Years ago, a poet friend of mine, Jim Mitsui, ended a poem with an image of people “following their keys home.” That image has lingered with me as a lesson about what the writing life saves us from, which is the dullness of always expecting the expected, and what it requires of us, which is that we remain open to the unexpected rather than working toward the predetermined.

I talk often about following our words as we write them instead of commanding our words to go in any certain direction. To me, inventing writing feels like flowing along with a river though I don’t know where that river will end. When I revisit what I write in that state, I switch metaphors and think like a sculptor who intuits a shape in a block of stone and releases it carefully. So for me writing is first flowing with a river of words and later using carving tools to shape what is beautiful. The work of the carving demands intuitive attention and care. It is not about hacking away and upsetting myself about what I had first created.

When we look into the river of words, we are looking for the shape of magic. Sometimes that requires a radical reduction in words. Editors are behind-the-scenes helpmates. When I advise students by showing them what I see, the work remains the original writer’s work.

In December 2013, Cyndi Lloyd signed up for a tutorial with me. She worked from prompts I sent her. She has given me permission to show you the writing she did from one of the prompts I sent along with my suggestions for sculpting the words into a finished piece. By reading the prompt, her resulting writing (the river), and my shaping, you will see what happens when we allow ourselves to write what occurs to us and then follow the words’ emotional evocations to unearth the shape of inner experience. Though we may always need another’s eyes and heart to reach this final work, we learn by doing, and in future pieces, we get closer and closer to seeing the final shape on our own.

Prompt From Sheila to Cyndi

First, I shared this writing with Cyndi from novelist Lisa Shea’s contribution to The Writer’s Journal: Forty Writers and Their Journals, an anthology I edited.

Lisa Shea had contributed this entry from her journal:

When I came across the word lovage in the newspaper this morning, in an article on English herbs, I thought of two other words – love and age – and right away I knew I wanted to write about these words, to put down something of their meaning, to see what I have learned from them, taken together and apart, in the eight months since my marriage ended.

I want to know where I am with love, and with age, and what is the proper fit of my heart, and how I will go on out of that need, out of all the knowing that I do not yet know.

Love first.  Because it is harder, more ineffable, bigger, dumber, more wondrous, harder, truer, falser, faster, slower, not at all, harder, softer, softer, softer; it is unreliable, less and more, and never enough and baroque and italianate and South Brooklyn and Northampton and Washington and all in the mind and in the heart and especially in the groin.

Love is barbarous and cruel, chivalrous, utterly civilized, capable of killing you and you it.  Love is backward, forward and I don’t have to tell you it is upside down.  It is sincere, a sham, shamanistic, solipsistic, scrofulous and smart, stupid and shocking and stillborn and somnolent and sublime.

Love is a lie.  It is pure truth.  It is a sickness, and in perfect health, till death do us part, partake, take apart.  It is a small green park, a moat, a chimney, a purple rock.  Love lies there, seducing you with its gorgeous hair and eyes, its muscled back.

Age.  the thing we wear, our first skin, and into it and out of it we shrink and expand, elongate and contract, shrivel and stretch.  Age carries us on its back, as we carry our children, and they us.  It is newborn and unborn and reborn.  It is the color of nails and eyelids and teeth, of the planet Saturn, of anything homemade, of wariness and pleasure and beat-up hope.

Age bears down as it flies up, coming round like sniper’s fire and feathers, like olives and old underwear, touching our ear lobes, our ready loins.  Age takes us and gives us back, always different, always the same.  We can’t walk away from it or toward it but only with it, as it stays and stays, making us real, forcing us with its brilliant, bullying, buffoonish ways to be who we are, and only that, thank God and Goddammit.

So there are love and age, and how they separate and combine, mysterious herbs in a strange garden, the worlds of these words dehiscent as I read in the paper of lovage and borage and fire and frost, as the days accumulate away from an ending that was large and long, full of love’s terrible labor, the gorgeous, grotesque garden of our making and unmaking.

****

My Prompt in Three Parts for Cyndi Based on Lisa Shea’s Writing

Freewrite #1: Write down the names of plants you know, trees, flowers, vegetables, and shrubs. Cottoneaster, buddlea, potentilla, and cornflowers come to me. Choose one from your list and begin writing freely about what comes to your head when you say the name of this plant.  Keep writing without stopping for 10 or 20 minutes.  Remember that Shea starts many paragraphs by repeating love or age.  She introduces other strong sounding words to make her points in lists.

