Both Sides Now

Eight writers gathered online yesterday for our First-Ever Hay House 3X Weekly Writing Group All-Day Marathon. Quite a mouthful that. Good turnout.

The format we followed was not wildly different from our regular 3X weekly accountability writing group sessions. They start with a meditation to ground us and last about two hours from start to finish. Yesterday’s session was considerably longer and with more breaks.

As my “projet du jour,” I turned my attention to the 100 Moments exercise prescribed by the Hay House Writing Challenge. The goal is to produce a list of (at least) 100 memories or incidents or “scenes” that you would like to elaborate on and fill out.

It doesn’t matter if the recall of those moments differs drastically from how someone else who was there remembers them. It is about recalling and recounting how you experienced them. Happy, sad, frightening, painful, joyous, or funny. That doesn’t matter.

What matters is what they meant to you and how they affected or changed your life. Did moving to a new house make your life better or worse? Did you look forward to Aunt Edna and Uncle Edwards’ visits or did you run and hide when they came over? Were you in the car when Daddy smashed it into the garage? Was he drunk or sober? Was he ever sober? And how was he when he sobered up?

My father regularly suffered from the “26-ounce flu.” We kids tittered and ducked him when he was in that place. We made a lot of bad things funny. Hungover Dad was usually in a foul mood and swayed unsteadily on his feet the morning after. Cue us kids to disappear by heading into our room or out the door. Alcoholics are lonely people. I should know. Like father, like daughter.

A recent Facebook post (there is much solid if fleeting, depth and wisdom on that platform) exhorted us to reserve judgment about people. Wait a little. Watch them in various situations. Get to know them a little better. Our perceptions of them might change.

I see the necessity in our writing of pulling in perspectives from all different angles and different times of our lives to create a fuller character and fuller story. Our perceptions change as we get to know people better. Our perceptions change as we get older and can see others through a more compassionate lens.

Capturing the moments of our lives and examining them more closely can produce rich if sometimes disturbing, results. When we recognize our inherent humanity and that of every flawed human being we encounter, we can make a choice to see them more clearly.

On reflection, we can better understand what was happening to them, and by association, what happened to us. It doesn’t change the damage done but it can mitigate and ease the more painful memories so they don’t hijack and cloud up our present. Don’t think me naive. I am fully aware that getting there can take years and years and years. If ever. It’s a choice. A hard one.

Scenes vs Chapters

It was validating yesterday to hear a book coach encourage us to write scenes instead of chapters to complete a memoir. I really like this approach.

My background is full of scenes. Scenes with my sister over ice cream. (I was holding two. So sad that I dropped “hers” and not mine.) Scenes of battling parents. Schoolyard scenes of playing marbles and pounding a tetherball into submission. Scenes of barely contained laughter at a funeral.

In his eulogy for my great-uncle – a man he did not previously know – the minister solemnly intoned about his “deathbed” conversion to the “word of Jesus Christ, Our Savior,” I tried to hold my legs tightly together and my arms folded across my chest to hold in the laughter. I beelined for the bathroom outside the sanctuary and barely made it inside before blurting out an explosive guffaw.

If you knew my great-uncle, you’d get the joke. Not a reverential man. When I returned to the pew – red-faced, shaking (mostly with embarrassment), and with my head hung down – a kindly lady patted me on the arm and said, comfortingly: “There, there, dear. It’s alright. He’s gone to a better place.” I smiled wanly.

I could devote a whole chapter of scenes to funerals. Both the hysterical and the horrific. The tone usually depended on the circumstances of the decedent’s passing. The funerals of older people were generally hushed and respectful. Mourners murmured platitudes about the blessing of a long, well-lived life. Sometimes tinged with relief. When young people died, however, the church was often filled with anger as well as despair at life’s cruelty and unfairness. Unfortunately, there are all kinds.

