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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781608682966 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New World Library |
| Publication date: | 03/24/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 802 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Wild Women, Wild Voices
Writing From Your Authentic Wildness
By Judy Reeves
New World Library
Copyright © 2015 Judy ReevesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60868-296-6
CHAPTER 1
MAPS FOR THE JOURNEY
Once upon a time ...
Long ago and far away ...
In a land that never was and a time that could never be ...
I remember ...
Ever since human beings invented language, these words, or words like them, have signaled the approach of a story. We have always been story-telling creatures. From the beginning, myths, folktales, and fairy tales have told of human flaws and frailties, of meeting and overcoming threats and challenges, and of human transformation and redemption. You and I tell stories of our daily lives. We can't help ourselves. We meet a friend in the grocery store and stand beside the bananas for fifteen minutes, telling stories. Our children come home from school and say, "Guess what happened?" Ask someone, "How was your day?" and prepare to settle in for a tale.
We tell stories to give shape to experiences, to entertain, to process, to grieve, to heal, and to share our perspective on the world. Our stories reside in place, in things, in relationships and events. And, oh, the stories in our families ... "The fact is that anybody who has survived childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days," Flannery O'Connor tells us.
By story, I mean a narrative rather than a particular structure or format. Telling stories is how we relate a memory and how we identify ourselves. A story can be a few paragraphs describing an incident or experience, it can be the description of a place, or it can be a series of dialogue exchanges. A story can even be a grocery list. It can be six words or six hundred words or six times six hundred words: whatever it takes. One word following another and the one after that until we reach The End.
Responding to the call of your wild voice signals a departure, if even for a brief time, from your ordinary world and an entrance into the world where your wildish nature resides. And like the protagonist in the classic hero's journey who, after many challenges, receives a great gift that he brings home to share with the world, you can return with a gift, too. Your gift will be the stories you discover and relate in your creative, ferocious, and authentic wild voice. How you choose to share your gift — writing for yourself, writing for your friends and family, writing for a wider audience through publication — is up to you. I believe that the world longs for each of us to use our creative gifts, whatever they may be and however they want to be expressed.
You Are Here: Beginning the Journey
During the Wild Women writing workshops, we meet once a week, working our way through the sections of this book. You may want to follow the same schedule — reading the text, responding to the questions, and completing some of the writing explorations to create your own self-guided weekly workshop. You may find, as have others, the questions and explorations so compelling that you'll want to take time to respond to all of them. Though you can certainly do this work alone, you might like to invite other women to join you. (A guide on forming your own Wild Women, Wild Voices group can be found in the appendix.) As I've experienced countless times, and maybe you have, too, some powerful mojo happens when women join together to do the deep work of the soul.
Whichever way you choose — a solitary journey or traveling in a pack — you will need a map for the journey. Following are some suggestions that will guide you along the way.
Claim Your Wild Nature
Claiming your wild nature as you set out on the journey is the first step. By saying, "Yes!" to this inner calling, you give voice to your intention, confirming your commitment to your Self. However you make this claim — an affirmation that you say upon waking and that you repeat throughout the day, a ringtone on your phone that serves as a call to prayer, a love note to your wildish self stuck in your wallet — these small, personal expressions will act as declarations of your claim and enable you to take the next step in your journey. So write those two words, wild and woman, next to each other on a sticky note on your bathroom mirror or write them in a bold shade of lipstick, and repeat them to yourself each morning as you look in the mirror. Recognize and acknowledge the natural wildness in you and your voice, give a wink or a growl, and get on with it.
Set Aside Time
Right about now you may be thinking, "Time? That's what I have least of." But what I've seen happen for more than a few who make the commitment is that once we begin mining our memories; writing our stories; and giving ourselves over to what our minds, bodies, and spirits respond to, as if by magic more time becomes available. Our priorities shift and we find ourselves saying no to distractions that aren't as rich or fulfilling and yes to ourselves and our journey.
Experience shows that we're more likely to keep a date with ourselves if we note the time in a calendar or datebook, especially until we can build a practice that comes as naturally as taking a shower and is as rewarding as having a massage. Telling a supportive friend, especially a friend who will hold you accountable, maybe someone who is taking this journey with you, of your commitment can also help you honor your intention.
Because I mostly teach in the evening, I reserve first thing in the morning for my daily writing practice. When I had a day job that started early in the morning, I'd often take time during my lunch hour and get away from the office. Sometimes I'd camp out in my car with my notebook and pen for ten or twenty minutes of writing solitude. Using your afternoon coffee break, arising an hour earlier in the morning, taking an hour or so away from usual evening distractions: it doesn't matter when you do the work, only that you do it.
