Writers-in-Progress

Good Quote

In reality the main purpose of life is to raise everything that is profane to the level of the holy.

- Martin Buber

I would argue that this is also true of poetry, but in the opposite direction (making what's holy, profane) as well.

Quote for the New Year!

Anything you do from the soulful self will help lighten the burdens of the world. Anything. You have no idea what the smallest word, the tiniest generosity can cause to be set in motion. Be outrageous in forgiving. Be dramatic in reconciling. Mistakes? Back up and make them as right as you can, then move on. Be off the charts in kindness. In whatever you are called to, strive to be devoted to it in all aspects large and small. Fall short? Try again. Mastery is made in increments, not in leaps. Be brave, be fierce, be visionary. Mend the parts of the world that are "within your reach."

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.

Madison Smartt Bell Interview

Here is a link to an interview with Madison Smartt Bell, one of my mentors and, happy to say, friends. We worked together at Goucher. He is a phenomenal writer/teacher, and he's just written a biography on Toussaint Louverture. His trilogy on the Haitian revolution (a fictionalized account) is a must-read. (Better save it for a summer read - they are long books - but worth it!)

Madison Smartt Bell Interview

In All Things, the Right Word Counts

"The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug." --Mark Twain

Go Crazy Baby!

"The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive and more constructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person."

Dr. Frank Barron, Professor of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz
Think, November, 1962

You always knew you were special. Now you know why.

Approfondement Anyone?

I copied this quote from Rob Brezny's Free Will Astrology Newsletter (www.freewillastrology.com, if you haven't signed up for it you're falling behind on your spiritual evolvement).

"The notion that inspired play (even when audacious, offensive, or obscene) enhances rather than diminishes intellectual vigor and spiritual fulfillment, the notion that in the eyes of the gods the tight-lipped hero and the wet-cheeked victim are frequently inferior to the red-nosed clown, such notions are destined to be a hard sell to those who have E.M. Forster on their bedside table and a clump of dried narcissus up their ass.

"Not to worry. As long as words and ideas exist, there will be a few misfits who will cavort with them in a spirit of *approfondement*--if I may borrow that marvelous French word that translates roughly as "playing easily in the deep"--and in so doing they will occasionally bring to realization Kafka's belief that 'a novel should be an ax for the frozen seas around us.'"

-"In Defiance of Gravity" by Tom Robbins, *Harper's Magazine,* Sept 2004

Misfit - yes, that's you. Yes it is. Start cavorting.

What You Think is What You Get

I'm a big believer in the power of thinking your way to a good day and a good life. We can't control everything, but we can act in our lives rather than react as if we're victims or puppets or pawns. It's a little more work (lots easier to lie around complaining about how the world is against us, less risk there too), but worth it.

This applies double to our writing lives. Decide today that the world wants to and will hear your voice, somehow, somewhere, and get writing. Tell the stories you want to tell.

There's plenty of room and success for everyone. If you don't get in line for your share, you don't get a turn at the top.

Here's a quote to get you going:

"...what I focus on in life is what I get. And if I concentrate on how bad I am or how wrong I am or how inadequate I am, if I concentrate on what I can't do and how there's not enough time in which to do it, isn't that what I get every time? And when I think about how powerful I am, and when I think about what I have left to contribute, and when I think about the difference I can make on this planet, then that's what I get. You see, i recognize that it's not what happens to you; it's what you do about it."

W. Mitchell

Insist on Yourself

"Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession...Do that which is assigned to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quotes - 2

There are no limits but the sky.   --Cervantes

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.  --Tom Stoppard

I learn by going where I have to go.   --Theodore Roethke

Every noble work is, at first, impossible.  --Thomas Carlyle

Creativity comes from accepting that you're not safe, from being absolutely aware and from letting go of control. It's a matter of seeing everything, even when you want to shut your eyes.  --Madeleine L'Engle

Live all you can. It's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?  --Henry James

Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.  --William Faulkner

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.  --Flannery O'Connor

What I adore is supreme professionalism. I am bored by writers who can write only when it is raining.  --Noel Coward

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.  --Raymond Carver

Quotes - 1

The quotes I post on this site are those that have gotten me through the dark, dry times - hope they inspire you as well.

"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source.  There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there."      --Henry Miller

"To believe your own thought, to belive that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all--that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense, for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost--One should learn to detect and watch taht gleam of light which flashes across one's mind from within, more than the luster and firmament of bards and sages. Yet we dismiss without notice our thought, because it is ours.  In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.      --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I dwell in possibility."  --Emily Dickinson

"Fail. Fail Again. Fail Better."  --Samuel Beckett

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."   --W.  Somerset Maugham

"They wished to flower, and flowering is being beautiful: but we wish to ripen, and that means being dark and taking pains."   --Rainer Maria Rilke

"What you can do, or dream you can do, BEGIN IT. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."  --Goethe

"Too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous and must be left in."  --Robert Frost

"If you're going through hell, keep going."  --Winston Churchill

"Poetry. I like to think of it as statements made on the way to the grave."                    --Dylan Thomas

"Our words must seem to be inevitable."  --William Butler Yeats

"So we say life and death, as if that were the edge of ultimate concern to the imagination, when the real edge is between life and more life, memory and wish. The powerful imagination does not work, as every good poem reminds us, unless it comes to an edge, makes its pass, and, one way or another, returns.  It surely, in a lifetime, gets harder and harder to get back."  --Stanley Plumly.

“You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.” --Dylan Thomas