This Tuesday at The Cabin, we combined a search for our own personal urgencies with tools to excavate active language, in order to build our personal manifestos. You can take part in what we did on your own time, and add in your own flourishes. 
  
Write Your Urgencies: Consider everything that’s on your mind. Everything in your personal life. In your community. Everything going on in the world right now. The biggest things pressing on you right now. What has been pulling on you? What is that pull asking you to write?

Now, write what you’re afraid to write, what you can’t write, what you’ve been longing to write, needing to write. Write for ten minutes. 
 
An American Lyric: We then read a series of short pieces from Claudia Rankine's An American Citizen, and discussed them. Here is one we used:

--

At the end of a brief phone conversation, you tell the manager you are speaking with that you will come by his office to sign the form. When you arrive and announce yourself, he blurts out, I didn't know you were black!

I didn't mean to say that, he then says.

Aloud, you say.

What? he asks.

You didn't mean to say that aloud.

Your transaction goes swiftly after that. 

--
I encourage you to find Rankine's full book of hurricane strength pieces like this one. We talked through some  of these questions after reading:

What is urgent here?
What is speaking to you?
What is the hidden world underneath?
What questions are these pieces asking you?
What questions do you have for these stories?
What is active here?
What calls you to action?
 
And we discussed how writing can help us deal with the world.
How writing can bring a call to action.
How we can be active in our writing.
 
Active as in Verbs...
We used this delightful exercise from Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones: 

Divide your paper up into two columns.
List one to ten on both sides
On one side, list a bunch of juicy nouns.
Objects, occupations, places, types of people, animals…anything.
No need to connect them or make sense of them. Make them specific. 
Hairbrush, professor, Bermuda, singer, leopard...

On the other side, in the second list’s heading, write an occupation. Any job.
Below that, list all the verbs that job does. Active verbs.
A cook cuts, slices, boils, steams, washes...

Once you have your lists, make pairs between items in each list.
Draw lines between them like a kid's matching game.
Mix and pair. Nouns and verbs. Don’t aim for logical groupings.

Write sentences based on these pairings.
You can change present tense to past. Keep it playful. 
The hairbrush sliced through brunette strands...
After writing your ten sentences, choose your favorite.
Write a story starting with that sentence.
Can all your verbs burst with that same active energy?
Write for at least ten minutes. Keep going if time and space allows!
 
Active as in Making a Stand
Having a better sense of strong verb potential isn't the only kind of action...
We can also use active verbs to create a different kind of writing.
A personal manifesto.
These writings can take many different forms.
Perhaps yours is made up of observations that call your readers to take action.
Like Rankine’s meditations on race in Citizen. 
Perhaps it is a specific call to action.
Perhaps it is a list of everything fundamentally important to you.
 
Here is a manifesto from my dear friend and amazing performer Sarah Gardner:

Now write yours, perhaps bringing in an attention toward strong active verbs.
Can be manifesto about your writing
About how to live
To yourself, how you’d like to be
To yourself and others, how you’d like everyone to be
To the world. 
Remember what is urgent for you write now.
What do you have to say? What are you afraid to write? What do you need to write?
Try for a ten, fifteen or twenty minute writing session here... 
 
After you've written this piece, share it with someone!
 
Then, reflect. What was useful or interesting to you about these exercise?
What was difficult or challenging?

Thank you for taking time to write with me today. 

This is a mashup of what we did this Tuesday at The Cabin's Free Drop In Writing Workshop and the workshop I brought to the inaugural Puget Sound Workshop Workshop last week. I included the reading from the Drop In and reintroduced the interdisciplinary art focus from PSWW (an absolutely incredible experience, by the way -- and they just opened up registration for 2018!).

Objective: We will investigate our personal limits as creative people, and then utilize those limits and additional boundaries as an avenue to generate new artistic material across disciplines that breaks our expectations.
 