The online writing webinars happily consumed much of my day yesterday. A shoutout here to Perfect Your Process Writing Summit host and organizer Daniel David Wallace. Of particular value was learning there are countless helping resources should I start to falter in this writing process. It is a common writer’s complaint that we start to flail mid-process with our material, our fears of insignificance, rejection, motivation, and numerous et. al. of all types

As the webinar day wore on, other authors, influencers, book coaches covered a wide range of subjects. There were helpful sessions about how AI may actually relieve the drudgery of non-creative writing. The world is still in a postpartum period after the birth of this newborn technology. We’re all adjusting our lives and anxious to see how it/she/him grows.

Today, a seven-hour marathon writing session is planned on Zoom. instead of our usual 3X Weekly Writer’s Accountability Group. The same 3X weekly folks have committed to this extended writing session today to see how deep and far our writing will go inside that container. I’m pretty excited.

As I have committed myself to birth this memoir, the Universe is faithfully bringing me insights, support, solutions, and guides that I may well need up the road. The rest is up to me. You may not go for that wooey-wooey framing of this process as the Universe’s doing. That’s okay. We all draw motivation from somewhere, whatever we choose to call it.

Voom-Voom

Momentum is about the only physics I understand. You want to make “something” happen and start the ball rolling. Put a plan in place and then work to create the conditions to move that “something” forward. Your chances of having “something” come off successfully largely depend on how well you have done your planning. Combined with a little luck. Planning and luck were strategies deployed regularly in my communications career. So I shouldn’t be surprised that “something” has started happening in my writing life. Largely for the same reasons. I committed to publishing a book next year and writing more regularly to make that happen. Starting this blog was part of that process. Now more writing guidance and opportunities to write are opening up. As I immerse myself in the company of writers, I discover I am not so very different from them. I am beginning to see myself as a writer again. In a good way. Today I signed up for the online Perfect Your Process writing summit. Hosted by writing coach Daniel David Wallace, there will be hourly presentations and podcasts throughout this weekend on all manner of writing-related content: AI, editing, and ways to restart your writing engine when motivation flags. I paid a modest sum to access the podcasts and presentations in perpetuity after the summit weekend. My digital, document, and book writing library grows daily, along with a wealth of useful tips and tricks on developing your craft. One writer advises us to mindfully engage all five senses as we sit down to write. Play music. Reread inspirational quotes and phrases. Put a blanket around your shoulders. Keep a favorite beverage at hand. It is a way to ground and focus on the task at hand. On Sunday, our 3X Weekly Hay House Writer’s Accountability Group is holding its first-ever writing marathon. Seven hours are committed to this day-long experiment in two 3.5-hour blocks. I am stocking up on fresh coffee beans and almond biscotti to keep up my energy and motivation. A theme is arising about what it takes to write a book the more reading and research I do about the writing process. Basically, it is as Nike simple as “Just do it!” It seems that with the increasing technological assault on all of us, writers and writing are rising up as even more important than they have ever been, in spite of fewer people reading actual books. We worry and wonder and doom speak about technology “taking over the world. ” Historically, anxiety about new technology is nothing new. The typewriter was first viewed as a threat to the art of writing. A version was invented in Italy in 1575, but it took a while to come into widespread use. Historians have estimated that some form of the typewriter was invented 52 times as thinkers tried to come up with a workable design. Professor Steven Pinker reminds us that counterforces will inevitably arise to tackle any serious technological threat to our survival. Because they always have. Also because we have other very real and present dangers to attend to, like climate change. Writing is conscious resistance and a collective, if tacit, defense of our humanity. In a world where apps and cellphones and streaming videos and gaming continually distract us from that which makes us human, writers are rebels. Writers form a united – if unorganized – front against the assault of technology’s impersonal and utter disinterest in who we are as a species. Technology does not care what becomes of us. That there are so many writing these days about personal and human stories is proof of those technology counterforces in action.

