Being Intimate?

Yet often for me - and maybe for you too - my “official writer” takes over. My work veers so far away from my imaginative storm that it reads like a tax return: wooden, self-conscious (fear of audit perhaps), and distant.

On the surface, letting your “official writer” run the show might seem like a safe, smart strategy. But what if you want more? What if you want your writing to be intimate, juicy, and emotional? Maybe you have an unruly tale whispering in the basement. Or memories dangling on branches after the wind blows through.

I remember a few years back, when I was taking acting classes in New York City at Black NeXXus Studios Inc. My teacher, Susan Batson, would say, “If you want your work to be intimate, you’ve got to let your audience see what's inside. You have to use your body as your instrument and open up. Intimacy means: Into Me See.”

(For the record, I’m a poet, not an actor. I was there to discover new ways to go deeper in my creative work.)

Susan focused on one thing: “USE YOUR BODY!” This strategy is just as true for writers as for actors.

Here's an exercise that will help you learn to use your body to generate dynamic writing. It will also help you engage emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and physically. It's spontaneous. (I've learned that my most creative moments come when I stop worrying about what people think.)

Do it in private. It's kind of like singing in the shower.

Pick a song you know, for example, “Summertime.” “Summertime and the living is easy, fish are jumping and the cotton is high. Your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good looking, so hush pretty baby and don’t you cry.” Sit down in a straight chair and sing the song. It’ll probably sound fine. Or maybe not. Who cares. Nobody's listening.

Now sing it again. This time, stand up and sit down, stand up and sit down, stand up and sit down WHILE YOU'RE SINGING. Notice how using your body focuses you on the process rather than the result. You smile. You chuckle. You laugh. You’re relaxed. You’re free. You might even sing on key. Most of all, you’re open.

Now pick a topic that you’re working on right now. Remain standing and write for ten minutes. Notice how your writing flows when your body is warmed up, relaxed, and engaged? We're all so used to holding our bodies a certain way, maybe hunched over, closed in, protecting our tender innards, that we forget that our bodies are our instruments. Opening up makes your writing more intimate and invites other in.

Intimacy: Into Me See. Now, that's an idea worth spreading.

If this notion of intimacy in your work strikes your fancy, and you’d like to explore it more, then join us and write from the imaginative storm at our next Writing Salon in Taos at the San Geronimo Lodge, July 20-25.

Publishing "Her Royal Highness" by Kate O'Toole

This piece was written in the Writing Salon in Thailand, March 2005, by Kate O'Toole, an actress based in Connemara, Ireland. Like the others we will publish, it is an unedited first draft written under a slightly forgiving time limit. The prompt was: Write for ten minutes, starting with an unattractive physical characteristic. This exercise unfailingly produces fascinating work, focused on characteristics ranging from the truly repulsive to things so minor that only one character notices them – but obsessively. There's a huge amount of juicy conflict and contradiction to be found in the tensions between health and happiness, between attractiveness and the need to be liked, and in how characters judge each other according to appearance and give aspects of appearance a moral dimension. Why not try it? Begin with an unattractive physical characteristic and write for ten minutes. If you like what write, we'd love to see it, so please feel free to email it to us.

Let your imagination amaze you!,
James Nave
Allegra Huston Her Royal Highness by Kate O'Toole Ordinarily, I should stand at five foot eight. Thanks to a lifetime of fast food, physical inactivity and the misfortune of having been born with female hormones (now all depleted), at the grand old age of thirty-eight my full frame has stooped and stunted down to an irksomely small five foot three. The missing five inches have bunched up into a gnarled fist of flesh and deformed bone which starts at the base of my neck and then ends up by sitting on my left shoulder like an interfering guardian who can never leave me alone. I call this useless lump of redundancy Her Royal Highness, the Princess Diana. When people look at me they fail utterly at trying not to notice Her Royal Highness as she peers up at them from the top of my bent back. She makes walking such a painful and labour intensive exercise I often have to use a stick, which makes me feel as if I’m 109. In fact the stick makes me so angry about everything that’s gone wrong I avoid using it for fear of turning it into a weapon against the world. There are different ways to use a stick or a crutch. Blind people possess an interesting juxtaposition of tentative confidence with their flexible white canes, people with freshly broken limbs and the loaned metal crutch have a far clumsier, nouveaux technique. Hill walkers use their wooden sticks like pins with which to pierce the hills they walk on and then, when they have no hills left on which to deploy their sticks they forget about them and leave them behind in the pub. Old people own their canes, befriend them, and are as comfortable with them as with a pipe or a favourite hat. Mine I will never get used to. It angers me. It becomes a weapon to wield against the unfair world which contrived to lumber me with this burden.