Intro: I believe our limits help show us who we are as artists and people. Working within boundaries breaks open creativity. Our failures shape our greatest art and our mistakes create the style that makes our work stand on its own.

This workshop inquiry came about following the enforced stillness and silence this spring brought about from acute laryngitis wiping out my voice and an oncoming car wiping me and mobility out on my bicycle. Those sudden informing limits gave me intense frustration and some all-too familiar depression as I couldn't get everything done I wanted to when I had hoped for a productive spring, but also got my inner resources simmering on the value of such restrictions. 

Read/Discuss Oliver Sacks' excerpt: Recently I read Oliver Sacks' fascinating study on music and the brain, Musicophelia. Many of his essays deal with intensive, sudden limits thrust on people that resulted in unexpected change. This one deals with musicians facing dystonia, which is a condition much like an intensive writer’s cramp caused by repetitive movement that prevents musicians from playing – sometimes for life.
 
Sacks says: “The term ‘dystonia’ had long been used for certain twisting and posturing spasms of the muscles such as torticollis. It is typical of dystonias, as of Parkinsonism, that the reciprocal balance between agonistic and antagonistic muscles is lost, and instead of working together as they should—one set relaxing as the others contract—they contract together, producing a clench or spasm.” 

Here's a focus on one particular affected musician:
 
From Athletes of the Small Muscles: Musician’s Dystonia
By Oliver Sacks
 
Recently Leon Fleisher came to visit me a few days before he was to give a performance at Carnegie Hall. He spoke of how his own dystonia had first hit him. “I remember the piece that brought it on,” he began, and described how he had been practicing the Shubert Wanderer Fantasy for eight or nine hours a day. Then he had to take an enforced rest—he had a small accident to his right thumb and could not play for a few days. It was on his return to the keyboard after this that he noticed the fourth and fifth fingers of that hand starting to curl under. His reaction to this, he said, was to work through it, as athletes are often told to “work through” the pain. But “pianists,” he said, “should not work through pain or other symptoms. I warn other musicians about this. I warn them to treat themselves as athletes of the small muscles. They make extraordinary demands on the small muscles of their hands and fingers.”

In 1963, however, when the problem first arose, Fleisher had no one to advise him, no idea what was happening to his hand. He forced himself to work harder, more and more effort was needed as other muscles were brought into play. Bu the more he exerted himself, the worse it became, until finally, after a year, he gave up the struggle. “When the gods go after you,” he said, “they really know where to strike.”
He had a period of deep depression and despair, feeling his career as a performer was over. But he had always loved teaching, and now he turned to conducting as well. In the 1970s, he made a discovery—in retrospect, he is surprised he did not make it earlier. Paul Wittgenstein, the dazzlingly gifted (and immensely wealthy) Viennese pianist who had lost his right arm in the Great War, had commissioned the great composers of the world—Prokofiev, Hindemith, Ravel, Strauss, Korngold, Britten, and others—to write piano solos and concertos for the left hand. And this was the treasure trove that Fleisher discovered, one that enabled him to resume him to resume his career as a performing artist—but now, like Wittgenstein and Graffman, as a one-handed pianist.

Playing only with the left hand at first seemed to Fleisher a great loss, a narrowing of possibilities, but gradually he came to feel that he had been “on automatic,” following a brilliant but (in a sense) one-directional course. “You play your concerts, you play with orchestras, you make your records…that’s it, until you have a heart attack on stage and die.” But now he started to feel that his loss could be “a growth experience.”

“Suddenly I realized that the most important thing in my life was not playing with two hands, it was music…In order to be able to make it across these last thirty or forty years, I’ve had to somehow de-emphasize the number of hands or the number of fingers and go back to the concept of music as music. The instrumentation becomes unimportant, and it’s the substance and content that takes over.”

