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.

I’ve put a couple of haikus on the site since January – I don’t consider myself a haiku writer, nor do I sit down and actively try to write haikus. Rather, they seem to “come” when they come and arrive as they will. I have no complaints.

A few nights ago one found me in a really wonderful dream that went like this:

I was at a conference. Hillary Clinton was sitting next to me. She was flirting with me in a passive sort of way, or in the least was very friendly. We were writing haikus together, which had something to do with the conference itself.

Hillary had no time for the whole notion of “exploring thoughts” or “following the stream of consciousness,” though I was trying to impress both upon her while explaining that my interpretation of a “good haiku” is one that joins two things together in a very brief, eternally present moment.

My haiku had to do with my father sitting on a porch. Not only was I writing it in the dream, but I was also editing it. (I remember distinctly editing out the word “are”, which is a good word to edit out in just about any piece of writing.)

In my second draft, my second line was the longest; in my third, my last line was the longest – as in life, I wasn’t following any American convention of 5-7-5. I simply don’t agree with it and I wish teachers would stop professing that haikus must be written in this form . . . but I digress.

When I woke up, the actual haiku had evaporated – I couldn’t recall it word for word, but I reconstructed the three versions I remember having worked on –

First:

There you are on the porch
I wonder if my father
Is as beautiful as always

(notice the word “are” in the first line)

Second:

On the porch
my father is as beautiful
as always

Third/Final

My father
on the porch
as beautiful as always

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.

Ask the Writer Guy is a now-and-again feature where I’ll address writing-related questions from other writers, students, or just people who stumble upon the site.

Today’s question comes from Natisha, a student at Aloha High School just outside of Portland.

Q: What made you want to write?

A: The short answer is that I wasn’t too good at anything else. Another way of looking at it is that I was OK at a bunch of things, but seemed to be a “little better” at writing, so followed that current.

The longer truth is that I didn’t have any clue what I wanted to do or be when I was in high school, or in college for that matter. Of course I had a vague idea that it would somehow involve writing, but I had no notion of what that looked like or how that “might work”.

When I enrolled as a college freshman, I tentatively declared journalism as my major, which felt safer than declaring English. I didn’t want to teach and figured if I was an English major I’d wind up either teaching or starving. Two-and-a-half years later, after changing majors a couple of times and finding myself completely lost, I declared English and stuck with it. The turning point came when the head of Penn State’s Journalism Department, who for some reason let me enter his office unannounced at the exact moment I needed to see him, said the following: “They’ll always need people to write VCR instruction manuals.” He also informed me that he’d never taken one journalism class – he’d been an English major.

Going further back to the time when I first discovered I liked to write, I can’t really say with any certainty there was any one thing that made me “want to” write, as opposed to simply “making me write.” What I mean is, when I was 12 or so, these strange little poems began popping into my head from nowhere – mostly they had to do with girls and heartbreak, or else were rather obtuse observations about life in general. I decided to write them down – by writing them, I got them out of my head, which effectively cleared space for new ones to come in (though at the time I didn’t know that was part of it).

I wrote a poem or two every couple of months without taking it too seriously. I shared them with certain friends, all of whom thought the poems were great – when you’re 15 and no one else writes, anything that winds up on paper is great.

Over time I discovered that writing was a way to work through a lot of teenage/high school anxiety, anger, fear, etc. Some of my friends at this time were either into punching things or carving stuff into their arms with razors in order to cope with breakups and hormonal imbalances; I chose to write, which seemed less violent and possibly more rewarding.

Another thing that happened was that, toward the end of high school, I hit a wall with math. I was good up until Algebra II, then completely lost all comprehension. At the same time, we started doing more writing exercises in English classes. Up until then, English had been reading-intensive and, in a word, boring, at least for me. I wasn’t a reader, nor did I come from a reading family.

(My mother would probably argue with this, and has every right to, since she was always reading something – what I should say is that I was never encouraged to read on my own.)

By my junior and senior years, with math becoming harder and English becoming more interesting, plus with the poems that were already coming out of me, I simply followed the path of least resistance – writing.

Thanks for your question, Natisha.

Have a question? Send a note.

Early February in Portland, Oregon isn’t typically a time of cascading blue skies, but today is one of those days where you need to be out doing anything but sitting in an office or even your house. Temperature is near 60 and a few clouds hang around so as to punctuate rather than threaten.

There’s a bit of sad irony for me today. I’ve just learned that a friend and fellow writer, Stanley Fisher, passed away suddenly. I don’t have details, don’t have the how or why, only know that he’s gone off to someplace else.

Stanley was a Guest Writer back in early December. He shared an essay he’d written entitled, “Blue Skies and Cotton-Puff Clouds”. The essay was an anchor for a larger project – he was collecting other peoples’ stories around the question, “What’s your simple pleasure?” Maybe someone’s asked you that question recently. Maybe Stanley asked. Maybe you sent him an essay explaining your simple pleasure. His simple pleasure had to do with a sky that looked very much like today’s.

