honors, I looked back and moved toward asking, Who am I?
Third-stage-of-life writers often employ creative nonfiction in memoir and personal essays. They are less interested in earning a living as a writer and more interested in the internal search on the page. This journey for self-knowledge is heroic in the Joseph Campbell sense, fraught with external and internal obstacles and resistance. We all have wounds in our past and tend to evade them at all cost. I was appalled to discover the extent of my evasions, self-centeredness, and self-righteousness, my need for approval, to be right and in control. The “clever” stories I’d told myself and others over the years were often self-serving and sometimes outright lies. My husband’s daughter took the same journey, until her mental illness exacted its toll. To become the master of my story, I had to portray myself as both protagonist and antagonist, to turn victims into actors, villains into humans, and the helpless into the able; to find a third way to manage fear, other than flight or fight. Only then could I find peace and offer what I’d learned to others.
The nuts and bolts of writing can be daunting. Pitches, proposals, publishing, platform. The bottom line of becoming a writer in the third chapter is growth, both personal and professional. Write, write, write. Take classes to grow your craft, read craft books and recommended models, join writing groups, attend conferences, create communities. Open yourself to criticism; be honest and generous in return. Study, learn something new, sing, garden, volunteer. Do all those things and more—and have a grand time!
Carole Duffis a veteran teacher, serious flutist, avid naturalist, and writer of creative nonfiction. She posts weekly to her long-standing blog Notes from Vanaprastha, and has written for Brevity blog, Mockingbird, Streetlight Magazine, The Perennial Gen, for which she is a regular contributor, and other publications.
Carole lives in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains with her husband, writer K.A. Kenny, and two, large overly-friendly dogs.
She will present a session on “Becoming a Writer in the Third Chapter of Life” at HippoCamp 2022 in August.
I am fascinated with finding writing prompts in a variety of places.
Today’s prompt is inspired from the Editor’s Letter in Better & Homes Gardens magazine, April 2018, by Stephen Orr, Editor-in-Chief.
“Color Theory”
“Remember mood rings? As a kid, I was obsessed for one hot Texas summer about the idea that the ‘jewel’ in those rings could indicate how a person was feeling emotionally: Pink was happy, black was depressed, blue was optimistic. My little glass oval was often an indecipherable shade of puce . . .” — Stephen Orr
What mood would you assign to these colors?
Purple
Red
Yellow
Orange
Green
Choose a color and write what mood, or emotion, or character trait comes up for you when you think about this color.
Using color when writing
Describe your character by the colors they wear, or what colors they surround themselves with where they live, or work, or their vehicle.
Use color in an emotional scene to match your character’s mood.
Utilize color to describe a space: Home, city, workplace, yard, vacation spot.
Let color be your work horse as a force in your writing.
New Millennium Writings is an anthology where newcomers are welcome to submit their writing along with established authors.
NMW also hosts semi-annual awards in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.
“New Millennium Writings was launched in 1996 with a 15-word classified ad. From those humble beginnings, NMW has exploded into an internationally recognized and highly sought-after literary award and journal.
We believe in the creative potential of every writer, regardless of experience. Our blind and anonymous judging system ensures equality to writers of every level. All writers are welcome, and no subject is off-limits.”
Jon Batiste has been a bandleader and musical director on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert since 2015.
Jon’s accolades include an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Grammy Award, and a BAFTA Film Award in 2020 for co-composing the score for the Pixar animated film Soul.
Jonathon Michael Batiste won five Grammy Awards out of 14 nominations in 2022, including Album of the Year for his album “We Are.”
The following is excepted from “Up at 4 A.M.?” by Amy Spencer, in the magazine, Dr. Oz The Good Life, Jan-Feb 2015 (an oldie, and hopefully a goodie).
What happens
If we’re not sure how something will play out, our primitive mind prepares us for the worst possible outcome.
Survival
Back in our cave days, our ancestors needed to be prepared to fight or flee to survive.
Key
The primitive part of the brain—the amygdala—thinks our idle ruminations are urgent matters that need to be dealt with right away, as if they are real emergencies.
Wide Awake
And there we are, wide awake, ready and alert, to battle the catastrophe that we have imagined.
What To Do
Take some deep, relaxing breaths.
Get out of bed, walk around a little, look out a window, read something light.
Write down what is bothering you, or make a to-do list. Get it out and onto paper.
Take a mental vacation. Visualize a relaxing place, recreate a fun memory, take a trip down Happy Memory Lane.
Soothe and Calm
Listen to soothing and calming music, white noise, or a sleep app.