Freewrite #2: “Age takes us and gives us back, always different, always the same…forcing us with its brilliant, bullying, buffoonish ways to be who we are.”  Writers let words roll off their tongues as a way of going on and getting deeper and deeper into their thoughts, as a way of throwing a rope down into the abyss and rappelling down.  You can try your hand at this strategy by taking a word you are obsessed with or a word you use often or a word that amuses you. Letting words flow because they sound right with the word you have chosen, you will create just the rope you need to get down to where you are going:

Go back and see if you have said anything that interests you. Take off from whatever that is in a 10-20 minute freewrite.  Be playful and don’t worry about where you are going.  Using the sounds of words you’ll find out where that is.  The writing is smarter than we are, my many teachers used to say.  You can trust that.

Freewrite #3: “Love is a lie.  It is pure truth.”  Take an intangible:  hate, joy, sorrow, imagination, frustration, beauty, success, and failure to name a few.  Make two simple opposing statements using the word you choose.  For instance: “Success is sweet.  It is as bitter as unripe apples.”  Now give your word an ability to perceive like Shea does when she says it seduces, and personify it further as she does by saying love has gorgeous hair and eyes and a muscled back.  I might say, “Success lies in wait like my cat watching my toes wiggle under the covers.  It eyes remain unblinking, only its whiskers twitch.  I know it will puncture my skin with its sharpened nails.”

Freewrite for 10-20 minutes telling a little story or anecdote about a time you dealt with the notion you are writing about.

Cyndi’s Writing Result 

Cyndi’s Result for Part #1

List: cottonwood, snapdragon, rose-of-Sharon, carnation, carrot, barberry, daisy, day lily, potato, spinach, pine, pansy, petunia, primrose, willow, fern, bamboo

Snapdragon

Snapdragons are one of my favorite flowers because of their profusion of colorful blooms. I admire the fact they can re-seed themselves, and I anxiously await spring each year to be surprised where their green stems will grow (for snapdragons don’t always grow in the same place). Funny how the sounds in the word “snapdragon” with the harsh sounding /p/ followed by the voiced /d/ don’t match the actual flower which I’d describe as dainty. Yet, they are hardy, at least the green parts of the plant. In fact, I still have one snapdragon plant in our backyard in full greenery that’s been surrounded by snow and has experienced nighttime temperatures in the mid teens. Snapdragon. Snapdragon. Snap. Snap, crackle, and pop from the Rice Krispy commercial. I remember Snap-its when I was a child, throwing them down at the sidewalk and snap! Snap my fingers next to 13-year-old Bear dog’s ear when he’s asleep late at night and can no longer hear my whisper. Snap at puppy Gidget when she misbehaves, my voice sounding like screeching brakes. Many years ago, when I went out dancing, I’d snap my fingers on my right hand as I danced. I prefer buttons that hook rather than snap. Snapdragon. Dragons. Vlad the Impale was called Dracula meaning order of the dragon. Dragons feature prominently in Dungeons & Dragons, a role-playing game my husband has played for years. He’s collected D&D miniatures and has many large, and some small, dragons – blue, red, black, white, green, silver. When my nephews were younger they always wanted to play with their Uncle Craig’s D&D miniatures, especially the dragons. Our Bear-dog likes watching dragons on TV, especially the one shown in the series “Merlin” and the ones in “Dragon: Riders of Bark.” Craig used to pose Speck and Bear with one of his dragon miniatures and take their pictures. My favorite dragon character is Grendel’s mother in Beowulf because I view her as a female warrior rather than as a woman-monster as some critics suggest.

Cyndi’s Result for Part #2:

Frolic

Snow flurries frolic in the wind and strings on wind chimes mingle while flakes frost windows. Dolphins frolic and swim, flip and spin, swish and sway their fins. Dogs frolic and play, frolic and play, prancing in the snow or splashing in the water then shaking, spraying droplets everywhere and then licking, licking their hair. How would it be to frolic again? To: roll down hills, swim, and skip rocks, bicycle, blow bubbles, lick popsicles, grin and giggle?

Cyndi’s Reslt for Part #3

Grief

Grief is heavy. It’s as weightless as space.

Grief blinds you to time, with its dark glasses and cloak.

Grief distorts time, blurring it with its smudged, dark glasses.

