The WordPlay Word-zine Volume VII, Issue 21 May 28, 2018 Dear ,
Happy Memorial Day! I hope you've enjoyed a lovely weekend with your family and/or friends. And a huge thank you if you, and/or anyone you know, who is served in our country's military.
I've been able to hang out with my sweet husband Richard for most of these past four days, and, today, when I mentioned I was getting ready to put the finishing
touches on the zine, he said, "So the word of the week is "soldier"?
This made my jaw drop, because, while the word of the week
isn't soldier, the word soldier plays a recurring, important part in today's featured writing. It was just a coincidence—Richard thought, aptly, that it was a good word for Memorial Day, when we celebrate the sacrifices of veterans and those in active service.
But I do love these little synchronicities (more about this next Monday, when the word of the week will be synchronicity). Because I knew I wanted this week's featured writing the minute I heard Lova Lantz read it a few weeks ago in the
Spinning Words into Gold class at the John C. Campbell Folk School. In fact, I could hardly wait until she finished reading it to ask her if she was willing to share it.
She was! But she couldn't do it right away because she was traveling, so I asked Morgan to schedule her for the first possible date—which turned out to be Memorial Day.
Here I am with Lova, who my friend Wendy Gill, who was assisting me, described as "radiant" to our book club members when I told them to look for her essay in today's zine.
It's a perfect word to describe Lova, who is truly radiantly beautiful inside and out. I want to be just like her when I grow up!
(In fact, I bought a scarf almost exactly like the one she's wearing here in the Folks School's gift shop to remind me of Lova's open, loving response to all she encounters.) I'm sure you'll see why I was so excited about Lova's "Room for Dreaming" when you read it below. It's not only a lovely story, but contains solid strategies for sustaining a writer's life that works.
I'd love to know—and to share with Lova—any insights and/or response you have to "Room for Dreaming." And may you have a goodly amount of room for your own dreaming in
the week ahead!
Love and light,
Maureen
Upcoming WordPlay
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
NOW TAKING REGISTRATIONS FOR FALL 2018! This class is designed to fulfill your writing dreams and projects. You’ll set goals and support structures and watch your writing flow! You’ll also get feedback on your
work (any genre) and learn revision tools and methods. Each week, writing prompts will generate material for new writing or further a piece in process, whatever your preferred genre. Through examples of accomplished writers, you’ll learn techniques to aid you right where you are in the process.
* For the benefit of participants, an audio recording of the class will be made
each week so that participants are able to listen to classes they miss and/or review material covered at any convenient time and place. These recordings are available throughout the class session, along with all handouts, in a shared Dropbox folder.
WHERE: Covenant Presbyterian Recreation Center, 1000 East Morehead Street, Charlotte, 28204. Click here for map. WHEN: Wednesday mornings from 10:00 a.m. – noon, starting in September 2018. (Other class time/day of the week may be available.) COST: $435 TO REGISTER: Please email us at info@wordplaynow.com to start the registration process by filling out a short "Clarity
Tool" to share your writing dreams and goals and where you are in the process (anywhere you are is a perfect place to begin).
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GIFT OF MEMOIR WRITING PERSONAL AND FAMILY STORIES (Preserving Family History; Writing for and about Your Family; The Art of Memoir)
NOW TAKING REGISTRATIONS FOR FALL 2018! Our life stories are a precious legacy.
Putting them in writing is a gift to all who know and love us—they can be treasured and enjoyed for generations to come. It is also a gift to ourselves. As best-selling author Rachel Naomi Remen says in her book Kitchen Table Wisdom, facts bring us to knowledge, but stories bring us to wisdom.
If you are interested in writing family and/or personal life stories—those significant tales of adventure, transition, love, loss, and triumph, as well as lovely everyday moments from times past or the present, come learn specific tools and techniques to retrieve and record them.
* For the benefit of participants, an audio recording of the class will be made each
week so that participants are able to listen to classes they miss and/or review material covered at any convenient time and place. These recordings are available throughout the class session, along with all handouts, in a shared Dropbox folder.
WHERE: Covenant Presbyterian Recreation Center, 1000 East Morehead Street, Charlotte, 28204. Click here for map. WHEN: Thursday mornings, 10:00 a.m. – noon., starting in September, 2018. COST: $285 TO REGISTER: Please
email us at info@wordplaynow.com to start the registration process by filling out a short "Clarity Tool" to share your writing dreams and goals and where you are in the process (anywhere you are is a perfect place to begin).
