As part of my ongoing adventures as a writing workshop instructor, the following piece owes a lot to this year’s third-grade class.

Some eight-year-old boys drool. In the four years in which I’ve worked with third graders, at least one boy has drooled in the middle of at least one class. Sometimes it’s from frustration, but mostly it’s a result of over-excitement coupled with a blood sugar spike.

This year’s drooler is Ben. He’s now drooled three times in two sessions, which means he has six more sessions to break the all-time drool-per-session record of seven. Ben’s in-class snack of choice is a juice box. His teeth are coming in at jagged angles, leaving plenty of gaps through which saliva can escape. And writing excites the hell out of him.

I say the record is his.

Read the rest @ ReadWritePoem.org

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Everything is new to a child; each step is an act of courage where no notion of being courageous exists, only the notion of being.

Now go, write, and know your words are good.

Who’s John Beecher? As best as I can figure, he’s an abolitionistic poet of early-to-mid 20th century working class folk. His work captures the soul and struggle of coal mines, mills, cotton fields – anywhere people happened to be working for next to nothing. He’s a member of the same family that produced Harriet Beecher Stowe, and was an activist, writer, and journalist straight up to his death in 1980.

I found an old beaten hard-bound copy of Report to the Stockholders & Other Poems in Powell’s. I’d never heard his name before, and was taken by the simple, yellowed dust jacket, the collection’s title, and the William Carlos Williams quote on the back. It was just sitting there lost in the Bs with a $5.00 tag on it and a note inside the cover from the book’s previous, and possibly first owner, which reads as follows:

“I enjoy sharing
my books as
I do my friends,
asking only that
you treat them well
and see them
safely home.”

The name on the tag is Elizabeth Sale of Stark Street in Portland. I have no idea if Elizabeth is still in Portland or still amongst the living for that matter. Nor do I know how what used to be her book wound up at Powell’s. Obviously, I’m guessing she or an heir sold it – and I can’t say why I get the feeling Elizabeth Sale has passed on, I just do.

So someone, possibly Elizabeth, possibly someone else, sold this fine collection – original copyright of 1962, the actual book is the third printing by Red Mountains Editions, 1971 – got a dollar or two for it, or else simply donated it, and now it was in my hands. It was the perfect confluence of a few events: I had a gift card, it was a beautiful day, and the first poem I read, “Report to the Stockholders”, spoke to me and seemed to be speaking to and about our times. Amazing when a piece written half a century ago does that, but I suppose all writing should have staying power and continue to resonate years and decades later, not only so it makes sense when you lay it out over the period it in which it was written, but when you stretch it out over any period of time.

And with all that, I’d like to share a poem from the collection:

ALTOGETHER SINGING

Dream of people altogether singing
each singing his way to self
to realms on realms within
all singing their way on out of self
singing through to unity
kindling into flame of common purpose from the
      altogether singing

such singing once I heard
where black children sang the chants of work in slavery
of hope for life at last and justice beyond the spaded
      unmarked grave
the platform dignitaries
of master race stooping for the occasion
were suddenly shamed and shaken
by these fierce and singing children
chanting out their stormy hunger
for freeborn rights
still wickedly denied

again once
in packed and stifling union hall
where miners gathered and their womenfolk
I heard such singing
while outside in the listening street
men stood uneasy and shivering beneath their heavy
      uniforms
more firmly gripped their guns
though unarmed were the singers
save for the weapon of song
and once again
where followers of the ripening crops
along the hot relentless valley hemmed by cool mirage
      of high Sierras
square danced with riotous feet
outstamping fiddlesqueak and banjo’s tinny jingle
there came a quiet
and from the quiet
burst altogether singing
yearning back to lands whence these were driven
the known and homely acres
then lusting forward to the richness of unending rows
      and vines and groves
the treasure tended only
but some day to be taken and be rightly used
the prophecy sang forth

You’re a writer every day. You may not write every day, but you’re a writer every day.

You have a certain way of seeing the world that never changes, regardless of how much writing you get done. As Natalie Goldberg says in Write Down the Bones – you live each moment twice, one time in and of the moment, the second time in reflection of it. It’s not a conscious decision – it’s how you’re wired.

Honor it. Be proud. Never judge. Simply run with it and be.

Now go forth, prosper, and know that your work is good.

