They say, begin at the beginning. It’s good advice. Sometimes.

I’ve offered the same advice to others occasionally. Even to myself. Begin at the beginning when you’re staring at the white space of the blank page (it’s not empty, just temporarily blank). When you’re blocked, go back and back. When you run out of words or when you’ve no words in the tank. It usually works to some degree.

The King in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland gave the same advice: “Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go till you come to the end: then stop.” Were it so simple. Glinda, the good witch, in The Wizard of Oz, tells Dorothy, “It’s always good to begin at the beginning.” True. True.
Yet here I am wondering, as others have and will, where such a thing as a beginning really exists.

The beginning of what? My life? When did I begin? Back further, perhaps. How about beginning with place. A little about where you’re from, without yourself in backdrop for a while. Doesn’t that say something about who you were to begin with and how things began? How about beginning with the lives who gave me life? Parents, their parents, and so on. How far back should that go to qualify?
Maybe just talking about the challenges of beginning is a good start.
 
I have a first memory. Is that a beginning?

The place, an abstract gravel parking lot. Something tells me it’s Texas, when my father was stationed at Fort Hood in 1971. It’s the town of Killeen, where we lived right outside of base. I remember holding hands with my father. I’m looking up at him. I’d be about two. He’s spent 1970 stationed in South Korea. My sister was born while he was overseas. He’s already done a year in Vietnam, before marrying my mother, straddling 1967 and 1968.

While we’re walking across the lot toward an opening that leads to a courtyard and apartments, I look down and see a candy bar wrapper. I don’t remember the brand of candy bar. I don’t remember if I noticed it because the wind was tumbling it across the lot. I don’t remember if I noticed it because it made me think how nice a piece of candy would be. I just recall seeing it on the ground in the gravel as I’m walking and holding my father’s hand. I remember being small in the world around us.

It would be easy to fill in the blanks at this point. Where we were coming from and going to, what I heard my father saying, what I was thinking, what the day was like, what we were wearing, who else was around. I could have written the rest of that story in my head over the last 51 years. But I haven’t. I haven’t let myself do this because I prefer to preserve this earliest memory in all its simple randomness. I could “remember” what that Christmas was like with the tree and our presents, what the nearby park with its swings and teeter-totter was like, who the neighbors were, what mom and dad wore around the apartment, but that would all be details from photos we have in albums from back then.

I occasionally ask my students to free write on their first memory. They panic. I see it in their eyes. Most, if not all, have never had anyone challenge them to pinpoint that earliest proof of themselves, a memory, let alone write about it nonstop for ten minutes. What could it be? Unwrapping presents on Christmas morning? Floating down a river? Holding hands with my grandmother while singing at church? Trying to escape a dog chasing them out of a neighbor’s yard?

Volumes, I want to scream! You have volumes of material down, down, down in your mind. But we have to dig and mine it out, which I’ve tried to myself. And the further back you go, the more you run across along the pathway. They often mention recovering lost memories along the way to that target of a “first” memory. We have to dig for the beginning.

One day down the road I might think back and have “lost” this earliest memory. That first “known” anchor of self. It might be so gone I have not recollection of it ever existing, not even missing it. I’ve wondered what would take over as the next, first one. How my brain would fill in that earliest blank.

​The new beginning.   
 
 

​If it hurts, you’re probably doing it right.

​This applies to plenty of life’s situation. Getting in shape. Therapy. Paying bills.

Another one is the act of writing. If the word choice of “hurt” makes you cringe a little, try “uncomfortable.” If it’s uncomfortable, you’re probably doing it right. We can also try: If writing hurts, or is uncomfortable, or inconvenient, or doesn’t come easy, or requires you to get up too early, or stay up late, or takes years to master, or sacrifice something that’s easier and quicker, you’re probably doing it right.

Face it - Writing is difficult. And though as writers we dwell in writing circles which can give us the false impression that there are lots of writers in the world, it’s simply not true. Writing is so difficult, most people in the big old world simply don’t do it. This isn’t meant to be discouraging. It’s meant to be bolstering to those who do write and would take up the mighty pen. Just don’t think it’ll be painless and that stretching those metaphorical muscles won’t cause us some soreness along the way.

