A Year of (Almost) Daily Writing

Today I’m joining a blog hop with a few friends from My 500 Words. Nearly a year ago to the day, I saw Jeff Goins’ call to join his challenge to write 500 words every day for 31 days.

Well, someone has to watch me, so I signed up.

The accountability mattered. Whether I shared my daily words with the group or posted only my word count or just popped in to cheer others on and share a laugh or three, I wrote every day.

Come February, most of us decided to stay, and the challenge was on to write every day of 2014.

From location to writing levels, we are a diverse and friendly and seriously supportive group. We have members everywhere.

We have some excellent writers, and it still sometimes blows me away that they even acknowledge me, let alone the gentle kicks in the butt I get when they know I need them.

We have watched others start their first blog or get an article published for the first time or finish their umpteenth novel, and we celebrate everything.

We have shared the hard stuff, too. Some members divorced this year, some lost loved ones, others suffered serious health issues. When down in the weeds, this group rallies together and tries to pull you out.

Most of you know I spent the month of September on the Oregon coast. One plan was to work on the novel I’d started in June. Never in a million did I think I’d ever want to write a novel. Look what these people did to me!

While chatting online one evening, Tonia and Roslynn decided to join me on the coast for a long weekend. Then we invited Laura, who lives near Portland. I was excited and also hoped I wouldn't run my introverted self into the forest and hide until time for them to leave.

Shortly after Laura decided to make the trip, I received an email from Pat, the editor of Not Your Mother's Book on Working for a Living (we had biz, ya'll!). Turned out she hits the coastal towns often. She agreed to join our meet up.

These stranger-friends arrived and rather than wanting to run into the forest, it felt like a reunion with long-separated friends. Tonia put the guilt on us if anyone wanted to go out before writing. She taught me better discipline. We wrote, we shared our writing with each other and critiqued for one another. We walked and talked and ate and laughed a lot.

Laura Hile and Pat Nelson

Tonia Hurst and Pat Nelson

We didn’t realize until departure time that only Tonia and Ros had met before this weekend.  That’s how easy it was.

We were no longer stranger-friends. None of us.

Tonia Hurst and Roslynn Pryor

Did I write every single day of 2014? No. I missed some days. Did I write anything that might change the world? Nope. I wrote some pretty good stuff and I wrote some stuff I should just burn. But I wrote. I wrote a lot. And I met good people that I never would have crossed paths with if I hadn't joined the challenge.

To the entire group, and especially the members who encouraged me to keep at it, may you find just the right words in 2015.

Write on.

Here are a few friends who took up the challenge a year ago. Check out their blogs and spread the love!

Linzé Brandon at Butterfly on a Broomstick

Vanessa Wright at Humouring the dark
Stella Myers at Stella’s Starshine
Amy Bovaird‪ at Amy’s Adventures
Crystal Thieringer at Muse and Meander
‪Roslyn Prior at Pushing the Bruise
Becky Williams Waters at A Novel Creation
Laura Hile at For the Love of Storytelling
Tonia Hurst at The Vast and Inscrutable Imponderabilities of Life

http://www.melindalancaster.com/2015/01/the-blessing-of-getting-stuck.html

The Ultimate Blog Challenge Day 9: Kicking My Butt

I’ve been participating in Christina Katz's 21 Moments Writing Challenge for a few months now. It’s simply an example of good writing, received via email each morning, as inspiration and a gentle reminder to write. 

Participants are to write at least 200 words per day, for 21 days of the month. You may use the email examples as prompts, or write whatever you wish. 

It isn’t homework. You don’t turn it in.

At the end of each month, you may submit one of your writing “moments” that you have edited and polished, and if Christina chooses it as an excellent example, you receive the next round of 21 Moments at no charge.

I see it as a little kick in the pants to remind me to put the words to paper.

After participating in 21 Moments for a while, I heard about the Ultimate Blog Challenge, and had to wonder why, if I can write something every day, that I can’t seem to do anything with the old blog. So I signed up. How hard could it be? 

By day three I was at a loss. This is not playing around with a few words every day that you might review and make something good from later, and nobody will ever know if you don’t. 

This is start it and finish it and edit it and post it for complete strangers, who are probably better writers and more successful and better than you in every possible way, to read and judge. Yeah, that.

No pressure.

Christina’s little kick in the pants did not prepare me for this UBC ass kicking. I’m still glad I did it, anyway. It’s got me back in the blogging habit, and has helped with the procrastination due to perfectionism problem.