I have an essay to send Stanley – it’s in my head, along with so many other things “I’ll get to” later. But I’ll do it. It’s about baseball, I think, somehow includes my father, brings it back home to boxscores and ends in a field. I’m not sure the best way to share it with him now. Write it and burn it? Read it out loud on a blue day? Not write it at all, just meditate on the thought of it?

Who knows?

I’d like to share Stanley’s essay now.

BLUE SKIES AND COTTON-PUFF CLOUDS

Blue skies.

With those two words the heart lightens, troubles ease and imagination expands to hold half of heaven. If only we could have blue skies all the time. For much of the year you can, if you enjoy living in deserts of sand, or ice.

It’s not the blue sky itself that lightens some things and expands others; too much blue sky causes oxidation, wilt, sunburn. It’s the way the sky changes out of winter’s grey flannel into a new spring suit, or when it removes its rain clouds like taking off a broad-brimmed hat to show me its sunniest smile. And when that beautiful face is accessorized with a necklace and earrings made from huge clouds white as cotton puffs, I fall in love with the sky all over again.

My home state, Oregon, is a place immensely proud of its mythology and despite the pressures of truth and the inquiries of outsiders, meteorologists, and other doubters, we strive to preserve it. One of our greatest myths is that it rains here all the time. Another is that if you live here, you will grow webbed feet.

Truth is: the rain myth does not apply to the eastern two-thirds of the state. That Oregon is semi-arid high desert, a family secret of sorts hidden behind the slogan, “Cool Green Vacationland,” pressed into license plate frames and printed on travel brochures from the state’s department of propaganda and myth preservation.

But here in western Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the most populous part of the state, just ask anyone: it is oddly wet and blue skies are oddly rare. Cars don’t wear out here, they rust. And people don’t really get fat here they just absorb the atmospheric moisture and swell.

I have cousins in southern California; they wash their cars a lot. They like not having to think much about blue skies, they take them for granted. In Oregon we take grey skies for granted. We like not having to think much about washing cars; we know it’s going to rain.

When you’re a child you spend a lot of time looking down at the ground, at bugs and worms and things; and a lot of time looking up at clouds shaped like ships that turn into sharks that turn into ice cream sundaes. And in the middle of your life you spend a lot of time looking straight ahead.

Grey days and mid-life are much the same, a lot of looking straight ahead, cloudy with a chance of drizzle, not much momo to look up. Then it happens: one of those rare days to see ice cream sundaes in the clouds, one of those days to get wrapped in the embrace of bliss. The temperature draws me outside and my blue sky, home from some sunnier escape, presents herself bejeweled with cotton-puff clouds.

Rare days like that cover me like the lopsided boyhood tents built with sheets borrowed long ago from mom’s linen closet. Over cords strung from the top of dad’s favorite chair to a handle on the opposite cabinet hung a miniature sky of cotton percale and beneath it new worlds came and went.

Rare days like that nudge me off the course of myself and my own little world and my own brief life and make me look up and recall ships and sharks and connect with things greater. Whether it’s those fantastic scenes imagined beneath living room tents or today’s expansive reality, the effect is still the same. Calm hues, brilliant highlights, and soft shadows wash over me in currents that gather up troubles, fears, worries—and for a moment—sweep them away.

When one of those cotton puffs floats between the sun and I and day’s brightness suddenly darkens, it is the drawing shut of an eyelid in the sky. Heaven is winking. Someone, something, out there, seems to think I’m still worth flirting with.

Some tell stories about their “out-of-body” experiences. I’ve never had one of those but every time blue skies brush aside the usual grey backdrop and cotton-puff clouds distract me from the usual forward gaze, there’s an “out-of-me” experience that never lasts quite as long as I’d like. But as it departs it always does so cordially with a quiet promise of coming again another day.

And as real life reasserts itself I return to wherever I was before getting nudged off course; a little happier, a little saner and a little more certain it’s possible to face whatever troubles there may be by looking up at blue skies and cotton-puff clouds.

Verse 22 of the Tao Te Ching ends with the following:

Be really whole, and all things will come to you.

I opened up to it today and thought of the writing process, not exactly the “process of writing” but just writing in general, and something every writer faces, which is the question of what to write when.

Many of us make our living writing certain things while we feel driven to write something else. Maybe not on a daily basis, but there’s a voice now and again that asks you to lift your eyes from one page and place them on another. Sometimes we listen and adhere; other times we argue and falter. Occasionally, either decision leads to guilt, which won’t help any writer accomplish anything.

When I read into these two short lines from the Tao and apply them to writing, I’m left with the following:

When we allow ourselves to go where we must and spend time with the writing that is calling to us, or even step away from writing and allow life to flow in, we are doing ourselves a service, and joy will filter into all of our words and work. If we block this voice, throw up walls, allow guilt to seep in or deny ourselves days “away” from writing, we are removing joy from the equation, creating a block in all of our work and complicating a process that should flow from us instinctively.

Go then, write, and know your words are good.