Category Archives: Working

In Praise of Teachers

15 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in art, communication, confidence, creating, growing up, Observation, Process, self, teachers, Uncategorized, Working

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This is a talk I gave at a fundraising dinner for the Artists in the Schools Program sponsored by the United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County. It’s about the teacher I had in fourth grade who turned my life around, and showed me that there was something to become that appealed to me. After the talk, a woman in the audience, a teacher who has had visiting artists in her classroom said that she a change in some of her children after the artists’ visits. She could see them light up, see new possibilities, and become more engaged. Art matters! It matters to children, but it matters to adults too. It matters more than ever now because we’ve all go to see new paths. Here’s my talk:

 

I was a withdrawn child. I was shy. I was awkward. I felt dumb. I couldn’t pass tests. And I am pretty sure that I tested out as having a low IQ. The reason I believe this is because when that first IQ test with the little squares to fill in arrived in my life, probably around first grade, our teacher told us we could not pass or fail, and a test one could not pass or fail did not seem very serious to me, so I filled in the squares to make patterns. And once I was committed to it, I kept it up. So, I don’t know how I tested out. I was probably brilliant one year and off the charts in the other direction the next.

I know though that I liked patterns. I noticed patterns. I noticed shadows and sunlight and tree bark and rhythm. But noticing patterns did not help me in school. It has however helped me with art. And I found this out in fourth grade when I met my new teacher. Her name was Mrs. Semonche.

On the first day, she wrote her name across the board in beautiful handwriting, in a straight line, underlined and she said, “Not Mrs. See-man-chee. Not Mrs. Comanche. Mrs. Semonche.” I was extremely impressed with her, not just because she headed off the butchering of her name right away, but because she was young and beautiful. She was slim, wore A-line skirts, stocking and heels, had fake eyelashes that I didn’t know were fake at the time, and reminded me of Jackie Kennedy, our first lady at the time. In short I could tell that Mrs. Semonche was fresh and new. She hadn’t been in the trenches long. She was not jaded and she had a lot of ideas about how to teach us, she was eager to try them out, and she was a big fan of the arts

During this one year of my life, we studied art. We studied every kind of art Mrs. Semonche could fit into our schedule. We sculpted, we drew, we collected color pictures of famous paintings, we learned about the Impressionists, the Modernists, Abstract Art, Surrealism. We’d never seen anything like Salvador Dali.

We also had a unit in theater. We put on a play: A Midsummer’s Night Dream by William Shakespeare. We were in fourth grade. We made the costumes. We created the set. We memorized the lines. Well, some kids memorized lines. I wanted nothing to do with a speaking part, so I signed up to be one of the fairies with my best friend Ellen. Our job was to drift across the stage periodically wearing some great filmy dresses. It seemed enough to me, but not to Mrs. Semonche. She needed an understudy for the main female role Titania, and there was no one left to do it but me, so Mrs. Semonche, in the way that grown ups do, coerced me into accepting the understudy role. But like the IQ test, I didn’t take it very seriously, and I never learned the lines.

One day Sally Hill, the girl whose role I was supposed to understudy was not in class on a day of performance. All morning long kids were hitting me on the arm and saying, “You’re going to have to play Titania. You’re going to have to play Titania.” And I nodded dumbly and mutely. I didn’t know any part of those lines. At what point I would have confessed this, I don’t know, because Sally Hill finally showed up, and I did not have to shame myself. I got away with it.

Mrs. Semonche was right that I needed to learn to speak up, but she was also wrong. I needed to find my own way to speak up. I needed something quieter. And I found it in the next art unit Mrs. Semonche taught called Creative Writing.

What a breath of fresh air Creative Writing was. I started receiving checkmarks on my papers. Nice detail, Mrs. Semonche wrote across my page, the part where I wrote about the smell of grass, the part where I wrote about the pattern of leaves in the sunlight on the ground, the part where I wrote about the filmy curtains in an old hotel room. Finally my penchant for noticing pattern was paying off. I started writing. I started seriously writing. Outside of school, I deconstructed movies I saw on TV and wrote them into stories, which is plagiarism, but I had no intention of publishing them, so really it was study. In the same way art students learn about composition by copying pieces hanging in museums, I was learning about plot and characterization and dialogue at a very young age.

Until Mrs. Semonche entered my life I had not known that writing and storytelling could be things, were things, adults did. I did not know I had a talent for anything. Stories were magic to me, and remain magic, but that magic was legitimized by Mrs. Semonche.

