A Poetry Workshop - Part 3

The poetry workshop led by Scott Cairns at the Laity Lodge writers retreat extended over two days, Friday and Saturday. Each session was three hours of discussion and readings, with some additional hours (for me, anyway) for the overnight assignment.

If someone had told me that by following Sam Van Eman’s blog New Breed of Advertisers almost two years ago that I would end up a writer for The High Calling and in a poetry workshop in southern Texas, well, who’d of thunk it? And read a poem I’d written to a group of people I scarcely knew? Who’d of thunk that, too? Two years ago, writing poetry wasn’t even on my radar scope.

But there I was, sitting with 11 other people, listening and talking, listening and commenting, being part of the silence after each poem was read.

At the Sunday worship time, I found myself sitting between two of the poetry workshop participants, Cameron Lawrence and Joan Fry. Another participant, Brian Williams, was sitting on the other side of Cameron. (At the brunch afterward, I would sit with Joan and still another participant, Jean Dunham.) In a few short hours, poetry had created a bond.

So, I’ve written this, for Scott Cairns and all of the workshop participants (Brian Williams, Cameron Lawrence, Joan Fry, Jean Dunham, Bill and Diana Bridgman, Mary Earle, Angela Carlson, Olga Samples Davis and Verbie Ann Helyger).

Workshop

We sit circular,
approximately,
holding pages filled
with hope and
desire and not
a little anguish.
And he says,
the opposite of faith
is not doubt;
the opposite of faith
is anxiety.
We nod.
Tentatively, then
more boldly, we read,
our words suffused
with Spirit, a cascade
of worship.

Photograph: Waterfall at the dam, Laity Lodge; courtesy of my cell phone.

A Poetry Workshop - Part 2

After Scott Cairns had given us our assignment at the Laity Lodge writers retreat – a poem based on a “dark saying” or difficult passage of scripture – I went back to my room at Song Bluff House to write. I wrote four drafts and decided I was done. And then off I went for a walk and trail hike, and rejoined my virtual-now-real colleagues with the High Calling Blogs for dinner and an after-dinner program.

The next morning, I woke up shortly before 5 a.m. I was wide awake with the sudden realization that what I had written was all wrong. I sat there on the side my bed and wrote two more drafts, continuing to work it, a word here and a phrase there, tried a new framework, and finally told myself I needed coffee. After walking down to lodge and finding the coffee, I sat in the empty, quiet Great Hall and wrote three more drafts. After breakfast and devotions, it was time for the workshop.

I had posted poems on this blog before, and those posts have always been the ones I am most sensitive about (this one is, too, because the poem is below). I think there’s something about me and poetry that involves a certain vulnerability.

But never had I read to group of real people before. Never had I been in a poetry workshop before. Never had I sat thinking about the critique and commentary to come.

After a short discussion, we started. I didn’t go first. I didn’t even consider going first, or even third. Part of me hoped we’d run out of time before I had to read mine, and part of me wanted badly to do this.

Each of us read our poems. Each reading was followed by a discussion and commentary. And something rather remarkable happened.

As each poem was read, a kind of silence descended upon us. We were all listening, and listening closely. With each reading, something was building. It was as if we were in church, listening to scriptural and liturgical readings. It was more than moving. It was often overwhelming.

We didn’t run out of time, and it was time for me to read my poem. The passage I had selected was Joshua, chapters 5-12, when the Israelites are invading the Promised Land and are instructed to destroy all men, women and children, and even the farm animals in some cases. Total eradication of all human life.

This is the poem I read:

As for me and my house
A meditation on Joshua 5-12

Would I have been cleansed
in the wilderness, or buried
in the sand as a submission
to the cleansing?

That man wielding the
great sword, that man
commanding the Lord’s host,
that man who makes ground
holy,
would I have obeyed, even
unto death?

Could I have stood in that
Jericho doorway, and plunged
the sword into the mother
and then the child? Or the child
first and then the mother?
And plunged that sword again
at Ai and Makeddeh,
Libnah and Lachish,
Eglon and Hebron,
Hazor and Anab, Jarmuth and
Gexer and Bethel and Aphek
and Tirzah and Megiddo and…

When the man who makes
ground holy turned over
the tables of shekels and
talents and doves, shouting
at thieves and robbers,
would I have conspired
to kill him, becoming yet
another submission to the
cleansing?
Or would he have
cleansed me?

(Last draft composed 10/3/10 in the Great Room at Laity Lodge, prior to the start of morning devotions.)

When I finished reading, and finally looked up, there was the familiar silence. Scott Cairns was staring at me. No one spoke, and for a moment I thought I'd produced a real turkey. And then he and the others began to speak, rather softly. People were kind.

“You have two poems there,” Scott said. “And that’s great. It’s a good day when you can write one poem. Two poems is a great day. And they should be published on facing pages in your collection of poems.”

I don’t think the poem is finished yet (or is that poems?). But it stands in a line of events last week that started with a devotion on Thursday by Gordon Atkinson and continued through another devotion by Gordon and communion on Sunday. In fact, the words Gordon spoke both times are the bookends for this poem.

And something’s changed.

Photograph: View from atop Circuit Bluff, Laity Lodge; courtesy of my cell phone. I think of it as looking out toward a kind of Promised Land.

A Poetry Workshop - Part 1

At the High Callings Blogs staff meeting at Laity Lodge last week, we joined the writer’s retreat conference on Thursday evening. On Friday, the workshops started, including ones for fiction, spiritual writing, non-fiction, song writing and others.

I had signed up for the poetry workshop, led by Scott Cairns, a poet and professor at the University of Missouri – Columbia. (Yes, I see a certain irony in traveling to the Hill Country of south Texas for a workshop led by a man who lives an hour and a half from my house in St. Louis.)

At the workshop, 12 of us gathered in a circle, and Scott began the discussion by asking what, exactly is a poem? How can poetry apply to scripture? Could we learn something from how the Jewish commentators explicated their scriptures? He read a prose poem by Jorge Luis Borges entitled “Legend,” about Cain and Abel meeting long after the great drama (and Abel’s murder) in the Book of Genesis. This is what I wrote as I listened to the poem and the discussion:

Listening to Borges

I was listening to a poem
by Borges and wondered,
did the mark upon Abel
become the mirror that
became the mark
upon Cain?