Record Your Journey Notes
I have been a journal keeper for as long as I can remember. Once I learned the basics of writing practice, from Natalie Goldberg's seminal book Writing Down the Bones, I have been a proponent and a disciple, first doing my own daily writing, then leading writing practice groups, and eventually publishing A Writer's Book of Days, based on my experiences as a regular practitioner. More than two decades later, I still write daily in my journal and do writing practice regularly.
In this book I'm calling this daily practice Journey Notes. Writing our observations, reflections, and stories helps us to clarify our thoughts and discover what matters to us. What shows up on the page can reveal understandings about our lives and ourselves that we might never gain otherwise. So often I've heard participants in my writing groups say, when reading back something they've written, "I haven't thought of that in years" or "I've never had that memory before" or "I didn't realize how important that was to me."
Daily writing practice encourages and nurtures wild voice. This is the voice that will come naturally when you give yourself over to the writing, without thought to structure, rules, or audience.
A daily writing practice has many other benefits as well. Writing can put words to feelings and allow us to write through them to the other side. It can be very cathartic. Writing is also a doorway to memories, bringing them into sharper view when we name the details and recall small occasions and incidents.
In her essay "The Site of Memory" Toni Morrison writes about the Mississippi River being straightened in places to make room for houses and livable acreage. "Occasionally the river floods in these places ... but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory — what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our 'flooding.'"
Writing our Journey Notes, we can ask questions and find the answers. Questions, after all, are what lead us into the deeper and often secret places of our inner knowing.
Give your wild voice free and open range as you write. Sometimes, when we're able to get our busy minds out of the way, this daily writing allows us to "take dictation." That is, we write in a language that comes directly from our intuitive knowing — the voice of our wiser self. It is our soul-voice, telling us truths; it is wild voice. In my writing groups, women often shake their heads and say in a voice filled with wonder, "I don't know where that came from." But I know. "It came from you," I tell them.
Thoughts, memories, bits and pieces of story, lines of what might become a poem, fragments of what could have been a dream, bones of something half-known and mostly intuited: all these go into your Journey Notes. Open up. Set the page on fire with your words, or soothe your mad imaginings with the language of your heart. Let your breathing create a rhythm for your hand, and let your hand follow your heart to places wide and deep and free flowing.
Whether you decide on a time-bound or a page-bound practice (fifteen or twenty minutes, two or three pages), I recommend writing by hand, and I'm not the only one. Julia Cameron suggests this as well: "Even the shape of my writing tells me the shape and clarity of my thoughts," she writes. And in an interview with the Paris Review, Pablo Neruda said, "The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again." Though we may not be writing poetry, writing by hand creates an intimacy with our whole being. It connects us to our senses, our emotions, our bodies, and our breath and allows us access to our deepest knowing.
You don't have to be a "writer" to experience the benefits of this daily practice. Simply putting words on the page, one at a time, without judgment or critique, will coax your wild voice to speak. In our writing practice groups we say, "Don't judge, compare, or analyze the writing, just write." Don't worry about the rules, grammar, or anything else, and don't go back and read what you've written until you're done. Don't worry if you sometimes can't read your own writing. Don't worry that what you thought you were going to write about isn't what appears on the page. What shows up is the story that wanted to be written — who can say why? Don't worry about anything. Embrace the surprises.
Always the teacher, I've included writing tips along the way, and suggestions for nurturing your wild voice. Some of these may be style guidelines you already know, others may help you access details or relate something in a way you haven't considered before. My hope is that these ideas will guide your writing toward more clarity, aliveness, and depth.
Any kind of book — a blank book, a bound journal, or a spiral-bound notebook (do you want to carry yours around in your bag or pocket?) will serve for your Journey Notes. It can be plain or fancy, store bought or homemade, an artist's sketchbook, or blue-lined paper. Maybe you want to use paper that's preprinted or hand decorated with images that inspire and influence your writing. Participants in the Wild Women writing workshops often create an original cover for their notebooks. While some might advise against using expensive journals or hand-crafted paper, saying that all the fancy might inhibit the writing, I say go with what inspires the pen to move and the words to flow. Go with what feels most authentic to you.
Leave Waymarks along the Trail
We women often set aside our alone time to perform the tasks associated with our many and varied roles, yet this aloneness is the very thing we need in order to hush the din of the world enough to hear our soul-voice.
