My Inhale Year

By Ellen Blum Barish
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“The average human being has about 55,000 thoughts a day: some of them are about injustice; some of them are about ketchup.”  Ada Limon

 

Since January, as friends and colleagues have asked what I’m working on, I’ve responded by telling them that I am taking the year off from creative nonfiction. I’m still blogging and posting on social media, but I’m taking a kind of breather, what musician and writer Henry Rollins coined as “an inhale year.”

Rollins writes: “I’ll have inhale years and exhale years. In an inhale year, like last year, I will travel and get information so I can have something to say on stage while I spend a whole year exhaling. So an exhale year, I’m on the road touring and the material is derived from all the crazy stuff I did last year.”

For someone who has been writing since the 1980s and publishing without a break, my response has lifted some eyebrows and roused some quizzical expressions. If one is a writer, shouldn’t one be writing?

I keep an ongoing index of my published pieces and that count is somewhere around 500. In thirty-some years of writing, that’s an average of one published piece a month. That’s a lot of words.

While I’m not in making mode right now, I am sticking close to the process. I don’t like to be too far from it. I’m focusing, quite happily, on the work of others. My workshop students. My private writing clients. Writers who submit to Thread. I’m nose-deep in writers and their process, and it is very gratifying indeed. Few things make me happier than seeing a writer’s work expand, contract, shape-shift and then transmute into artful, articulated expression.

So why am I doing this? Why decide what kind of year I should have, creatively speaking? Why not let the juices flow as they will?

I’m doing it, in part, for a much-needed break, so I can concentrate on the writers in my life and, also, to work on publishing and business aspects related to Thread.

But I knew there were others reasons that I just hadn’t identified until a writer friend, Rebecca Talbot, passed this gem of an essay by Ada Limon along to me. It beautifully articulates what I had not yet been able to: that there is pleasure and value in not writing.

Limon, who is a poet, writes, “What I mean is, there are times poems do not come and life is too heavy to be placed on the page, or life is so deliciously light and joyful you must suck it down before anyone notices. That is okay. You are still the writer watching that train, doing laundry, getting lost in this massive mess of minutes. There is value in this silent observing.”

We are still writers even when we aren’t writing. I know this. I’ve told my students this. But I needed reminding.

While I may not be writing in the traditional sense of the word, I am taking notes. A steadily increasing list of ideas which, because of my inhale year, will have the luxury of percolating. Marinating.

So watch out because next year – my exhale year – may bring along a very big wind.

Photo by Ellen Blum Barish. Copyright 2016.

 

A Theatre and a Literary Magazine Cross-Pollinate

By Ellen Blum Barish
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While he was traveling in Barcelona, Goodman Theatre Artistic Director Robert Falls was struck by bold promotional posters for a book featuring pink crosses in the desert.

The images compelled Falls to read that novel, a 900-page work that stirred him in its scope and structure and how it seamlessly moved between comedy, film noir, hyper-realism and fairy tale across Spain, England, Mexico and Germany and from the 1990s to World War II.

The book, 2666, written by Latin American writer Roberto Bolano, inspired Falls to bring it to the stage and the world premiere opened last week at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre.

At five hours with three intermissions, it’s an ambitious play, but how else to express Bolano’s aspirations? It’s a five-part, multi-media mingling of reality and fiction based on a real-life crime wave. Fifteen actors portray 80 roles wearing 120 costumes and includes video, projections and original music.

A recent New York Times article says the play is about “evil, memory, chaos, futility, dread, hunger for meaning, and, not least, the sometimes maddening lure of literature itself.” Bolano, who died at age 50 in 2003, was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for the book in 2008.

So when the Goodman Theatre reached out to Thread to help showcase this production, Thread was delighted to become a partner. As the editor of a literary publication that explores the breadth of human experience via personal essay, how could I resist a play that addresses such a wide range of themes that grew out of a real-life event?

The Goodman may be an iconic theatre and Thread, a new literary publication and reading series, but we are Chicago-based art organizations who share audiences who love both the literary and the stage. And, we each released new work just last week!

You love the arts, right? Show your support by reading the latest issue of Thread and clicking on the Goodman artwork you see at the right of this blog post. You’ll find everything you need about getting tickets to the show. 2666 has a limited run from February 6 – March 20.

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If you are local to Chicago, or planning to be in the area in early April, circle April 3rd on your calendar for the next Thread Reading series to be held at a new location, The Curragh, in Skokie.  Go to the Readings page of the Thread site for updates.

Sensational Sentences, Part Three

By Ellen Blum Barish
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There’s nothing like being swallowed up in a writer’s words. When something we read has us nodding, shouting, “Amen,” or marking in the margins, a writer’s work has been done.

The reader has been moved.

But being moved doesn’t mean that we remember every single word. It’s the whole work that moves us, and moves each of us differently. If we’re lucky, we can recall a phrase. With a decent memory, we may remember an entire sentence.

When I read a student’s work-in-progress or a submission to Thread, I’m absorbing an enormous amount of stimuli: I’m hearing the writer’s voice, visualizing her scenes, feeling his sensory details, absorbing the language, emotion, pace and theme.

But what stops and suspends me, urging me to hang there for a moment, is one beautiful, true sentence. And that’s usually the moment I fall in love with the work, even a work still under construction.

There’s just no arguing with a sensational sentence.

To illustrate my point, I offer eight very different examples taken from the pages of Thread. Some are the very sentences that sold me on the piece. Some I came to love later. But each stand out in their own way, like each of us does as human beings, highlighting something thoughtful, funny or just, human, and beckoning you to read on, or perhaps, write one yourself.

It was just some dog, the victim of a hit-and-run, lying in the middle of the street on a humid summer night in Detroit, not yet dead, panting shallow gasps, no visible sign of injury except for the small pool of sticky blood below its snout.

