Writing in Community: writing practice, writing rewards

I am a writer who chose to dive into life rather than attend college. I left my home on the East Coast to live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My story after that decision is filled with an alternative lifestyle, travel, kids, multiple losses, moving again and again, surviving a partner's suicide, re-claiming my voice, becoming a performance poet, my youngest son's suicide, moving to Mexico and co-founding an art gallery, providing child-care for grandsons. And finally creating a writer's life. My work appears in over 40 literary journals, anthologies, and magazines, many of which you never heard of, and I have published a novel, a full length poetry collection and two chapbooks.

I always wanted to facilitate writing groups but it was after the loss of my son that I realized I had hard-earned wisdom as well as a desire to be of service. I created Writing Circles for Healing as a way to deepen my own healing. 

By receiving McKnight Community Art Program grants in 2008 and 2009, I was able to bring a performance-writing workshop to one high school and a writing-art installation project to another. One high school hired me as the after-school writing instructor.  I volunteered to facilitate writing workshops at non-profits: victims of domestic violence and clients who were HIV+. In 2012 a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board gave me the opportunity to teach in twelve non-profit human service and arts organizations, from a heart patient support group to Saint Paul Almanac. I connected with Mn Prison Writing Workshop. I continued to teach in community education programs and was an artist in residence through Patrick's Cabaret for The Aliveness Project, a resource center for those who are HIV positive.

This lengthy explanation is to provide a bit of background to what I do now: facilitate writing workshops in cafes, churches, women’s retreats, libraries, prisons, healing centers, yoga studios, bookstores, and community centers. I teach mostly memoir, personal essay or creative non-fiction, and poetry.

I love what I do. Sometimes tears indicate that someone has found her/his voice. Always there is laughter. Someone may have a break-through or transformation during class. A young woman who had never written before started writing daily. Participants type up poems for the first time since school days. People give feedback that they have started writing again or re-discovered writing. I was gratified to hear the resiliency expressed by participants at The Aliveness Project. The participants who attended my workshop continued on to performance workshops. Later, these participants got up to share their work in front of over a hundred people.

At Pathways Healing Center, a man’s brain tumor had returned after three years of remission; he attended my class before he passed away. At that point the tumor was impacting his ability to be coherent and so he copied the last lines of a poem I used as a jumpstart. That day it just happened to be a poem I wrote and I will never forget the chills I got as he read my words back to me. One participant wrote in columns—first his words marched down the right side, then his words marched down the left. To tell you the truth, I didn’t always understand what he was writing about but others in the circle complimented his “poetic style”. A woman whose husband was dying from ASL came for a break from care-giving. One woman had to sit on the floor because it was too painful to sit in a chair. Several people grieved spouses or parents. Cancer survivors wrote about feeling they are a burden on others. 

We used prompts such as: what I am praying for, my beloved body, the knot of the self that won’t untangle, and what brings me joy. Here’s a quote from someone who went through a nasty divorce, then breast cancer: “Be what you need and want to receive, even though you don't have it yet.” Often I am in awe of their resiliency as it finds expression on the page.

The thing is, I believe we all have stories to tell and some of us have important stories. Some of us are the story-bearers for those who can't quite yet tell their stories. I have heard stories of abuse, grief, fear, regret, addiction, depression, and shame. I have heard stories of the will to survive. I have heard stories of unremitting guilt and stories of enduring love. My goal, I tell my students, is to get you writing so that when this class ends, you are motivated to continue. 

"Writing is a practice. The more you practice, the more you will find your voice and the story you are compelled to tell."

I have dreams and visions for me, the writer. But there is a satisfaction in teaching that keeps me on the look-out for poems to use as jumpstarts, articles about craft, and ways to encourage those determined to share the story they have inside.

There are many forms of death by Kevin Hershey, writer in Writing Circles for Healing workshop

There are many different forms of death

 

There’s the death of the bright yellow tulips

brought to my grandmother on Easter Sunday

already browning in their vase by Tuesday.

The death she awaits, as her green eyes grow foggier

each day staring toward the ceiling, looking for the place she knows she will go next.

This will be the death of the last immigrant

death when her green eyes close

and cease to reflect the green hills and gray seas of her home

and death of the stories she might never have told us.

