I’ve started a new writing project—working with my longtime friend and writing colleague, Stephanie Farrow who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In the last weeks we’ve developed a way of working which I’m analyzing into steps below in hopes it might help those writers among Riehlife’s readers. [Note: This is filed in the Write, Pen! section where you’ll find all of the Riehlife writing suggestions stored.]

The rules for freewriting, of course, are along the lines of “write as fast as you can without making corrections” and so forth…in an effort to get around the critic, and go deeper than the intellect.

In what I’ve coined as “Directed Contemplative Writing” the need for speed is replaced by placing the mind.

In Clive Matson’s “Let the Crazy Child Write!” workshops, one question he always asks participants to answer the first night is “What is the Crazy Child for you?”

Right now, my answer would be “directed contemplative writing” because using this technique allows us to produce writing that is akin to listening in on the unconscious mind, the creative unconscious.

1) Choose a nugget to work, from previous writing, conversation, or your thoughts.

2) Keep it simple…no more than one word or at most a short phrase.

3) Use your nugget as your touchstone throughout the piece. What Gabriele Lusser Rico calls “rhythm and recurrence.”

4) Journey to the place you need to be in to write closely with your nugget…maybe a real physical place, an emotional space, or frame of mind.

5) Scan. What do you know about this nugget? Follow it through like a thread through a maze. Take your time.

6) Go for sense image and the life of the object. Stay with the body, the visceral, in order to take the reader there and in order to keep you in the charged writing space.

7) Learn what it takes for you to get comfortable and cozy.

Writing is inherently risky because it involves revelation. One writing process guru says we need to “hush and hold” at the beginning of creative work.

What makes you safe and cozy?

For me, it’s fuzzy socks and a blanket my mother bought on her travels…combined with the cave conditions of dim light and quiet.

For others, it’s being surrounded in a coffee shop with muzak as an aural surround. Learn what it takes for you to get comfortable and cozy companion.

Timing and destiny and yearning.

What determines the timing of manifestation?

All coordinates come together.

Happening on god’s time, not ours.

“They welcomed me by letting me know that they hadn’t let me go. I was remembered. As far as they were concerned, no matter how far I roamed or what we’d had to do to survive, I was still in the story with them, and had never actually left the village.”
Martín Prechtel
Artist
Writer
Musician
Storyteller
Teacher
Healer

At the Mercy of the River: An Exploration of the Last African Wilderness by Peter Stark

“There is always something new coming out of Africa.”
–Pliny the Elder

Click here to read a profile by Joyce Boatright that gives a snapshot of some areas of my writing life.

Story Circle Network National e-letter
July 2008, Vol. 9, No 7

To read this e-Letter on the Story Circle Network web site, click here.

Click here to go to the main Story Circle Network web site.

Write your hearts out!

Anais Nin, photo courtesy Maryanne Raphael

Maryanne Raphael has written and co-authored 10 books, short stories, poetry, and articles. You can read more about Maryanne and her work on www.authorsden.com/maryanneraphael. She says: “No matter what I’m doing right now, I would rather be writing.”

Anais Nin was important in my own life as a woman and as a writer. When I lived in Ghana, some friends came back from home leave in the United States and brought back a set of her journals for me to read which I proceeded to devour. I didn’t think of her as someone you could actually meet until I was on my flight back to the States several years after that. I met a woman on that flight who’d met Anais. Now, we meet with Maryanne and listen to her story of how she met Anais Nin. —Janet Riehl

This story is the introduction to Maryann Raphael’s “The Voyage Within,” copyrighted 2003.

WHEN I MET ANAIS NIN
by Maryanne Raphael

I was first introduced to Anais Nin through her writing, when I was a student at the Sorbonne in Paris. Immediatley, I identified with her, for like young Anais, I was full of joy, desire, laughter, compassion and curiosity regarding the simple facts of life. I knew I wanted to meet her.

After I left France, I moved to New York City where I began working on a book of interviews called “Women on Women.” When I learned Anais was coming to the city, I called her and she agreed to an interview.

I’ll never forget the first time I met her. I was standing on the steps of her Greenwich Village apartment when she opened the door. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. With high cheekbones, flawless skin, bright emerald eyes and hair pulled into a bun, her Greta Garbo beauty took my breath away. Dressed in an aquamarine, velvet, floor-length gown, that accentuated her firm and slender body, her presence gave forth an aura of mystery. It was hard to believe she was almost seventy.

With a dancer’s walk, she led me into the living room. Decorated in her favorite colors, lavender, sea green, and aquamarine, the atmosphere was one of tranquility and meditation. Multicolored Indian mirrored pillows enhanced the setting. I relaxed in this artistic environment. We drank light, fragrant tea served in delicate cups and saucers.