Scott had so many good things to say. I don’t think I’ve known a more gracious workshop leader, and as this was my first poetry workshop, I had a lot of questions about what might happen. Among several other things, he said, “To understand tradition, you have to be humble. Arrogance has no understanding of tradition.” And this: “Let the mind descend to the heart to hear the text in a different way.”

I felt completely at home in the discussion, until he rather innocently asked each of us to name a passage in scripture that we found to be a “dark saying” or particularly difficult. Most of us could think of at least one.

And then he said, “Now, your assignment is to write a poem about it and read it to the rest of us tomorrow for comment and critique.”

I had posted poems online before – and they are always the postings I’m the most nervous and sensitive about. But I had never read a poem I wrote aloud to a group. Not to mention doing so with the expectation of comment and critique.

Oh, my.

Photograph of Scott Cairns by University of Missouri.

Virtual Staff Becomes Real Staff

For the retreat at Laity Lodge with the High Calling Blogs (HCB) staff, we drove from San Antonio west to Kerrville, and then another 20 or so miles west. Then south for quite a ways, turning off on a road of crushed rock (I’d guess limestone but I’m no rock expert; I sort them into ugly, pretty and common).

We drove for a few miles in the darkness, and then descended to the river. We went straight in and followed the river road (or road in the river) for what seemed like the equivalent of three or four blocks. And then a steep turn upward back on to the road. Eventually, four of us were dropped off at Song Bluff House – Gordon Atkinson, David Rupert, Sam Van Eman and myself. It was actually quite a nice residence – three bedrooms, two baths, large living and dining area, and perched on a bluff about the lodge’s youth camp. It was well after midnight, and we all crashed.

Breakfast the next morning was at 8, and then a devotion time followed by the staff meeting. Gordon led the devotion on Matthew 7:21-24, and I should have known something was up when I wrote the following in the journal I carry everywhere now:

Change Psalm

My heart is the Lord’s
My hands are the Lord’s.
My ears are the Lord’s.
My feet are the Lord’s.
My will is the Lord’s.
My hope is the Lord’s.
My desire in the Lord’s.
My desire…
    My…
        Lord…
            The Lord…
The Lord is my desire.
The Lord is my hope.
The Lord is my will.
The Lord is my feet.
The Lord is my ears.
The Lord is my hands.
The Lord is my heart.

The meeting started with a short presentation on the history of the Foundation for Laity Renewal and the Howard E. Butt family, and the lodge property itself. HCB editor Marcus Goodyear discussed the upcoming merger of the High Calling site with the High Calling Blogs site. Then Laura Barkat, HCB managing editor, talked about the importance of trust. We had lunch and then a telephone conference with the site design firm on the new process for entering content.

One of the best parts of the meeting was to talk with people I’d been working with online for more than a year in some cases. I had just worked with Sam on a Random Act of Poetry post for HCB. I’d worked with Marcus on several projects, and had been communicating and then working with Laura Barkat since the summer of 2009. And I work closely with Bradley Moore, aka Shrinking Camel, who’s my editor at HCB for posts on work.

But then there were all the others, people I had followed on Twitter and Facebook, left comments on their blogs, traded emails with from time to time: Gordon and Sam, Ann Kroeker, Laura Boggess, Claire Burge, Dan Roloff, David Rupert, Cheryl Smith, Dena Dyer, Deidra Riggs, Dan King (the Bible Dude himself!), Ann Voskamp and Jennifer Dukes-Lee.

When you read people’s writing for a sustained period and work with them online, you gradually form a picture of what they must be like in person. And for me there were no surprises. Well, not exactly. Sam Van Eman is a lot more serious on his New Breed of Advertisers blog than he is in person. Not that he’s wild and crazy. Well, not hugely wild and crazy. Okay, he’s kind of a crazy guy in a reserved sort of way.

That evening, we joined 50 or so other writers for the opening reception of the regular writer’s retreat. As I looked across the Great Hall, I noticed a tall man who looked a lot like someone I had seen before at my church in St. Louis. When he sat at my table at dinner, I realized he was the guy from my church. He was as surprised to see me as I was to see him – neither of us knew the other was a writer. (It’s a big church.)

I ended the evening by walking back to Song Bluff House, about a half a mile from the main lodge. The next day, Friday, we’d begin the workshops. I would be participating in the poetry workshop with Scott Cairns, a poet and professor at the University of Missouri in Columbia (who lives about 90 minutes from my house). All these Missouri connections…

Photograph: Laity Lodge, Great Hall building from across the Frio River, courtesy of my cell phone.

A Scavenger Hunt Snapshot

I spent four days with the staff and writers of the High Calling Blogs (HCB) at Laity Lodge near Kerrville, Texas. Laity Lodge is remote, and that’s by design. It is a retreat center that is devoted but not limited to the arts.

There were many things special about this meeting, not the least of which was, for most of us, we would be meeting face to face for the first time. People we had all known from blog posts, photographs, emails and comment boxes would translate from pixels to flesh and blood.

We arrived at various times on Wednesday, Sept. 29 in San Antonio. We were transported downtown for a scavenger hunt and dinner. Our scavenging team included an utterly fearless Claire Burge (HCB photography editor), a fast-tweeting Ann Kroeker (HCB family editor), an intrepid Jennifer Dukes-Lee (contributing editor on family), and me (with the map). We had to find a number of listed landmarks, photograph them, upload them to Twitter, encourage others to retweet them, and then wander around doing things like buying a stranger an ice cream and asking an employee what they liked about the boss.

In spite of technical glitches with uploading photos to Twitter, I’m proud to say that our team won.

Then we were off to dinner on the San Antonio Riverwalk, rushed to the airport to meet Bradley Moore (HCB work editor) who finally arrived after two cancelled flights, and then a 2+ hour drive to Laity Lodge.

And what happened there will take a few more posts.

HCB Editor Marcus Goodyear giving instructions for the scavenger hunt.
 

 
Claire Burge, Ann Kroeker and Jennifer Dukes-Lee in front of the Buckhorn Museum.
 

Claire Burge writes an inscription in a book left for any stranger who happens to walk by and see it (that was worth 15 points in the scavenger hunt)

An Engineer Got Emotional

In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, the authors cite emotion as one of the critical factors in why some things last, and others quickly fade away. By “emotion” they don’t mean an appeal to the emotions exclusively, although there is some of that in what they discuss. What they really mean is appealing to the particular instead of the general, to the recognizably human rather than the unrecognizable abstract.

