Writing – Page 7 – Grace Mattern

March 9, 2014

Disorientation

David and I get ready to go cross country skiing on the community trails a few miles from Vermont Studio Center. Except now he realizes he forgot to pack his ski boots. He also didn’t bring his micro-spikes for walking on packed snow trails. We study the walking maps VSC provides and decide to snowshoe on the Long Trail where it crosses through Johnson. We get to what we hope is the trail head (the hand drawn map is completely out of scale and hard to connect to where we are) and I realize I’ve left my snowshoes in my car back at VSC. And I don’t have my hat and mittens. Luckily an extra hat and mittens are things David did pack and they’re in his car. I put on my micro-spikes, because at least I have those. David puts on his snowshoes.

We follow what we think is the trail, but we never see any white blazes, which mark the Long Trail, and eventually turn around. We try a different direction on the packed road into the woods and find another parking area. This time we find white blazes and head uphill, to what we hope will be Prospect Rock. The map says it has a great view.

It does. In fact, it’s a 180 degree view, so that hiking intention for March is now met. It feels good to get something intentional done. The Green Mountains rise up across the wide valley of the Lamoille River. It’s sunny and warmer than it’s been for a very long time and we drink in the hint of spring.

We’ve been talking about the book I’m trying to pull into some kind of shape, and some of what’s been confusing and hard to grasp is coming into focus. From the distance of six years, the disorienting time I’m writing about makes more sense. How our decisions and reactions and responses to deeply felt needs and answers to those needs affected all that rippled out from that passage in our lives is clear in a way it hasn’t been before.

Spending four weeks away from home, navigating the dislocation of sleeping in one room, writing in a studio a few minutes walk away, eating in a separate building where meals include talking to what start out as 60 strangers and become a new family, figuring out where to keep my computer and books and snacks and journal and boots and toothpaste starts to feel more worth it, because it’s putting me in a place of concentrated focus on this book I’ve been carrying around as a huge intention for years. Is this an intention I’ll start to meet more fully? I’ve figured out where to keep my toothbrush, so the work is bound to go more smoothly now. Right?

When David and I get back to the car, I find my hat and mittens. They were in a bag in the back seat.

March 4, 2014March 4, 2014

A Map to Where?

A cup of moon hung above the Maverick writing studios last night, a faint outline of its whole self filling the crescent, a pale circle hovering. The Gihon River is a long, broad ribbon of snow between its banks, the only water bubbling through at the falls that drop past the old mill, steaming in the frigid morning air. Bushes along the road have long spikes of red branches, blushed with new sap, though spring seems far away here where I’m waking to morning temperatures well below zero. Vases hold twigs throughout the Red Mill building, the tips breaking out green, flowers enough for March.

An image strikes me, turns into language in my mind, I need to write it down. This has been happening to me for as long as I can remember. It’s why I’ve come to Vermont Studio Center for the month of March, to try to organize some of what has come out of this compulsion over the past seven years. I was here in the summer of 2007, putting together the manuscript of The Truth About Death. There are two more books stewing around in my brain and I’m here to try to make a shape that can hold the words that might be in those books, to figure out what those words should be.

Yesterday, my first full day here, I managed to stay off the internet most of the day and began reading and trying to organize the memoir I first started writing in 2008. I spent much of the morning talking myself out of abandoning the whole thing. Today I finished reading what I’ve written so far of the memoir and completed the notes I hope will help me map the book. But where will that map lead? And do I want to go there?

Today at lunch I talked to other writers and artists who are also just beginning their months here, and found lots of encouragement to keep muddling along, to give myself time to get used to giving myself time. I’ve given myself four weeks here to write. Four weeks! No wonder I’m terrified.

February 28, 2014

Visiting Poet

“I would like to invite you to be one of our guest poets here at The Center, where we have a lively visiting author program.” Here was the email I’d been expecting since a friend had told me she’d recommended me as a visiting poet. “We have hosted poets such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Martín Espada, Junot Díaz, Marilyn Nelson, Joy Harjo, and many more.” “Wow,” I thought, and “Yes,” I said.

The Care Center is an educational program in Holyoke, MA for pregnant and parenting teens who have dropped out of school. After studying the country’s most successful prep schools to learn what creates motivated and successful learners, The Care Center developed a curriculum that encompasses the arts, humanities and athletics and provides ongoing support for students. GED plus plus. The program works, with up to 85% of graduates going on to college.

A very popular component of the curriculum is the poetry program. “Care Center students soon discover that poetry is a kind of self-expression that can take many forms. The most important thing is that it express something authentic about the writer’s life, perspective, or perceptions.” The visiting poet is a popular part of that program and that was me on Tuesday.

The students had studied The Truth About Death before my visit and were ready, after my reading, with insightful and direct questions which led to the liveliest post reading discussion I’ve ever experienced. “You have a poem called ‘Drugs.’ What kind of drugs were you doing when you wrote this book?” “In the poem ‘Sex’ you walk miles out into the woods to get it on. Why would you do that outside?” “How did you chose the art for the cover?” “You said you were possessed by a demon while writing the book. What did the demon feel like?”

