“What can we say beyond Wow, in the presence of glorious art, in music so magnificent that it can’t have originated solely on this side of things? Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for a new breath. That’s why they call it breaktaking. We’re individuals in time and space who are often gravely lost, and then miraculously, in art, found.
I’m just back from New York City, a place I haven’t been in almost 20 years. My daughter was working there as an intern and we had big plans: A Broadway show. A Bobby Flay restaurant. The Guggenheim. Central Park. Katz’s Deli. A Woody Allen movie. We had a great time together – she and I – but the city shook me, rattled me and practically spit me out.
I think I’ve recovered now, but it took about a week.
Photo by Alysse Einbender
Just had to share this beautiful mix of word, sound, image and movement. It’s called a video poem — a testament to the potency of mixed media. The last four lines are especially poignant for writers. Enjoy.
And if you’d like to read along:
Reticent Sonnet
A pronoun is a kind of withdrawal from naming.
Because naming is heavy, naming may be slightly shaming
We live much more lightly than this
we address ourselves allusively in our minds –
as “I” or “we” or “one” – part of a system
that argues with shadow, like Venetian blinds
Speaking of Venice, called “the Shakespeare of cities” by a friend of mine
reminds me how often the Sonnets misprint “their” for “thine”:
beware the fog in Venice.
Beware those footsteps that stop in a hush.
I used to think I would grow up to be a person whose reasoning was deep.
instead I became a kind of brush.
I brush words against words. So do we follow ourselves out of youth
brushing, brushing, brushing wild grapes onto truth.
Anne Carson
Photo by Ellen Blum Barish
I was struggling and close to tears with every step on a steep mountain climb in Italy – as the least physically prepared of seven adults – when I rediscovered the potency of story telling.
Our guide, Claire, gifted not only in sheer strength and selection of the perfect cafe or watering hole after a long hike, also had the gift of gab and could tell a great yarn. As a single American woman living abroad for more than a decade, she had great stories to tell.
She was quick to see that it was going to be a really long day if I couldn’t keep pace with the others. So she dropped to the back of the line and proceeded to spin a series of very extended and hilarious stories that got me up and down that immense mountain. (You can see photograph above to help set this scene.)
Her voice took me into her story and out of my own body consciousness, allowing my legs and arms to go into automatic. Stories, quite literally, got me over the mountain that day.
When I was very young, I loved hearing an animated adult read a story. My children expected them as part of the bedtime ritual. I knew I still loved reading stories, but I didn’t have any idea how much I’d still love to hear them (let alone tell them), all grown up.
That trek up the mountain brought me back to the simple beauty of storytelling (now if I could only get back to Italy!) For many years, I wrote and recorded pieces for WBEZ/Chicago Public Radio, but even those stories were higher tech, enhanced with background music and fine editing.
What’s encouraging to me, as a writer, writing coach and supporter of the arts, is how many story telling venues have surfaced, especially in Chicago. How packed these venues get. How reasonably priced they are for one’s entertainment dollar. (Some just ask for donations.) How so many of these venues give money (or instruction time) to young children in the arts. How community building it is for artists. How it gets an artist’s work out there in a new way. How much feedback it gives to the artist. How satisfying it is to hear as an audience member and how much fun they are as an evening out.
As a frequent audience member, I never once thought that I would be standing there with a microphone in hand reading one of my stories. Writing is a solitary pursuit and I was drawn to it for that. I went with with my students to encourage them, to hear what was on writer’s minds. But the more I listened to the voices telling those stories, the more I returned to that happy place – the contented, peaceful state that helped me fall asleep as a little girl, that I created by reading to my daughters, and got me over that dang mountain. This delicious feeling, plus the desire to get my work out there, work that wasn’t getting published in traditional literary publications, got me thinking about trying this form. And then I met Jill Howe.
So I’m beyond thrilled to be one of the tellers at Story Sessions this Sunday, July 21st. It’s been great to massage my print writing voice into more of a speaking writing voice. It’s been good for me and for the writing. Tickets for this show are sold out, but there will be podcasts and another show next month (and the month after that) and you can, at the very least, put on your earphones and hear a story to help you get over whatever mountain you are climbing at the moment. (Or, if you prefer, lull you to sleep.)
You can read more about the storytelling movement in Chicago in the Tribune’s story here and if any of this talk of telling appeals or inspires you, email me and we can set up a time to talk about how to get your work from the page to the stage.
Photo by Ellen Blum Barish
A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
Maya Angelou
There’s a story you want to write. It hovers. Pokes at you. Maybe even stalks you. You’ve thought about it – in fact you have taken a seat, a pen and pad in hand, but you just didn’t know how where to start and you hoped the feeling would pass.
But it hasn’t. You’ve shared parts of the story with friends and they have urged you to write it down. It felt really good to tell it. You think it would feel as good — perhaps even better — to get it into words. Words that you could return to and read aloud, to feel it again and share with others. A bird, compelled to sing her song.
Anais Nin wrote that we write to taste life twice. Writing offers second chances, writes Jonathan Safran Foer, and allows us to reframe our life, to take it in and give it back differently, “so that everything is used and nothing is lost,” write Nicole Krauss.
There are so many reasons to write your story but, sadly, there are more reasons not to.
And most of the time, we chose not to because it’s so big … so time-consuming … so complicated … so scary… so personal … so private …. so hard.
I know all this because I have felt all of these feelings as I considered, struggled or walked away from writing personal narrative. But allow me to share three secrets about writing personal stories.
1) Finding and writing the personal story is better (not easier, just more pleasant) with someone – a knowing, trusted someone – rooting you on.
2) Having captured your story (or “having written,” as Dorothy Parker wrote) is one of the most satisfying, joyful experiences you can have in life. (Okay, I’m a little biased, but this I can guarantee.)
3) The third and perhaps best secret, so well expressed by Anna Quindlan, is about writing is for self discovery. She wrote:
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
Thinking about working with a private writing coach? I work with writers of all levels – face to face, via telephone, email or Skype – that is as unique as the individual and the project. I’ve rarely worked the same way, twice. Feel free to email me at ellen@ellenblumbarish.com to set up a free telephone consultation to see if private writing coaching is what you need to find your story and begin to write it.