 

There’s death in the piles of unread newspapers by her entry

faceless, nameless, technicolor death in oil-rich nations or marathon massacres.

Death was in the brown leaves that crumpled on the grass last fall

buried beneath a blanket of snow

only to resurface this spring, wet.

There was the death of that deer on Highway 61

who dashed out of the woods

and now she’s crawling with flies.

Hundreds of deaths all over the windshield

smudges obliterated by sprinkling skies

above the lakes next to the road.

Sometimes we call death

passing or crossing over or moving on

when it’s really just death

but sometimes it isn’t death at all

 

My hair was already dead

when it fell off my head

as chemotherapy caused the death of me from the inside out

a million little deaths in my cells that I could not even imagine

The backyard compost was full of death

when I scattered it with black shiny locks

greening orange peels,

the slimy pieces of onions we carelessly discarded,

old autumn leaves,

coffee grounds from many mornings ago.

My dead hair mixed with our dead waste.

It made a bed for next year’s tulips.        

Kevin Hershey returned to his hometown of St. Paul after completing college last year. Currently, his life is dedicated to full-time soul searching.

There's the Light (Writing Circles for Healing workshop participant)

                                        There's the Light from My Grandbaby

                  There's the light from her smile that greets me each time she enters the room.

                  The light of morning that moves on her face like invisible eyes blinking.

                  The light from her eyes as blue as the ribbon tied in a bow around her white face.

                  There's the light from her laugh that makes me a child after she wails and cries then

                  stops as if she was saying, I fooled you again.

                  There's the light from Van Gogh and Cezanne so perfectly arranged it moves my

                  blood to boil in my heart and sends little bubbles up my spine                                                                                                

                  and stimulates my mind for creations that I create.

                  The light from the moon that spreads in holy halos from its edge.

                  There's the light vanilla smell that emanates from her cheek against mine as we 

                  wrestle for the toys. 

                  There's the heat within the sun like the heat from her hands as she hugs my neck.

                  

                  There's the light through the shattered windshield after the wreck.

                  The light of winter’s skies, gray and still as the casket’s canopy.

                  There's the light reflections off my broom faced wrinkles as they gather as my mind

                  grows old and holes perforate my brain and block the memories of her.

                  There's the red light from a cat’s eye the in middle of the night Edgar Allen Poe.

                   There's the absence of light below the earth where the bugs and spiders clean the bones.

                   There's the empty light without her, without god, without soul, just an animal waiting for death.

                   There's the holy light of belief that relieves me as I lay down for my last sleep.

                Also, there's the light of god seen through the tunnel 
 that beckons me to her and to heaven 
 and to all my missing relatives and friends 

 that fly together on wings

 of wind to a better dimension of time and space.

Mark's statement: In '98 I contracted a serious case of colon cancer so I moved back here to be with my family.  After many months of treatment, the cancer went into remission; there has not been any since. In 2001 I was accidentally shot with a large caliber rifle and spent  months in the hospital near death many times. It has taken me 50 operations and 7 to 8 years pulling myself back together fighting chronic pain and infections. It is a story in itself of fighting through physical and mental trauma. I was always an artist ever since I was 5 or 6 when my brother and I started to draw to escape an alcoholic father and poverty.  I was always the best artist in the class and was chosen to do murals and art projects for the class. Through the years I've spent my time painting and writing poetry and short stories

 Mark East was a participant in Writing Circles for Healing presented by Wendy Brown-Baez and held at the Wellstone Center in St Paul. Wendy Brown-Báez is a fiscal year 2012 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is funded, in part, by the Minnesota State Legislature from the State’s art and cultural heritage fund with money from the vote of the  people of Minnesota on Nov, 4, 2008

  

Artist Initiative grant

I have about 6 weeks left of writing workshops sponsored by the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant.  In April I will be at Springhouse Spiritual Center where I will lead a class in Spiritual Memoir and Saint Louis Park Friends of the Arts creative writing circle.

This month, I am at Abbot Northwestern Hospital Heart Institute support group on Mondays, The Bridge for Youth on Wednesdays, Writing Circles for Healing at The Wellstone Center on Thursdays, and back at Stillwater DOC on Fridays although this is not part of the grant. I also am presenting a free training session for advocates, social workers, healers and therapists to demonstrate my technique at Cornerstone on April 6.