Growing up in a family of four sisters, I often heard my mother plead: "If I could just get a little peace and quiet ..." (She also often said, "You girls are driving me crazy!") But my mother, like so many women of her generation, was never able to find the peace and quiet that comes with alone time, and when the last of us sisters finally left home, she was so steeped in domesticity, so timid of anything beyond the realm that had defined her for so long, that she never attempted to step outside its boundaries. Still, in spite of all outward appearances, I don't doubt for a moment that Wild Woman lived inside my mother, just as it does in every woman. As a child, I crawled under the kitchen table often enough during my mother's coffee klatches with her friends to hear the bawdy laughter that marks any gathering of our tribe. I'm certain that all the years of lacking solitude — this distance from her own voice — not only limited my mother's connection to her wild nature but also accounted for her attempts to suppress my wild child instincts.
Solitude is a lovely word, often taken as meaning "loneliness." But really it's just the opposite; it's the kind of aloneness that being complete with our Self allows. May Sarton wrote, "Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self." Creating a ritual for our daily work is one way to find the solitude necessary for a dialogue with our deepest selves.
No matter where I've lived, and my friends will tell you I've lived a lot of places, I have always created a special place where I can go, alone, first thing every morning to read my meditation books and do my daily writing. Others tell me they do the same, though the specific details — a special chair, a desk at the window that overlooks the garden, the garden itself — may be very different, and they may not call them a ritual. "A cup of tea and back in bed with my notebook" is my friend Jill's routine. Dian escapes to her office, where between seeing clients, she sequesters herself with her writing. Lisa's living room can be shut off completely from the rest of the house, even the dogs, and there she has a chair that is "just for her." In my current apartment I'm a kitchen table writer, though you'll often find me taking my notebook on a mini-retreat to the park or to a café or to the library. It doesn't surprise me anymore that some of the quietest times I've experienced have been when I'm alone at a table in a crowded café.
Create a Space
A few years ago I had the opportunity to see the stunning installation of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Chicago's iconic masterpiece features elaborate handmade place settings for thirty-nine mythical and real-life famous women along a triangular table that measures forty-eight feet on each side. A tiled floor engraved with the names of nine hundred and ninety-nine additional women lies beneath the grand display.
Creating a space for your daily dialogues with yourself is like setting the table for a feast. Yours will most likely not be as flamboyant as Judy Chicago's, but whether it's simple or elaborate, by furnishing it with elements that are meaningful to you, you mark the space as special and the time you spend there as sacred.
I love the title of Rebecca Wells's novel Little Altars Everywhere. Creating little altars is something we do naturally; I have them all over my house — at my writing desk, on my bedside table, lining my bookshelves. Maybe for you it's a special stone you found on a walk and brought home and placed just so, or the tiny figure of Quan Yin you discovered in a bookstore that rides along on the dashboard of your car, or the silver heart that lives on your bathroom shelf, along with your collection of sea glass and shells. My friend Anita has a miniature doghouse with Snoopy perched atop the roof — beagles are that special to her. Barbara has a small statue of the Buddha. I do my morning writing in the kitchen, and on the ledge of the window there, I keep an amethyst crystal, still in its natural state. I love the way the sunlight burrows in the rough crevices and sends out flashes of lavender.
When you imbue these items with the power to carry your intention they become charms or totems, their presence inspiring or soothing, reminding you of who you are and what matters to you. In The Book of Awakening, Mark Nepo wrote, "Symbols are the living mirrors of the deepest understandings that have no words."
Each chapter in this book includes the suggestion that you add to your altar or writing table something that speaks to you or that represents that chapter's focus. At our Wild Women writing workshops our table held skate keys, stuffed animals, and bird nests during the Wild Child, Wild Girl session; love letters, wedding photos, and red lace lingerie during the Loves and Lovers session; and artwork of all kinds during the Artist/Creator week. While you work with the material in each chapter, your special object can serve as inspiration and will symbolize your desire to communicate with your deepest Self and to speak from your authentic voice.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wild Women, Wild Voices by Judy Reeves. Copyright © 2015 Judy Reeves. Excerpted by permission of New World Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,One. Maps for the Journey,
Two. Claiming Wild Woman,
Three. Wild Child, Wild Girl: Initiation and Forgetting,
Four. Body Writing: The Voice of the Senses,
Five. Family: Fact and Fiction, Myth and Mystery,
Six. Writing Place: The Geography of Our Lives,
Seven. Loves and Lovers: Journey into the Heart,
Eight. Friends and Companions: Finding Your Tribe,
Nine. Artist/Creator: Authentic Expressions of Wild Woman,
Ten. Life Journeys: Adventures, Explorations, Quests, and Pilgrimages,
Eleven. Where the Wild Things Are: Illuminating the Shadow,
Twelve. Dreams and Synchronicity: The Intuitive Wisdom of Wild Women,
Thirteen. Death, Loss, and Legacies: Wise Woman,
Epilogue: The Road Home,
Appendix. Call of the Wild: The Making of a Wild Women Writing Group,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Permission Acknowledgments,
Recommended Reading,
Index,
About the Author,