Performing Your Work

In a past entry, we published Kate O'Toole's piece "Her Royal Highness." Kate is a professional actress; when she read the piece, she drew us deep into her character's intentions and emotions as she struggled with the "gnarled fist of flesh and deformed bone" that sat on her left shoulder.

We're not all trained actors, but we all have the opportunity to perform our work: whether it's a formal reading, a gathering of friends, or simply someone who asks, "What are you working on?" Here's a good definition of performance: Regardless of whether you have an audience of one or a thousand, it's a performance.

If you've ever seen a great performance poet -- Billy Collins comes to mind -- you know how memorable the experience can be. On the other hand, a bad performance is like going to an art opening to find unframed paintings tacked to the walls, unlit and unidentified. You feel let down, unvalued, cheated somehow –- yet an amazing number of writers present their work with as little thought or care, as if their job ends at putting the words on the page.

If you've performed your work for an audience already, you know how thrilling, beneficial, and illuminating the experience can be. And don't forget the professional benefits: in a world of I-Pods, YouTube, radio art, pod casts, interactive web sites, public access television, and video phones, it's smart, even essential, for all writers to develop performance skills.

Becoming a better performer is easy. Whether you're reserved or outgoing, the key is to develop the strengths of your own style. A shy person with a quiet voice, speaking low into a microphone, can be as compelling as someone with a big voice who moves around a lot on stage. Practice using the microphone, working the stage! Once you're comfortable with these basics, you'll be able to allow your audience to be inspired by the emotional intimacy ("into me see") of your work.

In the Writing Salon, we do a performance workshop, which is always a blast. Here are a few rehearsal tips:

• Starting with your first draft, read your work out loud as often as you can.
• Also starting with your first draft, pay attention to the details. This will connect you to the emotional texture in your work. Is the shirt blue or red? Is the day warm or cold? Exactly what made you so happy? If your were crying, were your tears wet or had they dried? What were your previous narrative circumstance before the first line?
• Form a performers' group, which could be an extension of your writers' group. Watch for your audience leaning forward or back, making little sounds, eyes focusing or going vacant. You'll get an excellent, immediate sense of what does and doesn't work.
• A stage can be anywhere: it's the space you inhabit when you perform. Take possession of your surrounding space; if it isn't already a stage, make it one. The movements of your body will claim that space, as if a spotlight is being shone on it.
• Confident movement is essential. Practice being more conscious of how you walk, how you sit, how you interact with people. A straight back is powerful; a hunched posture is submissive, recessive, unconfident. Your body is your instrument and your performance begins the moment you start to walk toward the stage.
• Watching a dog bark is a terrific way to study voice projection. A dog doesn't bark from his throat, he throws the sound from his entire midsection. Experiment with how much or how little projection you need to make your voice fill a room. Project your voice even when you're using a microphone; this will give your words deeper resonance and your audience will appreciate it.
• Record your work and play it back. You'll be surprised at how much you'll learn about phrasing, timing, and tone. This is also a great way to discover opportunities for revision.
• Become familiar with potential performance places. Notice the chocolate bedside the cash register, the Baume & Mercier watch on barista's wrist, the soap bar on the kitchen sink, and the chairs and the stage where you might perform. Do you like the way they're set up? What would you change?
• It's show time. Drink plenty of water. Warm up. Break a leg!

Publishing "Rehearsal" by Abigail Cain

The following piece was written by Abigail Cain, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, during the one-day Salon we held there in February 2006. The exercise: Describe a room in order to evoke an emotion, without specifying what that emotion is. Write for 10 minutes.

In this piece Abby shows a nail-sharp eye for detail, and a shape-shifter's ability to slip in an eyeblink from one point of view to another: real and imagined, present and future, inside and outside the glass. We hope you enjoy its visceral immediacy as much as we did.

The room, which was lined with full-length mirrors, smelled of sweat and dirt. From the morning, when forty beautiful people walked in, and the girls put on their make-up at the mirrors while the gay men plucked their eyebrows, and everyone was fabulous, there were now slippers and leg warmers thrown about, Tupperware containers of carrots left behind, and droplets of sweat and snot on the floor that would dry long before they were bleached. Hair that was clean and perfectly in buns that morning was now flopping around in ragged ponytails as if begging to be washed. Eyes that had been bright were now sunken into dark circles on the faces of those whose make-up had mixed with perspiration and ended up on hands, and other people, and who knows where else. Backs had cracked and muscles stretched, so that now they shook as everyone looked at the clock as the director stopped the music and the dancing to yell about how they sucked, but they all knew: fifteen more minutes. Children walked by the wall of windows going to their own class, as they examined their dreams in front of them, manifested, so everyone tried to look a little happier, but the director was still yelling because he couldn’t go get a drink yet.