Scut Work

This day was bound to come. I might even say it is long overdue. Took a deep dive today into the research to come up with an outline, settle on a word count for my first draft, and find “similar” books that echo thematically the memoir I want to write. The memoirs Educated by Tara Westover; The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls and the play August, Osage County by Tracy Letts resonate deeply. If you know those books, that should give you insight into where my project is going. In my professional writing career, I learned that an 8″ x 11″ page of double-spaced copy equals approximately 250 words. This generally accepted desirable “mean” manuscript length (more or less) is around 50,000 words. That means I have to produce at least a 200-page manuscript as a start. That is the easy part. What to put into those 200 pages is where the project gets tricky. In writing memoirs or personal narratives, take for granted that large swaths of your life will end up on the cutting room floor. No one wants to read page after page of pointless deep and sticky details. I know I don’t. I don’t want to write like that either. So we must get selective about what we bring back and plan to put in the book. We cannot produce every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking for guests coming over for dinner on Saturday night. We have to pick and choose what to share, one dish at a time. Ensuing dinner dates and the dishes we serve at those meals can be compared to cooking up chapters in our book. I acknowledge this is something of a mixed metaphor. Still, I hope you – dear reader – get my drift. As my craft deepens, I can only hope my metaphors improve. Still, looking forward to a Julia Child entree for dinner next weekend isn’t such a shabby analogy, metaphor, what-have-you. With the writer’s retreat in New Smyrna Beach, Florida behind me, keeping up my motivation is mandatory. I feel very lucky to have stumbled into the online company of a group of great women writers who are more or less focussed on the same writing goals as me. They show up from across the continent on a scheduled Zoom call three times a week from Hawaii, and, California and Colorado and Texas, and Costa Rica. As an added bonus, I get weather reports from all over the continent. We start with a grounding meditation, set our intention in the chat box, go away for an hour to work on whatever we are working and come back together at the end of the hour. to debrief what we accomplished That said, we are a garrulous lot. The topics of our half-hour freespeak time after we’ve all checked in have covered the known universe. Lately, those topics have touched onAI, universal themes in life and literature, writing blocks and how to push through them, and how our personal lives support or detract from our writing progress. The topics are as diverse as the women in the group. If you are looking for a supportive platform to share your work, create an accountability group of your own. I have hooked up to a “group in progress” and have lucked out. Like the formation of any social group, you need to feel out the temperature and tone to see if the people you are connecting to are simpatico. That can take some time and a little alchemy to find. Be prepared to do a little online “writer’s group” shopping until you find your pack. So worth it.

Don’t Blame Me

Love is energy. That energy circulates and moves through all living things and us humans, in the constant rhythm of our breaths and our heartbeats. Pretty reliable markers over the course of a lifetime. When we are children, we are taught we need to plant the “right” seeds, then stand up as adults, work hard, and watch our lives grow. Of course, everyone gets different seed packets: in the guise of different genders, talents, geographic locations, physical gifts, inherited experience, race, aptitudes, innate knowledge, and the circumstances of our births. We’re human and malleable, especially when we are children. We need to belong and be loved so we listen to who our families tell us we are. Many families have very definite ideas about your “ideal” life path though it may be radically different from your own inner desires and direction. We all know lawyers who wanted to open a bar or be commercial airline pilots. Doctors who really wanted to be farmers and company CEOs who might have been stay-at-home mothers had that been an acceptable option. We all make decisions based on what we know and what we learn along life’s path. In my family, my mother was convinced I should become an influential and powerful public figure. My Dad – by contrast – thought that I would be better off as a wife and mother and that pursuing a university degree was a waste of time and money. I completely let him down by earning three. You can only grow from the level you are at any given time of your life. Babies, for example, are not expected to understand mathematics or physics. That anyone can at any age, of course, is an utter mystery to me. “Adulthood”  arrives at the moment you start listening to your own heart’s desires and begin moving your life in a direction of your own making. Countless numbers of people are willing to cash in on our innate insecurities. It can be a moment of crisis when we wake up and start to shake off the labels and expectations that have been placed on us throughout our lives.  Because each one of us is utterly unique, there is no “one size fits all.” When we decide to seek meaning and direction in our own lives “our way,” we have to carve out our own path. I tire easily of the fashion and cosmetic industries that assure us women that our self-worth and belonging is guaranteed “if only” we buy their products (and give them a five-star rating on Yelp!) I am tired of so-called experts who try to sell me their version of “the way, the truth, and the life.” This approach can only make sense in a capitalist society that has lost a deep sense of community and lauds individual achievement over the collective power of joining our gifts and talents to work together. So making that often jerky turn toward adulthood often comes down to self-determination and a lot of courage. When people can no longer abide the internal disconnect between who they really are, lives can change radically. Marriages collapse. Businesses fail. Abused children turn their backs on the parents who had ground them down from birth. Adulthood is taking personal responsibility. Responsibility for everything that happens to us, what we do, and the choices we made regardless of how badly misguided or uninformed we were. That means blame is out of the question. There may, indeed, have been negative incidents and forces that shaped you. Blame won’t fix it. It will only perpetuate it and stultify the process of making your own life better. Our focus must turn from trying to find someone or something to “fix us” and stepping up to “fix ourselves.” The answers are already deep inside. We need to encourage that small, still voice and learn to listen to it. We need to consciously train our energy on the good things in our lives and work to eliminate what is bad or “doesn’t serve us.” Such has been my relationship with words. External voices and expectations drowned the seeds of my creativity. They were much more comfortable ingesting the pablum I wrote for money. My energies were focused for far too long on keeping a lid on and suppressing me and my voice. The one I knew I had to develop. Not anymore. Who’s with me?

