Channeling Virginia Woolf

I’m building myself a writer’s room. Currently I’m squashing all the contents of my head, a laptop, reading lamp, and a child’s artwork circa 2001 onto an old desk that’s barely 18 x 24 inches. It’s no wonder I’m struggling to produce.

Camping out in my dad’s house (we are in-between houses, as my husband decides what to do with his just-inherited childhood home), where my daughters toddled and watched Little Mermaid over and over, has brought back more than memories. The courage to redesign, I find, is borne out of the need for a big, wide workspace.

After repainting the loft bedroom’s sloped ceilings (they were wood-stained), it became the brightest spot in the house. It was the nursery. Reclaiming it as a place to think and string words together, it’s only fitting to still call it that.

The Nursery will have one long writing desk against this wall. I imagine bookshelves on there too. One east-facing window is all it takes to flood the place with light.

Even after we move (it’s imminent, that’s just how my life is) I plan to spend a few days out of the week here.

Where do you go to make stuff? May I have a peek?

But how do you know?

From The Well Written Woman

Of Penguins, Dreamcatchers, and Dark Coffee

Seattle, 2007

Between 2004-2008 I escaped writing to study and practice photography. I traveled with my camera to Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, and Hong Kong; and around the US, in Texas, Washington, California, and my home state of Illinois.

I spent the last few days revisiting photos from that time, my “travel photographer” phase. Now and again I’ll be posting some sentimental favorites here. Maybe you’ll find something you like, an image that might connect on a meaningful level with something you’re working on.

Here’s one of my images as it appeared in One Thousand Shipwrecked Penguins, an arresting collection of flash fiction by extraordinary writer Marcus Speh.

To my Twitter friend Marcus, the encouragement has been like a slow-release capsule of very effective medicine. I’m grateful for your patience.

Ear Worm

Jack Kerouac has said that what you feel will find its own form. Music is a shape-shifting medium, as proven by the genre-straddling Australian musician Gotye. This song has been stuck in my head all week, inspiring me to look beyond established forms and find my own way of saying what needs saying. Just look at the odd little keyboard he plays. What is that thing, even? Oh, but how the whole of this song moves me to string together things that don’t necessarily belong.

Gotye performing “Somebody That I Used To Know” on KCRW Video.

Word Math and Summer School

Mathematics (Photo credit: Terriko)

I’m signing up for a summer writing class, which excites me in the same way that having cupcakes stashed in the fridge excites me. My problem is which class to take for my second session with the UCLA Writers Program. I took an introductory poetry class last fall with Kimberly Burwick, MFA and award-winning poet who was wonderful and generous with time, encouragement, and patience for the handful of us who hadn’t the slightest clue what we were doing.

In ten weeks I had drafted about ten poems (air quotes here), and so thought to take another poetry class. This one is focused on form and meter. The poetry that I enjoy most is surprisingly mathematical. Each line seems to function just like an algebraic equation or part of one, pieced together with words chosen with care. Managed well, a poetic line in combination with other lines should result in tension and release, balance and a kind of quiet power.

That’s how I see it, this early in my writing life. Unfortunately I never really was any good at math, except for 6^th grade algebra (thank you, Sister Stephanie). This insinuation of capability with numbers could account for my fixation on getting lines to agree with each other, balance out, and make sense of x at the end. But should I spend my summer working with verbal math?

The other class is a new course, experimental and playful, designed to address the writing process. As my creative juices have grown stagnant, with sediment swirling around the bottom (of what, exactly? A wine glass comes to mind) this one (using found texts to generate new text) could be just the cure.

God knows I have scribbled down enough phrases overheard, stray quotations, and dream fragments, scrunched into wallet crevices along with receipts and boarding passes, thinking to use them in the future. I just never thought of how they might come together and provide value.

Until recently. I’d tell you more, but right now I have a mopey Corgi that needs to be taken to the vet.

Pembroke Corgi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Related articles

• Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric (3quarksdaily.com)
• New Metaphor game! (catherinemjohnson.wordpress.com)