I’ve only experienced grief – soul-shattering grief – once. It happened when I was 39 years old, after my beloved dog, Speck, passed away. (Hers was the second death I’ve ever experienced.) I say, “soul shattering” because Speck was my soul mate. For days I cried or ambled about in silence. My crying bouts were usually triggered from something that reminded me of her. I’d be watching TV and all of a sudden, some character, human or animal, on the show would die and throw me into tears. Or when it thundered, it reminded me of Speck, how she didn’t like the thunder and would run into the bathroom. Or when I noticed it was 1:00 in the afternoon, the time I used to give Speck her pill. Or the day, about three weeks after her death, when I vacuumed the carpet in the front room next to the couch where Speck used to lie, vacuuming her hair. Vacuuming, removing a part of her physical essence. And my tears wouldn’t stop. Grief. Grief. Grief. I wore my grief like a heavy, thick cloak. Only rarely did I journal about what I was going through because I was afraid of writing everything down – my feelings – because then it would be outside of me, making my pain and my sorrow even more real. No one knew how much my grief was strangling me because I didn’t share my deepest thoughts and feelings. Only Craig knew to a certain extent, but I don’t think he ever fully understood my grief. Mike probably had an idea, and I certainly had shared a lot with him. I just didn’t talk to other people about it because sometimes when I did, I got the impression that some people thought I shouldn’t be so grief-stricken because it was “just a pet” whom I’d lost. I wish I would have known about Rainbow Bridge, an online company who supports those dealing with the loss of a beloved pet. Perhaps there I would have found the comfort I so desperately needed. Speck had always been my comfort and so I was lost once she passed. Obviously, I wasn’t dealing with my grief. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what to do with it. I also wore my grief like smudged, dark glasses, distorting time, and I only saw the world through my tear-smeared eyes. At times, I felt like a zombie, walking around, unaware of what was going on around me. I withdrew from the world, except for school. I had to finish getting my degree. I was depressed, but didn’t want to admit it, nor did I seek help. Grief. My grief was burying me, piling on one heavy, thick cloak after another, so I felt smothered and breathless – extremely lonely. Finally, a month before what would have been Speck’s birthday (and more than three months after her death), I wrote. It was after one in the morning and I’d been crying, missing her, aching for her. I needed to talk to her so badly and to wrap my arms around her and bury my face into her neck. I needed her to lick away my tears. So I sat down and wrote her letter, telling her everything – all my thoughts and feelings. I just poured out my grief. Almost four pages later, I finished the letter. The letter was good for me to write, but I wasn’t healed. I’d still experience the grief and depression for the next two years, and I wouldn’t touch Speck’s kennel until almost five years later at which time I had to clean it for the new puppy Craig and I were adopting. Grief. Grief. Grief. I also grieved when my sisters’ dogs, Mowgli and Nala, were euthanized. They had known Speck. Now my last link to Speck is our 13-year-old Bear dog. I still miss Speck. That will never change. And I still feel like a part of my heart has a hole in it that will only be mended once I’m with Speck on the spirit side.

Sheila’s Edit of Cyndi’s Prompt Results

What I am suggesting here may seem radical, but Cyndi’s freewrite seems to me to contain a poem in several parts. I very much admire what her unconscious was up to regarding her way of associating from snapdragons to the grief of losing a beloved pet. I suggested this sculpting:

To the Snapdragon in Full Greenery Though It is Surrounded by Snow

I.

Snapdragon. Snapdragon. Snap.
Snap, crackle, and pop from the Rice Krispy commercial.
Snap-its when I was a child, throwing them down at the sidewalk and snap!
Snap my fingers next to 13-year-old Bear dog’s ear when he’s asleep late at night
and can no longer hear my whisper.
Snap at puppy Gidget when she misbehaves, my voice like screeching brakes.
Years ago, when I went out dancing, I’d snap my fingers on my right hand
as I danced, but I prefer buttons that hook rather than snap.

II.

Snow flurries frolic in the wind;
strings on wind chimes mingle,
as flakes frost our windows.

Dogs frolic and play, frolic and play,
prancing in the snow then shake,
spraying droplets everywhere,
licking, licking their hair.

How would it be to frolic again?
To: roll down hills, swim, skip rocks, bicycle,
blow bubbles, lick popsicles, grin and giggle?

III.

Grief is heavy though weightless as space.
Grief blinds you with its dark glasses and cloak.

I’d be watching TV and all of a sudden, some character,
human or animal, would die and throw me into tears.

Or when it thundered, it reminded me of Speck,
how she didn’t like the thunder and would
run into the bathroom. Or when I noticed it was 1:00
in the afternoon, the time I used to give Speck her pill.

