Natalie Goldberg

Reading Round-Up: June 2018

/ Christine Pennylegion

June was a good reading month for me, unusually heavy on the non-fiction. I found that once I finally made my way through the massive … And Ladies of the Club, I was ready for a significant palate cleanse (although I did dip into fiction again towards the end of the month). I read a lot of poetry, and a fair amount of memoir, and it was deeply satisfying.

Here’s the final list:

  1. … And Ladies of the Club (Helen Hooven Santyer)
  2. Felicity (Mary Oliver)
  3. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Natalie Goldberg)
  4. Upstream: Selected Essays (Mary Oliver)
  5. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (Tracy Kidder)
  6. Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home (Natalie Goldberg)
  7. The Secret Keepers (Trenton Lee Stewart)
  8. A Phone Call to the Future (Mary Jo Salter)
  9. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Jaron Lanier)
  10. Aimless Love (Billy Collins)
  11. One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both (Jennifer Fulweiler)
  12. The Rooster Bar (John Grisham)
  13. Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good (Jan Karon)

A handful of these were already featured in their own posts: … And Ladies of the Club, Writing Down the Bones, One Beautiful Dream, and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. And I’ll take the rest on by genre this month:

Poetry: This month I greatly enjoyed reading a few new-to-me poets, Mary Oliver (Felicity; the other book by her was essays) and Mary Jo Salter, and also re-acquainting myself with the inimitable Billy Collins. I like all three of these poets very much, and I think there are a couple things they have in common: they write a lot about day-to-day living, they are very grounded in natural surroundings, and while their poetry is of an informal, contemporary style, it still has recognisable structure: stanzas, rhythm, occasional rhyme. Above all their work is clear: I don’t mind working at poetry a bit, but I dislike poetry that reads as if it’s obscure for obscurity’s sake. But Oliver, Salter, and Collins are all masters of clarity and I adore them for it.

Memoir: I read several books of memoir this month. Mountains Beyond Mountains is not quite memoir, I guess, because it’s biographical about Dr. Paul Farmer — but on the other hand, it’s also Tracy Kidder’s account of meeting Farmer, and so it’s memoir-ish as well. I accidentally read the dumbed-down-for-middle-schoolers version of the book, but it was still a fascinating account of Farmer’s work among the poor, chiefly in Haiti, focusing on infectious diseases such as TB. It’s an inspiring read — I don’t like using that word because it’s become such a cliché, but sometimes that’s all you can do — and a good spur to remind us that for Christians, caring for the poor is not an optional item.

On a very different note, Let the Whole World Come Thundering Home is a slim little book by Natalie Goldberg, remembering the year (or so?) when she and her partner were both diagnosed with cancer. When I flicked through it at the library I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy it, but it is a deep and tenderly-wrought book and I am glad to have read it.

Finally, Mary Oliver’s Upstream is also on the kinda-sorta memoir scale; it has some personal essays, but also some literary criticism and other things. I was particularly struck by Oliver’s accounts of how she came to treasure the natural world, and her take on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which is very influential on her own writing.

Fiction: It was mid-month before I cracked any fiction, but Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Secret Keepers was a great place to begin. I had previously read a few books in his Mysterious Benedict Society series; The Secret Keepers is a stand-alone novel that encompasses all of the same charm, following eleven-year-old Reuben after he discovers a powerful artifact that must, at all costs, be kept out of the hands of the sinister ruler of his city, known only as The Smoke. It’s great fun.

Striking a very different tone, I read The Rooster Bar, which is John Grisham’s latest-but-one, published in 2017. Although it tackles some compelling issues in America these days — including crushing student debt, for-profit law schools, and family deportation — I had a hard time rooting for the protagonists, who got away with what they were trying to do in the end (well, sort of) but made some bad mistakes that harmed people along the way. It felt as if the ends were meant to justify the means, but I’m not sure that they did.

And last in the fiction department as well as in the month, I picked up Jan Karon’s latest three Mitford novels, and finished Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good right at the tail-end of June. This is a long-running series following Fr. Tim Kavanagh, an evangelical Episcopalian priest serving in the small town of Mitford, North Carolina. They’re sweet books, funny but above all warm-hearted. Some people feel as if they have to apologize for liking the Mitford books because they’re not, you know, high literature — but I don’t. They’re some of my best go-to comfort reading and I love them.

And that was my month of reading! I hope that yours was equally satisfying.

 

Freeing the writer within with Natalie Goldberg

/ Christine Pennylegion / 3 Comments

If you are a writer — however you interpret that — then this book is for you.

