Category Archives: Nancy Peacock

Proof of Seriousness?

11 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by in Attention, creating, Nancy Peacock, Observation, Process, Working, Writing Workshops

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For years I wrote while holding down some sort of job that had nothing to do with writing. The jobs were not glamorous. House cleaning, bartending, carpentry, costumer, clerk in a grocery store, cocktail waitress. Have I mentioned house cleaning? I held that job off and on for fifteen years.

While working these jobs, I occasionally carved out time and finances to attend a writer’s conference. I always got something out of the conferences. I always picked up some new clue to the craft of writing, or some new way of looking at what I did. I made friends and enjoyed being around other writers. But attending conferences can be an expensive proposition. It takes time away from earning an income, and it takes money to attend. I wasn’t able to do it often.

Recently I was alarmed when I heard some advice being dispensed to young writers to attend lots of conferences and list these when submitting a piece for publication. The purpose of this was to prove to an agent or publisher that one is serious about writing.

Attending conferences is a wonderful thing to do, but frankly it proves nothing except that you have somehow found the time and resources to attend a conference. To gauge a list of conferences as proof of seriousness about writing is simply to value writers with money over writers without money. I’m not sure agents or a publishers actually use that gauge. Somehow I doubt it. I imagine agents and publishers gauge a writer’s proof of seriousness by their writing, and their willingness to work.

But perhaps I’m wrong.

Agents and publishers are bombarded every day with manuscripts from writers of every ilk. There are some who could be searching for a simple way to winnow the pile. Perhaps there are one or two (or more) who find a list of conferences attached to a manuscript as reason to read on, and a manuscript lacking such a list as a reason to not read on.

If so, this is a sad thing for literature. Work done outside of the publishing world and the academic world can only enrich a piece of writing.

Listing one’s crappy jobs (in my own list I left out milker on a dairy farm, assistant drum maker, and telephone surveyer) is probably no way to endear yourself to a publisher or agent. Yet, I value my crappy jobs as experiences that have helped me a great deal with my writing, with getting a scene right, or stepping into the mind and body of a character. I know what it is to stand on my feet eight hours a day. I know how small-minded some bosses can be. I know what it’s like to get kicked by a cow and smacked with its shit-encrusted tail. I can write about these things. The back aches, the frustrations, the quickness developed when that mean cow is in your stall. These things are not trivial. They’re important to fiction.

And they’re important to the world too. I stand by my belief that people who do blue-collar work are no less intelligent than people who don’t. This also helps with writing fiction. A basic respect for all people means a basic respect for all characters.

Writing benefits from engagement with the world. Travel is good, and like the writer’s conferences, it’s highly recommended as a way to expand one’s mind. But work can also expand one’s mind. Besides it being a way to pay our bills, it can also be a way to reach out to the world that surrounds us. And reaching out to the world that surrounds us, the non-writing world, is proof of seriousness. In my book, so to speak.

The Chase

30 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by in Alchemy of writing, Attention, creating, creativity, ideas, Nancy Peacock, Process, prompt writing, ritual, slowing down, Writer's journey

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Twice a week I teach a prompt writing class. We write to a prompt, provided by me, without editing, thinking, or worrying. The rules are: Let it rip. This past week the prompt was: Running out of something. Here’s what I wrote.

 

This morning, I felt as though I was running out of fresh ideas for prompts. I sat at my desk and looked out the window and said out loud, “I know you’re out there.” The leaves rustled in the breeze showing their white undersides. It felt like a taunt. A tease. “You’re looking too hard,” the leaves said. “You want too much. Your head is too filled.”

I know. I know. I know.

But it doesn’t change the fact that I sometimes feel I am running out of ideas for prompts. And it doesn’t change the fact that I believe there are a million ideas surrounding me that I’m just not capturing. They are like little fairies in the woods. Lithe and free and quick and laughing at the lumbering writer who tries to catch them. They call out, “Here we are. Here we are. Here we are,” and then vanish, a puff of smoke left behind. An idea that could have been mine, but instead remains its own.

