To Write is to Observe: Learning This Again on a Trip to Turkey

In Mid-May, I took a trip to Turkey with 11 women writers. Susan Bono and I gathered participants who met together for four days of touring Istanbul. Our Turkish counterpart, writer and teacher Yesim Cimcoz and her student Fusun Centinel put together walking tours for us to historical sites and to neighborhoods.

Mornings we discussed assignments from Susan (the use of Ekphrasis, perfect for traveling in Istanbul) and from me (epistolary writing), and we came back to our hotel after touring, enriched and ready to write. It’s been a long time since I stayed up all night writing, but I did that in Turkey one of our nights there when what I’d started wouldn’t leave me alone (but certainly my body not being sure what time zone it was contributed to this stamina).

Touring Istanbul with fellow writers and then visiting the Ephesus region of Turkey near the Aegean helped all of us accomplish what artist and neuroscientist Beau Lotto claims  is necessary for creating:

“You must see yourself see. It’s about observation and curiosity, having a sense of wonder, becoming aware of the connection between the past and the present. Becoming an observer of yourself enables you to do amazing things.”

In Turkey, we caught glimpses of life we are not familiar with, learned snatches of history we hadn’t known, absorbed names and ideas new to us, ate delicious food prepared in what to us were unusual ways, received the hospitality of strangers, and, of course, suffered the minor mishaps and embarrassments of travelers (such things are akin to how we feel taking the risks we do in our writing). Then as writers we used our experiences in combination with our own histories and emotional interests to see in a new way and come to new understandings–at least our words were ready to lead us there if we followed them, if we believed that the substance of our observations would carry the emotional weight of insight and evocation.

Our last afternoon, as an oral exercise, we created a list poem together based on one by William Stafford, “Things I Learned Last Week.” Some of what Stafford includes in his list, he learned from first-hand experience, some from the newspaper, and some from his own meditations. Our group’s blend of learning ranged from becoming aware that olives can be a breakfast food to learning how often what we want requires a climb uphill. Our unrecorded “What I Learned in Istanbul” poem proved moving because we created it from individual memories of our days in the city. Stafford’s poem had served as a strong model for allowing a blend of small observations to take on metaphorical meaning.

And so again, we must listen to Beau Lotto when he asks, “What do I notice, what do I ask?”

The experience of Istanbul loosened us up to notice, sense, associate, listen, and reveal our perceptions and questions, helping us experience this prized aspect of writing and put it to use.

Here is an epistolary poem I wrote on Mother’s Day after visiting the Hagia Sophia and the Roman Underground Cistern and remembering to call my mother whom my daughter was visiting:

Letter To My Daughter Emily from Istanbul on Mother’s Day

I write in a circle of women, my feet on an antique kilim
covering a concrete floor in a refurbished building, thinking
of the Christian mosaics in the Hagia Sophia, how on one wall
they are partly revealed beneath Islamic frescos painted to cover
them when the Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottomans.

Amidst our arrivals and our departures, between lire coins and tram
passes and the food we order with names new to our tongues,

I remember that in life all of us are both hidden and revealed,
both essence and clutter, at times hungry, at other times sated.
We visited the nearby Underground Cistern for what was once
New Rome; there two marble blocks with carvings of Medusa’s
head are the bases of pillars because in his time the Emperor Justinian
did not want pagan reminders; still the stone made good blocks
for construction and one Medusa’s head is installed sideways
under the column she holds up; the other one is upside down.

There is a story that this was intentional to break Medusa’s power.

I think the stonemasons were looking for the most stable
stone platform for the pillars to stand on.

We walked back to the entrance and saw the Weeping Pillar,
a marble column with a worry hole in one place. Visitors are
invited to put their thumb inside and rotate it to wipe the smooth
marble and, of course, make a wish. And I did.

I thought of the good luck place you and I visited, Kiyomizu Temple,
the ladles of three waters we splashed over ourselves when you
were in Japan at university and the same ladles years later
when we returned years with your young son.

Tonight when I cannot sleep among the city’s motorcycles
and calls to prayer, I will pretend Medusa is winking at me,
standing on her head, never tired even after centuries holding
up pillars, the snakes of her hair but yarn for spinning the wool
of a strong and double-knotted rug, like the one I bought today.
It comes from Kayseri, 10 hours by bus from this city.
A traveler like you, the rug holds a girl’s story of wishes and love.

Medusa had the power to turn those she loved into stone,
but she winks in my thoughts because she knows, Emily,
when it comes to my love for you, I have always been
revealed and always sated, your life so full of fruit.

*

A writer’s life is a life of seeing, reporting, and then listening for the emotional messages that our observations bring. When we trust the images that call to us and write them, they start to show us what they are adding up to, what we have to tell ourselves, the world, or, in the case of epistolary writing, a particular person first.

One assignment I taught in Istanbul was to write to someone you have strong feelings about. When I did this exercise, I addressed my daughter, who is a traveler, and let myself talk about what I had seen and experienced that Mother’s Day in Istanbul until I saw the threads the images I used had spun, the threads of finding luck in being open to love and experience. As I wrote, I stayed with my observations from that day and the associations they brought up, until I found the message my letter wanted to contain for my daughter. And then I found my poem.

Writers approach every day as a traveler approaches a trip. Wherever you go, even around your own block, there is much to observe and much to connect with. Look, listen, touch, hear and smell the world you move through, connect your past to the present; your writing will do amazing things.