Sometimes you just have to take a breath and hit the Publish button.

Thank goodness there are also Edit and Delete buttons.

Sage Cohen on poetry and holidays

I'm adding Sage Cohen to my list of things and people I'm thankful for this holiday season. Although my muse has gone into hiding recently, I still yearn for a good blog post, and here we are with more from Sage. I especially like the idea of "writing our souls into existence."

‘Tis the season to write poetry
A conversation with Sage Cohen
author of Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry

As the holidays approach in a down economy, Sage Cohen proposes that poetry can provide a meaningful way forward. Author of Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry, Cohen sees poetry not just as an art form, but a way of life. Following is our conversation about the possibilities of poetry today.

It’s the holiday season. Why poetry? Why now?

In today’s economy, many people are seeking alternatives to the typical holiday spending frenzy. The good news about hard times is that they challenge us to find creative new ways to give, share and create meaning. Poetry can be a powerful instrument for conjuring such alchemies.
These days people have less cash than usual. How can poetry help?

Poetry can’t change our bank statements, but it can change the way we think about wealth and prosperity. In fact, it is my lifelong relationship with poetry that has taught me that income is one thing, but prosperity is frequently something else.

For example, a few years ago, I heard Mary Oliver speak. She reported that a critic of her poetry complained that she must be independently wealthy to have so much time to lie around in the grass and ponder nature. This made the poet laugh, because the critic was reporting in an underhanded and confused way about a truth that Oliver tapped into long ago: the act of lying in the grass and listening to the world IS wealth.

The truth is, we don’t need to go anywhere special to tune in to poetry. Our lives are already inundated with sensory information that is the raw material of poems. All we need to do is slow down, pay attention and write down what moves us, intrigues us or stirs our curiosity. This does not require an inheritance or a 401K. It simply requires a willingness to welcome the abundance that is already ours, and to follow the golden thread of language wherever it leads us.

What poetry can give us is something far more valuable than money could ever buy – it gives us ourselves. Poem by poem, we write our souls into existence. Weighted in words, the spirit that animates us becomes palpable. By the same token, each poem we read offers a small window into the human condition, in which we may better recognize some glimmer of our own being.
The world seems to be falling apart around us. Why should we be focused on poetry when it can’t help change anything?

You’re right; poems may not stop the clubbing of baby seals, domestic violence, child trafficking, dog fighting, genocide, conflict in the Middle East or whatever it is that feels most difficult on any given day. But as the motorcyclist must lean into the turn to prevent a fall, poems become a kind of machinery of transport, giving us a context for leaning into the pain that we meet and safely navigating through it.

My father always said, "Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted." And poems are the treasures that can be exhumed from those undesirable experiences. Just think all of the great, poetic opportunities for understanding that lie coiled at the heart of every mistake, heartbreak, disappointment, and regret.

What if you were to literally look to your poetry practice as a way of moving through what pierces you to the core? What injustices might it help you examine unflinchingly? What epicenter of pain or grief might it help you enter and consider? How might you relax into the universal truths of divorce, death, intolerance, and change, and make a poem offering that illumines these truths with compassion?

How do you recommend that readers get started with their holiday poem-making?

I always remind people that their ordinary lives will offer more than enough source material for poetry. The following exercises are designed to get folks mining their own daily experience to see what inspired thoughts and language might be awaiting them below the surface.

Choose an activity you do regularly that is the absolutely most routinized, unremarkable event of your day. (Mine would be doing dishes.) Write down the answers to these questions about it:
Notice the physical feeling of this routine. Which muscles are involved? What kind of rhythm or tempo does it involve? Are you cold or hot, energized or depleted?

How do you feel emotionally when you do this?

What are the smells associated with this activity? (I use lavender soap, so my sink smells like a French garden.)

What do you see when engaged in this routine? (I look out at the butterfly bush and magnolia tree in my back yard. I enjoy watching meals erased from plates and glasses.)

Pay close attention to your thinking. What images and ideas bubble up as you are doing this activity?

How does the time of day or weather or location (indoors vs. outdoors, your home vs. someone else’s home, summer breeze or snowfall) affect your experience?

What wildlife, plants and trees do you see out your window at home, at work, or en route? What do they look like, feel like, sound like? What are their names? What are the visual cues and references in your home and/or workspace?