On Giving Up and Fading Away

The pull to give up is an all too frequent hazard on the writing path. As we get older, the drive to advocate for ourselves can diminish. Our wish to fight against injustice in our own personal world or the world at large or to tell our own story can fade. What does it matter anyway? Who am I to write a book? Let’s get crystal clear that the process of writing a book is deeply personal and generally isolated. In truth, isolation – whether we buy into this or not – is actually how we live our lives. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. It is realistic. “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.” – Orson Welles. No matter how well someone knows you, they cannot know all of you. They cannot know who you were at that moment, what your options were, the constraints of your situation, or the limited choices you had. I often hear in response to stories of domestic violence: “I would never stand for that treatment. I would head out the door the moment someone raised a hand to me and never come back. Why didn’t you just walk away?” Always delivered with a look of disbelief and faint disgust, a wrinkled nose, and a raised eyebrow. Oh yeah? Only other survivors or sufferers of domestic violence can credibly relate. Rape survivors often get the same reaction and experience when disclosing their pain to others. Most women conclude disclosure isn’t worth the risk. You take risks whenever you share anecdotes about your life with other people – both the hilarious and the horrific. And by hilarious and horrific, I mean both the anecdotes and the people you share them with. You cleverly couch and cover up your experience by sharing insights you gained from your pain and your healing. You refer to the “ah-ha” moments that changed your life. Because while it is a nice and tidy platitude, no one else can ever really walk a mile in your moccasins. For example, you have been bombarded by advertisements against smoking all your life, but then witness a beloved relative – perhaps a parent – succumb to cancer. That brings it up close and personal. Everyone can relate to sadness and loss but no one can feel exactly about that particular incident what you felt. They could not have seen what you saw, heard, smelled, or thought at the time. So why not give up on this impossible task from the get-go or even bother to set off on this fool’s errand? Face it. What you have to say likely doesn’t mean anything in “the grand scheme of things.” So here’s why I won’t give up. Because I am the only me there is. Because books and the words within them saved my life. From an early age – about three years old – I learned to read and write. It made Grade One a boring cakewalk. As the adults around me were doing daily crazy, I crept up into my little “book nook” in the space above my bedroom closet wearing my thin cotton nightie. I had a stack of books beside me then just as I do today. Different books, mind you. The authors back then became my close-ish, personal friends. Back in the day, it was anything written by the Grimms Brothers with their dark implications about life’s dangers in their “fairy tales.” The wonders of the Childcraft encyclopedia took me everywhere and sowed the seeds for lifelong eclectic learning. Aesop’s Fables afforded me lessons in morality and cause and effect that I wasn’t getting from my parents at home. Crazy adults, remember? Mom made sure local author Desmond Pacey’s The Cow with the Musical Moo was always on display in the house where visitors – especially Professor Pacey himself – could clearly see it. At some point, “doing the best they could with what they knew at the time” doesn’t quite cut it. There is much they chose not to know. They have long been forgiven but the scars are immutable. Scars can certainly be softened over time but not erased. It’s similar to forgiving rapists who were – you know – just looking for love in the only way they knew how. “Boys will be boys after all,” they say. And the dumbfounded women they’ve terrorized sink inward and deeper until they are in danger of completely fading away. Until one day they are no longer there. Fuck that!

