Jenny Rough: Writing For Wellness

“I hate to say writing is therapy, but let’s face it. It is.”

-Barbara Abercrombie, author of Writing Out the Storm: Reading and Writing Your Way through Serious Illness or Injury

A few years ago, I took the train up to New York City to attend a magazine launch. I was almost ten weeks pregnant. Later that night, on the train ride back to D.C., I made my way to one of Amtrak’s individually enclosed bathrooms. When I saw blood—too much blood—I knew immediately I was having a miscarriage. Over the next few days, the bleeding grew heavier and my contractions started. Although my husband and I tried for years afterward, we were never able to conceive again.

To cope, I turned to my journal. Flip-flopping in bed as anxious thoughts flooded my mind, I would sneak down the hall to my home office to write. For me, writing is essential to break through life’s barriers. It worked for me in college at the end of a relationship that left me devastated, it worked for me when I went through a major career change in my early thirties, and it worked for me as I came to grips with my miscarriage and infertility.

Filling my journal’s blank pages helped me process what I was thinking, what I was feeling, and what I was afraid of—it was a tool I could use to wade through all the mixed up thoughts jumbling around in my brain. At times, facing truth on the page was difficult, but writing helped me find meaning in my experience.

This Saturday, I hope you’ll join me for the workshop Writing for Wellness. We will spend time reading passages from authors who have told their own stories, and then we will use their words as a launching pad to spring us into a series of exercises. We will also talk about different ways to keep a journal and how to maintain a practice at home.

Jenny Rough is a lawyer turned writer. She has written articles for The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, AARP The Magazine, Whole Living (Body+Soul), More, Yoga Journal, USA Weekend, and Writer’s Digest, among other publications. In addition to writing Roughly Speaking, her blog about nurturing the creative spirit, she blogs for Mothering.com. She is currently working on a book about healing from infertility.

Impossibly Busy: Pamela Ehrenberg

New workshop leader Pamela Ehrenberg is our guest today. She is the author of two novels for young people, Tillmon County Fire (2009) and Ethan, Suspended (2007). A former junior high teacher and AmeriCorps alumna, she is currently a higher education consultant and mom to a four-year-old and not-quite-one-year-old. For an introvert, she can be found on a surprising number of social networking sites, including twitter.com/pamelaehrenberg, Facebook, and MySpace, as well as on her own Web site (http://www.pamelaehrenberg.com/). She has three upcoming workshops at TWC, including one on how to make time to write in an "impossibly busy" life. View all her workshops here.
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"I have so much to do today!" my four-year-old said recently. "I have to make a picture, and do my sticker book, and take my dollies for a walk . . . ."

So much for thinking that life grew "impossibly busy" only when parenthood came along--or adulthood, or was it those pesky college applications when I was seventeen? I now know that impossible-busyness can begin by age four. (My one-year-old son is busy in a different way, exploring electrical cords, household products, etc. His life might not feel impossibly busy to him, but he sure lends a different definition of the term to the rest of us.)

Impossible busyness--the feeling that one can't possibly find enough hours in the day for everything that needs (or "needs"?) to be done--is both a luxury and a curse. In January, Washington Post Magazine reporter Brigid Schulte kept a diary of her time, in an effort to figure out why she had none. That article was the first time in years that I read the Post Magazine immediately on pulling it out of the plastic wrapper, rather than piling it on my nightstand or stuffing it in my laptop case for those "free" moments on the Metro. Clearly I wasn't too busy to read about how busy I was.

The article talks about busyness as a status symbol, but I think it offers yet another false benefit for writers: a surprisingly sturdy protective armor. Ah, the novel/memoir/poetry that would fly off my fingertips, if only I weren't so busy. Free time leads to freedom of discovery: discovering that I can write some pretty terrible poetry, discovering that writing a third book is as hard as writing a first. Discovering these truths is much scarier than fantasizing about a word-filled life of leisure.

But supportive others can help. This spring and this summer, I'll once again be offering an online workshop, "How to Make Time to Write in an Impossibly Busy Life." True confession: as a widowed mom of two young children, I originally devised the course because I felt I was too busy to lead a traditional-style workshop; I wanted something where I'd complete the exercises along with the participants, leading me back to the kind of disciplined writing where I've found success in the past. Previous participants indicated that the experience "really help[ed] me focus and prioritize" and that the supportive environment affirmed that "someone is listening (reading)." Individuals may log in at 6 a.m., 11 p.m., lunch hour, or their baby's nap time; while on a business trip or in pajamas. But together we form a community that recognizes there is something to gain from shedding the armor and making time for what matters.

Impossibly busy? Or just having trouble getting around to what's important to you? Either way, I hope to "see" you online in the workshop--or that another Writer's Center workshop or activity helps you carve out the writing time you need this spring and summer.

Poetry Deep Like the Rivers: Socially Conscious Poetry with David Salner

New workshop leader David Salner is our guest today. He has worked as an iron ore miner, furnace tender, machinist, and garment worker--and he's a longtime activist in social struggles. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. His fourth collection, John Henry’s Partner Speaks, was published in 2008, and his poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, North American Review, Threepenny Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals. He has received grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Puffin Foundation.

His workshop, Poetry Deep Like the Rivers: Socially Conscious Poetry, begins October 10.

To me it is a no-brainer that poetry needs a social conscience. First and foremost among art forms, it derives its creative impulse from the lives of ordinary people. It should be a lively art form, based on the good nature and genius of humanity. But the assertion of our humanity in the face of an oppressive society implies resistance. How this is reflected in poetry will be the topic of this workshop. It is a rich topic. There are countless examples of powerful poems taking up the African-American experience, the status of women, war, and working class issues. The environment and gay rights also informs many fine poems. Through the course of this four-session class we will pinpoint the tools that make socially conscious poetry work.

The course is open to non-writers, but about 20 % of it will be based on developing our own socially conscious poetry and workshopping the results. Everyone will have the opportunity to develop poems based on writing exercises and to bring in previously written poems.

Together, we will look at the roots of antiwar poetry in the twentieth century and today’s antiwar poems. We will discuss the irrepressible genius of such divergent poets as Robert Hayden, Dudley Randall, Dorianne Laux, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim. We will watch video clips of Lucille Clifton and Philip Levine and discuss their poetry and their perspectives on poetry. Time will be available for all workshop participants to present their favorite poems for discussion.

By the end of this class, we will have taken up important background questions: Is protest poetry a valid form? How much weight must poets give to the arguments of those who urge art for art’s sake? And what about the controversies stirred up by poets like Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka?

America is a brutal society, where creativity is crushed and hopes imprisoned. Does that mean poetry is impossible in such an environment? Join this workshop and help celebrate the creativity of human resistance!

Note: Copies of the poems we will be studying will be distributed; a class outline will be available at the first session.