I took Creative Writing as an elective throughout public school. I wrote my first novel in 11th grade. I’ve written six books since then and published four. I’ve learned something from every single one of them. I learn something every day about writing and how to be an artist. It’s a daily education that began for me in fourth grade when I was lucky enough to have Mrs. Semonche as my teacher.

In 2012 I attended my fortieth high school reunion. I’d not really been aware of it at the time, but I went to school with the same batch of kids from first grade through 12th. When asked what teachers we might invite to our reunion, we named Mrs. Semonche. She only taught that one year. In talking to my classmates, I learned that she’d made a difference in their lives too. The arts, they said. She introduced me to sculpting. To painting. To writing. To acting. To a new way of seeing the world. To knowing I was smart. I learned I had a talent. I began exploring. I started reading. I visited museums. She expanded my world. That introduction to the arts was a lifeline. I heard this again and again.

Mrs. Semonche, that one teacher who celebrated the arts and taught her only fourth grade class everything she knew, did attend our class reunion. She had cancer at the time, although none of us knew it. We surrounded her and hugged her and told her what a huge difference she’d made in our lives. Many of us had found a niche because of her. We began to understand ourselves as important and worthy. We started expressing ourselves, and we kept it up through the sixties, through the turmoil of our own roiling hormones, through good decisions and bad ones, she gave us a tool to use for the rest of our lives.

This is what the arts do. They give a feeling of belonging, of expression, of value, of community, of humanity. The arts make us kinder, and we need that. The arts give is different points of view and we need that too. The arts give us empathy and self worth and self trust, and we need all of that. When you support the arts you support much more than that one individual who created something. Your support fingers out into places you can never know about.

I teach a free class at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill. I’ve been teaching this free class for 15 years. Sometimes someone emails me and says, “Remember that story I started in your class. Well I finished it, and it’s going to be published.” Just yesterday a student, Don Basnight, emailed to tell me he’s been accepted into The Monti in Durham and to say thank you. And I feel so blessed when this happens. My own career may or may not be going well, but art is never about one person. Art is always about relationship. It is about how we can help each other. Artists are often seen as selfish, but we’re not. We just have different sets of priorities.

Mrs. Semonche passed away a few years ago. She’s someone I will never forget, and although I never fessed up to her about not knowing my lines as the understudy to Titania, I am sure she is aware of this now, and forgives me and is probably having a good laugh too.

So I want to thank you for caring about the arts, for supporting the arts. You never know who you’re touching, and that spread of goodness, even without knowing its exact trajectory, is its own reward. I hope you put your trust in that, because it’s a solid place to stand as a human being. The most stable of all.

Thank you.

Mute

17 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in art, continuing, creating, creativity, emotional safety, frustration, heart, Process, safety, self, slowing down, stability, stress, Uncategorized, Working

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How do I carry on when I feel mute?

How do I create art and to whom do I offer it?

Does art even matter anymore?

The answers are:

How do I carry on when I feel mute? I don’t know. I just do.

How do I create art and to whom do I offer it? I don’t know. I just do.

Does art even matter anymore? Yes.

The truth is, even though it seems the world is escalating and spinning out of control, even though I feel closer to the brink of street fighting and/or ecological destruction than I ever have before in my lifetime, even though I know more about my own and other’s suffering than I knew before, these have always been the answers to these particular questions.

Yes, art matters.

You don’t know how you make art or whom to offer it to, but you just do it anyway.

You don’t know how you’ll carry on, but you just do.

Stay as grounded as possible. Notice nature. Make art. Find the things and people that will help you not despair, because despair is not an option. The world needs you and your voice, and this has always been true. And will always be true. And on this you can count. This is truth. Art is a steady and stable place to stand. Artists are often known for being flaky and unstable. The truth is, we are very stable. Because we have to be.

 

 

Hurricane

12 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by in hurricanes, natural world, Publication, safety, slowing down, stress, Uncategorized, Working

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Hurricane Florence is bearing down on North Carolina. If you’re reading this you’re likely in the path of it, or at least of a part of it. We all know the drill – get food and water, gas up the car, tighten down the hatches, get ice. It sounds easy when listed like that, but it’s not. There are lines at the grocery stores and the shelves are empty, lines at the gas pump and people cutting in front of you, or bags over the pump handles, the freezer is void of bags of ice, your mind is constantly scanning for what else needs to be done.

Is the patio umbrella down? Should it be brought in? Do we need to take down the porch swing? Is there something I’ve forgotten? Something I’ve forgotten? Something I’ve forgotten? The echo goes on until it’s over. The question can never really be answered.