Women Talking

When the writing retreat in New Smyrna Beach finished, I headed straight home to my husband. Most of the writers at the retreat were women with two exceptions – the director and a friend of his known to most of the repeat attendees. By making the commitment to write a book, I’ve learned something important. You cannot take your foot off the gas. You can coast for a little to enjoy the scenery and take a break or two. Ultimately you have to get back on the road and keep moving forward. It is a choice. And no one has to make that choice but you. I hate that. During the retreat, I realized I do not spend much time in the physical company of women nor do I hear much directly about women’s day-to-day experiences. I never did which is an issue and consequence of my upbringing that I mean to address in my book. In recent weeks, I have connected with and become part of an enriching 3X weekly writing accountability group. We are women from a variety of backgrounds who live across the United States from Hawaii to California, Colorado, and Texas to Florida and as far down the continent as Costa Rica. Our writing interests are equally far-flung and diverse. A professional chiropractor is writing about sleep. There are two astrologers in the group and one of the regular participants is male. I like to chide him that his knowledge of astrology is so deep, he will need to put a glossary in his book. Another woman is a past professional webmaster and her contribution to sorting out our technological roles is almost as important as her creative endeavors. The 3X weekly writing group emerged from our mutual involvement in the Hay House Writer’s Community. Hay House has a twice-annual contest inviting book proposals from its members. The winning proposal will be published and receive a $10, 000 advance. Great incentive and it was the reason I initially joined the group. I was heading for the May 5 – June 5 deadline for submissions until I had a hard reality check. The sample book proposals Hay House circulated are in the range of 65 to 120 pages long. Color me intimidated. I am revising my expectations and internal deadlines. If I get a book proposal in this spring, I will have accomplished more than I expected. If I don’t, so be it and I will head for the next deadline in December. I am learning it is healing for me to be in the company of caring and intelligent women. For the longest time in my life, I wasn’t much interested. My mother was someone who might best be described as “more like the boys than the boys.” A lot of catchphrases like that floated around in the 60s and 70s to describe successful women who wanted and sought out power. It seemed they could only achieve it by doing what the men did in terms of competitiveness, empire-building, and outmuscling their competition for the roles and rewards that come with generating attention. It baffles me that women are still subjugated and dismissed across the board in society. A hopeful phrase now circulating out there is “the future is female.” Perhaps we are all done to death with the power imbalance of male privilege and energies shaping our lives. Or, more likely, young women have woken up to the necessity of creating their own power. If you are interested in an extreme example of women’s subjugation and their collaborative attempt to rise above it, see the Academy Award-nominated film, Women Talking. The script beautifully articulates the dilemma women traditionally live with. They love the men who are their husbands, brothers, sons, and relatives. But the women can no longer tolerate what the men consider their physical due. Either by complicity or by force. To say much more would be to spoil the film’s trajectory and ending. But I encourage women to see it. It’s tough going in parts but aren’t our lives inherently tougher than men’s? If this fact of life has escaped your notice, then you live in a very fortunate bubble. So if you are one of those lucky women, see this film anyway. It may horrify you, but it may also change and incite you. Women’s voices have often been seen as second-best to men’s voices. There is an ever-so-subtle shift away from that in the emerging generation. Today I get to reconnect with the writing group over ZOOM. Our writing sessions always begin with a beautiful meditation to ground our efforts and focus us on our writing. I so look forward to it. We get to catch up on the past few days, work together, share our work with each other, and implicitly hold each other up. This is alchemy at its finest.

