There’s something about being with writers: the unspoken bond, the understandings, the pursuit of words that likely won’t buy you a sandwich or even a glass of beer, the pursuit of the shape and sound of language that dips below the necessary and can’t even be translated without loss.
Interlochen Writers Retreat 2024.
I just returned from the Interlochen Writers Retreat. I like working with adults who have all this life they want to transform, ponder, whatever, into written language. They talk to me, they tell me the story they want to write. Every creature on earth wants to do this, to tell others something. Even whales. But for new writers, or frankly, for all writers, in the leap from the story in your head to what you write down, so much is lost. The feeling in your heart ends up falling into a chasm along the way to your description of it. It’s your fate. You’re chasing a rainbow. A rainbow is true, but try to touch it, try to gather the delicate shadings of color and tuck them into a drawer. It’s all mist and perception.
Faculty, celebrating at the end of the retreat. Out front in black is Patty McNair, our fearless leader.
You can’t teach writing. You can teach tricks, sometimes. But you can gasp at good writing and hope some of it rubs off on you. It occurs to me that writing is akin to a religious vocation. You’re devoting your life to something you can’t reach and can’t even explain. All you can do is stumble along in the moment, trying to live up to some longing you feel in your bones. You’re not trying to make converts, but you are trying to make friends. Not necessarily friends of your writing, but friends who catch the invisible threads of your momentary feeling and feel it with you, as closely as possible.
Discussion after our readings: Patty McNair at podium, John Mauk, Christine Rice, and me.
The friend first of all is you. You’re showing to yourself what you know, or feel. If you get it close to right, that may be pretty much enough.
What strikes me about the people who come to the retreat is that they’re not there to become anything but better at writing. They’re not after a degree, a line on a resume, or a promotion. At the University of Delaware (likely at most schools), every year I had to turn in a list of my year’s accomplishments. My status and raise depended on it. I learned to think of every published poem as a small lengthening of my list. Maybe when I was writing, I wasn’t thinking about that, but the feeling creeps in after a while, that there’s a great tally sheet in the sky. St. Peter will ask for my resume. It took a few years after retirement to shake that feeling. At first it was scary. I felt rudderless, a little bit invisible.
But then the freedom kicked in. No one’s checking on me. My God, I can do anything! Maybe only then, after all those years, I became a writer like our students at the retreat, writing because. Because nothing in particular. Because I want to. Because still I’m trying to get better. Because the next poem. Because the next blog post. Because the next essay.
How to be a Poet
(to remind myself)
i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.
ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
--Wendell Berry
The P.S. . . . .
Five Friends Reading, this Saturday at 5:00 at Horizon Books in Traverse City. We’re doing another round-robin reading, which worked great last time.
Aaaannnd….It seems odd to put this in a P.S., but Carnegie Mellon University Press just took my full-length book, “The End of the Clockwork Universe.” So sometime next year I’ll have that coming out, plus the Finishing Line Chapbook, “Doctor of the World.” When it rains happiness, it pours. :)