Stanley Kunitz deliberately oriented the basement studio in his Provincetown summer home so that his desk faced out through a window onto two swollen mounds: one a pile of decomposing seaweed, the other a compost heap.

In “The Round,” he wrote, So I am sitting in semi-dark/hunched over my desk, with nothing for a view/ to tempt me/but a bloated compost heap, steamy old stinkpile/under my window/

It is revealing, I think, that Kunitz saw the compost heap, the stinkpile, as something that would tempt him, attract and engage him. The decaying mass nourished not only the poet’s garden soil but his consciousness as well, reminding him of the continuous cycles of the universe.

Poets do create out of compost. The garbage heap is where the steamy work gets done. Things sit, disintegrate and break down and then are transformed into fertile matter out of which new life is nourished and rises. This cyclic alchemy is always at work in nature and in life. Vietnamese Zen master and poet Thich Nhat Hanh writes that the flower and the garbage inter-are. The flower is becoming the garbage and the garbage is becoming the flower. If we look deeply we can see one in the other.

The garbage heap is the alluvial sludge that writers mine for material. We call it memory.

Scientists tell us that memory is inscribed on the cortex of the brain, stored in our cells. Poets are more lyrical. Oliver Wendell Holmes called it a net. I think of memory as a sponge, the repository of everything we have ever dreamed, smelled, seen, heard and tasted. It holds our hopes and dreams, failures and successes. Our wild imaginings. Excitations. Passions. Amorphous illusions and concrete experiences. Memory is creative work, built of slippery truth and mythic fantasy, confusion and tangled imaginings, all mutated by time

Always we are absorbing. Perpetually, in the compose heap, memories are being consumed, digested and assimilated. Out of it, grow the blossoms of creation. We take a memory and imagine it fully which in turn adds to the bank of remembrances. One sparks another. Both inter-are. There is a direct and kenetic relationship between memory and imagination.

That is why writers count memory among their most valuable tools. It is why we keep journals. The smallest thing – a fragment of a conversation, a remembered smell, a name, one object from the past – is enough to stoke the creative mind. “Memory,” says writer Amy Tan, “feeds imagination.” We have only to take the sponge and squeeze the good stuff out.

All of my novels were born in memory. One was built on a haunting story I heard at dinner one night when I was ten. Imagine holding on to a tale for decades before releasing it in the form of a novel. Another book was built on an image of an exhibit at a museum. A third on the morning recollection of a dream. Still another on a remembered newspaper headline. Another on the cellular memory of a profound loss.

Try this. Take a piece of paper and write the words, “I remember.” Then fill the page with things you remember. Out of deep recesses of the cortex, reminiscences surface.

I remember the calluses on my father’s hands; the first time I swallowed seawater; drinking buttermilk at my grandmother’s house; hearing my neighbors fight; Ellis Island; hunger.

Now add an additional word or phrase: “I remember holding…,” “I remember smelling…,” “I remember the first time I ….”

This exercise is a sure cure for the sterile thing we call writer’s block. Retrieve a memory from the list and enlarge it. Embroider and expand it. If it shifts to the sphere of fiction, relax any concern about holding to the literal truth. Just follow where it leads. This is how we write. We go to the workspace and the play yard we call memory. We swim there. We dive. We learn again how to create. We pay attention to what we’ve stored. We discover that often a memory that makes us want to run in the other direction is the stuff out of which powerful writing comes.

We till our compost into the garden of imagination.

And we remember to give thanks.

Posted by Anne LeClaire at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You're a writer. You enter a bookstore, stare at the shelves.

“Don't compare,” a tiny voice advises.

Too late. You're already lost.

A colleague's novels are stacked in their own flashy display unit. Obviously her advertising budget totaled more than your last advance. And what's this? That novelist has another book out. Does he produce a novel every three weeks now or what?

You reach for a book, read the cover blurb. Clearly the author is brilliant. Magnificent. You pick up another book, study the jacket photo. Lord, lordy. What is she, in middle school? Maybe.

You're a writer. You go to the bookstore. You look at the books. You might as well go down to the morgue and dance with the bones.