The Color of Mom

Writing requires organization and discipline. In order to write a book, you need to make choices about what to include and exclude from your story as the process unfolds. Some writers sit and free-write faithfully, and from this exercise, a book eventually emerges. These writers – I recently learned – are called “pantsers.” They write their book, literally, “by the seat of their pants.” I am normally that type of person on many projects I undertake. In this case, I have been told I have too much material to draw from and too many anecdotes to share. I have to put them in some sort of order. A narrative arc I believe it is called. I explained in an earlier post that I went to a stationery store, and bought lots of writing paper, and bright neon-colored index cards: pink, yellow, blue, pink, and green. “Assign a color to each major character,” I was advised. “Collect your stories and observations about that character on that single-color index card as they come up for you. Carry the blank cards with you so you can jot down ideas that come up on the fly.” I may be overthinking it but I immediately wondered: what color should Mom be? She was a tiny, feminine woman so maybe her cards should be pink. Then again, she was not very much maternal and had a hard and bitter edge. I vacillated while considering the yellow cards. She committed stunning acts both of bravery and cowardice in her lifetime. Does she deserve to wear the yellow stripe of cowardice in my musings? Given our troubled history, it would not have been inaccurate. What about the blue index cards for the sadness and chaos she created in my life and her own and that of many others? And certainly not the green index cards. Poet Irving Layton once wrote a phrase about poets and poetry that has stayed with me: “The poet’s colors are green and black – the colors of life and death.” Green is sacred to me. It has always evoked life and renewal. I’ve painted the walls of my home in shades of green. I crave the fresh green palate I encounter on forest walks. My doctor insists fresh greens on my palate will prolong and enhance my healthspan. I cannot assign this precious color to musings about my mother. Sadly, so much of what I remember about her is sad and sick and life-sapping, not life-giving. I told my husband about the dilemma I faced. He replied immediately: “Perhaps you should make her cards in dual colors.” Duplicity was a strong character trait of hers so that could work. “Put a diagonal across the index card. Write your pleasant memories on one side of the line and the not-so-pleasant memories on the other side.” A logical compromise, I think. But as to the color? Possibly white. White-faced. Bloodless. Whitewash. Cadaverous. A void. I have so few warm or pleasant memories of my mother and that is sad. What I mostly remember is surviving her. For years, my survival was nowhere near a foregone conclusion. We’ll see how the card color selection plays out. Meanwhile, I will take the advice of author Anne Lamott. She advises authors who are reluctant to share bad things that others had done to them to let it all out: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” 

What Color Should My Mother Be?

Final night at the Murphy Writing School in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. The twelve memoir students read in the dance studio what they worked on this week. Throughout the readings of these diverse pieces of writing by diverse writers, I was transported to eras, countries, and life situations to which I had no previous exposure or knowledge. If I did know about them at all, my knowledge was glib and superficial.

These memoirists shared raw, wretched, deep, delicious, hilarious, poignant, wry memories and observations. We spent time in a psychiatric hospital with one writer tonight. When the writer’s husband left her for a 17-year-old girl shortly after the birth of their first baby, she mused that there was only one difference between her and her patients: she had the keys.

A young first-generation Vietnamese told the wrenching story of the long COVID his mother was suffering. She shunned conventional treatment because she followed the orange-headed leader’s claim that bleach would kill the bug and cure the problem.

An older American fellow revealed what he went through to extract a psychiatric evaluation to keep him out of Vietnam when he was drafted. Agemates of his were not as fortunate. One Vietnam veteran casualty was buried close to his family’s plot in their hometown.