I answered as honestly and directly as their questions, and there was laughter and a lot of knowing nods. The straight forward story of grief, confusion, struggle and a yearning to stay connected to a meaningful life that The Truth About Death tells was a story these young women could understand. It was a powerful morning of connection, and a reminder to me of how effective poetry can be in keeping us grounded in what is most essential in life — truth, honesty, and a willingness to risk expressing whatever is inside. And it was great fun.

January 29, 2014

Small Stone #29

Sun sharpens my study, warming the room. I’ve photographed a page from my Monhegan Island journal, digitally colored and printed the page, and cut it into small squares and rectangles of fragmented text. This visual art project has been wearing a circular track in my mind for a couple of days and now is taking shape on my desk. Is this preparation for my upcoming month at Vermont Studio Center where I’ll be mapping the island journal/memoir I started five years, trying to shape it into a book? At this moment, cutting colored text into boxes to arrange is what I need to do. So I’m doing it.

January 26, 2014

Small Stones #24, 25, 26

Where do three days go? There were so many moments, in the three days of the Mindful Writing Challenge that I missed, when I did pay proper attention to something, and even did some writing of those small stones in my mind, but I never got any of them written outside my head. So have I failed the challenge? Does it count that I spent almost all of Friday working on poems, with so many files open I had to keep pulling them all up on my screen to figure out what poem to jump to next, and reading poems, and celebrating the online publication of two of my poems in the new issue of Petrichor Review? (Yes, please, do go check them out.)

Then yesterday David and I met our new New Year’s intention of hiking above tree line, or at least to a 180 degree view, at least once a month, by climbing Parker Mountain. Standing on the cliffs overlooking Bow Lake, with a wide view to the cloudy horizon of ocean to the east, was a moment that got lots of my proper attention. But then we got home and had phone calls to answer and food to prep for a dinner and wood to stack in the barn and then it was time to go out and then time to sleep.

This morning we skied to Flat Meadow Brook, which was running open and loud when I was there on Tuesday. After five days of mostly single digit temperatures, the brook is closing in, with only small pockets of water showing through some ruffle-edged holes in the layers of white, crusty ice.

Now it’s a quiet Sunday afternoon with sunshine streaming into my study and that low hum of stillness in the house again. Time to step back up to the Challenge.

January 23, 2014

Small Stone #23

Home alone, the low hum of no-one-else-around-silence layered over the quick breath of fire in the stove. A day of solitude, largely spent with language — writing an article, revising poems, discussing poems and poetry with a friend, reading, reading, reading, mostly poems — has quieted me. This is my center, a warm circle, the hearth.

January 21, 2014

Small Stone #21

The exposed skin on my face aches and stings and my fingers are numb. The trees look brittle and the branches I pass as I ski snap and break. Another storm moving up the coast bruises the southern sky a deep purple, dark beneath the sun’s low ball of hazy light. The woods are a different world than yesterday, when it was 20 degrees warmer, the snow was soft and wet, the sky blue between passing clouds, trees tossing off clumps of slush from the storm on Saturday. But Flat Meadow Brook is still open and I stop to listen to the tumble of water running, the music of motion through a landscape descending back into winter.

January 19, 2014

Small Stone #19

“Boong, boong, boong.” The timer signaling the end of the 10 minute meditation chimed across the room. I rubbed my hands together, then cupped them in front of my face, eyes closed, as the teacher instructed. “Drink in the energy,” she said. “Now open your eyes and look at your hands.” Late sunlight was filtering into the room through the thin, bare trees outside. I was surprised at how quickly the ten minutes had passed. I was surprised to find myself having just finished a mediation class. I was surprised at my ability to be still, if only for minutes at a time. I was delighted.

January 18, 2014

Small Stone #18

Don’t go looking for 1 – 17. I’m starting with 18 because that’s the day’s date, the date of the day I caught on to this year’s Mindful Writing Challenge.

I drove home from Albany today, across southern Vermont, just ahead of the snow that was moving up the Hudson Valley, smack into the snow off the coast. Again and again as I drove Rte. 7 and then Rte. 9, the horizon would be pulled up close with the steep slope of a field, the curve of the hill climbing to sky. Like skiing up from the bottom of the hay field behind the Johnson’s old farmhouse, a field of snow bleeding off into blue. I love that view.

January 17, 2014

Small Stones

Thanks again to A Woodland Rose, sister poet and blogger, for the idea of mindful writing through collecting a small stone each day. A small stone is “a short piece of writing (prose or poetry) that precisely captures a fully engaged moment.” Collecting a small stone for each day in January is promoted by Writing Our Way Home — the Mindful Writing Challenge 2014. A Woodland Rose is sharing her small stones on her blog, and while reading her blog this afternoon I remembered that I did this in 2012 (prompted by her blog). It worked for me, as most assignments do. Give me a context to focus my writing, and I’ll focus.

The instructions are simple. 1. Pay proper attention to one thing every day during January. 2. Write it down.

I know we’re well into January, but it’s January 17, and 17 is my favorite number, so it seems to me like an auspicious day to start. So I’m starting.

My small stone for today: standing in one of the spectacular stairwells in the New York State Capital Building this afternoon, reveling in the artistic grace of the extraordinary architecture and grand space.