I wonder if I shouldn’t go to a mall. Not that there is a store where I can purchase ideas, but that it might help to expose myself to the mass of humanity. Perhaps ideas among people are less illusive. Less playful and teasing. In the mall I might see a mother, harried and stressed, tugging a child behind her like a suitcase – and this might trigger an idea for a prompt, or a story. I might overhear a man tell someone on the other end of his cell phone that he is in a meeting. “Just taking a break,” he adds, realizing his friend might overhear the muzak, the clang of cash registers, the sloosh of Coca-cola descending over a cup of ice.

I might sit in a mall and capture the rhythms of conversation in my notebook. I might find ideas jumping onto the page instead of hiding on the undersides of leaves among the eggs of insects.

The woods are my home. There, a deep peacefulness settles over me. The woods make my mind go cottony like a cloud. Thoughts are less important. They flit through and don’t land. They are like the waterbugs across the surface of the pond. Glittering in the sunlight they skim across the surface before being eaten by turtles and fish. They do no mind being turtle food, or fish food, or eventually fertilizer dropped by a heron lifting off from the branch of a tree. They are afraid of nothing. They are not even afraid to be my ideas, the ones we use for prompts to write about on Friday mornings. But ooh – they do love a chase.

Weaving a Blue Horse

01 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by in Attention, creating, Fiction, Guidance, Nancy Peacock, Process, Revision, Story, Working

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This weekend I tried to weave an image of a horse on my small tapestry lap loom. It had been a long time since I’d tried to shape a horse with yarn across tightly stretched warp, and it wasn’t coming easily. I unwove my horse three times.

Unweaving is simply undoing what you’ve done. Instead of going over and under the warp threads to build, you go over and under to take down what’s there. It’s not unpleasant. It’s the same motion as weaving. But no matter what I did, my horse kept looking like a rabbit. I found the rabbit imagery interesting and thought I might try a leaping bunny at some point, but what I wanted was a horse. A blue horse.

Tapestry weaving is simple. Warp and weft, and only two sheds (the space opened between the warps). But it can get frustrating when your image does not progress after having woven and unwoven and woven again so many times. Writing stories can also be frustrating. To use a weaving metaphor, you need to weave a lot of plot and character and setting and what-all-else threads into the story. In weaving this is called the weft. In tapestry weaving it creates what you can see, and the warp, the strings held tight on the loom, become the invisible foundation. In writing warp and weft are the same, both the picture (reader’s experience) you’re building and the foundation of the picture you’re building.

One thing I’ve noticed in both writing and in weaving tapestry is that there is a lot of forgiveness in the medium. You really can fix things that come out wrong. You can unweave, revise, rewrite, patch, or splice in a new warp thread. A lot of beginning artists don’t know this. They look at a finished tapestry or read a published book and feel awed by it, as well they should. It’s important though to realize that things rarely come out perfectly in the beginning.

I could say that the miracle in making art is that sometimes things do come out perfectly the first time around, but I think there are deeper miracles.  Three to be exact, three miraculous gifts every artist is given, a sort of holy trinity of the creative process. This holy trinity is something on which you can build your creative life.

Miracle #1 – We get second, third, fourth, fifth, and endless chances to make it right.

Miracle #2 – What we create will never look like our original vision, and we should rejoice in this.

Miracle #3 –  Often our “mistakes” end up not being mistakes at all. “Mistakes” can be our guides, not guides that tell us what not to do, but guides that show us what we did not know we could do. A “mistake” can send a writer or artist down a path they’d not consciously set out on, but that becomes the backbone of their creation. (A reason for rejoicing in both miracle numbers 1 and 2)

That blue horse I was weaving? After unweaving it for the third time, I set my loom on the couch and went about my day. Each time I walked by I looked at it. I squinted my eyes. I took the long view. I related to it. And I studied the two weavings I’d done previously that had horses in them. I looked closely. How did I do that? I really couldn’t remember exactly, but that night, while watching TV I took my loom back into my lap and I wove a horse. He’s not perfect, but I’ve got some ideas on how to give him a nip and a tuck to make him prettier.