Sitting with the blank page is a frustrating act of love. The little flashing curser mocks our many blockages. Dares us to type without anything “worthy” to say. Dares us to sit down without a plan. With only fifteen minutes, rather than an entire, blissfully relaxed, uninterrupted morning. Dares us to write out of our genre. Dares us to try another style. To tell the truth. Or to lie. Or mix the two. To build worlds hitherto unimagined. Hell, dares us to even sit down at the desk.
We ask ourselves: What could I possibly have to write?

I can’t answer that question. I know this much. You won’t know until you write.    

I know you can write without knowing where to start. Or where to end. Or what the middle ought to be. Or what your characters will tell you about themselves. I know you can make observations about the world. Especially about parts of the world you know well. You can write about what you know. I know you can read for examples and inspiration.
           
o, yes, the pleasure of writing comes with some pain. We know this, yet fall upon our sharpened pens willingly. Bleed ourselves out for the world to see in drops on the reluctant page. We call ourselves writers. We often claim that we write because we can’t not write. Let’s be about the painful business it, shall we – at least we’re all in good company.  

<<<<<<<Tears Trigger Warning>>>>>>>
​
(Note: I wrote this a few months ago when a writing friend died very suddenly. I’m only now sharing it.)
 
We still ask that question, don’t we?
 
But I have questions.
This is an essay of mostly questions.
 
Have we not lost enough writer loved ones in the middle of their life work?
At the beginning of their work of promise? Who had so much to say?
Who were making the world a better place? Guaranteed? 
Who were taking chances with who they were, with what the world
had taught them, done to them, in order to put on the page those beautiful lessons?
 
What would they say about our being here, but not using our time?
 
Have we not lost enough loved ones who were hard at work and, unbeknownst to them, inspired us to work harder? Or to begin our creative journey in the first damned place?
 
How about people we never personally knew, but emotionally depended upon for our creativity? What would they say about our not being able to write, or paint, or sing?
 
What does waking up in the morning and finding out that someone you cared for and was laughing with only a few days ago, singing with, studying with, writing with, living with, is now a memory do to your sense of writing urgency?
 
Anything?
 
Yet in the midst of devastating loss and that long hard afterward we hesitate, don’t we? We slow in the confusion. We don’t work through the slog. 
 
Have we not lost enough to realize that our turn is coming?
That if, in fact, we believe our own rhetoric about having something to say to the big world then we’d better quit staring at the thieving clock and get to staring more at the giving paper. At least then our eyes are pointed in the right direction.
 
“But I don’t know what to say,” we might respond. That’s true.  
 
Guess what? I didn’t know what to say either, especially in my selfish confusion and anger and heartbreak this shitty morning brought. Yet here I am at the end of something.
 
Something is a start.
 
They’d want that. And they’d smile at our keeping on with the loved thing we share.  

Themes as prompts are good for jostling us out of a creativity funk. Writing poetry or flash pieces, or even journal entries, along a common thread as a goal can give us new direction. It often leads to unexpected places, if we let it.

A theme can be as strict or liberal as you like. It's a guide, not the law. Whatever you choose can remain literal or abstract in your interpretation. The idea is to be about the work of writing, right? 

It's interesting how many filters our creative steps go through as we make a thing into the world: a general theme, an abstract vision, environmental influences, our own mind, spirit, our physicality, our resources, drives, short and long-term goals, our arcing passions over the work, lack of motivations, frustrations, demands, etc. All of these and more give and take upon a final creative work. Why not guide ourselves on a single idea and see where it goes time and time again? 

Blue: The sky is blue; I'm feeling blue; my blue shoes; the blue dishes; first blue thing I saw today; last blue thing I saw: blue things I hate/love; blue rhyming words; new words for the word blue; the history of blue; who came up with the word blue and what was happening in that very moment that required that word and what time of the world was it and what language was it; blue on blue; blue near blue; blue over blue; Rothko blues; singing the blues; blue spines of books lining the book shelf; blue items of clothing. On and on. 