And yet, throughout those decades, he never fully accepted that his one-handedness was irrevocable. “The way it came upon me, “he thought, might be the way it would leave me.” Every morning for thirty-odd years, he tested his hand, always hoping.
Though Fleisher had met Mark Hallett and tried Botox treatments in the late 1980s, it seemed that he needed an additional mode of treatment, in the form of Rolfing to soften up the dystonic muscles in his arm and hand—a hand so clenched that he could not open it and an arm “as hard as petrified wood.” The combination of Rolfing and Botox was a breakthrough for him, and he was able to give a two-hand performance with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1996 and a solo recital at Carnegie Hall in 2003. His first two handed recording in forty years was entitled, simply Two Hands.
Botox treatments do not always work; the dose must be minutely calibrated or it will weaken the muscles too much, and it must be repeated every few months. But Fleisher had been one of the lucky ones, and gently, humbly, gratefully, cautiously, he has returned to playing with two hands—though never forgetting for a moment that, as he puts it, “once a dystonic, always a dystonic.”

Fleisher now performs once again around the world, and he speaks of this return as a rebirth, “a state of grace, of ecstasy.” But the situation is a delicate one. He still has regular Rolfing therapy and takes care to stretch each finger before playing. He is careful to avoid provocative (“scaley”) music, which may trigger his dystonia. Occasionally, too, he will “redistribute some of the material,” as he puts it, modifying the fingering, shifting what might be too taxing for the right hand to the left hand.
At the end of our visit, Fleisher agreed to play something on my piano, a beautiful old 1894 Bechstein concert grand that I had grown up with, my father’s piano. Fleisher sat at the piano and carefully, tenderly, stretched each finger in turn, and then, with arms and hands almost flat, he started to play. He played a piano transcription of Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze,” as arranged for piano by Egon Petri. Never in its 112 years, I thought, had this piano been played by such a master—I had the feeling that Fleisher had sized up the piano’s character and perhaps its idiosyncrasies within seconds, that he had matched his playing to the instrument, to bring out its greatest potential, its particularity. Fleisher seemed to distill the beauty, drop by drop, like an alchemist, into flowing notes of an almost unbearable beauty—and, after this, there was nothing more to be said.

Think about other artists you know (or know about) who’ve faced unexpected limits.
How have these boundaries affected what they've made?

And what about you?

List and Reflect:  Now, list ways that you find limits in your own artmaking/creativity.
Physical, mental, emotional limits, others…?
 
Time, space and money are some of the most common. Start there and then go deep. Consider all your limits. Conditions, boundaries, restrictions…

List for about 5 minutes. 
 
Then reflect on every way your limits have gotten in the way of your art or productivity.

But what if these limits have unexpected benefits? Can they help you understand why you do what you do? Can these limits help you create something remarkable?
 
We’ll come back to this part later…
 
Adding Boundaries Exercises: Consider how you work as an artist. What additional boundaries can you impose? Can these added boundaries inject new life into what you make?

First Exercise: Impose a real, physical, imposing boundary that impacts what you do.

Such as…
If you’re a visual artist, you’ve lost the use of one eye, or are completely blind.
If you’re a musician, one of your playing hands is no longer functional.
Or you have lost your voice.
If you’re a dancer or physical performance artist, you’ve lost one or more limbs.
If you’re a writer, you can no longer use a language that you know well.
Or you can’t use a letter of the alphabet. Or your dominant hand. 
If you’re an actor, you’re paralyzed from the waist up.
Or…?
 
These are examples – if you there’s a limitation that excites/scares you more, go for it.
Use these examples to get ideas flowing.
A lot of these limits are interchangeable between genres.

Now, create something new.
It can be about anything – you can start with something you’re working on already.
Something about the room you're in, or someone nearby.
About someone you love, where home is, what your limits are. Anything.
But whatever you create needs to impose this one specific limitation.

Spend about a minute deciding your limitation. 

Then take 4 to 8 minutes brainstorming what you want to make and how your limit could change or challenge you. If you're already stoked to dive in, you can use this time on the creating itself. 

Now spend 10 to 15 minutes working on your thing.
Use any arts material available that speaks to you! 
 