The process for weaving my blue horse was similar to my process for writing. Sometimes I have to back away before I can go forward. Sometimes I need just a nip and a tuck to fix something. Sometimes I need a big overhaul. Sometimes I want a horse but it really should be a bunny. I think if my weaving had come out bunny-like a fourth time I would have accepted it as a bunny, and it would have been fine. As it happened, I did finally end up with a horse.

Every time though, no matter how I feel about it, my art was guiding me. Your art will guide you, too. Trust that.

A Poet and a Novelist

17 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Fiction, Mimi Herman, Nancy Peacock, Poetry, Writing Advice, Writing Workshops

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Here’s your chance to see two laureates in one post – 2017 Piedmont Laureate Mimi Herman, and 2018 Piedmont Laureate Nancy Peacock– in Mimi’s final post and Nancy’s first.

Welcome Nancy! We’re all wishing you a fabulous year of sharing your gifts with the writers and readers of the Piedmont.

How would describe yourself?

Mimi Herman: I’m a writer who brings out the writer in others, an inventor of ways for people to learn, and someone who can’t resist finding useful solutions to problems.

Nancy Peacock: When I think of how to describe myself, pairs of words come to mind. Reverent and irreverent. Serious and funny. A hard worker and lazy. I don’t see these paired words as opposite of each other. Irreverence is bred of knowing what to be reverent about. Humor is spawned by seriousness. A writer must be a hard worker, and, in order to avoid burnout, enjoy a fair amount of “moodling” time as Brenda Uhland called it in If You Want to Write.

What matters to you in your own writing?

Mimi Herman: I want my writing to be as evocative and engaging as possible – and to be of use to readers. I hope my writing will help see people through difficult times and give them ways to understand the world in which we live. I would love for people to say, “That’s how I’ve always felt, but I’ve never been able to say it.”

Nancy Peacock: Telling a story that wants to be told. Working with a character in a way that honors his or her voice, and his or her needs. This means that with each draft, I, the author, disappear more and more, and give over to the character.

How do you think poetry and fiction are connected?

Mimi Herman: I’ve always thought that poetry and novels – both of which I write – are somehow linked. Maybe poetry is condensed, freeze-dried fiction; maybe novels are what happen when you add the water of extended time to poems. In both, paying attention to how the world works is essential.

Nancy Peacock: When I was younger I wanted to be a poet. Not having any real knowledge of what it means to make a living or pay rent, I imagined what I thought would be a poet’s life: living in a big yellow house with my loving partner and a cat. Not having a job. Spending every day, writing and then taking care of cozy domestic things, like baking bread (which in my imagination was always warm, fresh out of the oven, and the dishes were cleaned), producing wonderful meals (ditto the appearance of food and absence of clean up) shared with a plethora of brilliant friends (never mind that I was very shy and had only a few friends). As I matured, I maintained this fantasy but transferred it to writing novels. And as I matured even more, I recognized that it would never pan out this way (exactly), and that this is okay. Good even.

While my desire to write poetry may have been more driven by fantasy than anything else, I did write poems. I like poetry for its succinctness and punch. I think my early efforts as a writer of poems helped me a great deal in learning to say a lot with only a few words, and in being precise in my use of words when telling a story. It also helped me learn to notice many small things in life that now feed my fiction. Poetry helped me appreciate the world I live in. This is a practice I think is very important to anyone who wants to write anything.

What are some ways you tempt people to become writers?

Mimi Herman: I like to get people thinking about the experiences and ideas that matter to them, and help them find the words to describe these things. We all share our five senses. When these are translated into images through writing, the words come alive on the page.

