Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Time Alone in the Realm of Creation

For years I've been teaching writing at the Northwest Writing Institute with variations on the basic message: Write a little every day, and see how it adds up. We've convened classed on writing poems, fragments, "daily writing in the spirit of William Stafford" (which I'll offer again January 17-18), a class called "La Propria Luz" which attended to the moments of illumination that can happen even in a very busy life.

Basically, I was overwhelmed by daily imperatives, and needed students to help me find ways to keep writing in spite of it all.

That's all good. I'm a believer in the possibility, and the importance, of such a practice. But all the same...what might it be like to write all day and into the night, and then again the next day, and the next...in one long blur of creation?

Well, that's what I'm trying to do. I applied for an artist residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast, and lightning stuck! I'm here for eight weeks. I've brought bushels and bushels of paper--writing starts from twenty years of daily practice and myriad classes where we wrote together. And guess what--? It's still hard. It took me five days to create one huge computer file with 321 pages of poetry. Now I'm sorting that. There must be a better way. I have three categories: poems published, poems to publish, and abandoned poems. The last category is the biggest, and still, I'm wistful about some of those oddments.

I will have some kind of poetry book from this time, and I'm returning to the novel I stopped composing August 28, 1993--the day my father died. It's time to circle back to that for sure.

This time is challenging for my family, and I still spend many hours on email to keep in touch with the world work that needs to be done. But here I am.

What I want to witness about all this is that time is elastic and the work the same. It still comes down to staring at a draft until it begins to whisper change, and then attend to what wants to happen. That's the program whether I have a half hour before dawn at home, or a day at the coast.

I'm scared. What if this time ends and I'm not done with it all? Well, actually, I know that's going to happen...so I just keep at it, as I always have.

I hope to see some of you at the classes we will be offering this spring and summer. All kinds of possibilities on the website: www.lclark.edu/dept/nwi/workshops.html

See you soon, my friends,
Kim Stafford