I once wrote a speech for an executive that did that. In fact, it did more than that. I’ve described the man I write it in a post in August at The High Calling Blogs.

The executive, a chemical engineer by background, was speaking to a joint meeting of 1,500 chemical engineers in London. It was 1988, a time of environmental ferment and change: drought, excessive heat, Time naming the earth as “plant of the year,” syringes washing up on New Jersey beaches, and general rising awareness and concern about environmental issues. Feeding these issues had been the tragedy at Bhopal, India, three years earlier, when a leak of a chemical resulted in the deaths of 10,000 people.

The executive believed he had a prime opportunity to put all of the issues and concerns in context, and appeal to fellow chemical engineers to help address the problems. It might also be an opportunity to seize some high ground, and position the company in a better light than “one of the usual villainous suspect.”

The speech told a story of two chemical industries, one which had brought unparalleled progress and the other unparalleled environmental damage. Of course, there two were the same industry, and the listeners knew it.

And then came the finish.

The speech could have done this: “In Bhopal, more than 10,000 people died because of an accident. We must never let it happen again.”

This is how the speech actually ended, describing a BBC-TV special on Bhopal:

“A few weeks after that tragedy, a British film crew went to Bhopal and interviewed dozens of people there victims and non victims. The resulting program, called ‘The Killing of Bhopal,’ recently aired on public television in the United States. And what it dramatically showed was what we might call the public's answer to all of our sophisticated risk assessments, risk probabilities, risk quantifications and public education programs on how safe our industry is.

“It showed doctors and nurses frantically trying to learn what had happened, to know how to treat the victims.

“It showed a mother describing how her baby died in her arms, choking to death.

“It showed a young wife who watched her husband die.

“It showed a 12 year old boy who was the only survivor of his large family.

“For all our talk about the safety of chemicals, these scenes from Bhopal are the end point of chemical risk. We must live up to what the public expects of us, and do our jobs as we know we can.

“Anything less is failing the trust we have to the public.

“Anything less is failing ourselves.”

And what did those 1,500 engineers do?

They stood and cheered. They asked the executive to videotape the speech, and they sent tapes all over the world, to every chapter of their international association. Requests for printed copies of the speech poured in, and kept pouring in – for the next seven years. The speech led to amazing changes at our company, and within the industry at large.

And I believe that ending had a lot to do with it. It made the speech stick.


Laura Boggess is leading the discussion on Made to Stick over at the High Calling Blogs. Last week's discussion, on "credible," can be found here.

Previous blog posts in this series:

On Simple: The One Time Something I Did Went Viral

On Unexpected: Singing Opera in Journalism Class

On Concrete: As Concrete – as the Air

On Credible: Credibility – It’s all in the numbers

An Addendum to the RAP

On Friday at the High Calling Blogs, I had a post for the Random Acts of Poetry about “The Poems We Come From.” The prompt for the poems submitted was to name a poem that you had first read or experienced in high school or school (or anywhere else) that had had an impact on you, and then to write a poem about it.

And the poems came in. We had poems representing Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Langston Hughes, Anne Sexton, Luci Shaw – and even Johnny Cash. One poet even did a YouTube video of his poem, and another submitted the video of the Johnny Cash song that had inspired her. It was amazing.

We had to establish a deadline for the submissions, but another one came in (and yet another may still come in), and I offered to note it here.

Monica Sharman at Know-Love-Obey God wrote a moving story about the poem she selected. She was not the first of her family to go to college, but she was the first to live on campus, and the reason was that her parents had separated and sold the home she had lived in since kindergarten. She became part of a Bible study, and that led her to write a poem. And that is the poem she came from.

And this is from the new poem, entitled “Nothing,” she submitted:

He began the poem with a question,
“Who shall?”
and so I questioned, I wondered:
Indeed, who shall?
I began to read a list
of potential separators
and wondered,
which of these is the thing
that shall separate me,
that shall tear me
from God’s love?
Which of these?
The list continued
and, unsure, I worried.
The answer did not come
and did not come.
It was a long list…

Visit Monica’s place to read the whole story and the rest of the poem. And visit the High Calling Blogs to see all of the poems submitted.

Photograph: Tree in Fog at Night by Petr Kratochvil via Public Doman Pictures.

Credibility -- It Was All in the Numbers

For the High Callings Blogs, we’ve been discussing Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Last week, we focused on the third characteristic of why some ideas survive –that of concreteness (the first two being simplicity and unexpectedness).

I gave an example of the company I worked for in the late 1980s, and how it dealt with a new law requiring disclosure of toxic emissions to air, and water. What the CEO did was announce a goal to reduce toxic air emissions by 90 percent by the end of four years. It was a startling goal, one which evoked skepticism from both within the industry (and other manufacturers outside the industry) and from the environmentalist community. “Impossible,” said the first group. “They’ll cheat and lie,” said the second group.

The credibility of the initiative was the key to its success. If no one believed the results, it wouldn’t matter if the initiative was successful or not.

As it turned out, the answer came from what created the issue in the first place – the public reporting of the data on an annual basis. Reports had to be filed with the U.S. EPA. The reports would be made public. If the air reduction program was making progress, the reports would show it. Numbers. Data. Examples from almost 30 manufacturing plants. Filed with and checked by the EPA.

Credibility.

Inside the company, there was a debate about the chemicals involved themselves. The 120 or so chemicals on the list had been derived from two different lists of chemicals, all thrown together to make one list (such is how regulations often occur). There were some materials on the list that were harmless, and those would likely be removed eventually. There were other materials not on the list, but should have been. Obviously, some things would be added. What could you do if the base from which you were measuring was going to be changing over the four-year period?

The decision was made to adjust accordingly. If a chemical was taken off the list by the EPA, it would be removed from the reduction program as if it had never been there. If one was added, it would be added to the reduction program as if it had been there from the beginning. This took careful planning and some calculated guesswork as what the EPA was likely to do. But it was absolutely critical for the credibility of the program, even if it made things complicated.

In Made to Stick, the Heath brothers cite the kinds of things that made an idea, a program, an initiative or any sustained effort credible:

• The source is reliable and believable. Few might believe a chemical company, but data checked and verified by the federal government would be.

• The information has lots of vivid details. The reports would cover 120 chemicals and, for the company, more than 30 facilities, both large and small. Reports would be made available by zip code. There would be plenty of detailed ways to measure whether the reduction program was working.