Twenty-two years ago Hurricane Fran hit NC and came inland. I lived in a cheap apartment in Chapel Hill in an area that was prone to flooding. My neighbors in one apartment moved out in a rush that very night, taking everything they had with them and not cleaning the apartment and digging up the irises they’d planted and taking the bulbs. I made sure I had plenty of food and cat food and candles. I put the legs of my furniture in plastic cups and hoped that if my apartment flooded it wouldn’t rise above the rims.

The hurricane came at night. Neither I nor my cat could sleep. I stood at a window (which was pretty stupid) and watched the trees whip around against the streetlights. Then the electricity went out and everything outside was dark and all I could hear was the wind. Around 2:00 a.m. there was a knock on my door. It was my neighbor Dawn. Water was coming into her apartment. We decided to vacate and see if we could stay in another friend’s place, up the hill from us. But first Dawn needed to move her car. Water was creeping into the lower parking lot. I called my friend and got the wrong number and woke someone up. I put my cat on the refrigerator and told her she could jump up there if need be (as if she needed my permission) and we walked up the hill with our flashlights to Tift’s place. Tift wasn’t home. We walked back and knocked on the second story apartment of another friend, and he said we could stay there through the night. Unbeknownst to Dawn and me there were fallen live wires all over the place during this walk. The wind had died down but it was still raining. We were lucky. It was pure dumb luck. The best kind. Sometimes I think the only kind.

The next day we returned to our apartments to assess the damage. Only a little water in Dawn’s. None in mine. My cat was fine and happy to be let out. The sky was clear. The air smelled like pine from so many snapped trees. The ground was covered in green needles and green leaves.

My first novel was published two weeks later. In the days preceding this event I was living without electricity. One day a neighbor came by to tell me there was a truck with free ice at University Mall. I got in my car and managed to snag a five-pound bag. I made rice and beans for a group of neighbors and gave candles to others. I got fired from a cleaning job because I’d mouthed off when my client complained about Duke Power taking three days to get their electricity back on. I’d said, “It’s an infrastructure. There are crews from other states up here helping us out. Maybe you haven’t noticed but there was a hurricane.”

There’s no moral to this story unless you want to read it as a cautionary tale not to mouth off to a client. But the real point is this – be patient with people. We’re all stressed out. Be patient with yourself too. After going out into the world of commerce, with varying degrees of success and failure, to get ice and gas and another cooler and butane canisters for the little one burner stove I bought after Fran, I forgot to put water in a pot in which I was steaming vegetables last night. I burned the pot. I berated myself for doing this. I don’t usually make such mistakes. “That was stupid,” I said to my husband.

“Yes,” he answered, “but you did a whole lot of smart stuff earlier.”

That was nice.

In the store where I bought the extra cooler, I thanked the clerk and said, “I’ll see you on the other side,” right when he said the same exact thing to me. We smiled and laughed.

Be safe. Be wise. Be patient. I’ll see you on the other side.

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.

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.

How Not to Write a Novel

04 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by in Attention, Process, Publication, Working

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The title says it all. I could just leave this space blank. The way to not write a novel is to not write. Or the way to not write a novel is to start and then stop writing. The way to not write a novel is to not dedicate yourself to it, to not develop the habit of writing, to expect it to be perfect first time around, beginning to end. If you get that far.

For me the way to not write a novel also includes talking about it. I don’t talk about my specific projects except to other writers, and even then I am selective. I tried once talking about a work-in-progess. I wanted to seem as though I was confident, and knew what I was doing with this novel, so I spoke about it publicly. I gave a brief summary that didn’t reveal very much. I mentioned the setting. I said the characters’ names. They didn’t like it. That’s all I can say. The story left me. It did not want to be paraded about. It wanted a private, intimate relationship with me. It wanted a partnership. It was not ready for relationship with anyone else. That’s what publication is for.

I know all this makes me sound like a nutcase. That’s okay. I am a bit of a nutcase. I believe in things we don’t know. I believe in working intuitively. It’s not always comfortable, and it doesn’t give me confidence, but that’s the point. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just doing it. It’s very hard to understand that for many writers, it’s a blind grope into a story. It’s stepping off a cliff. Sometimes we are caught by our characters, and sometimes we are allowed to crash to the bottom of story the canyon. But that’s the process. Always there’s a point of stepping out into the unknown, be it the stage of plotting a novel, if plotting’s your thing, or the stage of writing it for someone like me, who flies by the seat of her pants. Novels are unknown until they are written. And even then, throughout the process, they reveal themselves slowly, sometimes reluctantly. You have to keep showing up. You have to be committed.

 

It’s easy to not write a novel.