Through books, articles and often in-person seminars, Seattle author and poet, Priscilla Long, shares her experience with those of us who write. Her recent book, Minding the Muse: A Handbook for Painters, Composers, Writers and Other Creators, is, at just over a hundred pages, packed with her reflections on how creators use their time, their surroundings, and craft tools to enrich their creativity and to make sure they remain creative and not blocked. I am so pleased that she and her publisher have given me permission to share an excerpt from the book, and I am thrilled that Priscilla has answered questions here specifically for Writing It Real members.

Read our short email interview exchange and then the excerpt from Minding the Muse because whatever paragraph Priscilla writes is full of just what we writers need.

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Sheila
What prompted you to write Minding the Muse?

Priscilla
I wrote Minding the Muse for purely selfish reasons! I wanted to know how the greats produced their great works. Why? Because I wanted to produce great works myself, or at least increase the possibility. What were their habits, what were their methods, what did they do every day? I began to study artists, beginning with women visual artists, shortly after receiving my MFA degree (in creative writing) in 1990. So I’ve been at it for a long time and it still amazes me how often world-class artists across widely different domains engage in similar or even identical practices. (There are exceptions though; these things are not carved in stone.) I’ve produced other works stemming from this ongoing study, including a creative nonfiction on the Medieval writer and composer Hildegard of Bingen, another on the painter Piet Mondrian, and so on. Most importantly, I have myself taken in and taken on the practices I describe in Minding the Muse, and without a doubt they’ve nourished my work as a poet and writer. I teach writing and it also pleases me to observe how the writers I work with flourish using these practices. This is what I hope for the reader as well.

Sheila
What started you off researching how people in a multitude of creative arts work?

Priscilla
From an early age I’ve had a love of the visual arts. I grew up on a farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland but several times a year our parents made sure to take us to the National Gallery in Washington DC or to the great Philadelphia Art Museum. And then as a college student and ever after, whenever I was in a new place, or revisiting an old place, I’d go to the art museum. Remember that art museums used to be free. That was important. I also grew up with a love of all types of music and for a decade I played the banjo and even got pretty good at it. So it was natural to study artists working in areas other than writing, even though I’m also an avid student of the lives of writers.

Sheila
What is the best way to use the book as a handbook?

Priscilla
First, read and consider. This is a short book! Then I suggest starting a notebook, the purpose of which is to consider your own habits and practices as a creator, whether you are a poet or a painter or a memoirist or whatever. You can move through the chapters in whatever order pleases you. The first question on the topic at hand is, what is the reality of your own practice right now. (You must have a good grasp of what the reality is to move forward from it.) Then, what is the goal? Then what are the steps to the goal? And?how can you improve in your practice by five percent? I suggest answering the questions in the writing practice manner: write to a timer, continuously, without stopping or considering correctness. Just write.

Keep in mind that in your creative work, the piece you are currently working on becomes part of your body of work. Whether you are in the early stages of making art or quite advanced, providing yourself with better working habits is a gift to the artist you are growing into.

Sheila
Anything else you want to say to the readers?

Priscilla
A life in art, whether literary or any other kind, is a deeply satisfying life. The entry ticket is desire. If you desire to write a great poem or a great novel or a great memoir, you can do it. All it takes is a lifetime of study and work. The lucky part is that we have a community of people with analogous dreams. We have buddies, we have company. It is my hope that this little book will help you to get your habits and practices fully in line with your art goals and writing desires. Good luck!

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Excerpt from Chapter II, pages 16-19 of Minding the Muse: A Handbook for Painters, Composers, Writers and Other Creators by Priscilla Long, reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher, Coffeetown Press, Seattle, WA.

Gathering, Hoarding Conceptualizing
by Priscilla Long

The painter Gordon Wood makes intricate, brilliantly colored paintings and collages utilizing both traditional and digital means. His works, which fuse abstraction and figuration, engage extensively with nature and our place in it. They evoke, at one and the same time, the cosmos and the atom, the vast and the minuscule, the universe and the quark, birth and death. His gathering process involves extensive reading in science and philosophy. It involves hiking and camping in the Cascade Range, located near his Seattle home. There he enjoys and contemplates — often with his young son — forests, alpine meadows, glaciers, and the night sky unblotted-out by urban light. He also studies images on the Internet and manipulates them in Photoshop, and he takes notes on thoughts and ideas. Despite all this, the greater part of his creative process takes place in the studio, working on the work itself, which is, he says, “time-consuming, complex, and laborious.” ¹

My own gathering practice has deepened as a result of a Saturday course I took recently in Writing Poems on Place offered by visual artist and poet Carletta Carrington Wilson.^2?Wilson invited us to bring a blank scrapbook, maps, colored pencils or markers, and an object or two connected to the place we were thinking of, in my case the Skagit River. This does appeal to my kindergarten nature, and I’ve fully adopted the scrapbook idea. My scrapbook on the Skagit contains lists of plants (cattails, skunk cabbage), lists of creek names (Red Creek, Coal Creek), and tributary river names (the Sauk, the Suiattle), maps, photos, and my own drawings — inept as they may be. I entered quotes by people like Jack Kerouac, who spent time meditating on the riverbank of the Skagit. I wrote down questions about the place. I pasted in pictures of the wild salmon that run on the Skagit — chinook, chum, pink, sockeye, and coho. The whole time I was working on my piece on the Skagit, I played with my scrapbook. After I completed the piece, there were scrapbook pages left over, so I continued using it for the next river in my series of river pieces, the Duwamish River. This was almost too much fun.

About this gathering business, sometimes known as research: Do not gather for too long before beginning to work on the piece. The best way is to begin gathering and to begin composing at the same time. The two activities exist in a dynamic relationship. The work itself points to what it requires. The gathering process can continue until the piece is done, but if you gather for too long before beginning to work on the actual piece, the dynamic relationship will never begin.

Questions to Contemplate as You Continue Your Practice

~ Do you spend part of your work time consciously gathering, consciously dabbling and doodling, collecting, ruminating? Are there ways you could deepen your art practice and make it more pleasurable by putting into place a gathering phase, one that continues as composing begins? What sort of materials might you gather and where might you keep these materials?

~ If you are one of those creators who loves research, do you work on the actual composition — whether poem, painting, or film — at the same time that you continue doing research? Is the composing phase in sync with the gathering phase, or do you continue to do research for days or years without working on the work itself? Can you improve your practice in this regard?

Footnotes in the text

¹ Gordon Wood written communication with Priscilla Long, July 9, 2014, in possession of Long, Seattle. Wood’s website may be found at www.gordonwoodart.com.

² The website of this visual and literary artist may be found at www.carlettacarringtonwilson.com.

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Thank you so much, Priscilla, for sharing this rich material with us. For those who want to hear Priscilla talk about her work and teaching, please listen to Priscilla and me discussing her writing and teaching on ?In Conversation: Discussions on Writing and the Writing Life? broadcast by KPTZ FM radio in Port Townsend, WA.