• Statistics are used. We had more statistics than you could imagine.

• Statics are brought to human scale. A billion pounds of toxic air emissions in the United States sounds large but almost meaningless. But 250,000 pounds in Alvin, Texas, made the information much more real to people who lived in that community.

• One example alone may prove the case. Early reductions were published, with details of how they had happened.

The program wasn’t easy, but it stuck. It inspired a host of similar initiatives within the chemical industry and beyond. It was extended beyond air emissions to include water and land, with the same reporting programs.

And at the end of four years, it had succeeded, confounding all the critics.

Laura Boggess is leading the discussion on Made to Stick over at the High Calling Blogs. Last week's discussion, on "concrete," can be found here.

Previous blog posts in this series:

On Simple: The One Time Something I Did Went Viral

On Unexpected: Singing Opera in Journalism Class

On Concrete: As Concrete – as the Air

Random Acts of Poetry

Over at the High Calling Blogs today, I have a post for the Random Act of Poetry -- The Poems We Come From. Last week, we provided a writing prompt to consider a poem from high school or college that had an impact on you, and write a poem about it. The result was 13 poems that represented infleunces ranging from Walt Whitman to Johnny Cash. There were also some fascinating stories about the poems. So stop by the High Calling Blogs and take a look.

As Concrete as -- the Air

Concrete.

The word suggests heavy, solid, firm, substantive. (Except in St. Louis, where “concrete” means ice cream.)

One of the characteristics of “stickiness” described by Chip Heath and Dan Heath in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die,” is concreteness: the idea has to be about something substantive and memorable. Then the Heaths say this: “Concreteness makes targets transparent. Even experts need transparency.”

That’s a true statement if ever there was one.

In December, 1984, a leak of a toxic chemical at a Union Carbide (now part of Dow) at Bhopal, India, killed more than 10,000 people. The worldwide chemical industry went into a kind of collective shock. There were all kinds of responses, some enlightened and some dumb. Three years later, finally agreeing on a regulatory response, the U.S. Congress passed a law with a long name but referred to simply as “Title III.”

The law was simple in concept: all manufacturers would have to report emissions of toxic chemicals to the air, water and later, and report it every year. That’s all they had to do – report it. No other action as required.

In terms of creating change, the law was brilliant. Because the information wouldn’t be stored somewhere; no, the U.S. EPA would be required to publish the data. The public would get access to it. All of it.

It wasn’t only chemical companies which be reporting. Any company in any industry that used the chemicals on the list would have to report. Chemical companies would have the biggest totals, of course. But a lot of companies no one had ever dreamed used toxic chemicals would have to report, too.

Like your local newspaper.

I was working for a chemical company at the time, and it fell to my team to deal with the communications relating to the new law and its implementation. We had about eight months to prepare. And while this is a very long and involved story, we knew from the beginning that we had to convince the company that two things would be required.

First, we would disclose our data to the public as soon as we filed it with the EPA, and not wait almost a year for EPA to report. In other words, we would have to take responsibility for our emissions by disclosing the numbers ourselves, even if everything was legal and under permit.

Second, we would have to make a public commitment to reduce those emissions.

The first requirement had unassailable logic behind it: if we didn’t, the government and everyone who hated chemical companies surely would.

The second drew blank, sometimes hostile stares. More than one executive said that “we will not reduce emissions for the sake of reducing emissions. That’s ridiculous.” The same response in presentation after presentation. Along with a few side comments about the PR department having lost its mind.

We made it all the way to the CEO. He looked at the estimated numbers. He looked at what he knew was likely to happen with public perception. And he said, “We will start with air emissions. We will pledge to reduce our toxic air emissions by 90 percent in four years.”

Shocked silence. And then he said, “And then we going to work on all the other emissions, too. Get busy.”

The CEO had lost his mind along with the PR department.

Ninety percent in four years. A concrete target whose progress could be tracked simply by reading the reports filed with the EPA.

Next week, the subject of Made to Stick is credibility. I’ll finish this story by explaining how a chemical company could make a commitment like this credible.

Over at the High Calling Blogs, Laura Boggess has started a discussion on Made to Stick. You can find last week’s discussion, on the concept of “unexpected,” here.

Previous blog posts in this series:

On Simple: The One Time Something I Did Went Viral

On Unexpected: Singing Opera in Journalism Class

I Hear America Singing, Still

When I attended high school, the English curriculum was rather fixed. Ninth grade was introduction to British and American literature. Tenth grade was introduction to world literature, although we studied Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that year. Junior year was American literature in depth. And senior year was British literature in depth, although the administration got rather daring that year and required that one six-week period be devoted to a masterpiece of non-English literature, which is how I met Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes.

My junior English class was taught by a wild woman. She was tall, flamboyant, and given to theatrical gestures and outbursts. Everything about her was an exaggeration. She made no secret of what she believed to be the greatest work of American literature ever published – Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. (No one in the class took that seriously, not even the people who hated to read.)

One good thing (there were others) that she did was to introduce us to American poetry. I can still remember her standing in front of the class, wearing lots of large, colorful, flowing scarf-like dresses, and reading poetry, especially that of Walt Whitman, whose work often seemed to fit her flamboyance. (She often wore turbans, too, that matched her flowing clothes.) She’d read – and often act – poems like this one:

I Hear America Singing

By Walt Whitman

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as
he stands,
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning,
or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work,
or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day--at night the party of young
fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

With a nod to Whitman, and for the sheer creativity and inventiveness he brought to poetry, I would submit this (I should probably offer apologies, too):

I Hear America Singing, Still

I hear America singing still, songs
both shallow and deep; not the
songs by Whitman sung, less bursting
with manifest confidence, more a
timidity of tentativeness, as if we have
walked into a room of no lights, no windows,
no mirrors to reflect, only darkness, darkness
to experience, darkness to feel our way forward.

I hear the songs of the Greek choir, as they beckon
us to Odysseus’s rocks; the songs of the preacher
preaching a revival of prosperity, as if naming gave
you a claiming right. Those songs, too, join the exodus 
of the deafening songs, the roaring songs, the songs of 
steam and noise and bellows and gears and furnaces
and fires as they escape into a silence
made in China.

