Writing Prompt Wednesday: Written on Stone

What if, each day of your life, your actions created a stone that showed up somewhere in your life, your garden wall, your bedside table, in the middle of your breakfast eggs.  What would your stones say?  

Writing Prompt Wednesday: the Past is Present

Cafe tables at the basement cafe of the Writer's House in Tbilisi, Georgia.  Image © Lori Gravley

True story:  In June 2015, I went to Tbilisi, Georgia to facilitate a course for Engility for USAID.  As I was walking the city the first day of my one week in Tbilisi, I saw a sign that said, "Tbilisi International Festival of Literature."  When I got back to my hotel I looked up the schedule.

Carolyn Forche, the first poet I ever saw read (at Florida State University in the spring of 1984), was giving a reading and several talks at the festival.  I decided to attend.  I got there early to have dinner in the cafe in the basement of the Writer's House and found her seated at the far table above, looking at her notes, drinking a glass of wine.

After a total fan girl moment, I introduced myself and we chatted for an hour about her work, about my work, and about the state of  our country (especially the increase in police brutality against African Americans and all Americans).

It was extraordinary to meet, after thirty years, someone who had had such a profound influence on my life.  I am a poet because of her.  Well, I was a poet anyway, but it was seeing her read that made me realize that people could make their lives out of the work.  I left our meeting thankful and inspired, but it could have gone the other way.  She could have been aloof and critical (I met Margaret Atwood in 1992).  She could have been shy.  Meeting her could have left me feeling hollow and ashamed instead of inspired.

So, what would your story be?  What person (famous or not) from your past would you run into half way around the world in an empty cafe?  How would it change you?

Expectation and Longing

Image © Lori Gravley 2016

I once had an amazing critique group.  We met once every two weeks. Three of us taught at UT El Paso, the other poet took classes at the graduate school.  Connie, Leslie, Jacquie and I shared a common vision for excellence.  Each of us had a regular writing practice.  Each of us respected each other’s work and valued the input we got from each other.

We met for nearly three years, beginning twenty-six years ago.  We stopped meeting when two of us had babies and I moved away.  I’ve been looking for a writing group like that one ever since.  And though I’ve met other writers whose work and feedback I love, I’ve never had another critique group like that one.   

We met twice a month at a restaurant or at Jacquie’s lovely home.  We ate.  Then we got to work.  We read each other poems, listened to each other’s poems and then offered suggestions for ways to look at the work again on many levels—meaning, imagination, language, form, line, stanza, word, punctuation.   We were all thoughtful, critical, careful, and generous readers of poetry.  Working together made all of our work stronger.

I don’t know if it’s my expectations that keep me away from finding a new group or if its that I’m not at a University anymore so that the people I meet either aren’t committed to craft and the same process as I am or aren’t sure that my work and work ethic would mesh with theirs.

Either way,  I’ve been actively seeking a critique group for seven years.  I thought I had found one last year after a local writer’s workshop, but that fizzled.  I thought about trying to put another one together this year, but I don’t think I will.  It takes energy and time.  I’d rather put that into my work.

And, I think I’ll also release my expectation of a perfectly simpatico group.  I’ll attend the monthly critique group in my area.  Maybe I’ll reach out to other poets who live far away to see if they are open to a weekly or bi-weekly critique via email. 

I know I can’t step in the same river twice, but I still long for that perfect critique/support group that I once had.  Maybe, if I can let go of the ideal critique group that I’ve been carrying around for twenty-five years, I’ll find one that’s just right for me now in this moment.   I’m open.  I’m waiting.  I’ll try.

Writing Prompt Wednesday: For the Roses

Writing Prompt Wednesday: Writing from Art, Part One

Bikes on a Florence, Italy Street.  Image © Lori Gravley

 I wrote a chapbook last year inspired by the photographs of the great and prolific American photographer Elliot Erwitt.  I love writing from photography.  I also love writing from art, and I have  collection of postcards of art I love on my desk to inspire me if I'm feeling uninspired. Someone asked me recently how I do it.  How do I take a static two-dimensional image and bring it to life?

It was a good question.  I've been writing ekphrastic poetry (poetry inspired by art) for as long as I can remember.  And my ekphrastic poems are frequently accepted for publication.  I've noticed that there are a number of ekphrastic challenges posted online.  Poetry Magazine recently published a beautiful section of art and poetry inspired by art honoring Latino/a artists and poets.  But not everyone knows how to start writing in response to art.  

So, here are some thoughts on my process. 

First,  I enter the scene.  Even if I've never been there or if it's from something in the past, I try to imagine the sounds, smells, and tastes I would encounter.  The sights and textures are already there.  In the picture above, I hear voices in Italian, traffic sounds echoing off the stone wall.  I feel the texture of the uneven stones beneath my feet.  I imagine how uncomfortable the peeling bike seat would be.  I imagine, perhaps, two people walking away from the locked bikes down to a cafe at the end of the street.  The smell of cheese and bread, perhaps coffee, drift up the street.  

Have the riders stopped because the tire is flat or were these bikes left here years ago, weeks ago? I imagine the sound the bikes would make as they too off down the street.  The simple gears and rusty chain make an unmistakable sound.  The brakes likely squeal as the hardened rubber tries to catch the edge of the rusty wheel.  The cobblestones here would bounce the rider up and down uncomfortably and the seats look hard enough already.  Why would someone ride a bike this old?

Notice how I moved from sensory detail into questions about character in the paragraph above.  Sense is the way I get to character. If I let my mind spin out imaginings without shutting it down or getting distracted, I create a lively scene in my head.

Then it becomes easy to picture the object in three dimensions and move around in the photograph or painting.  If I stood next to the bikes in the picture, what would I see waiting just outside the frame.  The photographer or artist can become invisible at this point, or they can take center stage.  What else is happening in the scene that you can't see?  Are the bike riders arguing, kissing, opening the door to their apartment?  

When there are figures in the photograph or painting, I bring myself into the minds of those figures.  I wrote a poem about two paintings in one of the saloons at the National Gallery in Washington, D. C.  In the poem, I move from a painting by Picasso to a painting of Chaim Soutine and think about the way the figures in the paintings interact.  Here's an excerpt from that poem, "The National Gallery."

Maybe it’s because in The Family of Saltimbanques

the woman is separate, alone,

the focus of everyone’s gaze

that I think about how art can

keep us out, give us beauty or terror so grand

we must rest on the other side of it. . .

Here the figures themselves are the inspiration for my thoughts and maybe that's why I work hard to enter into the art work I'm writing from.  I wouldn't have noticed the interaction between the performers in the Picasso painting if I hadn't been willing to imagine myself in the frame.  And imagining myself within the frame of the earlier painting made it easier for me to be hit with a moment of lust as I looked at Chaim Soutine and saw in the painting his not paint on canvas, but a breathing person in a vivid room.   

As poets and storytellers and essayists, we're continually looking to express the experience of the other, and for me, the practice of writing from art helps me hone the ability to walk in another person's shoes and into a flat world that opens up for me when I step beyond the frame. 

The prompt today is to look at the photograph above, and let it inspire in you a poem, an essay, or a story.  I'd love to see what you come up with.