From “Rescue,” by Tom McGohey (forthcoming Spring 2016)

During my travels across America, I’m always looking at other cities and asking, “Could we grow old together?”

From “I’m Not From Here,” by Eileen Dougharty (Summer 2015)

This counterfeit ski photo of me sitting dumbfounded on top of a grimy snowbank represented exactly where I was in life: Stuck on the Bunny Hill of a career that was on a slow downhill slide.

From “The Paper Trail” by Tom Wolferman (Spring 2015)

I wanted to write stunning poems and make my friend David, a classical guitarist with green, basset hound eyes, fall in love with me.

From “Should I Feel Anything Yet?” Ona Gritz (Fall 2015)

Others looked where he looked, not seeing what he saw.

From “Seaside Bohemia,” by Randy Osborne (Fall 2015)

It was also the summer my brown baby boy learned to battle the blue jays.

From “First Day of School,” by Gay Pasley (Fall 2015)

Imagine the nerve: My dealer had gone out of town without informing me beforehand.

From “Smoke Screen,” by Timothy Parfitt (Spring 2015)

All I wanted was Barbie’s Dream House and a decent set of Shabbat candle sticks.

From “A Piece of Sky,” by Jeremy Owens ( Summer 2015)
Want to read “Sensational Sentences,” parts one and two? Here is One and here is Two.

Sensational Sentences

What a Stitch! Sensational Sentences, Part Two

 

Photo by Ellen Blum Barish. Copyright 2016.

A Fire Burns in the Ice

By Ellen Blum Barish
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This year marks my tenth as a writing coach and it’s got me musing on how we end up doing things that we love that we didn’t set out to do.

I liked school well enough to pursue a graduate degree, but I wasn’t anything close to a stellar student. Enthusiastic, sure. Yet far from a star.

But I sure put that degree to use. My bylines appeared in Newsweek, The Chicago Tribune, Self, my essays aired on public radio and I helped several publications earn editorial awards. I felt really lucky to enjoy so many of the pieces of my chosen field – the reporting, writing, editing, and publishing. I even liked rewriting and proofreading.

Twenty years after I graduated, a former professor of mine at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications where I received my fine j-school education, recommended me for the editor post at the school’s alumni magazine. I was delighted at the offer and happily accepted.

During my three years there, that same professor thought I might be able help coach students who were destined for fine journalism careers but struggling with some aspects of writing. So in addition to my editorial duties, I coached a few students on the side. I keep up with a several of them on Facebook and boy have they have soared!

I’m not exactly sure what it was he saw in me then that promised some skill at working with people on their writing and helping them to reach some goal. I suspect it had something to do with my love for the work, dedication to excellence (even if I try and fail), and a certain gusto that I still carry with me.

Gusto, I guess, because I’m not that patient when it comes to other things. Very little else holds my attention like the process of making something appear — into what is often gorgeous and artful – out of nothing. There’s something extremely appealing to me about the blank page, something alluring and challenging that offers us a chance to capture an experience, a thought, an idea, a memory, or simply a series of words, that if handled in just the right way, provides an answer or a clue, is a gift to someone else or, perhaps most importantly, remains forever.

To leave a legacy behind, even a small one, made of static words on the page that have the power to move people. How cool is that?

Many years into a career, some folks burn out. I feel like the fire glows brighter for me now, especially at the sight or sound of a spark in the eyes, voice, or written words of the writer with whom I am working.

In the gem world, the tenth anniversary merits a diamond but because it’s below freezing here in the Midwest, I’m leaning toward readily available ice as my metaphor, with a multi-faceted look back at some of the successes I’ve seen in the writers with whom I’ve had the joy of working:

  • One of my first tutees from j-school has a high-level communications role in the Democratic National Committee.
  • Three personal essays of a writer I met at one of my book readings were recorded and aired on Chicago public radio.
  • Numerous stories that were struggling to leave the head of the writer, looking for a safe place to land, found their way to the page.
  • Many stalled final papers, dissertations and business proposals became unstuck.
  • Writing prompts given to four of my students turned into essays that I felt were good enough to publish in Thread.
  • I believe that the strong personal essays for graduate school applications helped send at least ten writing students into the programs of their choice.
  • A powerful story was published by one of my writing students in Shambhala Sun, another in More Magazine and a third in Blood Orange Review.

If you have been thinking about working with a coach, consider this year as the one where you make that dive.

Click here for more on my coaching.

Does working with others sound better to you? Try one of my workshops – online or live – that start next week!

Subscribe to Thread.

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Thoughts? Questions? Something you’d like to share? Comment below or email me at ellen@ellenblumbarish.com.

Photo by Ellen Blum Barish. Copyright 2016.

 

“A letter. That’ll show him!”

By Ellen Blum Barish
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“A letter. That’ll show him!”

Jo March in Little Women

New for 2016!  Join me for my new essay workshop, online version. It’s guaranteed to stimulate and move you to a deeper level in your writing journey. And it’s perfect for people with busy schedules or more inclined to self-directed learning.

We’ll read essays by Annie Dillard, David Sedaris, Pico Iyer and Jo Ann Beard, to name a few. You’ll receive weekly writing prompts. Engage in online discussion about these. Unfurl from gentle, productive feedback on your work-in-progress. Each week we’ll focus on one of eight elements of the essay: theme, detail, scene, dialogue, language, voice, memory and pacing.

Give yourself, or someone you know, a literary gift. The cozy, warm winter version.

The fun starts the week of January 18th and goes through the week of March 9th.

For more information, go to http://ellenblumbarish.com/workshops/ or email me at ellen@threadliterary.com.

Jo: Beth, I’m not a great writer.

Beth: But you will be.