Now hold onto that…
 
Second Exercise: Building on the last piece, now do the genre you don’t do.
 
It’s time to create a new piece.
But you can’t use your preferred medium.
It can be a variation of the last piece, or something else.
But if you’re a writer, make a dance about it.
If you’re a musician, express this as a painting.
Endeavor into the artform that feels riskiest for you.
 
If you feel comfortable in all genres, awesome.
Then go even further outside the box – how can you make this as a culinary recipe? As a stand-up routine? As a phoned in message to the President?
 
Again, spend about a minute choosing your genre. 
And 4-8 minutes brainstorming, if that's helpful. 
And 10-15 minutes (or as long as you want, really!) working on your thing. 
Then you deepen it, go further, do some revisions, even some polishing...
How far can you go with this new piece? 
 
Reflect: How did that go?

Think again about your limitations you wrote down earlier.

Can you think of ways you could use these limits in your artform that you aren’t already?
 
Now Share your new piece(s) with someone!

This week, we created powerful pieces out of image banks based on abstract words.
 
Warmup 
 
I’d like us to start today by writing, in list form, in free form, however works best for you, all of the images from your day, from the moment you got up to this moment.

Warming up the mind/heart/body/spirit in this way, writing without stopping, and without a lot of talk or explanation, about everything you’ve seen, heard, tasted, felt, smelled, experienced, noticed. Be specific and go deep into each moment as much as you dare. Show us your day from your perspective, as though you carried around a video recorder from the moment you woke, one that captures all the senses and has a perfect memory.
 
Read 

How did that go? Let’s keep those detailed, concrete images swimming through our consciousness as we read Mary Oliver's essay from Upstream, Bird. Pay attention to what you notice, what words or phrases stand out, and especially what sensory images hit your gut and skin. Read it out loud if possible. 

Discuss

What do you notice when you read this essay? What words and phrases stand out?
What does it make you see? Hear? Feel? Smell? Taste?
What images does it show you?
What emotions and meanings come out of those images?
What big abstract ideas, thoughts and feelings can you pull out? (longing, grief, love)
 
Image Bank Prep 

Images create meaning/meanings create images. Concrete sensory images can conjure up the abstract, and we can generate visceral material out of abstract thoughts and feelings. We’re going to experiment with this concept/practice for a while.

Image Banking is a material generating activity I love, learned from writer and theater maker Dwayne Blackaller, that can draw up tons of fodder for stories, poems, essays, plays, anything, through mass producing images based on abstract words. What images can you pull out of the word “hope”? Things you can see, feel, tangibly, scenes created. A single strip of white cloud over a turbulent ocean, perhaps. 
 
Image Banks 
 
Have a timer ready.
Give yourself an abstract word. Have a list of them ready, perhaps.
Words like love, war, fear, laughter, joy, hurt, ugly, violence, hope...
Announce the word to yourself or a group.
No need to write the word down.
Instead, spend 3-5 minutes writing on each word.
Write images based on that words. Tons of images. Whatever comes.
Images you can feel smell taste touch hear.
Could be one huge image all detailed out, based on one abstract word. 
Could be a mix of several one after the other, tiny phrases.
Or a mix.
Don't think think about them. Let your gut do the thinking. Keep your hand moving. 

When each timer goes off, give yourself a new word, and start the timer again.
Then write a new bank of images, right after the last one.
It's better not to show deliberate spaces between each section of images. 
Better to make it one full text, all these images colliding.
BUT: Leave one free space in the middle, anywhere.

Again: Write without thinking, without stopping, keep hand moving.
If it makes you react physically, great – push into that image more.
 
When done, write one true thing in that free space.
Whatever that means to you. Don't think about that much, either.
What is true for you right now?
 
Share 
 
Are you brave enough to share this whole piece in full with a friend?
If you're alone, read it aloud to yourself. 
Pay attention to what what you hear.
What makes you react physically?
Notice those aloud, exact words and phrases.
Mark those in your first draft. 