Know it By Heart

In a previous entry on performance, we touched on some of the things you can practice to improve your presentations and readings: voice projection, confident movements, and audience awareness. The performance workshop is always a high point in the Writing Salon. Not only do we take a close look at what it means to use your body as a performance instrument: intellectually, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. We also look at memorization, which is the subject of this newsletter.

Of course, you already have some experience with memorization. You remember phone numbers, addresses, directions home, good jokes, song lyrics, and great film lines. You remember these things not because you worked at it, but because you repeat them, you use them in your daily life, they entertain you, and you often have an emotional attachment to them. As a result, you know these things by heart. Sometimes you know them in your bones.

You can transfer this everyday skill to getting your written material "off book." Think of memorization as a full-body experience, something you incorporate into the whole creative process, from inception – that moment you notice a plastic bottle with a torn label - to the final form: an environmental poem that shakes the world. The moment you glimpse the bottle, the writing process begins - and memorization is part of that process. Memorization is about paying attention to details, dwelling on what you see, and allowing things deeply considered to be remembered by your whole body. .

It's important to remember that, like writing, memorization is (at least partly) a skill. The more you do it, the better you get at it. If you've never memorized anything before, start with something short that you like. Here are a couple of examples. One is a poem by Ogden Nash, the other is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. The poem is titled "On the Antiquity of Fleas." Are you ready?

Adam
Had 'em.

Now the Hemingway story, which has no title: For Sale. Baby shoes. Never used.

How much is unsaid behind those few words! As you come to know them, not in the mind's memory but in the memory of the body, you start to feel the depths of emotion, insight, and life experience behind each piece. You come to understand them not with the cold critical eye of schoolroom analysis, but, as Keats said, "on the pulse."

We hope these tidbits will start you thinking about memorization in a different way from the chore it may have been at school. Try it: start working on a piece or two. If you have a chance to join us at one of our Salons - Taos in July, Chapel Hill in August, Spain in September - we'll go into this further, and have a lot of fun in the process.

Meanwhile, to keep you going, we've included some memorization tips from a wonderful book, Immersed in Verse, by children's author Allan Wolf (www.allanwolf.com).

Your Creative Identity

How do you find your creative identity? We ask all kinds of questions, but could it be that you actually find your creative identity by just showing up and doing the work? When we engage the work, often with great joy, that engagement inspires different perspectives. Then, as artists, we translate what we perceive into some kind of form--or to put it another way, we make things, like, for example, music.

I bring this up because my father was an Appalachian fiddler who also played guitar, mandolin, accordion, and piano. As a boy growing up in Western North Carolina during the sixties, I learned how to play guitar while sitting in a circle with other great musicians like Tommy Bell, who bowed Listen to the Mocking Bird so beautifully that his fiddle became the bird's song.

Never in all that time do I recall anyone ever wondering about creative identities. Whatever they did for a living--tobacco farmers, nurses, lawyers, mechanics, truck drivers, plumbers--if you asked any one of them what they did, the response would always be, "I play music." Even now I still get a thrill when I hear old songs like Sweet Georgia Brown, Bill Bailey, Old Joe Clarke, Cripple Creek, Tennessee Waltz, Lonesome Road Blues, Down Yonder, and Alabama Jubilee. Years later, even though I've happily wandered far afield to become a poet, a writer, and a traveler, I still identify myself as a musician. And when I return to Western North Carolina, which I often do, the music is joyfully alive and well, perhaps now more than ever.

If you'd like to see what I mean, and happen to be driving I-40 through Asheville on any Thursday evening and you have a little time to spare, take the Brevard Road exit and drive south about a mile past the farmers' market until you see the cars lining both sides of the road and musician walking up the driveway beside the large oak trees that surround a small frame house. You'll hear music rising from backyard doors of the garage. Everyone calls it Mrs. Hyatt's Opera House.

For the past fifty years Mrs. Hyatt--along with her husband, Wayne, until his death in 1984--has hosted a traditional music jam every week. When her health allows, Mrs. Hyatt, now 89, welcomes everyone. In the back above the food table loaded with baked beans, fried chicken, cole slaw, and sweet tea you'll find photographs and newspaper clippings of those who have come before and those now at Mrs. Hyatt's house, playing the old tunes as if for the first time, their joy of making music unbroken like the circle in the song.

Because they're doing the work of playing, music has become the artistic essence of who they are, what they're about, what they make. In short, it has become their creative identity, which grows with every tune they play. Happily, this idea applies all of us, regardless of our art form or level of mastery. When we do the work, the work rewards us with a creative identity. To anyone who asks, we can tell, with great joy and confidence, who we are as artists.