Only two songs heard now, only two: the distant yet
approaching, small but consuming song of the prairie
fire, the song of destructive lament; and the light trill of
the sailing, soaring dove, the song of undeserved hope.

A bit dark, perhaps; I’ve been paying to much attention to government and politics lately.

This poem about a poem I know is connected to today’s Random Act of Poetry (RAP) over at the High Calling Blogs. I have a short article and prompt posted, for next week’s RAP (I’m subbing for our usual RAPster, L.L. Barkat). The prompt is based on a recent experience I had after tweeting a Poem of the Day, “Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats. Take a look and join in.

Singing Opera in Journalism Class

In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, the authors relate a story by the writer Nora Ephron, who described how a high school journalism teacher have her class its first assignment – to write an article for the student newspaper about all the teachers and staff would be in a seminar on Thursday. The students dutifully wrote their stories. The teacher read them and then noted they had all missed the lead, at least as far as their readers were concerned – school would be closed on that day.

It was an unexpected thought or conclusion – and the entire class had missed it. Being unexpected is one of the attributes of ideas that are “made to stick.”

I have one of those journalism stories, too.

I took my first journalism course – Introductory News Reporting (J 51, as we called it) – in my sophomore year. The instructor was relatively young for the faculty at that time – somewhere around 40. There were stories that he had been in the military, and there were stories he had been a Jesuit priest. Both could have been true.

We all knew that something would be different about this class when he gave us a week to memorize the Associated Press Style Book. And we were expected to have it for every class. After that week, he gave us our first in-class assignment: write a news article from our “Assignment Jonesville” workbook.

And then he said: “You have your style books with you, and the dictionary is right here. All the facts are in the assignment. Just so you know, if you make a style error, it’s an automatic F. Same thing for a misspelled word. And for a factual error. You can now start.”

Shock set in immediately. Then came the second shock.

He started doing calisthenics. Side-straddle hops (jumping jacks). Push-ups. When he finished, he started singing. Opera. (And he wasn’t bad.) Then back to calisthenics.

To say that the class was rattled would be an understatement. Every one of us was convinced we had fallen into the hands of a lunatic. And we had – a lunatic for writing accuracy. A lunatic for writing properly. A lunatic for learning how to do your work in a noisy, distracting newsroom. A lunatic for teaching you how to work under tight deadlines and do it accurately in the middle of chaos.

It worked. Well, it worked for some of us. But the end of the semester, 70 percent of the class was gone, most having transferred over to advertising (I'm making no moral judgments here). I stayed. I took the second journalism course with him, and a history of journalism course, and two independent studies. After that first year, he was moved from teaching the introductory courses – the Journalism School grew alarmed at how many people were switching majors. But the quality of student journalism skyrocketed.

What I learned stuck. And a lot of it still sticks, 40 years later. I can often block out the entire world to get writing done.

And all because a teacher chose an unexpected way to help us learn. the Heath brothers, I think, would smile.


Over at the High Calling Blogs, Laura Boggess has started a discussion on Made to Stick. You can find last week’s discussion on the concept of “simple” here. This weeks's discussion is on "unexpected," so take a look at Laura's post, "Unexpected Journey."

The one time something I did went viral

Over at the High Calling Blogs, Laura Boggess is starting a new book discussion on Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The book was first published in 2007, and if today you head the word “stickiness” about the power of ideas, you can attribute that comment to the Heath brothers.

The authors outline six characteristics for ideas that stick:
• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional and
• Stories.

(Note what’s spelled when you combine the first letter of each word.)

The book is divided into six longish chapters on each characteristic, followed by an epilogue. The first chapter is about simple – the simplicity of powerful ideas – or the idea that ideas need to be simple to become powerful.

I once did a project that went viral inside the company I was working for at the time. And it has all six characteristics of “stickiness.”

In 1993, a colleague went to a communications conference and came backnotes from one of the sessions she’d attended – a person for ATT had talked about their company’s email employee newsletter.

Yes, I know what that sounds like in 2010; antique and quaint. But 17 years ago, it was so revolutionary that it was almost frightening. The only other company that had one was an insurance company in British Columbia. And I thought, what a great idea! My team was responsible for employee communications, among other things. So we set out to figure out how to do it.

IT said no; it would crash the system. And I said a simply text-only newsletter will crash the system? And they nodded their heads. Vigorously. I spent several weeks patiently arguing, and then had a blinding flash of the obvious: the only way to stop the newsletter would be to shut down the email system. So I said we would do a test – 100 people worldwide, crossing different computers, systems, firewalls, everything (In the days before Microsoft Office, things were borderline riots when it came to consistency and compatibility.

We launch the newsletter to the 100 people in August, and told them they were free to forward it to colleagues. Within a month, the newsletter had saturated the email system. Everyone wanted to be in the distribution. We never advertised its existence. In four weeks, our little text newsletter had moved from 100 people to tens of thousands.

The CEO would later tell a senior management meeting that our newsletter was one of the two most innovative things done by the company in 1993. And he specifically cited two things: its reach across the company in a way nothing else had ever done before, and its voice.

The voice was what was simple. We assumed that employees were adults and could handle bad news and disagreement. Our letters policy was simple: no personal attacks, no profanity. Other than that, everything was a go. We had employees debating each other on company products and policies – and it was extraordinary to see employees teaching each other. We had people talk about products in one part of the world that people in other parts of the world had no idea even existed within the company. PR helped create markets and sell products.

We also didn’t get clearances for anything we did from Law or HR. That’s what the CEO meant by “voice” – it was the voice of employees that wasn’t being stifled. And the impact showed up in surveys we did – the email newsletter had the highest credibility rating of any communication medium in the company – and that included immediate supervisors and top management.

It was a simple idea, with a simple philosophy. And it worked beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Including mine.

Related:

Today's discussion at The High Calling Blogs.

Six Steps to Going Viral by L.L. Barkat at Green Inventions Central.

At the Core of Action by Monica Sharman at My Big Three.

Nice Guys Finish...What?

I’m reading the newspaper one Tuesday morning, and there on the obituary page I see a photo with a story about a local retired executive who had died of cancer. I stared. I could barely comprehend the words.

I wrote speeches for this man for four years, and I wrote some of the best speeches I’ve ever written. I loved working for him…

To read the rest of the article, please visit The High Calling Blogs.


