A Sense of Place

I joined a writing group a few weeks ago called “The St. Louis Artist’s Way”, which for the most part focuses on the work of Julia Cameron’s book of that name. This morning I woke up early to do morning pages and skim the exercises in Week Four, which is our assigned reading, looking for one that speaks to me.

The one that I hover over for an extra minute is asking me to describe my “ideal environment” in about one paragraph. “Town?” Julia asks, “Country? Swank? Cozy?” Ahhh! Now here’s something I can write about, because of course, I feel so conflicted about this nitty, gritty question of environment.

I moved from Scotland to America seventeen years ago. I can still remember coming off the plane and onto the sticky black tarmac at Chicago O’Hare (that’s how they de-planed in those days). The heat was thick and heavy as a blanket wrapped around my unwilling shoulders and the air smelled like stale french fries.

The roads I was used to in Scotland were narrow and twisty. They were made to accommodate nippy little cars, like Minis and Fiats. The towns always had a pedestrian path, usually lined with a bank of short grass at the side of each road. In college I walked everywhere, too impatient to wait for the bus when my strong legs could take me where I needed to go just as fast.

In St. Louis, the roads were massively wide, with majestic Chevys and Fords moving like stately behemoths through constantly flowing intersections that seemed impervious to the vulnerability of the frail, unarmored beings who dared to cross them. At the time I felt the message was that in America, cars were more important than humans. There often wasn't a pavement (sidewalk) in sight for miles. It was a strange new world in which the strip-mall stores looked eerily similar, mile after mile and where nothing, not even a corner shop was in comfortable walking distance.

But I've been here many years now, and I chose for various reasons, to remain. There are places in St. Louis that time has made familiar and memories have made fond. Sitting in the Hartford Coffee Company on Friday night, waiting for the members of my writing group, I wrote in my teal blue journal with my favorite pen and looked outside, past the company logo emblazoned in white on the window and beyond to the huge tree across the street, a damp, brilliant splash of green. A young hipster couple sat behind me, endearingly awkward together, perhaps on their first date. Musicians began to filter in with damp hair disheveled from the rain, carrying guitars and amps. 

Questions of environment and the complexity of what it means to live in a place that does not belong to me by birth or by choice, but (for lack of a better word) by destiny, are things that I think about often. At school last week I was having my students cut images out of magazines that represented things that made them feel calm or happy. I came across a photograph of a group of women who were making preserves in a barn, rows of glass jars lined up on a bench, dust motes floating on the rays of morning light between the wood slats in the walls. I found myself tugging the page out to keep. Is that the kind of environment that I want? I remember my horror when my husband and I went to visit family in Sabetha, Kansas and he suggested we could live there. “What would you want me to do all day,” I demanded churlishly, “dance in the corn-fields?” Did I come all the way from a small town in Scotland to live in a small town in Kansas? I think not!

When we visited Colorado, I loved the mountains, but there was so much open space ... miles upon miles of highway ending in vast suburbs organized into neat grids. “See,” my husband said proudly, “at least the roads here make sense!” I loved Boulder, but wasn't so sure about “family-friendly” Fort Collins.

I’m still not sure what environment makes sense for me. Perhaps somewhere in the Pacific Northwest where I can hear the steady heartbeat rhythm of the rain that was part of my childhood, and is now part the essence of who I am. The rain reminds me of summer days in a far-away land, and opens the doorway to reflection, and to my creative life in a way that nothing else can. I need somewhere that I can feel the peace and tranquility of the country, but still have access to the diversity, the culture, and the vibrant life that city living brings.

I look up from my writing to find that it’s raining still. All the environment I need is here this morning.  I have written, right here in this place and I know that wherever I am, I hold the key to heaven in my very own hands.

Hartford Coffee Company, South St. Louis City

A Slice of My Writing Life

I’m sitting in my kitchen on this rainy Saturday feeling somewhat of a sense of accomplishment. The bed is made, the house picked up and the dishwasher and the dryer are both running. My daughter, who is three years old, is singing parts of Taylor Swift’s song “Trouble” repeatedly as though she’s one of those big old LP’s where the needle gets stuck in the same spot, “Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble ...” ad infinitum.  At least she’s not torturing us with endless repetitions of PSY’s “Gangnam Style” video.  This is all “women’s stuff”, and it really belongs in my morning pages (which I haven’t written today) rather than a blog. This stuff is part of the daily landscape (for me) of being a woman and a creative person. I do housework at breakneck speed and I even joined a semi cult-like group called “FlyLady” a few years ago in my efforts to become domestically super-efficient so that I would have more time to write. More time to write, dear God let me write something half-way decent before I die! My daughter watches me sitting at my computer a lot. Lesson planning. A little writing. More lesson planning. A little more writing, maybe.