The one true thing is important.
Adding something true in our writing, even if it’s fiction, makes it sing with heat.
 
Extract 
 
Now, read back over your image banks.
Your image writing from the beginning, too.
Find three statements that really make you react.
The most powerful, risky, vulnerable perhaps.
It’s okay if it’s more than three, but keep it five or less.
 
Rewrite 
 
Now, take those 3-5 statements and begin creating something new.
A poem. A story. An essay. A play. A crossword puzzle. Anything.
Don’t worry about it being good or making sense. Do what your gut impulse wants.
You can improve on the statements you made, revise them.
But try to get all those 3-5 underlined images in this new piece, to connect it.
Make them sing together.
 
Share
 
Share anything you’ve written today.
Share it with a friend. With a neighbor.
Make it into something you can share with the world. 

Or even read aloud to yourself. And notice: 
What do you hear in this? What is meaningful? What images hits you hardest?
 
Closing
 
Thank you for taking time out of your day to write with me.
My gratitude goes to all of you.

This week at The Cabin's FREE Monthly Drop-In Writing Workshop, we located our urgencies, listened to our bodies, noticed our surroundings, and used our writing, reading, discussion and actions to come up with instructions on how to live.
  
Write

I’d like us to start today by writing, in list form, in free form, however works best for you, about what you’re urgent for. Warming up the mind/heart/body/spirit in this way, writing without stopping, and without a lot of talk or explanation, about what, right now, you’re urgent for, you’re lunging after, what gets you up in the morning, what is driving you right now. Essentially, what is your lifeblood made up of right now, how is it filling you and what is it charging you after? 

What are you urgent for?
What are you lunging after?
What gets you up in the morning?
What drives you toward action right now?

Write for five minutes, keep your hand moving, don’t think, don’t edit, lose control. 
  
Read/Discuss 

How did that go? Let’s keep those urgencies and articulations swimming through our consciousness as we read Annie Dillard’s "Living Like Weasels". Any one read this before? See if you can read it with new eyes, a fresh mind. Pay attention to what you notice, what words or phrases stand out, what questions it brings up in you. 

Full text of Annie Dillard's essay "Living Like Weasels" HERE.

What do you notice? What words and phrases stand out?
What questions does this piece bring up in you?
What does it make you see? Hear? Feel? Smell? Taste?
Where does it take you in your body?
What is it saying for you? What is urgent here?

Be/Observe 

Let’s get out of our cognitive/language brains a bit. I’d like you to explore, using your senses, as a weasel might explore. First, close your eyes. Deep breath in, out. In, out. Listen to your body, check into what it’s telling you.

After you open your eyes, now, in this room you're in, outside this room, outside this building – take 10, 15 minutes allowing yourself to wander, in a specific way. Be and observe. Notice your surroundings with animal fervency. As though your life depends on it, capture everything you can see, hear, feel, taste, smell. There is no hurry. I’ll call you back when it’s time. Go after what calls you, what compels you, what drives you, take everything in. 

Write 

Now write down everything you noticed. Leave nothing out. Every detail. When you come upon a particularly juicy detail, go into deep specificity using all the senses.

Write for 10 minutes. Go.
 
Write 

Now, using everything we’ve written, read, discussed and observed today, write starting with the title: Instructions on How to Live.

This can take any form – poem, story, nonfiction, song, dramatic writing, text/image. In honor of national poetry month, maybe you want to take that form. In honor of cultivating creativity, you might choose to write something outside your comfort zone discipline.

Pull from the writing you did on what is urgent for you right now. Use your sensory observation writing. Take inspiration from Annie Dillard. Be wild. Break boundaries. Push past your comfort zone. Write your lifeblood on a page.

Go for about 15 minutes.
 
Share 

Find an outlet to share anything you’ve written today.
Or even how the experience went for you.
 