Sooner or later all writers confront the beast, the unholy ghost named Envy who dwells in the soul. No one escapes. Not even writers like Buddy Nordan.

Buddy is the only living author I know who has an entire week named for him. For a fact. February 7-14 is “National Lewis Nordan Appreciation Week.” Reviews of his books are so outrageously enthusiastic you might think his mother wrote them. Critics say things like “greatness in our midst,” “storytelling genius,” and “the best prose writer in the United States.” So one might imagine that Buddy wouldn't have to contend with envy.

One spring, during a writing residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Buddy and I went over to Sweet Briar College to hear Lee Smith give a reading from “News of the Spirit,” her collection of short stories.

Lee is a funny, generous-hearted and wildly talented writer and all Southern charm. When she is on the stage, she owns the audience. For more than an hour, in the cradle of the Blue Ridge Mountains during a theatrical thunderstorm, Buddy and I and several hundred fans sat in an overheated room and, completely enthralled, gave ourselves over to the magic of Lee.

Later, on the way back to the residence hall and still high from the evening, I turned to Buddy. “Listening to Lee just makes me want to run to my studio and write,” I said.

Buddy gave me this hangdog look. “It makes me want to shoot myself,” he drawled.

Well, I thought, if Mr. National Appreciation Week, Mr. Storytelling Genius himself can be silenced by envy, I might as well pack up the tents and go home.

That is what envy does. It silences us. And at one time or another we all wrestle with it. We compare ourselves to another and come up short. Our admiration is mutated into envy.

Several years ago, a good friend's book was surfacing on The New York Times bestseller list and she appeared on “The Today Show” and “Oprah.” “I'm so happy for you,” I said each time Jackie phoned with the latest news: the ascent on the list to Number One, the movie sale, the terms for her new two-book contract, the Oprah Book Club Selection.

“Doesn't it make you a little envious?” another friend asked.

“No. Not at all,” I said. This was my friend, after all. Surely you aren't jealous of a friend's great good fortune. Surely you celebrate rather than covet.

Yet these calls corresponded with a personal dry spell and after each conversation I felt a little bit more like a failure. I wanted to take up residence in a closet and eat shoes.

“I'm so happy for you,” I'd say. But secretly the Maurice Sendak creature that was rooming in my liver wasn't so happy. Secretly this fanged and furry critter hoped my friend would get fat.

It took nearly four months of battle with the corrosive emotion named Envy before I could release it enough to genuinely rejoice for my friend.

That summer I asked her if she was ever envious of other writers.

“Only constantly,” she said. “When I'm writing a book and go into a bookstore and look at all the work, I am sick with grief and envy. And I can't read any work – even of writers I don't admire – if it is remotely graceful. When I am writing I can only read botany.”

Hmmmmmm.

“And,” she continued, “I'm ill with envy when another writer says, ‘I'm having such a good time at it. It's like I'm taking dictation. My characters just tell me what to write.’ Meanwhile I'm slugging through the dirt and my characters are eating chips and getting acne and not helping me out at all.”

That's when I felt safe enough to confess that maybe I'd felt the teeniest bit jealous when her book came out. Just the teeniest bit, you understand. I didn't mention anything about how I'd hoped she'd put on a pound. Or thirty.

In our culture, we're trained to feel ashamed of emotions like jealousy and envy, to disown them.

The Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chodron has a different take on it. She teaches that emotions like envy need to be regarded as wisdom in disguise.

If we are willing to sit with it, she says, to begin the queasy business of going deep inside, there is much we can learn.

Easier said than sat. Who wants to sit quietly while a beast chaws at your liver? Better to run. Better to deny.

But, instruct the Buddhists, by becoming quiet, we grow to understand that envy is the lodestone that brings us back to self-knowledge. After a while we grasp this truth: When we experience envy, it means we've undergone a lapse of faith in our own work, our own lives. We've gotten off track. We've gotten caught up in the poisonous game of comparing. We've come to the false belief that there is only so much success to go around. We've given in to fear.

Gradually, we come to comprehend that the experience of envy and the belief in one's self cannot exist in the same space any more than love and fear can, and this knowledge pulls us out of the pit. We go on. And we find that because we can't inoculate ourselves for life, envy periodically surfaces like a virus that sleeps inside.