There’s plenty of talk right now about eras ending, what with the presidential inauguration a day away – and there will continue to be plenty of talk about it. Eras are constantly ending while new ones start up. What we’re left with is an ongoing flux by which all life ebbs and flows. Someone’s dying right now, someone’s being born – something ends and something starts and there’s not too much of a use hanging on to what was.

Still it is our nature to hang on.

I hang on to eras. I know I do. I tuck physical and mental pictures away. Then I go back, not to see what’s changed but to remember what hasn’t. This makes everything a static moment resting on a continuum that, no matter how fluid, is actually frozen. Locked. The young man aging before you is still the boy heading off somewhere.

I’m writing from this place today because I’ve just learned that Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, a Milwaukee, Wis. landmark for 82-years, is closing its doors. All four locations (at one point there’d been five) will be gone as of March 31st.

I’m saddened by this. Troubled. Bothered. Annoyed. Pissed off. All of those things. Why? For any number of reasons. On a topical, tangible level, because they’ve always been independent, that means there will soon be one less independent out there. Also, we’re talking about books here. Call me a throwback, but even as my reading habits tend to wax and wane, I’ll take sitting in a room filled with books any day of the week over just about anything else.

Mostly I’m bothered because I’m still in that bookstore. Back in 2001, at a time when I’d gotten about as far away from writing and literature as I’ve ever been, Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops saved my life. They hired me as a bookseller not because I had any retail experience – I didn’t – but because I loved books. My interview with Amie, the manager at the time, was 45-minutes of talking about our favorite writers. Then I jumped at the chance to make minimum wage for eight-months because I got to talk books, stock books, smell books and buy books for an amazing discount. A few years earlier I’d been a janitor in the same bar where I drank – my paycheck went right back to the company store, so to say. Now I was turning a fat chunk of my thin check back to Harry W. Schwartz each month and loving every hardcover I carried home. On my last day of work, as Courtney and I prepared to move to Portland, Amie presented me with a $100 gift certificate to use at Powell’s. Why? Because we are all book people, a collection of failed or failing writers, PhD candidates in stasis, old activists, young activists, book worms and book snobs. Even when we hated our jobs – and of course we did at times – we loved talking books.

Yes, things change, eras end and new things rise from the ashes. It’s an easier proposition to accept when there’s no connection calling you back. In this case, with the news still fresh, even 1500 miles away in Portland, I’m not ready to accept that this one is over. Not yet.

The essence of winter –
looking through morning fog
that will lift into a day
you would have painted
if you were the one
who painted the day.

The title of this post comes from the book, haiku mind, copyright 2008 by Shambala Publications, gathered and edited by Patricia Donegan. The post itself comes from the fact that I can’t get the fire started this morning.

I can’t get the fire started this morning.

I’m on the floor with the dogs, working with the split wood, newspaper, cardboard, kindling and flame. And I can’t get it started.

Can’t get the fire started.

I’m on the floor with the dogs, and when I think about it, it’s an honor to be on the floor with the dogs, just as it’s a privilege, I feel, to have a wood burning stove, not to mention to have the time to slowly go about the act of starting a fire while the rest of the world, or America at least, or maybe just Portland, or maybe just my neighborhood, has gone off to work, to traffic, to load up on their personal octane before their commute.

The fire won’t start.

I have all types of excuses as to why the fire won’t start, and at times like these, when the fire won’t start, I’m good at letting them jangle around inside my skull. Eventually I mix them with air, breathe life into my thoughts and let words fall off my lips in tiny pirouetting grumbles.

The wood is too wet.
There isn’t enough kindling.
I was sick for a month and couldn’t split smaller pieces.

I am on the floor for 20-minutes trying to get the fire started. I decimate a small forest of newspaper plus what little dry kindling I have. I’m left with three semi-scorched logs, each one glowing but their sum total in no way adding up to a solid lasting flame.

So I quit.

Of course I don’t quit quietly.

No.

I remind myself that I’ve wasted 20-minutes on the floor trying to get the fire started, that I could have been writing/reading/editing for 20-minutes rather than trying to get the fire started.

I set the logs back in the stove, stuff paper around them, close the door and walk away, planning to try later.

Then the fire starts.

Which, more than anything, is the reminder I need – and maybe a good many of us need – to be open and not rigid in our pursuits, which is to say to be fluid and flexible.

I close the door and walk away. Then the fire starts.

The reminder that there is no wasting time – sitting on the floor with the dogs could very well be called meditation, and very well IS meditation.