Sometimes, when people are struggling to write anything at all, I ask them to tell me what they want to say. Then I write it down for them until they’re speaking too quickly for me to write—at which point I hand them the paper and pencil and tell them to keep going. This ends up being pretty much irresistible for even the people who consider themselves complete non-writers.

Nancy Peacock: Writing from prompts in a group is one of my favorite things to do. I offer a free prompts class the second Saturday (10 to 12) of every month at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill. I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, starting at the old Borders Bookshop, and migrating around different meeting places until the group landed such a great home in Flyleaf Books. I witness a lot of magic in this process of writing from prompts in groups. It’s wonderful to sit with a group of people telling stories. How often do we get to create something and immediately share it, without criticism? This temptation I offer is not so much about “becoming a writer” as it is about tapping into the subconscious and finding unknown stories inside, which we all have. It’s a lot of fun. Y’all come and join in.

What do you do when you can’t write?

Mimi Herman: I read. What I really like to do is to read someone else’s poetry until I get interested – then use the energy and fascination evoked by another writer to launch into my own poems.

Nancy Peacock: For me writing is a little dance. I have to make myself walk across the room and ask the partner I think I’m interested in to dance with me. That’s the going forward part, the making myself sit down at the desk even when I don’t know what I’m doing, or have a full plot or character in mind. Once the partner and I get out on the dance floor, I sometimes find that this person didn’t want to dance with me after all, in which case I drop the project. Or sometimes I find that this person isn’t so sure about me, in which case I try to prove my interest in her by showing up every day. Sometimes though the partner and I enter into a difficult relationship where we’re stepping on each other’s toes. When that happens, I back off from that particular material. Maybe it will hold something for me at some future date, and maybe it won’t. I move on. I ask someone else to dance. If this difficulty continues with other characters and projects, I know it’s time to just take a break from writing. I read. I take walks. I weave (I have a small tapestry loom). I clean the house (or plan to). I try to replenish the well by just being. I’m happiest when I have a writing project though, and feel a little bereft during this time of not writing. That’s the hardest part.

How can writing help people through challenges – both internal and external?

Mimi Herman: One of my favorite phrases is E. M. Forster’s “How can I know what I mean until I see what I say?” I think when we’re struggling with something, the process of writing it out helps us understand it – and perhaps even solve it.

Nancy Peacock: Writing in my journal always helps my state of mind, and helps me process what is going on around me. My journal is the place where I get to have an uncensored voice. If I’m grumpy or pressed for time, it helps to just write that I’m feeling grumpy and pressed for time. It allows it to be, and I don’t feel like I’m faced with fighting against it. The page holds my grumpiness and busyness for me, and allows me to move through it. Yet it remains a place that will also hold the spaciousness needed for art. Writing in my journal has been a way for me to learn to trust my own voice, and trust my own thoughts. I know artists in other mediums who also keep journals as a way of working through the daily onslaught of events and energy, and as a way to work out thoughts and insights on particular pieces of art they are producing.

And then there’s reading. Reading is so important. Stories help us become more empathetic to other people. Period. This is the most important life skill you can ever have, and you can hone it by reading fiction.

Why do we need laureates?

Mimi Herman: I think the job of a laureate is to open a door for writing and invite the community we represent to the party. We are ambassadors, helping people not only understand the country of poetry and prose, but inviting them to visit and even become citizens. Citizenship in the country of writing is open to anyone who has something to express. All are welcome.

Nancy Peacock: I think we need laureates now more than ever, to remind people of the written word and of storytelling, and to celebrate the work that has come before us, the work that writers do now, and the work that is not yet written. We need laureates to encourage people to read books other than those on the bestseller lists, and books that are not written by celebrities or about celebrities. Novels and stories reach deep into the human condition, the human experience and human nature that we all share. A laureate’s role is to spread this magic about as widely as possible. We need that.