Friday, September 25, 2009

Such a lovely evening with Elizabeth last night. The event went more smoothly than I could have imagined. Not only did I manage to avoid coughing while being recorded, but we also had a good-sized and apparently very attentive audience. Elizabeth and I started out by answering the questions that I posted here yesterday, and then each of us read for about 15 minutes. Afterwards, audience members asked their own questions about craft, emotional engagement, the risks of writing, and so on, all of which were very interesting to me because Elizabeth and I answered them in both very similar and very different ways. Clearly our ways of writing and tapping into our imaginations are unique to us as individuals, yet we share similar perceptions about how we've learned to structure prose and to follow the prose thought process, which is so different from the poetic thought process. I do hope that nothing goes wrong with the recording so that I can post a link to the podcast for you.

Frost warning for tonight. Last hurrah of the cucumbers and green beans. Oh well. I'm tired of gardening anyway. Let firewood season begin.

3 comments:

Ellen Power said...

I was part of the attentive audience last night and loved every minute of it. I had intended on coming up and thanking both you and Elizabeth for the wonderful discussion and readings and for sharing so much of yourselves (what courage that takes!), but I felt so overwhelmed with emotion that I got up and quietly went out the door. I realized, after listening to you, that I've shut off a part of myself - the writing part - because I didn't want to feel. And how would I ever dare put down on paper what I feel anyway? Better to shut down - better to shut up. But when Elizabeth said she originally balked at the idea of writing prose about her father because "why would she want to write about something that she had spent twenty years in therapy trying to overcome?", a bell went off in my head. I've been afraid to write about what I know because I've been afraid of exposing the truth. I was raised by a crazy mother. Why not say it? Ten years of therapy didn't work so why not try writing? Thanks for the inspiration and, by the way, I thought your shoes were lovely!

Dawn Potter said...

Oh, Ellen, thanks so much for writing. I wish we had talked. Writing is by no means therapy. Sometimes it makes you feel worse afterward, but at least what you write becomes yours; and once it's on paper you have the right to reshape and reconfigure. Another suggestion: when writing about painful subjects, you have every right to invent a character to experience that pain. Sometimes avoiding the "I" allows a writer to say what needs to be said.

Ellen Power said...

I wished we had talked too! When I was a child I wasn't afraid to write. It flowed off the pen until the day it was discovered by my mother and I was punished. As an adult, I'm been stumped even though thoughts pop into my head all the time and they seem like opening lines to poems or stories. Instead of writing them down, I dismiss them. I've purchased many books on writing, but instead of reading them, they decorate my room - The Right to Write, Writing your Life, Writing Down the Bones, Bird by Bird, Wild Mind....and the list goes on. I just have not been able to bring myself to take any beginning steps at all. You've given me courage and I appreciate your insight and suggestions. Thank you so much.