I had never heard of Natalie Goldberg, until I read Tricia Lott Williford’s post “The Sparkling Moment” a few weeks ago, and then Writing Down the Bones immediately went onto my library holds list.

I devoured this book. Its chapters are short and digestible, sometimes just a page long, but each one brings its own treasures. Most helpful to me, probably, was the growing conviction as I read that if I want (need) to write, then that is something I need to honour and to make the time for. Yes, I have small children underfoot. Yes, I have other things on the go. Yes, I need to write anyway. If I care about it, I need to find the way. So I am trying to do just that.

Writing Down the Bones was a well-timed kick in the pants as far as my own writing practice — and I do mean, “practice,” as in doing a small amount of it every day. Julia Cameron suggests writing “morning pages” every day: three longhand pages, or about 750 words if you’re typing, that’s totally unfiltered and stream-of-consciousness. They should be the first thing that you write, and the idea is that it clears out all the gick that’s floating around in our minds and allows us to focus more fully, afterwards, on what we actually want to write. I did morning pages some years ago, briefly — probably less than three weeks’ worth all told. I didn’t see the value in them. But I love how Natalie Goldberg frames writing practice:

This is the practice school of writing. Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it. Some days you don’t want to run and you resist every step of the three miles, but you do it anyway. You practice whether you want to or not. You don’t wait around for inspiration and a deep desire to run. It’ll never happen, especially if you are out of shape and have been avoiding it. But if you run regularly, you train your mind to cut through or ignore your resistance. You just do it. And in the middle of the run, you love it. When you come to the end, you never want to stop. And you stop, hungry for the next time.

That’s how writing is, too. Once you’re deep into it, you wonder what took you so long to finally settle down at the desk. Through practice you actually do get better. You learn to trust your deep self more and not give in to your voice that wants to avoid writing. It is odd that we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game; yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice. […]

One of the main aims in writing practice is to learn to trust your own mind and body; to grow patient and nonaggressive. Art lives in the Big World. One poem or story doesn’t matter one way or the other. It’s the process of writing and life that matters. Too many writers have written great books and gone insane or alcoholic or killed themselves. This process teaches about sanity. We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories. […]

A friend once said that when she had a good black-and-white drawing that she was going to add color to, she always practiced first on a a few drawings she didn’t care about in order to warm up. This writing practice is also a warm-up for anything else you might want to write. It is the bottom line, the most primitive, essential beginning of writing. The trust you learn in your own voice can be directed then into a business letter, a novel, a Ph.D. dissertation, a play, a memoir. But it is something you must come back to again and again. Don’t think, “I’ve got it! I know how to write. I trust my voice. I’m off to write the great American novel.” It’s good to go off and write a novel, but don’t stop doing writing practice. It is what keeps you in tune, like a dancer who does warm-ups before dancing or a runner who does stretches before running. Runners don’t say, “Oh, I ran yesterday. I’m limber.” Each day they warm up and stretch. (11-13)

That’s a way of putting it that makes intuitive sense to me. I don’t do morning pages just to clear out my subconscious mind (or… whatever); I write morning pages because there’s something in me that isn’t happy unless I’m writing regularly, because I want to write more and write better, because it’s all grist for the creative mill, because writing begets writing. I write so that I will want to write. I write to understand the world, and to understand myself. I write because if you want to write, to be a writer, the only way to do it is to put your butt in your chair and your pen on paper (or your fingers on the keyboard) and do it. It’s both that difficult, and that simple.

And so I’m doing my morning pages again, nine days in a row and nearly 9,000 words so far. I do it while I’m drinking my tea before breakfast, and I use 750words.com to do it since I type way faster than I handwrite. Sometimes I do a writing exercise, like trying to describe a house I’ve visited as completely as I can. Sometimes I just write whatever I happen to be thinking about. Sometimes I surprise myself. And the thing is, whether or not these morning pages are doing all that Julia Cameron promises, they are motivating me to write more during to day, to keep my notebook and a pen at hand for when I need them. My production is up. So is my enjoyment. Maybe even my sense of purpose, at least as far as writing is concerned.

I’ve read other books on writing before, and I’ve gotten useful things out of them. I wrote a three-part series on reading Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, which you can find on my Post Series page. I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, or most of it. And I read Stephen King’s On Writing (as one does) and got some useful things out of that too — most specifically his rule of thumb for cutting, which is that your second draft should be equal to your first draft minus roughly ten percent. Okay, that’s useful advice. I’ve used it. But Writing Down the Bones is the first book on writing that’s actually galvanized me to sit down and write — and that’s priceless.