writing

Writing as Risk

By Ellen Blum Barish
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She’s writing a memoir of that year in Paris to remember. He wrote the academic journal article on book preservation for professional advancement. She’s finishing a personal essay on that anxious stretch of time during her pregnancy for fun. He described how his dreams inform his painting for that college application essay. She wrote a summary of a medical journal article for a school assignment.  He’s putting the final touches on a collection of essays on family life that spans fifty years for posterity.

Writers bring their words to the page or screen for a range of reasons and in a multitude of forms. But with each project – work I’ve been witnessing from my private coaching clients – no matter what the mission, there is risk in the writing.

There’s so much at stake. Hurting someone’s feelings. Inaccuracy. Negative response. Rejection. Changing your mind. Putting your work out there. Getting your work out there, and not feeling seen or heard. Like taking a running leap from a lush green pasture into a white, open sky.

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What We Keep

By Ellen Blum Barish
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Earlier this week, I wrote about burning my journals in a what I’ll call a ‘letting go’ ceremony and I received a wide array of responses.

A friend shared that when she told a group of writers that she let go of hers, there was a collective gasp.

Another tells me he understands, but wonders where I found the strength.

Another writes that she is inspired to let go of hers, but that she would keep the one where she meets and falls in love with her husband.

Tears streamed down my daughter’s face when she heard about it. She just couldn’t understand why I would do such a thing.

I spent the week reflecting on these reactions. It seems to me that some of my reasons for letting my diaries go are uniquely connected to writing personal narrative which is process-centered. Present tense oriented. Personal.

But there were other reasons and these were connected to what we keep and why. I found it an interesting exercise to think about what we hang onto and what we easily let go.

(For my writing students in search of a prompt, I urge you to try this one.)

It’s for the following reasons that I was moved to make such a permanent act:

They served their purpose and were taking up physical space in my home and psychic space in my life.

I’m not that girl anymore. (Thank you, Leslie, for the words.)

So much of the content was sullen, whiny or dull and it didn’t feel like good emotional feng shui to have that around.

They were locking me into one storyline.

Like paint palettes or mounds of clay, they weren’t fully formed. The pieces that came out of these found their way into finished work.

And finally, through this ritual, I’ve become aware that:

I’m more interested in writing words that remain true, that stand the test of time; the words that I will, consciously, leave behind.

Photo by Ellen Blum Barish.

 

 

 

 

Ashes to Ashes

By Ellen Blum Barish
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I’ve written in one journal or another for 40 years. Here’s a picture of them. You can see my very first one, a paisley print on the far left tucking out from beneath a dark blue leather journal. Fourth from the top. Amazing that before they were colorful, bound or wire-ringed books, they were trees.

But last week, with a very full glass of wine that I filled twice, I went through my journals, reading some passages, skimming others. And then, I thanked each one, ripped out the pages, built a fire and fed the pages into it.

Here’s what it looked like in its early stages:

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The fire burned for four hours as it consumed rants, to do lists, plans for the future, vents, wishes, dreams, annoyances, story ideas, rage, gratitude, doubt, praise, doubt, uncertainty, fear, doubt, whining, joy, relief, and more doubt. Me, usually with a pen, working things out. To get to here.

You can see it burn here:

I couldn’t let go of them all. I saved both of my pregnancy journals for my daughters. And I couldn’t let go of my first one from 1973.

I also kept the covers. I have an art project in mind.

But I wanted to remember the burning. So I can remember the mix of  emotions I felt as I watched: light, strong and giddy.

In the morning, in addition to my memory and the images I’ve shared with you, this is what remained. I’m going to take the ashes and bury them in the earth where they began so another 13-year old girl will have paper on which to practice her writing and work things out.

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Your Voice, When No One is Listening

By Ellen Blum Barish
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“At its core, writing is about cutting beneath every social expectation to get to the voice you have when no one is listening. It’s about finding something true, the voice that lies beneath all words. But the paradox of writing is that everyone at her desk finds that the stunning passage written in the morning seems flat three hours later, and by the time it’s rewritten, the original version will look dazzling again. Our moods, our beings are as changeable as the sky (long hours at any writing project teach us), so we can no longer trust any one voice as definitive or lasting”

Pico Iyer, from his New York Times Book Review essay, “Voices Inside Their Heads,” April 14, 2013

 

Art Appreciation

By Ellen Blum Barish
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ThomasCouture_AmericanPupilPaintingThe question of why we are drawn to the page popped up this week in my writing workshop. It comes up at least once every session. We could be anywhere else right now, I tell my students. With a few free hours we could be taking a walk, playing tennis, cleaning a closet. Okay maybe not cleaning a closet. But here we all were, in a room with no windows, talking about personal essays and the process of writing them.

Why do we do it? I’ve thought a lot about this. I remember the moment I realized I was one of those people. Eight years ago, when my eldest daughter and I were driving into the city to visit liberal arts colleges, she noticed a city wall covered with graffiti and remarked on its beauty. Her response wasn’t a surprise. She had been drawn to art all of her life. But when I reminded her of this and asked why she wasn’t con­sidering art schools, she said, “Mom, I’m an art appreciator, not an art maker.”

It was an interesting distinction. There are people — like my daughter — who utilize music, for example, as a soundtrack for their daily activities: dressing and undressing, driving and falling asleep at night. They cover their bed­room walls with collages of magazine cuttings, stop to study a sculp­ture or abstract painting and note the loveliness of graffiti on a wall. My daughter is a gifted improvisationalist who is very comfortable on stage. Though they surround themselves with the creative artifacts of human beings, art appreciators are not necessarily compelled to make art themselves. They prefer instead to allow the art to shift their mood, to bask in the emotions it stirs, to immerse themselves in the beauty or powerful messages.

I, too, am moved by the art I experience — but I am drawn and pulled toward the process of making it. Artists see the world through a possibility lens, asking themselves: What if I took that idea and stretched it this way or that using sound or paint or clay or film or texture or landscape? They are insatiably curious and want to dig deeper to explore an idea or a feeling. Often they are not so good at letting these go. They get stalked by them. Sometimes haunted.

Making art is what some people do in response to living. Artists are interested in the act of expression. Making art is how they make sense of life. I believe that virtually everyone is creative – but I’m talking about the overwhelming desire to respond to life by taking a Sharpie to a hard-bound journal or yellow pad; use horse hair dabbed in paint to spread onto textured cloth; to make words and images pop on a page, to plant seeds or transplant plants into a configuration to bring out the best in a piece of land, to visualize a handbag or blouse from piles of col­lected fabric. The artist seeks quiet to absorb life’s stimuli. Time to process events so that she can re­arrange them in her imagination and respond in some form and then put something artful and tangible back out there for others to absorb. It’s a dynamic thing. An in and an out. A back and a forth. I’ve often thought that artists seek something very much like a conversation with the Divine; they want to visualize, to make something that isn’t there yet. To imagine something different. And leave their own personal mark.

My daughter’s comment stirred something inside of me that day. I remember that it brought up a feeling that I’ve had ever since becoming a mother who is also a writer: That the need to make art was sometimes so strong that it felt as powerful as another child calling, tugging, cajoling, wanting to be attended to. And when I ignored the feeling, it felt something like a tantrum. Because the artist answers to a powerful voice outside of her loved ones: the one inside.