(Several people have asked, so here is the article published on Aug. 4, 2005, by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

Hal Corbett Pushed Chemical Industry in Right Direction

(St. Louis Post-Dispatch Commentary Page – Aug. 4, 2005)

Harold J. Corbett, 78, died Tuesday of cancer. As his obituary in the Post-Dispatch noted, he had a distinguished career at Monsanto Company, retiring as Senior Vice President for Environment, Safety and Health.

I knew him as Hal. I met him in late 1987, when I was assigned the job of environmental communications at Monsanto. He had the right height for a typical Monsanto executive – he was tall – but he wasn’t typical. He was modest and quiet, almost unassuming, almost shy, the “nice guy,” which the corporate culture of that time tended to read as “non-assertive.” But Hal had come up through manufacturing, and he was tough. And he had the courage to do the right thing.

This quiet, unassuming, nice guy ignited a revolution in the chemical industry.

As 1987 gave way to 1988, concerns about the environment were growing everywhere. It wasn’t just what some NASA guy had said about some new thing called global warming, or the drought of 1988, or the medical syringes washing up on New Jersey beaches, or the ongoing coverage of toxic chemicals and Superfund sites. It was all of these things and more – not for nothing did Time Magazine choose an ailing “planet of the year” for 1988.

In the midst of all these concerns that year, a new law was going into effect in July 1. All manufacturers would have to report – publicly – their emissions of toxic chemicals. It didn’t matter that these emissions were legal and permitted by state and federal regulators. And the law didn’t require that manufacturers actually do anything about these emissions. Manufacturers would just have to be report them.

The problem for manufacturers was that the numbers were going to be huge – billions of pounds of toxic chemicals emitted or released into the environment every year. The chemical and mining industries would have the biggest numbers, but no manufacturer was exempt – even the Post-Dispatch had to report its toxic emissions (which it did).

Hal Corbett’s organization was responsible for measuring and reporting these emissions for Monsanto. He, and everyone else involved, and everyone else in the chemical industry, understood the implications of “simply reporting the numbers.” And while every major chemical company was scrambling to figure out what to do, Hal had a small team at Monsanto look at the issue in a non-traditional way: what if we release all of our emissions data ourselves, before the EPA does? What if we decide we have to take responsibility for these emissions, and accept public concerns as legitimate, even if we are the experts and even if we can prove that no harm is being done? What does accepting that responsibility actually mean?

The team met internal opposition at every step of the way, as Hal knew it would. But he kept helping it forward, figuring a way around that obstacle or how to deal with that particular pocket of opposition. The fact that he was so well liked and respected inside the company was an enormous asset.

In April of 1988, when Hal’s team was right in the thick of moving this rather startling strategy through the company, Hal gave a speech that ultimately cemented the new strategy into place. He wasn’t a great speaker, or an eloquent one. But his sincerity trumped great speaking ability and eloquence every time. He believed what he said, and believed in what he said, and every audience who heard him knew it.

The speech was to a group of 1,500 American and British chemical engineers, meeting in London. Hal told a story of two chemical industries – one that had transformed and improved every aspect of life imaginable, and one that had polluted the earth in the process. And he said that both chemical industries were real, and the one that had brought so much benefit to so many people was responsible for figuring out how to address and deal with the concerns and problems created by the other. And he said if people in the industry didn’t think we should take responsibility, we needed to look no further than the thousands of men, women and children who died in Bhopal, India, when a chemical plant leaked a toxic material.

The speech had an immediate and dramatic impact inside of Monsanto. Richard Mahoney, the company’s CEO at the time, announced an initiative to reduce toxic air emissions by 90 percent – in four years. Mahoney would follow that up with a series of seven commitments to environmental protection and additional waste reduction efforts. DuPont followed Monsanto’s lead. So did Dow. So did the industry’s trade association. Waste reduction and process improvement initiatives sprouted everywhere.

Hal’s speech became known as “the speech that refused to die.” Thousands of requests for copies poured in over the years. One of the last I remember came in 1995 – seven years later – from a BBC reporter in London, who had read the speech and was amazed that any industry executive would have said the things that Hal had said. From London to London, Hal’s speech had come full circle.

In his quiet, unassuming, nice-guy way, Hal Corbett made the world a better place. And all of us are better off because of it.

Following his initial stint at Monsanto and Solutia Inc.,a spin-off of Monsanto, Glynn Young served as Director of Executive Communications for St. Louis Public Schools. In 2004, he returned to Monsanto, where he is now director of Environmental Communications.

What I Learned from Managing 20-Somethings

It was a challenge -- hiring for jobs in "new media" that had never existed before. We had to throw some assumptions and long-held policies out of the window -- and then came the management part. So how do you be a team leader for people in their first jobs out of college -- and they know more about the work than you do?

To read about what happened, see my blog post today at the High Calling Blogs.

Looking for That Toy Radio

My wife sent me to the basement last week with a specific mission: find the Fischer-Price musical radio that plays “Picnic Time for Teddy Bears” that both of our children listened to when they were young. Yes, she was trying to find it for the grandson.

I descended into a chamber piled with almost a quarter-century of stuff. I eventually found the radio in a box on a shelf in an area lined with storage shelves and boxes (and no, I didn’t find it in the first box; I found it in the ninth box). But before I tackled the storage shelves, I thought I would find it where virtually all of the toys from our two sons’ childhoods are kept – under the basement stairs.

It was an area that had not been disturbed for 12 years or more. I didn’t find dust bunnies; I found dust Godzillas.

Going through the boxes of old toys was fun, and a lot of the toys, particularly the Fischer-Price play sets, are in really good condition. (“Stop playing with the Fischer-Price farm and find that radio.” “I’m not playing with the Fischer-Price farm; I’m playing with the Fischer-Price airport.”)

Stacked with the boxes of old toys was an unmarked box. I looked inside, and found two side-by-side stacks of documents – speeches and articles I had written up to the mid-1980s, back in those pre-historic days before desktop computers. Speeches typed on a typewriter. Some of the very first speeches I had written when we lived in Houston. Speeches about oil and issues and United Way campaigns and chemicals and education and agriculture.

Each speech tells two stories: the story of the speech itself and the audience it was given to, and the story of the creation of the speech. For some, I could only remember having written them. For others, however, I could remember all the details – sitting with the speaker, research, working with executive secretaries, drafting outlines, fighting with the Law or HR department over sections and wording, what happened when the speech was given, problems I had writing them and rewriting them, the times the speaker was a joy to work with and the times when the speaker wasn’t.