Over the years, as we sit with our beasts, we learn to foster compassion for ourselves when they assault. We learn to sustain ourselves. We grab on to our lifeline, return to the writing, which nurtures.

We tutor ourselves to hold firm to our belief in our own path.

This is good practice. In writing and in life.

Posted by Anne LeClaire at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

By the nature of our work, writers create in solitude, but out of this withdrawal comes the gift of connection.

“The word,” wrote Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, “preserves contact.” One May, I was reminded again of the inherent power of story to connect. I had been recruited to teach creative writing in Ireland to a class made up of American and Irish women, and before I left I was laden with anxiety, an apprehension that centered on the bicultural nature of the class. Would I be able to understand the Irish brogue? Would I, an unknown American, be accepted as a teacher in a land where poetry is the native tongue? What was I getting into? Lost in anxiety, I had forgotten the power of story to transcend any division created by culture. Then, for ten days, in the village of Kenmare, County Kerry, I sat in the center room of a stone cottage and listened to stories written from the heart.

The first day of the class, without any directive, the group formed a circle, that classic configuration for storytellers, and we settled in. For the first assignment, I gave an in-class exercise that began with the phrase, “I remember…” With no time to succumb to page fright, the writers took up pens and sailed off to their individual interior worlds of memory.

Mo wrote about holding the weight of a shriven breast in her hand as she bathed her beloved grandmother. Eileen wrote about her childhood on a farm and about the small square of treasured green silk her father gave her to clean her wee glasses and the fly-away-Jack he invented to keep the crows from the crops in Stephen’s field. Kate wrote a remarkable stream of consciousness piece about the day when – in her former profession as a nurse – she held an amputated limb for the first time. Iva wrote of Harpies and fear. Margaret composed a piece about a hen that pecked flesh from one’s neck and held little pigs beneath her speckled wings, and wept when she realized she was, in fact, writing about her mother.

Lorraine wrote about her father’s service station and the ties it promulgated between three generations. Vera, the vicar’s wife, wrote about a young man with a playgirl tattooed on his bum who performed Striptograms, and the old dame who bared her tit at him. (Days later she would confide the tattooed boy was her son.) Pam wrote of her childhood in South Africa and the courage it took to leave her family so she could pursue a dream. Cornelia wrote of loss and life struggles: cancer, the death of a husband.

Each day, we returned to the stone cottage, a haven situated fifty feet away from Our Lady’s Holy Well and Shrine and yards away from a Druid’s Circle more than 3000 years old, and each day the class formed its own circle. Together we drank from the well named memory and dove into the deep sea called imagination. We plummeted into white water filled with risk and danger. We shared writing and bore witness for each other. And it didn’t matter where we lived or in what country we were born. What counted were the stories.

They were fiction and fantasy and memoir. They spoke of courage and fear, desire and despair, of sons and daughters, fathers, mothers, lovers and husbands, of soaring off to distant stars, of senses come alive.

By now, my initial anxiety had long since dissolved. My only question was How could I have forgotten? How could I have forgotten a truth I’ve seen demonstrated again and again, the lesson I had learned so poignantly during the two years I had taught creative writing to women in jail: Words unite us. Stories connect us.

How could I have forgotten that there is within each of us a deep yearning to share our stories, and it is through the telling of these stories that we build relationships, that we reveal ourselves? How could I have forgotten what E.B. White said so perfectly? That all writing is communication and creative writing is the Self escaping into the open.

Stories cross borders of geography, sex, age, culture and race. In a time when connections seem to be breaking down at a frantic rate, our stories hold the power to forge community and create bonds. They are catalysts to open our hearts, dissolve preconceptions and connect us to our world. Through them we dare demonstrate who we are.

In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, Pablo Neruda said, “All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are.”

To convey to others what we are.

That is what we yearn for. That alone is worth the journey to the dark and daunting place of isolation that is the territory of the writer. And when we have the courage to face the darkness, we come out with stories that shape and connect us. As Naruda said in the same speech, we come forth to “dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song.”

How could I have forgotten? Through stories we sing the music of our lives.

Stories have always been the magic.

Posted by Anne LeClaire at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)