A woman of Filipino descent shared her father’s World War II stories. One, in particular, underscored his futile attempt to stop a Japanese pilot friend from committing kamikaze, or, “divine wind.” It appears young Muslim suicide bombers have stepped up to weather the mantle of martyrdom.

Another woman mused tenderly about the inevitability of death for us all and how she wishes to embrace it when the time comes. A woman living with a stroke wrote about constant vacillation between hope and despair with her and others in physical therapy. A woman raging against the physical vagaries of age spoke hilariously on behalf of hundreds of thousands of aging women. In her diatribe, she spoke convincingly about the necessity of undergoing the same sort of renovation for her body as her house had recently been through.

The poetry readings last night and the memoir excerpts tonight had similar impacts: both were powerful and highly humanizing. School director Peter Murphy says, “Yes. This happens every time.” People’s personalities and characters emerge and their issues take shape when they focus on their writing And even more powerfully when their work is witnessed. Murphy continued: “Whether it is a smaller group like ours with under 50 students, he said, or workshops with 200 or more. There is magic in the doing of the writing. It changes you and it changes those who hear or read it.”

That, at the very least, is my dearest hope and ambition. Has the title of the post confused you at all? Well, me too. if I’m honest. I meant to talk about where my mother will likely fit in my life story and how I am going to capture the wealth of events and anecdotes. For a physically slight person, she was fairly imposing and affecting. But why do I have to decide what “color” she will be is TBD – to be decided. A next step in the book writing process.

As I leave this nourishing workshop environment today and head back to “real life,” you’ll just have to hold on to your questions until I fully explain tomorrow. I believe that is called a cliffhanger in LitSpeak.

If Words Be The Food of Life, Write On

Borrowing ever so loosely from William Shakespeare, I was humbled last night by the sheer talent of my fellow colleagues at the Murphy School of Writing Retreat here in Florida. I had drifted away from a felt sense of why words and writing are so vitally important. A general cynicism had befallen me after years of writing professionally. I use the term “writing” in the “government communications” context ever so loosely. Producing and publishing words for politicians and greedy, soulless clients whose only interest was whether they could manipulate the reader into parting with hard-won cash or votes was soul-crushing. Tonight, I started the process of relearning that words – which, admittedly, have their own limitations (more on that in a future post) – are the most effective tools we humans have to share our human experience with other humans. Words make us laugh. Words cross gulfs of isolation. Words make us think. Words teach us stuff. Words can make us cringe, bring forth tears, and leave us breathless with awe and wonder at the breadth, depth, and vagaries of the human experience. A mother speaking tremulously and tenderly about the birth of and life with her dearly beloved child who has cerebral palsy. A woman “of a certain age” speaking about finally discovering joyous orgasms after finding a loving partner with a “slow hand” in a sly nod to the Pointer Sisters’ massive 80s hit song. A woman who disclosed and bears the deep and immutable childhood insult and primal wound of incest. She called it a “dent.” Another with similar primal wounds due to rape shared her outrage at those who would question how “it” happened. Rape victims hear that line of questioning all the time. Another recalled a carefree day in her youth exploring a big, dirty city with a dear lifelong friend. Her final poem was a study in controlled rage and exasperation over the America she loves and lives in which – she implored – “desperately needs to get its act together.” And from a farm-raised writer, sharing the sensual joy of spraying warm milk from a cow’s udder at cloying kittens with open mouths. I had forgotten or lost contact with words’ ability to transport us somewhere else in time, place, or experience. Glennon Doyle wrote and encouraged us to know and understand that “we can do hard things.” These writers certainly did and do. I had forgotten about the power of words to move and deeply shake us emotionally. I had completely forgotten about the power of words to change us by changing what we know, how we think, and even our sense of who we are. Most basically, words can make us feel less alone and isolated on this big crazy planet in this crazy time. For that learning alone, this retreat has been worth it. Tonight’s performance will be by the memoir group. I am still reeling, chortling, and choking back tears after tonight’s iridescent performances. After tonight, I could well be emotionally apoplectic.