Looking through those speeches was looking through a window to the time when I was 25 to 35 years old. It’s like looking at old family photographs.

And I was reminded of why I write.

I write to earn a living. Or at least writing contributes to my earning a living.

I write to preserve memory, even if the memory will last no longer than my own lifetime.

I write to make sense of the world, and the world desperately needs much making sense of, even if it’s only for me.

I write to connect to others, to use the words to create relationships and build community.

I write to express the emotion I often cannot express though speech and tears and laughter.

I write to tell a story, to help others see what I see, to see what others see.

I write because writing is an act of creation, and it moves me closer to the Creator because every story has an “in the beginning.”

I write to encourage, because it is the gift I’m expected to give.

I write to understand, because reading alone is not sufficient to achieve understanding.

I write as a kind of prayer, and I write as a kind of worship.

I write to make myself vulnerable, and never am I weaker than when I allow others to read my writing.

I write because it is what has been put into my heart.


We’ve come to the final chapters and the grand finale of the discussion of Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life. Laura Boggess has been leading the discussion over at The High Calling Blogs. Cameron’s book has been a good read, and it’s been a good way – a disciplined way – to think about why I write. And I’ve concluded that writing is less of a right – and much more of a privilege and a responsibility.

Related:

What I Should Be Writing by L.L. Barkat at Seedlings in Stone.

Choices and Voices by Nancy Kourmoulis at Treasures of Darkness.

A Different Story by Lyla Lindquist at Inside Out.

A Contract for a Life of Writing Bliss by Erin at Filling My Patch of Sky.

High Stakes by Cassandra Frear at The Moonboat Cafe.

What I’m Up to At The High Calling Blogs

For several months, I’ve been posting occasional articles at The High Calling Blogs (HCB). The site is owned and operated by Foundations for Laity Renewal, whose mission is to renew society by renewing the church; renew the church by renewing the family; and renewing the family by renewing individuals. In addition to HCB, Laity Renewal also operates The High Calling web site (and I’ve written an article or two for that site as well).

How I got there is one of those “internet stories.”

Long before I was on Twitter or Facebook, I had been following a blog called Inside Work, which focuses on the integration of faith and business. I would occasionally comment on a post, especially those written either by editor Jim Hancock or a business executive named Bradley Moore. One day, I followed Bradley’s link to his blog site, Shrinking the Camel. And enjoyed it so much I started following that blog as well. A regular commenter on Bradley’s book was a guy named Marcus Goodyear, and one day I followed the link to his blog, Good Word Editing. That’s where I discovered The High Calling and HCB, because Marcus is senior editor for these sites. About the same time, I found another blog I liked – New Breed of Advertisers – by a guy named Sam Van Eman whom I didn’t immediately connect to HCB – but he’s one of the editors there, too.

Looking at my RSS reader, I can see that Inside Work, Shrinking the Camel, Good Word Editing and New Breed of Advertisers are among the very earliest blogs I followed. (One day, in a post or a comment at HCB, Sam – and I remember distinctly it was Sam – mentioned a book he really liked called Stone Crossings by L.L. Barkat. His comment led me to her book, which led me to her three blogs, which eventually led to me becoming a co-editor with L.L. and Eric Swalberg for TweetSpeak Poetry.)

So what was it that attracted me to these bloggers and sites like The High Calling Blogs?

Obviously, we shared a common faith – different backgrounds and affiliations but a common faith nonetheless.

We shared an intense interest in how faith does – and doesn’t – function in the workplace.

Even more significant (for me, at least) was the sense of community. People from all over the country and even outside the United States come together in the spaces called The High Calling and HCB. And they share their community by writing about life and work and culture and family and art and a lot of other things.

Earlier this year, I received a direct message on Twitter from HCB, saying they had a proposal for me. I didn’t hear anything else for a few days, but soon enough L.L. (the HCB managing editor) asked if I would be interested in being a contributing editor. I didn’t have to think about it. I said yes – a big fat enthusiastic yes.

What a contributing editor does is write posts or articles on a regular basis (mine generally fall into the category of “work”), participate in commenting and discussions about posts, and help build the community. On my posts, I work directly with Brad Moore, who’s an HCB content editor in addition to his day job as a senior business executive and (most recently) a poet, with his own poetry blog. Brad is one of the best editors I’ve ever had. This is a heretical confession for any writer to make – but I don’t mind being edited by Brad because he helps me be a better writer. (And my next post is scheduled for Tuesday.)

That’s what this community is about as well – encouragement.

If you haven’t been to HCB, you should visit. If you’re looking for community, you’ll find it. If you’re looking for good writing, it’s right there. If you’re looking to stretch and challenge your faith, you’ll find it there as well.

It’s a cool place to be a part of.

I Don't Believe in ESP, But...

Actually, there’s no “but.” I don’t believe in ESP. Period.

In The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life, Julia Cameron has a chapter on ESP, and includes a number of other concepts as well, like reincarnation, psychic phenomena and something called “the Akashic Records.” She wasn’t advocating for any of these things; but there was more than a little head nod that something like these things can happen to writers.

I suppose I’m talking about something similar when I say imagination and inspiration.

For me, ideas for writing come from everywhere. Perhaps a better way to say that is that ideas come from everything. I once watched a PBS documentary, and went on to write a speech that changed the course of a company (it was a speech for someone else). I mentioned last week about how a song whose words I couldn’t translate (I don’t speak Italian) started a chain of ideas that ended up as two manuscripts. I drafted a blog post just this past week that started because I mentally focused on a corner of the building I work in (it wasn’t the corner, but the collection of offices that had been in that corner).

But it’s more than ideas, and I think I understand what Cameron is talking about when she talks about ESP. It’s not so much some psychic power as it is seeing the connections – the “connectedness” of things. I can look at a group of what seems to be totally different and unrelated things – and piece together how their connected. And my mind often works faster than my mouth can articulate the connections. That’s especially true for ideas and events. I look at ideas and read and see things on TV or at the movies and skim a story in the Wall Street Journal and then a blog post and see two interesting Twitter links and an interesting line in a novel and then – wham – something happens.

I don’t know why I think this way, but I do. It’s not ESP. It simply may be how something seen leads to something imagined and then creativity goes to work.