Consider when you look back over your writing from today, what do you hear in this? What is meaningful? What resonates?
 
Closing 
​
Thank you for taking time out of your day to write with me.
My gratitude goes to all of you. Happy Friday!

​Matter of Fact. Statements out of Questions.
 
Regardless of what you’re feeling right now, writing and sharing a piece using both the heavy and light parts of us can be a healing, energizing and connecting experience.
 
This past Tuesday at The Cabin, we read and discussed:
 
Between Solitude and Loneliness by Donald Hall
 
What do you notice here? What stands out?

What are the light parts? The dark parts?
What images, details and moments strike you?
 
Notice how much of Hall’s life this piece takes up, of several people’s lives.
Notice these strings of very short sentences.
Almost as though these statements are answering a series of questions.
Can you think of any questions that might prompt some of these statements?

We worked through a short meditation sequence:

Often in these workshops, we might reflect on a space that is part of our lives.
Or we might focus on one particular moment.
Today I’d like us to focus on time, funneling out a much larger portion of our lives.
Perhaps even our whole lives. Perhaps even parts of our lives we haven’t lived.
 
For that, I think it will help us greatly to get into an open minded/
hearted headspace. All of us are bringing our whole days into this room.
Perhaps something outside this space is eating our attention even still.
Let’s aim to let go of that. Closing eyes. Focusing on breath.
Breathing in. Breathing out.

We practiced just this for a few minutes, before stepping into some visualization:

Then we can start to cast backward:

From this moment, go back in time. From when you came into the room. To your drive here. To your afternoon. The work you did today. This morning. This past week. Let details rise up. This past month. Do images call out? This winter. This past year. This past five years. This decade behind you. The last fifteen years. Twenty. Go back to your college days, if you haven’t already. Your high school days. Allow little details and moments to stir out of that big chunk of time. Spin back into adolescence. Into childhood. Summer vacations. Family trips. Days before school. Days when time was immense. Before you were born…

Pause. Let all that sink in. Take a big deep breath, and fall it away.
 
Questions:
 
Now that we’ve cleared our heads and time traveled, let’s start to take down our lives.
I’m going to ask a series of questions that could be related to the present, past or future. After I ask these questions, I’ll give us a bit of time (1 minute each question) to write what we have to say. If you don’t know how to answer, do the best you can.

Try and write the whole time, and attend to every question.
Write without judgment or editing, be truthful and even lose control.
Try and use specific sensory details, open up and surprise yourself.
Remember Hall’s short sentences. Embrace those. 
 
At your age, what are you?
What are your days like?
What is this moment like?
What does solitude feel like?
What was childhood like for you?
What was early adulthood like for you?
What was your first big love?
What does anger look like?
What does loneliness taste like?
What was your most true love?
What does pleasure smell like?
What are you grieving right now?
What do you long for?
What memories are arising for you right now?
What are you dreaming of?
What are you fighting for?
What does silence sound like?

What haven’t you had a chance to write about now, that you need to write about?
(We wrote 5 minutes on this)
 
After all that writing, we got up, stretched and sat back down to reform our work. 
 
Now, take a look at all this material. Consider, what could this become?
A love poem? A cry for democracy? An essay looking back? A story looking forward?
You decide. Start to form what that could be. 

Underline what stands out, rewrite those sections on fresh paper, combine sentences, mix and match, begin a new piece from one sentence you wrote earlier...

So many options.
 
We shared and discussed a handful of pieces, and then ended for the day.
 
Thank you for taking time out of your day to write with me.
My gratitude goes to all of you.


The FREE Drop-In Writing Workshops happen the first Tuesdays of every month at The Cabin from 6:30-8pm, and leadership currently alternates between the fabulous poet Danny Stewart and me.


PS: I'll have to miss this blog posting next week, because I'll be in Creede, Colorado at the National Winter Playwrights Retreat, developing my new children's play, Rajpurr: Tale of a Tiger. Have a fabulous two weeks until I get back in the groove!