Make a list of the 20 things you come into contact with most.
Write down something else in the world that each of these 20 things remind you of. For example, The red teapot reminds me of the robin red breast. The worn wood of the mirror over the sink reminds me of the door to Grandpa’s barn. The curlicue pattern on the silver platter makes me think of storm clouds.

Think of someone you see regularly in passing but do not know well, like your mail carrier, barista or neighbor. Write a poem that imagines what their life might be like:
Who do they love?
What have they lost?
What do their pajamas look like?
What are their aspirations?
What do they eat for breakfast?
Explore your holiday archives:
What was your biggest holiday surprise?
What holiday is most meaningful to you and why?
Who do you yearn to see during the holidays?

How has Santa (if you have a relationship with Santa) satisfied you and let you down over the years?

What is the most embarrassing thing that ever happened around the dinner table with your family at holiday time?

What outfit comes to mind when you think back on past holiday celebrations?

This should give you a foundation of source material to start playing with. Circle a few words or phrases that interest you, and let those be the kindling for your poetic fire.

Don’t know where to go next? Freewriting can be a useful way to take your ideas and language a little further into the realm of the poetic. Set your timer for 10 minutes, sit down with your notebook, and keep that hand moving across the page, no matter what, without stopping, for the entire 10 minutes. You’re not trying to be brilliant here – just to get loose and let words start coming without thinking too hard. The more you practice, the looser you’ll get. And the looser you get, the more your language will surprise and delight you.

I’d like to send readers off with a thought about poetry and holiday cheer.

Egg nog, move over. Rudolph, there’s a brighter light guiding our sleigh tonight.
I’ve never experienced any holiday cheer that rivals the state of grace that poetry invites into our lives. That is why I often give poems I’ve written as holiday gifts. I print them on pretty paper, place them in an attractive frame and presto – the most treasured holiday gifts I’ve ever given only cost me the time I spent creating them.

Try it! You just might get hooked.

Wishing you all a peaceful and poetic holiday season.
* * * * *
Sage Cohen is the author of Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry (Writers Digest Books, 2009) and the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World (Queen of Wands Press, 2007). An award-winning poet, she writes four monthly columns about the craft and business of writing and serves as Poetry Editor for VoiceCatcher 4. Sage has won first prize in the Ghost Road Press poetry contest, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and been awarded a Soapstone residency. She curates a monthly reading series at Barnes & Noble and teaches the online class Poetry for the People. To learn more, visit www.sagesaidso.com. Drop by and join in the conversation about living and writing a poetic life at†www.writingthelifepoetic.typepad.com!

Welcome Sage Cohen

I'm thrilled to introduce you to Sage Cohen and her new book, Writing The Life Poetic: An Invitation To Read & Write Poetry, which does not have a blue cover - I'll fix that :) If you write anything you need this book. If I had to review it in one word, it would be FUN!

Her "TRY THIS!" exercises are fabulous, like this one: "Put on a cape and declare yourself the superhero of something: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, dog walking, properly conjugated verbs--whatever sweet spot you are ready (or even better, not ready) to claim."

So here we go! Please post your comments and questions for Sage, and of course there's a brand new shiny copy of Writing The Life Poetic (in the correct colors) waiting for one lucky participant.

Q&A with Sage Cohen, Author of
Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry
a new book from Writer’s Digest Books

How does poetry make the world a better place to live?

I think poetry fills the gap left by the so-called objective truth that dominates our media, science and legislation. Many of us want to comprehend and communicate the complexity of human experience on a deeper, more soulful level. Poetry gives us a shared language that is more subtle, more human, and—at its best—more universally "true" than we are capable of achieving with just the facts.

How has integrating the reading and writing of poetry into your life impacted you?

I will risk sounding melodramatic in saying that poetry saved my life. I stumbled into a writing practice at an extremely vulnerable time in my early teenage years. Poetry gave me then, as it does today, a way of giving voice to feelings and ideas that felt too risky and complicated to speak out loud. There was a kind of alchemy in writing through such vulnerabilities...by welcoming them in language, I was able to transform the energies of fear, pain and loneliness into†a kind of friendly camaraderie with myself. In a way, I wrote myself into a trust that I belonged in this world.†

Do people need an advanced degree in creative writing in order to write poetry?
Absolutely not! Sure, poetry has its place in the classroom; but no one needs an advanced degree in creative writing to reap its rewards. What most people need is simply a proper initiation. I wrote Writing the Life Poetic to offer such an initiation. My goal was that everyone who reads it come away with a sense of how to tune into the world around them through a poetic lens. Once this way of perceiving is awakened, anything is possible!