WordPlay Success Story "Maureen caused me to see writing in a new light..."
Lova Lantz, an avid reader since childhood, began to explore writing after retirement. For the 24 years of her
marriage, in addition to raising three children, she was an informal editor for her husband, who was an educator. After his death at age 47, she discovered to her surprise that through her work with him she had acquired valuable editing skills—ones that would enable her to earn a living.
For the next 20 years, she worked in various educational settings, often editing publications, curriculum guides, and programs of studies as part of her work. After several years of retirement, she began writing her own words in the form of memoir and discovered a new passion.
Since 2015, she has self-published two books for her family and friends—one about 45 years of visits to a lovely coastal Michigan town that told a story in themselves, and one about her parents’ lives that included a chronology of family birth, marriage, and death dates from 1791 to the present. She
is currently writing a third book about her husband and their life together.
What Lova says about WordPlay Shaped by decades of editing, my approach to a piece of writing was to read the words for content and edit them into a coherent and understandable document. Hence my approach to my own early writing was similar: Write words, then edit
them.
My writing began with two brief continuing education classes, which led to a small writing group being formed by the instructor. The group met for four years. During that time, I read
extensively about writing and embraced concepts such as “What is this story about?” and “Does this story ‘make a bagel’?” I also discovered the John C. Campbell Folk School and attended six writing classes there, expanding my knowledge and writing experience. During one of those visits, I spotted Maureen Ryan Griffin’s book Spinning Words into Gold in the craft shop and bought it.
Later, when I took Maureen’s class at the folk school, the techniques in her book came vividly alive. The idea
of deliberately crafting a story by priming my mind with words and using writing tools opened new vistas. Changing a writing piece from first to second person offered unforeseen possibilities for tenderness. Maureen caused me to see writing in a new light: Things happen to us. We see meaning in those things, and a story takes shape. We write it, and we fall a little bit in love with it, this piece of ourselves. But the power of the writing is that we tell the stories as no one else can. We
choose the direction they will take. We decide how they will end. Because they are ours. Because we say so.
I began to understand what it meant to be a writer.
Room for Dreaming
by
Lova
Lantz
Once it was a little boy’s room, with its regimented rows of toy soldiers papered on the walls in primary colors. The little boy dreamed of airplanes, and hung them suspended from hooks on the ceiling of the room. That was during the years when the house held growing children, a husband, two Siamese cats, and a parakeet.
In the first of the child-leaving-home shuffles, the room became my husband’s office. He furnished it with a library table, file cabinets, and a large cork board on the wall behind the table to hold his notes and
schedules. Along another wall, there was a place for me—his de facto assistant and informal editor-in-chief. In the evenings, he produced the curriculum and policies, agendas and proposals required for his work, and I polished them. In that room with the soldiers on the walls.
One by one, the children, the husband, the cats, and the parakeet all left their places, until the house was mine alone. All of these leavings occurred in the usual course of events, except for the husband, who died far too soon. Leaving his office to me. The one with the soldiers on the walls.
After he was gone, sometimes it seemed I could still see him sitting there when I passed the room, at his table in a pool of lamplight, thinking and writing, dreaming dreams that would never be. He had always wanted to write—not curriculum and policies, but his own thoughts—later, when there would be
more time. He had a folder full of ideas.
Years passed. I put to use the editing skills that he and I had learned together, and I earned a living. I found I liked it, the editing—shaping ideas with
words, rearranging sentences, clarifying thinking. Discerning what the writer meant to say, and saying it.
More years passed, and I retired from earning a living. I traveled, tacking
postcards of places I had been on the cork board behind the table in the room with the soldiers on the walls. In the file cabinets, folders of information labeled New England and Yellowstone and Texas, Paris and Australia and Israel, filled the drawers.
And then one day I had a thought. I wondered what it would be like to write my own words instead of editing someone else’s. I took a two-evening writing class, and I wrote a one-page story.
A year passed. I took a three-evening writing class, and I wrote a longer story, the one I had always wanted to tell about how my parents met, the one with the fortune teller and the unexpected train trip and the Miami pool room. And I discovered I liked writing too.
Now I had a dream.
I cleared one of the bookshelves in the corner
and began to build a collection of books on writing. I tacked notes onto the cork board that said things like, “Stories live forever, but only if you tell them.” I pulled out my favorite picture of my husband and tacked that up there, too, just because. He smiled at me. I imagined him saying, Go for it!