Children emulate what we do of course, so Sophie has learned to navigate the iPad like a ten year old.  She started with “Angry Birds” and moved into YouTube videos of people teaching her to play Angry Birds, or demonstrating Angry Bird toys. Then she started finding videos of people baking various novelties, such as “Angry Birds” cupcakes and “Hallo Kitty” cakes. “Mommy,” she asks me in that deeply serious tone that three year-olds sometimes use, “do we have a cake leveler?”
“Um, no honey” I say distractedly, searching for just the right  phrase in my latest mini-epic. “How about fondant?” she says  hopefully. We sit together snuggled on the couch while I type letters and write blog posts. Do I feel guilty about how much time I let her play with technology? Of course! Guilt is a language many women and especially mothers understand very well. Or maybe that’s just me. Maybe other mummies take time to sweep under the couch on a Saturday morning before they set to work baking with their cake levelers and colored fondant.

This morning I did something I never do. I asked my husband to clean the bathroom so that I could have more time to write. And he did. “Hey mommy,” Sophie asks me, “can I paint now, please can I?”
“We have to go out soon honey” I say, “but we can do some modelling clay for a few minutes if you like.” 
“Ooh yay, let’s make some Angry Birds!” she claps excitedly and I smile. She's creative, just like me. 

The Artist's Way

“The Artist’s Way” wasn't my original point of entry into the world of writing teacher/guru Julia Cameron. The first book of hers that I read in its entirety was “The Right to Write”. I even make reference to it in an image on the right hand side of this blog. I loved that book, and the way that Cameron explains so lucidly (and lyrically) that writing for its own sake is a wholly acceptable natural, human impulse, not reserved only for the super-talented, for the Stephen Kings and the John Le Carré’s of this world. “We write” she says, “because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes it directly and specifically our own.” 

At that time it made me think of the Paleolithic paintings in the caves in Lascaux, France, and the way that even stone-age people felt the need to record the events of their lives, the sights and scents of the hunt or whatever religious rituals that marked their days. If their experience was valid, why not mine? The book taught me how to write from the present moment, to dig deeper into my own experience and to keep developing my own authentic voice. She also taught me to write what I liked writing about, rather than what I should be writing: “Guilty pleasure is what writing is all about. It is about attractions, words you can’t resist using to describe things too interesting to pass up” she said. And above all, there was this phrase, “forget lofty motives”. How freeing! There was no need for me to write the great American novel, after all. The only need was to satisfy my impulse to write. 

Did I do all the exercises in “The Right to Write”? Honestly no, but even a few sentences of Cameron’s beautifully inspiring writing would often be enough to make me set pen to paper. (It's the same for me with "The Artist's Way".) She refused to allow me the feeble excuse that there was no time to write, and for a while I committed conscientiously to her practice of doing my “morning pages” each day, and even taking myself out on an “artist’s date” now and again. 

Of course, every approach has its limitations. I don’t believe that Julia Cameron does a great job of teaching you how to be a commercially successful artist. She doesn't explain how to structure a short story, or write a novel like “Twilight” that appeals to the masses. I heard that Stephen King’s classic book “On Writing” is much better for that, and much more pragmatic about the “business” of writing but for various reasons, I haven’t brought myself to read it yet.

I did buy Eric Meisel’s “The Creativity Book” but didn't get too far with it. I found a book called “One Year to a Writing Life” by Susan M. Tiberghien to have some useful thoughts and exercises. I have a copy of Cameron’s “Vein of Gold” which I bought because it was on sale and I haven’t really looked at much. My inspiration and reading pleasure these days often comes from softly reflective memoir writing, such as Phyllis Theroux’s “The Journal Keeper” or May Sarton’s “Journal of a Solitude”. 

Our writer's group had an on-going discussion over the last few weeks about  the limitations of Cameron’s approach; it's pretty dated and it's based on the 12-step recovery model. This gives it a quasi-mystical tone and the venerable author has the similar, unquestionable status afforded to cult gurus around the world. My own blog from last week raised questions for some members about the concept of the "artist's date", and the idea that our "inner artist" is in some way separate from who we are. We wondered whether Cameron's work encourages a "splitting" of the self, and whether in some way it causes us to infantilize ourselves as continually "recovering" artists, rather than to claim ourselves as bona-fide artists in our own right. On the other hand and in her defense, there’s nobody like Julia Cameron for giving aspiring writers permission to write and doing it so evocatively, so irresistibly:

“Left to its own devices, writing is like weather. It has a drama, a form, a force to it that shapes the day. Just as a good rain clears the air, a good writing day clears the psyche. There is something very right about simply letting yourself write. And the way to do that it to begin, to begin where you are.”

It's pretty hard to argue with that ...
Anna