Now some of these are simple ideas on the theme of blue - until you think a little more on them, which is the point. Does the world need another poem about a blue sky? Who am I to say. Maybe it's not exactly about that, however. Maybe it's about going outside for a moment, changing up your routine, looking up to the sky and realizing there's absolutely no blue in the sky that afternoon. That's what you end up writing about. Maybe it's not a simple poem about blue shoes, but about why you haven't worn them in five years and can't bring yourself to let them go. That story belongs to your theme work. No one expects us to know the history of blue, but whatever comes to mind thinking on it makes a great flash fiction piece, I guarantee. 

And then there's the color red... 

Jimi Hendrix asked if we'd ever been "experienced" in 1967. It was his debut studio album. By the mid-70s, my father, a lead guitar player in bands in his high school years, by then a father and recent veteran of the Vietnam experience in 1969, was playing this and other music every morning before I left for grade school.

Luckily, my musical curiosities were set for the rest of my life. It was a collage of Hendrix, The Beatles, BB King, and George Benson, to name a few. I remember my young fascination with the strange backward guitar of the song, "Are You Experienced?" In musing on today's blog I naturally traveled way, way back to those early memories, to Jimi's question to me on those mornings, and to how I grew up with that range of influences. To how important plain old experience is when writing. 

Don't knock the simplicity of this. We need such a reminder occasionally. 

We live a life of experience, obviously, yet many of us distrust the worthiness of our everyday lives as fodder for writing material. Of course, everything we do all day long isn't poem worthy, isn't short story worthy. But there are nuggets of worth, ideas to mine all day when we're paying attention. 

It's the art of life: It's not quite the mundane aspects of living that readers want (though that can be a novel approach to explore), but the art within normalcy. It's how we get that art on the page that requires our hard work. 

I'm not much for New Year's resolutions, but I'll offer you this suggestion: Start journaling. If you don't journal in some form you're missing out a great deal of writing material. Write about your day. Thoughts. Fragments. Long paragraphs. Memories. Prompts to return to later. First lines. Last lines. Sketches. Colors. Titles. Music. Lists. Plots. The first thing you think of when you wake up. Before you fall asleep. Keep a dream journal. Collect photos. Anything. Everything. It's all potential writing material. In whole. In part. 

It's not that "I woke up" is necessarily poem worthy, but perhaps that one line reminds you of something important, or you challenge yourself to write every morning for a week beginning with the line "I woke up" and see where the lines go. Make it the title: "I Woke Up." Journaling is a good way of noticing whether you "wake up" the same way every morning and whether something stands out worth wringing a bit of art from. It's in there. 

Jimi knew the answer to his own question (and it wasn't just some bad metaphor for being altered). Yes, we are experienced. We simply have to notice.   

We talk a lot about PLACE as writers. It's a core element of writing that's so essential, so ever-present, we can easily neglect its care. It's like a close relative we love with all our heart, but forget to call enough, perhaps sensing they're always there.

Like that dynamic in familial relationships, it's not good enough, however, to assume they know they're on our minds, that we're representing them in truth. Place, in our writing, requires a special tending. The relationship resents assumptions. Hold grudges when misrepresented. Requires a certain presence in the life of the page.    

The importance of place in fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction, can't grow old in our consideration when constructing what we hand over to readers as an encapsulation of time and place. Think of place as a canvas upon which our paint is applied. It is backdrop. It is foundation. It serves as context. Emotional thread work. Call it story behind the story. 

Treating place can intimidate, of course. But let's remember how we live IN IT. In places we love and want to so mystically transfer from a physical state, into the psyche, and to the page. Even when we're making up a world we're pulling from realities of a sort. It's not easy to pick up a portion of the world and make it real for another person. But we try all the time and in so many ways. 

Remember: We can say where a place is without saying where a place is.

Place emerges subtly. Place is sometimes a type of tree or flower. A taste. An accent or word. The height of a mountain. The absence of a mountain. The color or density of soil. A family's last name. A man or woman's first or middle names. A feeling of the earth under the feet. A prayer. The name of a store. Where someone works. Whether someone wants to work. What the air smell like. A song. What a pet is doing out in the backyard on a Sunday afternoon when it starts snow flurrying though the sun's still out. 