Each workshop has been unique and I have discovered what works and what doesn't. The youth at The Bridge may enter the room with an attitude of resistance (what? another group we have to attend?) but after a couple of rounds of writing, reading and realizing that they are free to speak their minds and not be judged, they want to participate. Unfortunately, by then, it is time for their next activity. But I have heard heart-breaking and affirming poems and stories as they move forward into self-awareness and standing up for themselves.

The women at Harriet Tubman were enthused and the program director told me it led to conversations with others about themselves and why they were at Harriet Tubman,  opening up as they shared their stories and their wisdom. Breaking patterns of addictive behavior and leaving abusive situations can be a long hard road. I suggested that they post the affirmations we wrote in a place where they could be reminded that they are headed towards wholeness.

At our first session at Cornerstone, one woman had a deep reluctance to share but agreed to allow me to read her words. As I did, she wept and the other women assured her that she was on the path to self-awareness and healing. The hurts these women have endured are hard to write about and yet, to admit that they have been hurt is necessary for the healing to begin. A break due to President's day threw off our rhythm but the writer who persevered is filling up notebook after notebook.

The workshop at the library had a different focus as writers wanted to work on writing skills. We discussed setting, character, and plot. One of my favorite prompts is to write about an ordinary activity and then have something unexpected happen. Or to detail a character doing an ordinary activity in public and then have another character approach with a secret that they feel compelled to confide. How does the first character react?

At Banfill-Locke, many of the 14 participants had been primed by taking Julian's Drawing by Intuition class, already connected to their creative imagination. I am always amazed at how a prompt can elicit so many different responses. "I am going to start living"....from Edward Hirsch's poem "I am going to Start Living Like a Mystic" led me to write:
I am going to start living as if the past is a bucket of stars. I can take each out and decide to put it on a shelf, paste it on the ceiling, or return it to the bucket. I'm going to start living as if each failure, each dead end, each detour was intentional experimentation....

At The Wellstone Center, I have the most unusual group I have ever worked with: all men. It is the first time this has ever happened to me, most workshops are filled with women!

The Saint Paul Almanac community editors workshop was the most exciting. We did the timeline exercise and heard brief stories from each participant, testimonies to the courage and determination and resiliency of the human spirit. At The Bridge for Youth, one young man said he didn't have anything to write about and I reminded them that we each have a story. As one famous writer said, if you have lived to be seven years old, you have enough material to write about for the rest of your life. But those I am working with have big stories: stories of immigration, abandonment and rejection, life on the street, escaping abuse, finding new direction, pursuing education, pursuing healthy choices, overcoming poverty, racism, and someone else's opinion of who you should be.

I give my writers permission to be honest on the page, permission to write badly, permission to pursue what comes up from their subconscious. As Natalie Goldberg says, go for the jugular. (If something comes up in your writing that is scary...it has lots of energy.) This is where the juice is, the passion that will ignite your writing. Writing is a practice, I tell them, just like any art. You need to practice to get better. And the more you practice, the better you will get. It is also work. Writing will break you open, make you see things you weren't aware of, show you a reflection of your heart and soul.

At Abbot, we wrote about what we yearn for and I found myself writing about peace: peace in the Middle East, peace in North Minneapolis, peace between my grandsons, a theme that has always been important to me and yet one I haven't tackled lately. For homework, I asked them to write to their hearts. I can't wait to hear the dialogue they create with their hearts. Then I will use the prompt from this: 

If anyone strike my heart, it does not break, but it bursts, and the flame coming out if it becomes a torch on my path. --Hazrat Inayat Khan

There’s a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put scriptures on their hearts. One of them asked, “Why on our hearts,and not in them?” the rabbi answered, “Only God can put scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your hearts, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.” 

--Anne Lamont in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

What is written on your heart?

What is the flame that lights your path?

 

Wendy Brown-Báez is a fiscal year 2012 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. These activities are funded, in part, by the Minnesota State Legislature from the State’s art and cultural heritage fund with money from the vote of the  people of Minnesota on Nov, 4, 2008.