Get Checked
If sleep continues to elude you, seek professional help to rule out medical conditions to get to the cause of your sleeplessness
The mind’s natural tendency is to ruminate on thoughts that produce stress or anxiety.
Qi Gong provides powerful tools for calming the mind and returning to peace.
Why is it that humans tend to think about things that cause stress and anxiety? Why can’t we naturally gravitate toward thoughts that bring us to a place of joy?
Back when humans faced life-threatening situations on a regular basis, it was helpful to have a mind that could quickly identify unwelcome circumstances. The mind evolved to constantly look for signs of danger and plan for the worst.
In spite of all the encouragement to live in the present or focus on the future, most of us are likely to still spend a fair amount of time reviewing the past. And, more often than not, the moments we dwell on are not necessarily the highlights.
It’s normal … but it isn’t without cost. Because the mind can’t tell the difference between something that is real and something that is imagined, just thinking about past troubles triggers the same chemical reactions and the same uncomfortable feelings.
How to Write About Difficult Topics
And so, we lose sleep over troubling events and difficult people. We can’t change people and we can’t change what has already happened. We can only change our own thinking. We can write about them to “give them air,” and release these thoughts onto paper (or computer monitor).
But how to write about these difficulties without adding trauma?
Brave Healer works with writers to produce their books, such as:
“Shaman Heart, Turning Pain Into Passion and Purpose,” an remarkable book that inspires readers to develop a shaman heart — one that can only be obtained by coming through our darkest moments more healed and whole and then lighting the way for others.
English verbs are said to have two voices: active and passive.
Active Voice: the subject of the sentence performs the action:
His son catches fly balls. Creative children often dream in class.
Passive Voice: the subject receives the action:
The ball was caught by the first baseman. The duty is performed by the new recruits. The dough was beaten by the mixer. The mailman was bitten by the dog.
Adjectives: Use sparingly and consciously. Overuse indicates a need to find more precise nouns and to show rather than tell.
Adverbs: Too often, writers use these to beef up weak verbs. Your goal should be to make verbs strong enough to do the work themselves and kill off your adverbs. You won’t be able to get rid of all of them, but circle each one in your draft and use a thesaurus to find strong verbs that characterize and carry emotions as well as convey action.
An adverb modifies a verb and clarifies the action. Avoid adverbs and use strong verbs instead, because adverbs “tell” rather than “show” the action.
Example:
“I don’t understand,” said the man angrily, his hands balled into fists. “Angrily” tells, and “balled into fists” shows that he is angry. So, “angrily” is redundant.
Avoiding adverbs that end in -ly: “The boy raced quickly along the sand.” If he was racing, we know it’s quickly.
Adjectives describe nouns. Try using strong verbs so adjectives aren’t necessary.
Examples:
“Tears came to her eyes and she looked away” rather than “Sad tears came to her eyes.”
“A nerve in his jaw pulsed and his fists were clenched” rather than “He was angry and a nerve . . . “
Verbs are the action words and can be scene stealers when used well. A verb that is used well rarely needs to be modified. Example:
“The bear responded angrily and he dangerously revealed his claws.”
Delete adverbs for a stronger sentence: “The bear growled and bared his claws.”
It’s almost never a good idea to use an adverb when writing dialogue. It takes away the reader’s delight to imagine the scene.
“Do this or I’ll kill you,” he said menacingly, can stand without that menacing adverb, since his comment is menacing.
There are times when an adverb enhances and clarifies the sentence. For example:
“The rain fell intermittently.” The adverb “intermittently” tells us that the rain fell off and on.
“He paid the bill occasionally.” In this sentence, occasionally is an important adverb.
Paraphrased from Writer’s Digest magazine, January 2006, “Pick Up the Pace”
Quick pacing hooks readers, creates tension, deepens the drama and speeds things along.
Picking up the pace increases tension. How to quicken the pace:
1. Start story in the middle of the dramatic action, not before the drama commences.
2. Keep description brief. This doesn’t mean using no description, but choose one or two telling, brief details.
3. Combine scenes. If one scene deepens character by showing a couple at dinner and a few scenes later they have a fight, let them have the fight at dinner.
4. Rely on dialogue. A lot of story can be carried by spoken conversation. Readers seldom skip dialogue.
5. Keep backstory to a minimum. The more we learn about characters through what they do now, in story time, the less you’ll need flashbacks, memories and exposition about their histories. All of these slow the pace.
6. Squeeze out every unnecessary word. This is the best way of all to increase pace. There are times you want a longer version for atmosphere, but be choosy. Wordiness kills pace and bores readers.
From Marlene: Use present tense rather than past tense for “real time” — so the reader travels along with the protagonist as they explore and discover together.