Over at The High Calling Blogs, Laura Boggess has been leading a discussion of Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write. Last week’s discussion was about sound, “writing but” and driving. This week’s discussion is about roots, ESP and cheap tricks.

Related:

On the Table Where I Write by L.L. Barkat at Seedlings in Stone.

ESP? by Nancy Kourmoulis at Treasures of Darkness.

Writing Rooted in Life by Charity Singleton at Wide Open Spaces.

Cheap Tricks by Cassandra Frear at Moonboat Cafe.

Organizations and Bad Bosses

I learned very early that organizations will tolerate extremely bad behavior in bosses. I don’t know why, but they do.

Take Evelyn, for example (not the real name, and I may also have changed the gender).

A good writer, Evelyn was in her mid-30s and the speechwriter for the CEO, who valued and appreciated her work. Her scope of responsibilities was broadened to include a general executive communication function, with two writers and a secretary reporting to her. I was selected to be one of those writers, and I was thrilled – it was an elite writing group, and I was all of 24 at the time.

Things went well until the CEO retired. His replacement was very different. For my boss, what had been a warm, collegial relationship with one CEO became frosty, tense, and then combative with the new CEO. (A lesson for those who may not know: if you get into a combative situation with the CEO, you lose. Every time.) Everyone – Evelyn, her boss and even his boss – said this was a clear case of having to work with a difficult CEO.

But Evelyn’s insecurities began to surface. Her team experienced them first. She began to micro-manage everything, making the writing process increasingly painful and then erratic; the edits often made no sense. Then she began to arrive at work late or leave early, and sometimes not show up at all. Sometimes we could no longer wait for her to edit what we wrote and had to send drafts “upstairs” as they were. She never seemed to eat, but whispers about drinking were getting louder.

Her boss tolerated the increasingly odd and self-destructive behavior. It became so bad that I went to him and said she needed help (it was the right thing to do but not a wise career move – it implied that he wasn’t doing his job). He wasn’t pleased and said he was aware and taking care of it.

He wasn’t.

They moved the other writer to another team, but were reluctant to move me and the secretary. We were the department mainstays, and her boss was afraid that moving us would push her over the edge. Meanwhile, her disappearances were lasting longer. The cleaning crew refused to clean her office because of the smell.

Then came the day a senior executive asked where his speech draft was, the speech he was giving in three days. Evelyn’s boss came tearing into my office and asked if I was working on it. I didn’t even know one was due (and we had a calendar for speeches); Evelyn worked on this executive’s speeches herself. So her boss told me to come with him and we went to her office. You can imagine the scene – people seeing the commotion; the two of us entering her office; him shouting at people, including me, and demanding the secretary find the speech; and then the smell when we opened the door. It was ugly.

We tore her office apart looking – hoping – to find the speech. We found the memo from the executive requesting it. We also found old, moldy food and lots of empty beer and liquor bottles stashed in drawers and cabinets. The evidence of a personal tragedy was all around us.

He asked me what could be done; he had to see the executive at 9 the next morning. I took home what research I could find and spent the night writing the speech draft, finishing around 3 a.m. (I remember what it looked like – typed and hand-edited on the dull yellow paper we used for drafting; this was long before desktop computers.) When I got to work, I made a photocopy and had just returned to my desk when Evelyn’s boss arrived, asking if I’d been able to do anything. I handed him the speech draft. He didn’t say a word but left for the executive’s office.

Thirty minutes later, I was called to the executive’s office, with Evelyn’s boss nowhere around, and spent the rest of the morning and lunch working with him to get the speech finalized. His own secretary worked with us, typing his speaking draft. He didn’t trust it to leave the floor.

Another supervisor took over Evelyn’s job. She went on leave to get help. But the damage to many of the people involved, including her, and the damage to the department, was done.

This is what I learned. Never let a problem fester. When someone needs help, get it. Don’t assume a problem will run its course. Move fast. And understand that people who know better will turn a blind eye and hope the problem solves itself. Organizations have high tolerances for problem bosses.


The High Callings Blogs has a group writing project underway about bosses, and a summary will be published next week. If you’d like to write a post about a boss or bosses, you can participate by dropping your link here.

The Practice of Writing

I live a life that’s saturated in words.

At work, a large part of what I do is to write. I write articles, posts for the company blog, posts for the employee blog, presentations, plans, speeches.

Words.

Outside of work, I have this blog, occasional guests posts on other blogs, a regularly scheduled feature over at Christian Manifesto, scheduled posts for The High Calling Blogs, the co-editing of TweetSpeak Poetry’s jams on Twitter, and comments on others’ blogs.

Words.

And then there’s the “novel project” or I should say “novel projects” because there are approximately three going on in my head – interior conversations, scenes, plots and somehow I’m keeping them separate. I hope.

Lots of words.

And I haven’t even started on the reading of words.

I love all of this. Every bit.

What all this writing of words has forced me to do is be disciplined. I have deadlines at work and self-imposed deadlines for the writing outside of work.

One particular piece of writing has also allowed me to see what I do in a different way. The editing of the “Twitter poems” at TweetSpeak Poetry is among the most difficult things I’ve done. You assemble 400 or 500 tweets, sometimes more, depending upon the number of participants. You then arrange them by where they “touch” each other – where one tweeted line is a response or amplification or transition from another. Participants add their lines in different ways – some jump right in with an almost stream of consciousness/word association approach and others take time to ponder and shape. And sometimes participants do both.

So the words and lines have to be teased and coaxed and studied and understood and associated. Sometimes the fit is automatically perfect; sometimes the fit has to be “edited.” And sometimes I have to add lines and words to bring some coherence to a poem.

It’s a fascinating exercise. It is also a kind of practice with words, ideas and themes.

In The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life, Julia Cameron says that writing rewards practice – and I would add that practice rewards writing. “”Writing rewards attention,” she says. “Writing…remains a gateway to greater mystery, a way to touch something greater than ourself. Writing is an act of cherishing. It is an act of love.”

That’s it, exactly.


Over at the High Calling Blogs, Laura Boggess is leading a discussion of Cameron’s The Right to Write. Take a look and see what others are saying, commenting and posting. Last week’s discussion was about making it, honesty and vulnerability. This week‘s discussion is about footwork, practice and containment.

Related:

Julia Found Words for Me by L.L. Barkat.

Savoring Life by Nancy Kourmoulis.

Cassandra Frear’s Like Water on a Stone.

Sweeping by Marilyn.