LAUCHLAN: There was one summer that I was a forest ranger in Oregon for four months. I was alone for that whole time and I hardly ever wore any clothes that summer, because there was no one around. I was deep in the woods. By the end of the summer I was very tan and very calm. It was late August and I was squatting, picking the berries off a berry bush and eating them. Suddenly I felt a tongue licking my shoulder and I slowly turned my head. There was a deer licking the sweat on my back! I didn’t move. Then she moved next to me and together we silently ate berries off the bush. I was stunned. An animal trusted me that much!
JOSEPH: This story isn’t directly about me. It’s about a friend of mine’s roommate. I’ll call him Bill. Bill was from France. He was a bit weird, definitely out of balance. He was working with dolphins in New York, really loved them. We called him the Scientist. It was the early days of LSD. We called it lysergic acid back then. Some of us were experimenting with it. We were careful not to do it around the Scientist, because we were afraid he would take it and really go off the edge.
Well, one time he took some, I don’t know how he got his hands on it, but anyway, he did take some. We all thought, “Uh-oh!” but we tried to relax. He put on his jacket—it was night—and left the apartment. He walked down to where he worked, went in, and stood watching the dolphins in the pool. He swears that the female started to look like Marilyn Monroe and grew breasts, had on lipstick, and beckoned him to join her in the pool. He said he took off all his clothes and dove in and made love with her. He swore he did. We were all very weirded out when we heard about it, and my friend who was his roommate soon moved out.
I think this could be really true because several years later I was living with friends on Venice Beach, California. We were taking acid all the time then. It was the middle sixties and we decorated our whole house in bright psychedelic colors. The bathroom was avocado green, and we had a fishbowl in there with two goldfish. One day I dropped some acid and was walking on the beach. I came back to the house and went into the bathroom and looked at the goldfish. One of them suddenly became Brigitte Bardot. Spontaneously, I stuck my hand in the bowl, grabbed the fish by the tail, and swallowed her whole before I even know what I was doing! I was amazed.
BRETT: I visited my grandmother Chloe in Kankakee, Illinois. She was eighty-two at the time and I hadn’t seen her in four years. I was crazy about her and was really excited to see her. The visit was going to be a surprise. I hitched down from Minnesota, where I was living then. When I got to her house, which was across the street from Dunkin’ Donuts, she was in the backyard leaning over some red snapdragons. I yelled, “Chloe!” She turned around and said, “Oh, Brett, come here a minute. I want to show you something.” I went over and she pressed a snapdragon together to show me how it could look like a bunny rabbit. Then she took my hand and led me over to her two peach trees. “I’m gonna make peach preserves outta these.” “Chloe, you haven’t seen me in four years.” She reached up and picked a peach off the tree and held it up so I could inspect it: “I know, honey. I’ve missed you.” Then we went in the house and she fed me some of her famous dumplings and talked to me about the neighbors and my father and how she wished he would go to church. She talked to me like I had never been gone.
These four stories I remember vividly. Our stories are important. Try calling a story circle with some friends. All you need is a candle. You don’t need drugs or alcohol. Once the stories begin, they are all the enchantment you would want. Then later, on your own, write your stories down. To begin with, write like you talk, nothing fancy. This will help you get started.
Writing Marathons
USUALLY AT THE end of an eight-week writing workshop which meets once a week for two hours, we have a four-hour writing marathon. You don’t necessarily need a class to do a marathon. I have done it for a whole day with just one other person. This is how it works: Everyone in the group agrees to commit himself or herself for the full time. Then we make up a schedule. For example, a ten-minute writing session, another ten-minute session, a fifteen-minute session, two twenty-minute sessions, and then we finish with a half-hour round of writing. So for the first session we all write for ten minutes and then go around the room and read what we have written with no comments by anyone. If the class is too large and it will take up too much time, we alternate the people who will read after each round, so you might read every other time instead of every time. A pause naturally happens after each reader, but we do not say “That was great” or even “I know what you mean.” There is no good or bad, no praise or criticism. We read what we have written and go on to the next person. People are allowed to pass and not read twice during the marathon. Naturally there should be flexibility. If someone feels the need to pass more often or less often, that is fine. What usually happens is you stop thinking: you write; you read; you write; you become less and less self-conscious. Everyone is in the same boat, and because no comments are made, you feel freer and freer to write anything you want.
After a while your voice begins to feel disembodied; you are not sure if you said something or someone across the room said it. Because there are no comments, if someone writes something you want to respond to, you can address that person in the next writing round: “Bev, I know what you mean. My parents argued too under the kitchen lights with the dinner half eaten and the green linoleum spread out across the floor.” Not commenting on another person’s work builds up a healthy desire to speak. You can pour that energy into your next round of writing. Write, read, write, read. It is an excellent way to cut through the internal censor and to give yourself tremendous space to write whatever’s on your mind.