Place is often spoken and unspoken. Seen and unseen. Misunderstood. Valued and not. Misplaced. Forgotten. Created from nothing. Ignored. Destroyed. 

And for something that's so hard to define, it's around us for the taking, behind us, ahead. Speaking for us and as us. We take a part with us from everywhere we've tread, rejecting some along the way, absorbing some. We look to where we might go, or close our eyes to what might be. 

We'll occasionally get it right in our work. Or so very wrong. We'll know it when it happens. Some writers will abuse the concept and mangle the idea of what we know should be told differently.

What better time to practice our meditations on place than now? Place slips away. Place changes. It erodes like water or soil, like disease over memories. Place waits for us up ahead, but by a different name. 

But don't forget, sometimes it's a different place altogether. 

Ending Things

How to end a poem. A story. A conversation. A song. A good life. A bad life.

How to simply end a day. 

​These are struggles of varying degrees we meet along the way if we're engaged in a certain "in the moment" awareness. That awareness can be a constant challenge in our creative lives. It can never cross our minds until "The End." It can be a sort of panic, a voice asking, "How can I manage this in some graceful, sensible way that brings a little satisfaction?" We might be falling asleep on the couch as the day draws to a close and wonder how we spent our hours. 

Or, such a question might never bother us, this "how are things wrapping up" tug many of us feel. That might be because a person just can't bring themselves to struggle with the question. It might not matter to them, in that existential "not buying it" sort of way. Perhaps an artful "out" isn't required.  

Ever wonder about all this when trying to end a poem or some other piece of writing? I do. 

Some writers struggle with beginnings, or with the fleshing out of the body of a work, or with characters, or with the great question of place. I tend to have a hard time letting go. I think that's due to my sometimes thinking too much for the reader, wondering if what I'm seeing in my head is too foggy on the page, and that if I wrap it up too quickly or too ambiguously they'll end up confused or disengaged or even angry. 

Yet there are plenty of successful pieces of writing out in the world that seem as if they have more to say, that hold back, but wrap up anyway. In the hands of a skilled writer this is quite intentional. Used as an obvious emergency release when you've hit a dead end, it's a sophomoric move. There's a difference between a walking trail running up to, rather than off a cliff with a pretty vista. 

Especially when dealing with the frequent emotional flash of poetry, we sometimes deal in fragments of thought, rather than in the fully concrete details longer prose can offer. Poetry often relies on a trust of the reader and a confidence of the writer for a satisfaction to come about.

A clear ending, with absolute closure, offering an easy narrative explanation, can be one goal, of course. But poem endings can also be open-ended, yet finished. We have to be alright with both writing and reading that when it happens. And when it happens well, it's lovely. 

The end of a life can be like this. We can have plenty of time for the build up, lots of planning, even too much knowledge of the event question. It can also be sudden, but instantly meaningful. Sudden, but full of lingering questions. 

 

<<<<<<Tears Trigger Warning>>>>>>>
 
We still ask that question, don’t we?
 
But I have questions.
This is an essay of mostly questions.
 
Have we not lost enough writer loved ones in the middle of their life work?
Who had so much to say? Who were making the world a better place? Guaranteed?  Who were taking chances with who they were, with what the world had taught them, done to them, in order to put on the page those beautiful lessons?
 
What would they say about our being here, but not using our time?
 
Have we not lost enough loved ones who were hard at work and, unbeknownst to them, inspired us to work harder? Or to begin our creative journey in the first damned place?
 
How about people we never knew personally, but emotionally depended on for our creativity? What would they say about our not being able to write, or paint, or sing.
 
What does waking up in the morning and finding out that someone you cared for and was laughing with only a few days ago, singing with, studying with, writing with, living with, is now a memory do to your sense of writing urgency?
 
Yet in the midst of devastating loss and that long hard afterward we hesitate, don’t we? We slow in the confusion. We don’t work through the slog.  
 
Have we not lost enough to realize that our turn is coming? That if, in fact, we believe our creatively expressed rhetoric about having something to say to the big world we’d better quit staring at the thieving clock and get to staring more at the giving paper. At least then our eyes are pointed in the right direction.
 