Bags of old letters to my mother and to my husband, stored in the basement for decades, moved into plastic lidded boxes that I stacked in the corner under the sunny office window, ready for reading. A wealth of stories to be told. I added files to the cabinet with folders labeled Story Ideas, and Writing by Others; Class Notes, and Stories in Progress, and then . . . Stories
Completed.
Over time, I added certificates to the cork board from writing classes at the folk school I’d discovered—six of them—in a row along the top. Two books with my name on the covers took their
places on the shelf, self-printed, but still—books, with my name on them! Along the way, I discovered a purpose for the soldiers on the walls. On days when the writing didn’t flow, I sat at the computer with my fingers poised on the keyboard and engaged in an exercise I called “counting soldiers” until the words began to flow again.
So now I sit at the computer in this transformed room, a place of contentment, and I write. My mind opens to ideas, images, and memories, and I lose track of the time, the day, even the season. Sunlight creates dappled shadows outside the window while I write about falling snow. Surrounded by writing riches, I loosen my tether to this place, setting my mind free
to wander and to transfer words to my fingertips as if by magic.
Writing is a surprise to me . . . because it came into my life at all, and because of what miraculously appears on the page. It reminds
me that no matter what age we are, there are surprises. It reminds me that there is always room for dreaming.
Maybe it helps to be in a room with soldiers on the walls.
WordPlay Now! Writing Prompt
This is WordPlay—so why not revel in the power and potential of one good word after
another? This week, it's "room."
PROMPT: Usually, our weekly writing prompt serves to create something new. And this week, there is a prompt that provides that opportunity. But I'm also providing a second prompt, so
that you can give some thought to the "room" you are giving yourself to write.
- PROMPT 1: Make a short list of the rooms that you, or one of your characters, has spent a lot of time in, at
any point in life, from early childhood up to the present.
Pick one of those rooms and write it on the top of a blank sheet of paper. Now make a list of everything you can think of that was/is in that room: from memory, if it's a room of yours, or imagination, if the room is one where your character has spent time in. Include furniture, decorations, objects, tools, and also input from other senses: touch, taste, smell, sound, movement.
Now write a scene,
story, essay, or poem, incorporating as many of the items on your list as you care to, in any order.
- PROMPT 2: Gather a notebook and a pen or pencil, and spend some time with these questions, answering them in whatever way best suits you, whether that's a short, bulleted list, a few
phrases, or a number of paragraphs. And if you don't know the answers, your job this week is to treat finding out this information about yourself like a fascinating scientific study:
1. What do you require to have an active writing practice? 2. If you don't currently have what you need, what are 5-10 small steps you could take to move toward fulfilling these requirements? (If you get stuck, ask a supportive friend
to help you brainstorm.) 3. Where have you liked to write? (Make a list of anyplace, at every point in your life, where you have successfully written something that you were happy with.) 4. Do you currently have a room of your own for writing? If not, do you need one? (See number two above.) 5. When have you liked to write? (Make a list of any specific time of day, day of the week,
time of year, at every point in your life, when you have successfully written something that you were happy with.) 6. Do you write better on schedule/regular routine or without a schedule/regular routine? 7. Do you currently give yourself time of your own for writing? If not, do you need to? (See number two above.) 8. What would you be willing to give up to have more room
for both writing and dreaming? 9. Is there anything else can you think of that could give you more room for both writing and dreaming?
It's fun to play with prompts in community with fellow writers, and to be able to share the results when you're done. You can find out about WordPlay classes, workshops, and retreats here. MAUREEN RYAN GRIFFIN, an award-winning poetry and nonfiction writer, is the author of Spinning Words into Gold, a Hands-On Guide to the Craft of Writing, a grief workbook entitled I Will Never Forget You, and three collections of poetry, Ten Thousand Cicadas Can't Be Wrong, This Scatter of Blossoms and When the Leaves Are in the Water. One of her long-held dreams came true in July of 2015 when Garrison Keillor read one of her poems on
The Writer's Almanac. You can listen to it here. She believes, as
author Julia Cameron says, "We are meant to midwife dreams for one another."
Maureen also believes that serious "word work" requires serious WordPlay, as play is how we humans best learn—and perform. What she loves best is witnessing all the other dreams that come true for her clients along the way. Language, when used with intentionality and focus, is, after all, serious fuel for joy. Here's to yours! |
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