The more I dance the more I write

If I could shimmy like my sister Kate


Shake it like jelly on a plate


My mama wanted to know last night


How sister Kate could do it oh so nice


Now, all the boys in the neighborhood


Knew Kate could shimmy, and it's mighty good


I may be late but I'll be up to date

When I can shimmy like my sister Kate.

I mean, shake it like my sister Kate.

Those were the lyrics to my first ecstatic dance.  My dad played blues guitar and sang, and I’d shake and shimmy just as fast and furiously as my little three-year-old booty could across the ice blue carpet of our Florida living room. By the end of a jam session I'd usually ripped off most of my clothes and whirled around and around, my eyes streaming, to collapse in a heap.  This dance had a name.  I called it the widdy-waddy dance.

Since I was clearly not such a ballet type, my mother took me to tap class.  I loved the tah-TAH sounds my shiny Mary Janes made the first time I put them on, and hated the thick white tights that slid down my hips to create an unpleasant basket effect around my crotch during class as the instructor’s grating voice shouted, “shuffle ball change, shuffle ball change".  I crumpled.  We didn't go back.

The funny thing about the shadow, all those parts of ourselves we aren’t comfortable acknowledging, is that we leave our love and passion in the dark as often as we leave our fear and anger.  As Rilke says, “the darkness pulls in everything.”

After that one tap class I decided that I had a secret.  My way of dancing wasn’t o.k. with the rest of the world, so I needed to hide it.  The surest way to hide something is to bury it someplace where you can't even find it yourself, like a squirrel with an acorn.  That's what I did.  I told myself I wasn't interested in dance.  I didn't even like watching it very much.  I would still dance around alone in my room, but that didn't count.  That was silliness.  It wasn't dance.  When I danced in the theater, that was acting.  It wasn't dance.

The acorn stayed buried until I started developing my intuition during a terrible period of writer’s block.

The conversation with myself went something like this:

          "I HAVE to get out of this block.  What can I do?  WHAT?"

           "You are a dancer.  Dance."

           "What?  I'm not."

           "Yes you are."

           "Sure you don't mean that dance will shake me loose-- that's all?"

           "No.  You are a dancer.  It is a part of who you are.  Find it."

           "Really?  If I'm a dancer I'll be able to be a writer?"

           "Yes."

I didn't have anything to lose. I listened to that voice.

Within six weeks of my first epiphany I’d found my teacher, Dunya McPherson, and Dancemeditation.  I watched her dance and thought, ‘That’s it. I can come out now.  Its safe for me.  She's such an amazing dancer, and... she's doing the widdy-waddy dance!  She's moving just how her body wants to move.'  I went on her website and fell in love with her writing too.  Clearly perfect.

The writer's block took time to fully melt away; maybe a year of furious dancing within the healing context of Dancemeditation with its focus on awareness and respect for the body's innate intelligence.

When the block finally melted I thought, 'Well, maybe I got what I needed and now I can stop.'  But of course its not like that.  The more I deepen into dance, the more my writing deepens, the more I deepen.  The body is a doorway to reality beyond the personality, the ego, which can hold us all hostage.  It was my ego telling me I couldn't, shouldn't write.  My ego was telling me to stay small, safe, and to avoid criticism at all cost.

I'm often scared.   Dance is an art form that takes many years and hours to begin to master.  It isn't about steps, its about learning how to move the body with more and more articulation and awareness.  Five years and eighty days to earn my Dancemeditation teacher training certificate and I'm still near the beginning of that journey.  The exciting part is that like studying nature, studying the body from the inside out is also a life's work.

At its core my dance feels strong. The widdy-waddy dance is intact.  Its unfolding with greater variation every time I have an opportunity to learn technique, to discover more ways to move, different ways of seeing, feeling, of being in the world.

Rainbow Jelly in an Underwater Passageway (a five-year-old named this blog post)

Moonday.  Waning crescent.  Dark spring moon just before Wednesday's new moon.   A subtle time.   So many changes on the earth.