Or the day, about three weeks after her death, when I
vacuumed the carpet in the front room next to the couch
where Speck used to lie. Vacuuming her hair, removing
a part of her physical essence. My tears wouldn’t stop.

Grief. Grief. I needed to talk to her and wrap
my arms around her and bury my face into her neck.

Snapdragon. Snapdragon. Snap.

How I Explained the Source of My Idea to Cyndi

The flow of associations here comes from the images and the repetitions. The long narrative about grief is less immediate than the details about when, where and how grief would hijack the poet. Reading the details without the longer narrative allows us to have the experience as readers, not only read about the writer’s experience of grief. There is no considering of what the speaker did with her grief–there is the experience of being in grief.

I put the line “Snapdragon. Snapdragon. Snap” in again at the end because it pulls us back up to the opening. At the opening the snap is associated with happy, energetic things. By the end the snap is associated with loss, separation. We have to weigh the two energies and come to the conclusion that time passes, that the more we live the more grief we experience and the more tenderly we hold our memories.

Looking at the resonance of the images one against the other and recognizing the feelings I was having reading them, I realized the narrative about dogs in the author’s life was diluting the feelings and insights about time passing and about loss and grief. As writers, we often write past our endings, and we often include material we feel badly about not including. This is not wrong at all in our drafting process. We can’t censor what comes to our fingertips. However, when we look into the river we have created, we must be sensitive to the emotional message and to how our words are bringing that message forward and not diffuse or mask that message.

Cyndi wrote to me that she found the revision transformative. I believe that when our writing is fully manifest, we do change. I also think that just as actors say they could play a part well when they got out of their own way, we as writers have to get out of the way of the “act of writing” and notice where the writing is happening as if on its own rather than being orchestrated by our earnest and good intentions.

She also had these questions for me:

Could you speak about form — how did you arrive at a poem from my writing results rather than an essay or short creative nonfiction piece?

Also, would you speak about the process you take when honing in on the writing and making associations?

Here is what I saw when I looked into Cyndi’s exercise result: She was using repetition of the word snap, a word with lots of energy in its sound and one that moves the writer and the reader from flowers to childhood commercials and pets to a present day pet and dancing. The journey into more about the flower seemed to go in a different direction than the other images that followed the word snap.

In the passage that follows the word frolic, the dolphins seemed to be a different topic than childhood play and pet dogs. The images of human playful activity seemed in keeping with the images from the snapdragon associations. The idea that the speaker still dances but doesn’t play as much as she as she did as a child stayed with me.

When I got to the section about grief, I thought the phrases Cyndi had used, “Grief is heavy though weightless as space” and “blinds you with its dark glasses and cloak” were evocative and rhythmic. There seemed to be an emotional thread of time passing. When we got to the evocative lines about grief and from there to TV shows where people and animals die, it seemed exactly right to associate to losing Speck.

From there the details about Speck and the speaker’s continuing grief at missing Speck were the details in which I was interested. Having been brought to this specific grief, I wanted to stay with it rather than read about other pet dogs. And once I stayed with the portrait of what the speaker longed for with Speck, I knew the writing had found its message — the longing for what is lost. Recognizing that she doesn’t play as an innocent child plays was an acknowledgment of how loss changes us. The words “Snapdragon. Snap. Snap” now had a sad sound to me as opposed to the fun energy of their sound at the opening. We can do little about loss. We are changed by loss. Snapdragon, snap, snap seemed in their sound to contain that insight, so I put them as an ending that circles back to the opening and leaves us feeling how life’s opportunities to love also invite sadness, because we so often lose what we have loved. Recapturing the spirit of play can not change the bittersweet nature of loss.

Cyndi’s lines are poetic in their repetitions and images. The emotional points are made with simple details. The preference for buttons that hook rather than for snaps seems by the end to be a metaphor–hooks are not about endings. We long to deny that there will be endings, but we can’t see that until we face an ending. Things go snap. However, the speaker’s face buried in Speck’s fur is a hook, not a snap, a feeling she can call up always. This is the territory of poetry. When I saw the early mention of the greenery of the flower surrounded by snow as the unconscious at work showing the human truth of grief, I proposed using the image as the title. Certainly, we preserve fond memories in the center of the cold wet of grief.

****

I am hopeful that viewing the writing prompt, Cyndi’s fine writing result, and my shaping will offer a lasting explanation of how to follow rather than command your words. Our willingness to write and associate is step one. Our sensitivity to the heart of what we are evoking is step two. Sculpting the words to extract the evocation is step three.