We also have a box in the center of the room where people put in topic suggestions folded on pieces of paper. At the beginning of each round of writing, someone pulls out a slip of paper and reads the topic. You don’t necessarily have to write on it, but if you are stuck you can begin from there. You’ll be surprised that once you are in that automatic state, you can write on any topic. Or you might use the topic as a jumping-off place to get your hand moving: “‘Swimming.’ I am a great swimmer and very confident. There. Now what I really want to write about is how I will turn into white light someday. . . .” Or you can think there is nothing to say about swimming, begin to write, and remember how you adored Esther Williams when you were very young, sitting next to your father in the movie theater, hand dripping with the butter from your popcorn.
People are nervous the first time they do a marathon. They fear they won’t have anything to say or can’t keep writing for that long. They are amazed when it is done that the time went so quickly—“I could have written all day!” Once, at a week-long workshop for the University of Minnesota, I had twelve students try a marathon the first morning. In the beginning they were resistant and sneered at me. When it was finished, one man chimed in, “Let’s have lunch and then do another marathon in the afternoon.” For the entire week we did nothing else. We tried beginning some rounds at ten at night and writing until one in the morning or starting at seven in the morning and writing until noon.
During that week someone pulled “Your first sexual experience” out of the topic box. That topic set up one woman for the rest of the week. She wrote about her first sexual experience, her second, her third, and so on. I believe she is still in Hill City, Minnesota, at the Rainbow Tavern writing about her 708th sexual experience. The high school students are playing pool nearby, and she continues to order Pepsi so she can hold her booth in the tavern. She doesn’t know whether it is night or day, and her hand keeps moving across the page. Surely she will become enlightened any time now, and we wonder, “Will she ever return, will she ever return . . . ?”
Marathons are very opening experiences. Right after one there is a tendency to feel naked, out of control. I sometimes feel slightly angry, but I have no reason for it. It is as though some big hole had been blasted in the belly of your self-defenses and suddenly you are standing naked as who you really are. After a maratho
n you try to make normal conversation with the other marathoners about the weather and how lovely it is to be a writer, but you feel as though you just lost your face. Don’t worry, the state does pass and you become guarded and ornery again.
It is important to spend at least a half hour alone afterward. Doing something physical and concrete is helpful. Suddenly after a marathon I become an avid dishwasher or I madly plant twelve extra rows of bean plants where the grass seed was supposed to be planted. Just last week there was a marathon at my house, and before the last student left I had the vacuum cleaner out, vacuuming rugs in the living room where we had all just been sitting.
That naked feeling after a marathon is the same one I have felt often after a sesshin, a meditation retreat. After seven days of sitting meditation, we bow for the final time to Buddha and to the other Zen students, and then we usually have tea and cake treats in another room. After long periods of silence during the retreat, we can finally talk to each other. I always feel as though I want to smear the cake over my face so no one can see me. Once a close friend who visited with me on my porch right after a sesshin said, “You know, I feel like I’m sitting with a Cubist portrait of a woman by Picasso—all your dimensions are flashing at once!”
When I spend several hours alone writing, I have also felt this way. Do not worry about it. We are not used to being so open. It’s fine, accept it; it is a good state to be in.
Claim Your Writing
TIME AND TIME again, I have experienced a peculiar phenomena in writing groups. Someone will write something extraordinary and then have no idea about its quality. It doesn’t matter how much I may rave about it or the other people in the group give positive feedback; the writer cannot connect with the fact that it is good writing. He doesn’t deny it; he just sits there bewildered and later, through the grapevine, I hear that he never believed a word of what was said. It’s been over years that I have observed this; it isn’t just one downtrodden, insecure character in one writing group that has not been awake to his own good writing.
We have trouble connecting with our own confident writing voice that is inside all of us, and even when we do connect and write well, we don’t claim it. I am not saying that everyone is Shakespeare, but I am saying everyone has a genuine voice that can express his or her life with honest dignity and detail. There seems to be a gap between the greatness we are capable of and the way we see ourselves and, therefore, see our work.
The first time I became deeply aware of this was six years ago in a writing group I taught for eight weeks as a benefit for the Minnesota Zen Center. We all wrote about our family in simple, childlike terms—that was the assignment. We had fifteen minutes to write. There were twelve of us. When the time was up, we went around and each read what we had just written. I was the last one to read. The piece I read I later typed up and entitled “Slow Seeing the World Go Round,” about my grandmother drinking water, raising children, and leaving the world without socks, salamis, or salt. After I read, there was silence for a long time.
Everything I say as a teacher is ultimately aimed at people trusting their own voice and writing from it. I try different angles and tricks. Once they do break through, all I teach is dressing on a turkey. The turkey is already roasting. I felt peaceful and happy; each student in the group had broken through resistance to a genuine, deeply felt piece of writing. There was nothing more I could say.
Suddenly, I looked around the room and everyone was watching me curiously, waiting to go on to another exercise. I was astounded. I realized none of them had any awareness of what they had just written. “None of you know that right now you wrote something very alive, do you?” They just kept looking at me.