Last year in April, National Poetry Month in the US, I took the 30 poems in 30 days challenge.  I posted them on facebook-- which felt both bold and terrifying, but I knew that if I didn't post them I wouldn't write them.  Some days the poems stuck in my throat and twisted out of me, and other days they flowed.

After it was over I felt restored.  I hadn't written poetry regularly in over ten years.  I'd gotten my poetry mojo back. 

But after the month of forced poetry I disappointed myself.  I didn't keep it up the way I'd wanted to.  I punished myself for needing that outside influence, the uncritical cheering voices of friends.  Real writers don't need that.

Of course I know that's nonsense.  Any artistic or creative enterprise requires a dialogue with an inner five-year-old, and that five-year-old needs a big cheering committee sometimes, especially when she's been living inside of a small box for too long.

Now the poetry is taking over again anyway, because who can stop from writing poetry surrounded by all these blossoms?

So I'll start the 30-in-30 challenge today, just before the new moon, and continue every day through the next new moon.  Along the way I'll find ways to cheer for the five-year-old, and (with luck) keep it up this time after the 30 days are over.  Will report back on the progress.

It isn't too late to join me.  Never too late, actually.

Here is today's poem:

violet flower
stalk water-green,
translucent cells
rising in tiny spring spirals

deep purple petals
unfolding like a fan
in the hand of a flamenco dancer

inward wrist circling outward
down circling up
meeting the sun
for a half-life
of pure delight

In the comments I'd love it if you'd leave your own poem of course, and/or an answer to this question:

What or who encourages your inner five-year-old to be creative? 

monsters, perfect dads, and Frida Kahlo

Moonday.  New moon.  We are in the darkness before the light of spring which happens officially on the 20th of this month.  Its an excellent time for going in deep.  That's what I've been trying to do.

I've been having some trouble writing recently.  I need to make some minor adjustments to my play before it can go on to its next phase, several other projects want more attention, and then there is this little blog I love that hasn't seen a post in a week.

I called up a good friend to talk about it. 

'Well,' I said, 'I have a lot going on, but I think that what's really been stopping me are my limiting beliefs.'  She laughed.  'Do I sound too psycho-babbly?' I asked. 

'No,' she said.  'I just don't hear that very often.  Its refreshing.' 

'Oh!' It was like she'd pinned a gold star on my cardigan.

I told her what was stopping me.  It was this thought:

Its too hard to make a living as a writer, so you shouldn't even try.   

I know its origin.  When I was a little kid pounding away happily on the electric typewriter, my dad sat me down.  He told me that only two percent of writers make their living at it.  I needed to find something else to do.  Writing for fun was great, but find another job.

To my child's ears he meant that I would never be good enough at the thing I loved to do the most.

Many, if not most people have a version of this story, some way more intense than mine.  There is usually some doom-sayer along the way-- a friend, a teacher, often someone with good intentions, and no amount of singing the Wonderful World of Disney theme song can shake them out of the mind.

'Its a monster' I said. 

'What do you do with monsters?' my friend asked.

'First you turn on the light, and then... you help them.'  I said, remembering one of my favorite Rilke quotes:

'perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something helpless that wants help from us.' 

'How do you help them?' she  asked.

'I don't know. That's the problem.'

What do you think your monster wants?' she asked.

'She wants a good dad.  She felt abandoned by her dad.'

'You might have to be her dad,' my friend said.  And then she said, 'Frida Kahlo. That just popped into my mind.' Its great having intuitive friends.

That was it.  I love Frida Kahlo.  I adore her work, her inspiring life story, and I love the way she would usually wear these timeless colorful skirts, and then show up in a suit.

I'm like that.  I'm a bit of a princess with a dash of drag king.  I live mostly in silk, but occasionally I lust after herringbone jackets, french cuff shirts, wide legged pants and fedoras.

 
So now I'm assembling my perfect dad costume for my monster.    He looks good in a hat.  His shoes match his belt and umbrella.  But he looks comfortable, gentle, like an abused animal might follow him home.  He's basically a mix between Johhny Depp, my super stylish and wildly encouraging college design professor, and my grandpa.  My monster is delighted.  My perfect dad tells her that she can be anything she sets her heart on. (Yes, like the Disney song says.)