Why did you write Writing the Life Poetic?

While working with writers for the past fifteen years, I have observed that even the most creative people fear that they don’t have what it takes to write and read poetry. I wrote Writing the Life Poetic to put poetry back into the hands of the people––not because they are aspiring to become the poet laureate of the United States––but because poetry is one of the great pleasures in life."

Who is Writing the Life Poetic written for?

Practicing poets, aspiring poets, and teachers of writing in a variety of settings can use Writing the Life Poetic to write, read, and enjoy poems; it works equally well as a self-study companion or as a classroom guide. Both practical and inspirational, it will leave readers with a greater appreciation for the poetry they read and a greater sense of possibility for the poetry they write.
What sets Writing the Life Poetic apart from other poetry how-to books?

The craft of poetry has been well documented in a variety of books that offer a valuable service to serious writers striving to become competent poets. Now it’s time for a poetry book that does more than lecture from the front of the classroom. Writing the Life Poetic was written to be a contagiously fun adventure in writing. Through an entertaining mix of insights, exercises, expert guidance and encouragement, I hope to get readers excited about the possibilities of poetry––and engaged in a creative practice. Leonard Cohen says: "Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash." My goal is that Writing the Life Poetic be the flame fueling the life well lived.

Is it true that your book and your baby were conceived and birthed at the same time? What did you learn from this process?

Yes, I often refer to my son Theo and Writing the Life Poetic as my multi-media twins! I found out I was pregnant with Theo about two months into the writing of the book and I was making final edits to the book in layout two weeks after he was born. It was fascinating to have two of the most potent creative processes I’ve ever experienced happening in tandem. What I learned is a great respect for the birthing journey; it is one that has completely rewritten me along the way.

I am writing a monthly column this year for The Writer Mama zine titled "The Articulate Conception" which chronicles my journey of becoming an author and a mom. Through the course of ten essays, I am exploring this double-whammy birth trajectory--from the twinkle in my eye to the bags under my eyes. The first column is available here: http://thewritermama.wordpress.com/2009/01/20/the-articulate-conception-planting-seeds/.

What makes a poem a poem?

This is one of my favorite questions! I’ve answered it in my book, but it’s a question that I’m answering anew every day. And that’s what I love about poetry. It’s a realm where invention is not limited entirely by definition; there is room enough for the endless possibilities of the human. Every time we try to draw a line around what a poem is, something spills over into the next frame, shifting the point of view and demanding new names: olive, token, flax, daffodil. A poem is all of these, or none of them, depending on the quality of light and how the blade in the next room stirs the night.

What do you think people’s greatest misperceptions are about poetry?

I think the three greatest stereotypes about the writing of poetry are:

1.That one has to be a starving artist or deeply miserable to write great poetry.
2.That reading and writing poetry are available only to an elite inner circle that shares secret, insider knowledge about the making of poems.
3.That poetry does not fund prosperity.

I hope very much that Writing the Life Poetic helps offer alternatives to some of these attitudes and perceptions.

I’d love to conclude with a poem of yours. Would you be willing to share one?

Of course! Happy to!

Leaving Buckhorn Springs
By Sage Cohen

The farmland was an orchestra,
its ochres holding a baritone below
the soft bells of farmhouses,
altos of shadowed hills,
violins grieving the late
afternoon light. When I saw
the horses, glazed over with rain,
the battered old motorcycle parked
beside them, I pulled my car over
and silenced it on the gravel.
The rain and I were diamonds
displacing appetite with mystery.
As the horses turned toward me,
the centuries poured through
their powerful necks and my body
was the drum receiving the pulse
of history. The skin between me
and the world became the rhythm
of the rain keeping time with the sky
and into the music walked
the smallest of the horses. We stood
for many measures considering
each other, his eyes the quarter notes
of my heart’s staccato. This symphony
of privacy and silence: this wildness that
the fence between us could not divide.



About Sage Cohen
Sage Cohen is the author of Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry (Writers Digest Books, 2009) and the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World. An award-winning poet, she writes four monthly columns about the craft and business of writing and serves as Poetry Editor for VoiceCatcher 4. Sage curates a monthly reading series at Barnes & Noble and teaches the online class Poetry for the People. She has won first prize in the Ghost Road Press poetry contest and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. To learn more, visit www.writingthelifepoetic.com. Drop by and join in the conversation about living and writing a poetic life at†www.writingthelifepoetic.typepad.com!