I asked, “Can writing improve the world?” Her voice was soft, almost a whisper, with a slight French accent. She said, “I think it depends on what kind of books you read. Many people told me some of the ‘Diaries’ helped them to live.”

She laughed when I asked, “if you were marooned on a desert island, who would you like to have with you?” She said, “I can’t answer that. I would lose too many friends. That’s like asking who is my favorite writer?”

She glowed. Her energy was rich and positive. “I’m sorry for writers who succeed too soon,” she said. “I think writing creates a world in which you want to live and then others want to live in it with you and that becomes a little universe.”

Anais Nin, photo courtesy of Maryanne Raphael

When I asked if she read many novels, she said, “No, I read mostly biographies. We need a fusion of novel and biography. I think we’re going to find a perfect fusion the psychological truth but fictionalized.”

She surprised me when she said laughing, “Is it all right to interview the interviewer?” “Feel free,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to be interviewed by a world famous author.”

Anais laughed again. Then she began questioning me. It was hard to believe that this amazing exciting woman was so interested in my writing, my ideas, my life.

We talked about the place of sex in art. “I prefer to say sensuality, which means the whole range of our physical response to life,” she told me. “Otto Rank said the more you give to living, the more you have to give.” She sipped her tea, then said, “Most of our sexual vocabulary comes from men since they publish more erotica than female authors.” She talked of the womb as the true source of women’s creativity and of the need for a feminine language.

When I asked, “What is your main goal in life,” Anais became serious. “To be useful,” she said. “If I hadn’t had writing, I wouldn’t have created a world in which I can live and breathe. I think the writing creates a world in which you want to live and then others want to live in it with you and that becomes a little universe.”

[There’s much more! Read on.] Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by Susan Tweit

From witnessing my father at ceremonies surrounding death, I’ve learned a new approach to being at these events.

He is completely natural. He visits. He chats. He may even make a joke. He tells stories. These are transmissions of comfort through the transmission of culture.

I have never heard him utter any of the classic phrases of condolence. Yet, all the time, he is actively condoling, comforting, and providing companionship.

This is what is needed in times of loss: a human response from the heart, not a canned response from a book.

My father visits during a visitation with no false solemnity. As children we are comforted in our mother’s arms. As adults, we are held in the arms of community, extended in love.

Photo by Susan J. Tweit

I’ve gone to several visitations and memorial services with my father this past year since I’ve moved back to the Midwest. Recently, we lost one of my cousins in a rather haunting death. In thinking ahead to her memorial day at the cemetery, we began discussing the purpose of these gatherings. Pop says the purpose of a funeral is:

1) To gather the remnants of the family together.
2) To share memories of the person who has just died.
3) To plan out any future relationships among family members if there are going to be any.

This last reason was a revelation to me. It’s obvious, but not usually stated or attended to. In these days of families scattered to the four winds of the world, it seems particularly important.

With the third reason in mind, Pop called Cathe’s twin to invite the family to our home place after the memorial graveside service in Upper Alton and before the picnic in St. Louis’ Forest Park at the end of the day. “I had to gather up my courage,” he told me afterwards as we sat at the kitchen table. “I didn’t know how they’d respond.”

“Isn’t courage that which you are made of,” I asked him rhetorically?

The homeplace, standing here since the 1860s, has been a place of refuge through six generations. The older generation of Christoes had adopted Evergreen Heights as their home away from home when my father lived here as a boy and young man. When he became a wise old man, Cathe visited my father here and worked with him on genealogy and family research. My father has a strong sense of legacy, heritage, and continuity. He wanted to offer a peaceful place for the funeral party to pace their day and contribute to their healing. “We made their day better. We made their lives better,” he said as we chatted later.

Thus it was that upwards of 30 people flowed into and around the Big Brown House on the bluffs above the flooded Mississippi River…sipped tea, toured the basements and porches, and played tag on the wide lawn…with no funeral byers in sight.

Poet Michael Castro is the founding editor and spiritual father of River Styx.

Since 1974 Karen Duffy has hosted literary readings at her Central West End restaurant, Duff’s.

Says Newman: “Our literary agenda is to promote accessible poetry. In the early ’90s, poetry had been taken over by academics. It was obscure, unmoving poetry, and it was the only kind most people would come across. We want to promote poetry that an intelligent, educated reader would enjoy — not necessarily an MFA or Ph.D. candidate. You don’t have to compromise quality to be accessible.”

In her Harvard Commencement address J.K. Rowling is funny, dignified, deep, and delightful. Speaking of the lowest point in her life and how it prepared the way for writing her big idea, she says:

“So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

Click here to see, hear, and read the rest of the address which includes a moving segment on her time working for Amnesty International.