The concept of being present is within the very notion of setting the wood in the stove, preparing the paper and kindling and striking the match.

Presence is in the practice of starting the fire.

When I remove the expectation of the result – a fire – from the act of starting the fire, I return to being present. I move through “I want the fire to start” to “The fire will not start” to “The fire is not starting” to “I can’t start the fire” to what actually happens:

The fire starts.

The notion of “wasting time” is actually a wasted idea that literally strips the act of sitting on the floor with the dogs, setting the wood in the stove, readying the paper and striking the match from any and all meaning.

Suddenly I am perpetrating an action for an intended result, and when the result doesn’t happen “in a timely fashion”, I decide I have “wasted time”. I consider what else “I could have done” with my time.

To be present is to sit on the floor, to build, to let the fire come.

And the fire does arrive. Ten-minutes later, it burns soundly.

Have I done anything?

To be present in all things is an easy message to forget. To turn this around to writing: Perhaps my reason for being here in this lifetime isn’t so much about writing or being/becoming a writer as much as it is about learning presence through the practice of writing.

Perhaps the goal of all lifetimes is to learn presence.

Sitting there watching the fire, a haiku rises with the flame.

morning smoke

twenty-minutes of waiting
the fire catches
when I walk away

You can’t take pride any more. You remember when a guy could point to a house he built, how many logs he stacked. He built it and he was proud of it. I don’t really think I could be proud if a contractor built a home for me. I would be tempted to get it there and kick the carpenter in the ass (laughs), and take the saw away from him. ‘Cause I would have to be a part of it, you know. (From Working by Studs Terkel)

I was angry for no good reason back in 1997. At the time I’m sure there was a reason, but in reflecting, I can’t figure what it was. Life probably. I was a janitor and a student, a 21-year-old kid with a head that wouldn’t shut off. I wanted to be a writer. At work I used to chain smoke with a woman named Holly. She was in her 50s and was similarly pissed off at the world. Her anger seemed more justified. She’d been working —wirkin’, as she liked to put it—her entire life, or at least for the past 30 years after what she described as partying days spent riding around on the backs of Harleys. She had a son and a daughter and didn’t have too many good things to say about either of them. More than anything she liked when I talked, wanted me to tell her stories and liked to brag on my behalf that I’d wind up being a writer at some point as long as I stayed at it. I didn’t see how that was going to happen, but I kept up with telling her stories during breaks or while I pushed the mop along and she ran a dust rag over something.

One day she asked why I was pissed. I said, “Because people don’t care about workers,” or something like that. She asked what I wanted to write. I told her I didn’t know, but that I enjoyed interviewing people and wanted to write about people at work. The next day she showed up with a beaten back-pocket copy of Working by Studs Terkel. “Read this,” she said. “It’s what you should do.”

Her point was that there are millions of stories out there just waiting to be accessed, waiting to be told. I didn’t have to “make stuff up” to be a writer; I just had to listen. Over the next dozen or so years, between trying to write the next On the Road or create the next Holden Caulfield—token dilemmas that plague plenty of young anglo janitor writers—I would drift back to the role of listener, of observer, of recorder, always nodding, if you will, to Studs Terkel.

Back in 2000, Terkel read at Harry Schwartz bookshop in Milwaukee. Mostly he told jokes and made people shake their heads. I stood in the back of the room and listened, then waited in line to get my back pocket copy of Working signed. The anger I carried around back in ’97 had transformed into a blend of uncertainty, disillusion and anxiety. I was working as a janitor someplace new, smoking my breaks away with new coworkers who’d been working as long as Holly or longer. After work I went home and tried to wedge the next Holden Caulfield into the next On the Road.

I kept rehearsing something to say while I waited in line. I wanted Studs Terkel to write some bit of wisdom or guidance, to tell me to keep plugging away, keep sitting down, keep going after it. When I finally got up to him he smiled and asked my name. I choked and had to mutter “Dave” twice before he heard me. I walked away with “To Dave” on the cover page.

I haven’t looked at the book in years, but pulled it out this morning when I heard Terkel died last night. The sub-head beneath the title reads as follows: “People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.” I’m lucky to be writing all day, but I’m most fortunate when I get to sit and talk with someone else about what they do and how they feel about it. In the back of my mind I’d hoped to interview Studs one day, but I guess I’ll have to wait for our next pass through. In the meantime I’ll keep my recorder at the ready and do my best to capture the few stories he didn’t get to.