This is not true only of beginning students. I am thinking now of two examples. One woman is a poet; she is very good and also very well loved. I call her the Darling of Minnesota. She writes about her life, her minister father, her seven sons, the breakfast table. At her last reading not only were all the seats filled, but they had sold out standing room. She told me that when the reading was over she went home very depressed because they had all liked her poetry so well. She said, “I fooled another crowd with my work.”
The other example was a writer in one of my Sunday-night groups. She was a novelist and the assistant editor of a city magazine and had written two very successful plays; one was named Critics’ Choice by the Minneapolis Tribune. She wrote several extraordinary pieces during timed writing in the group. I thought for sure she would know their quality—after all, she was an experienced writer. When I met her a month later for breakfast and commented about one of her pieces, she was amazed that I thought it was good. (Good wasn’t the word for how good it was.) I was surprised that she herself didn’t know. All her professional writing had been about subjects other than herself and her life’s experiences. She said, “This kind of writing is all of you,” so she couldn’t see it.
Katagiri Roshi once said to me, “We are all Buddha. I can see you are Buddha. You don’t believe me. When you see you are Buddha, you will be awake. That’s what enlightenment is.” It is very difficult for us to comprehend and value our own lives. It is much easier for us to see things outside ourselves. In the process of claiming our own good writing, we are chipping away at the blind gap between our own true nature and our conscious ability to see it. We learn to embrace ourselves as the fine creative human beings we are in the present. Occasionally, over time, we can see it: “Oh, I was good then,” but it is in the past. We lag behind.
I do not mean for us all to become braggarts. I mean we should recognize that we are good inside and emanate our goodness and create something good outside us. That connection between our inner richness, our self-concept, and our work will give us a quiet peace and confidence that are hard for most artists to find. It is not “The work is bad and we are bad” or “The work is good and we are bad” or “The work is bad and we are good.” It is “We are good and therefore we are capable of shining forth through our resistance to write well and claim it as our own.” It is not as important for the world to claim it as it is to claim it for ourselves. That is the essential step. That will make us content. We are good, and when our work is good, it is good. We should acknowledge it and stand behind it.
Trust Yourself
IN CLASS TUESDAY we went over two pages of someone’s journal. The truth is it was my journal. Two pages of my journal. I selected them because I had pulled out a poem from those pages a few months ago. Not a great poem. A quiet poem. Those are tricky poems to find; they are the subtle hum in your notebook that can bring you into another world. I handed out copies of those two pages a week before. The students were to find the poem in them. They were also free to tell me if there was nothing there. “Nat, this is all junk.”
Five or six students volunteered. There were at least four different versions of the poem. Some included the first half of the journal entry, some the middle, and one even picked up some overlapping work that was accidentally duplicated on the copy machine. There was one line they all included: “The hills of New Mexico are everywhere you go.” All the versions sounded fine. None of them great poems, including the one I had chosen.
Give a piece to one hundred people, you could possibly get one hundred different opinions—not absolutely different, but lots of variations. This is where the depth of the relationship with yourself is so important. You should listen to what people say. Take in what they say. (Don’t build a steel box around yourself.) Then make your own decision. It’s your poem and your voice. There are no clear-cut rules; it is a relationship with yourself. What is it you wanted to say? What do you want to expose about yourself? Being naked in a piece is a loss of control. This is good. We’re not in control anyway. People see you as you are. Sometimes we expose ourselves before we understand what we have done. That’s hard, but even more painful is to freeze up and expose nothing. Plus freezing up makes for terrible writing.
The best test of a piece is over time. If you’re not sure
of something, put it away for a while. Look at it six months later. Things will be more clear. You might find that there are poems you love and that no one else cares about. I have one poem about a window that anyone who hears it uncategorically says is terrible. I think it’s brilliant. When they ask me for my Nobel Prize speech, I’ll whip out that little gem and have my satisfaction.
Don’t worry if you come back six months later and the piece you weren’t sure of turns out to be terrible. The good parts are already decomposing in your compost pile. Something good will come out. Have patience.
The Samurai
LAST NIGHT IN the Sunday-night group, I began teaching about the Samurai part of writing and ourselves. I realized that in class I have always been very encouraging and positive. That was because we were all in the creative space together. The encouragement was not dishonest; it naturally came out of that noncritical, open field of creativity. Everything you write is fine. And sometimes more than fine. It absolutely burns through to shining first thoughts. Sometimes students say, “Well, you’re not being critical enough; I don’t believe you.” They don’t realize that we’re sitting in different pools. I’m in the pool of creativity; they are busy mixing up the creator and editor and want to pull me into that fight. I don’t want to go there. It feels terrible.
But last night we started to work with the Samurai. Tom brought in a loosely finished piece, xeroxed copies, and we went over it. First of all, we looked for where there was energy. It was mainly in the third paragraph. William Carlos Williams said to Allen Ginsberg: “If only one line in the poem has energy, then cut the rest out and leave only that one line.” That one line is the poem. Poetry is the carrier of life, the vessel of vitality. Each line should be alive. Keep those parts of a piece; get rid of the rest.