“But I don’t know what to say,” we might respond.
 
Guess what? I didn’t know what to say either, especially in my selfish confusion and anger and heartbreak the shitty morning brought. Yet here I am at the end of something.
 
Something is a start.
 
They’d want that. And they’d smile at our keeping on with the loved thing we share.  

A poem’s birth and life cycle – fed with chance and patience
 
“I’m not ready to take my place among the dead…” was a prompt given us by Aaron Smith three years ago during a week-long poetry boot camp. I scratched out some unsatisfactory lines of a poem start in my journal and moved on to other work. Other prompts, other starts. 
 
This was the beginning of my poem, “Fresh Earth.”
 
I happened over those notes two years ago during one of my MFA residencies at West Virginia Wesleyan College. I had a flash of inspiration, I confessed then, during one of the lectures, and fleshed out a number of lines of this poem and worked on it over the next few days. I read a short incarnation of it during that week’s student readings.
 
With the assistance of my advisor, the poem went through revisions half a year later during periodic packet work for that semester. 
 
The poem was revised further and included as part of my final thesis collection half a year ago.
 
The poem is included in what became an edited and longer collection now on submission to a publisher under the book title, PORCH.
 
The poem, I’m happy to report, was honored this month with 2nd place in the George Scarborough poetry contest at the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival, geographically only a mile from where Aaron Smith gave us that original writing prompt.  
 
While every poem we write doesn’t travel this trajectory, shouldn’t we have a kind of patience with our work that allows the possibilities of time to unfold them? So they have a chance to be a fullness only scrutiny over time reveals?
 
I felt good about early versions of my poem, “Fresh Earth” (which is one of three possible titles as well), and might have easily stepped away and started submitting it.
 
But it lacked something. That something is hard to see with your own eyes and hearts. Another reader, an advisor, mentor, writing group, trusted friend who won’t spare your delicate poet’s heart, even a stranger, is often required. Who will say, This ain’t done, buddy. Take it back down into the mine.
 
Some writing feels emotionally perfect on a first pass. Lots, actually. But few poems are perfect on a first writing. Very little writing is. Most things in life require revising. Usually several times. With others for help. With their unbiased eyes along with your biased reflections on the world your trying to mirror.
 
And sometimes, by the time the light goes out, hits something reflective, comes back bending, to our eyes, and the eyes of others, the world sees just what you were trying to say.  

Letting.

There will come a time when you open your rickety eyes first thing in the morning, glance across the room at whatever happens to fall into random sight, and NOT have to wonder if THAT, in all its mundaneness, iffy-ness, and/or obvious immediacy, is worth writing about: light hop-scotching over neglected surface dust, an unknown single footprint impression in the bedroom carpet, a question of whether the end table’s corner is a true right-angle or microscopically, even atomically rounded, or whether you can still concentrate as you did as a child and tell the weather without looking.  

You will learn to relax and let the not knowing come on with it. And just write what comes. Without wrestling with the fear that brings in a way that is a wrestling that’s a struggle, but more like a tumbling dance all over the floor where you’re partners with your opponent rather than trying to beat them at something. You’re bruised by and bruising the other while babying and treating their injuries.  

The inanimate world around us poets (I’ll keep this conversation mostly to poets for now) isn’t out to get us, though it feels frequently combative due to its seeming challenge for us to crack the life and/or death code simmering beneath the surface of everyday life. We all sip from that conflict in order to fuel our obsessions, I think. And we haven’t even mentioned all the flying and crawling and mechanical beings out there underfoot and overhead demanding attention in the mind and eventually on the page.

Who’s got time to question if this or that THING is the correct or incorrect item or theme or birth or death or immovable thought to invest our daily dying in?

Don’t we then simply have to go write? Getting comfortable, eventually, with being in and staying in the creating state. Past all the silly (though very real feeling) permissions and worries, past all the ifs and can’ts and nevers, past the fear of not only death, but of living.
​
A living that is called the page.

Loudly. Softly. Letting go of not knowing everything. Letting go of knowing too much. Letting go of what we hurt ourselves over.
​
Letting.