*For the record, I have a pretty good adult relationship with my real dad now, and wouldn't change him, even though he still thinks that John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever is the pinnacle of style.

This moonday, I'm thinking about monsters and how I can help them.  If you want to share a story, or some inspirational art, quote, or poems that help you to help your monsters... I would love to see/read them.
Happy Moonday!

Writing Myself Out of a Box

I don't want to write a process-y post.  I don't think that anyone will want to read it.  But nothing else will come out, so here it is.

When I started this blog, I was in conflict.  I think of myself as a writer, dammit.  But I'm also an herbalist.  I wanted felt like I should have an herbal blog on my business website, friendlyherbalist.com.  But since it seemed to be stuck, I decided I'd just start a 'say anything' blog and see what came of it.

I didn't want to write-- exclusively-- about herbs.  I didn't want to be-- exclusively-- an herbalist.  I was afraid that somehow my artist self was going to be swallowed up by my herbalist self.  I'd started my journey into herbalism when I was pretty creatively blocked.

By the time I wrote my first post here I'd worked my way out of the block, largely thanks to years spent learning about medicinal plants, and through them deepening my relationship to nature and my body.

When you enter into a relationship with a plant, learning all about it firsthand by touch, smell, feel, taste, listening to the sound of its leaves in the wind, and listening to your intuition about its healing medicine-- it changes you.

When you gather its flowers or dig its roots and make herbal preparations that then cure your ailments-- your aches and pains, your grief, your scattered mind, your brokenness; it gives you strength.  Its incredibly empowering.  So then of course you can make your music, or dance like no one is watching or... write a play.  You can speak clearly.  You can step into your power instead of giving it away.   Having a relationship with the medicine plants is a portal into the sacredness of the earth and your own body.

 

Marsh mallow flower, wild harvested last July, Brooklyn, NY.

So, as you may be able to tell, I'm passionate about this stuff.  And what's been coming up for me lately is that... I have to share it.  More.  Its needed.  What's that line from T.S. Eliot?  'Hurry up now, its time.'

I love lots of things:  Poetry, dogs, dancing-- even dog dancing.  The theater has my heart.  But the sacredness of the earth... that is what I know.  That's the part of me that feels like a clear channel from sky to earth and back again. 

So I'm going to write more about that.  Not exclusively.  Oh no.  (Don't worry scared inner writer--I'm not boxing you in.) I think that I'm just ready to claim something.  Some knowing.  We'll see.

Feedback is good.  Are these topics-- deepening relationship to nature-- sacredness of body and the earth--- hands on herbal medicine-- of interest to you?  If you enjoy this blog, what would you like to read more about?

How very bad poems can heal the spirit

I've been writing, lately, what my critical judging mind calls (very) bad prose poems. These are free verse, plain, and just for me.  They've been helping me with my journal practice.  I write in a journal every day in the morning as a way to ease into the day, get the writing muscle moving, write down my dreams, and get unstuck creatively.  Only sometimes I feel stuck even in my journal writing.

The poems help me out of journal ruts-- when all I seem to write are lists of things I want/need/ can't seem to do, and lots of blah blah about my feelings.  They help me to articulate large experiences in few words when writing in prose seems daunting.

Because I'm letting them be bad, and just for me, they aren't stuck, and don't take long.  Usually they illuminate ideas or feelings.  There is always more of a quality of witness about them.  When I write prose, I'm in it-- mired inside the feelings, actions, ideas.  With poetry, I feel freer.  I feel more spacious.  I don't feel compelled to explain or understand every thought, emotion, or turn of event.  I simply write impressions.

I thought I'd share one of them, written soon after a Dancemeditation workshop at Kripalu with my teacher Dunya.  We had been listening deeply to our bodies.  Some of them are more story-like than this one.  I'm sharing it even though I don't think its a 'good' poem-- (it isn't one that I label very bad, though.  I'm not yet brave enough to share one of those) because it helped me, even though it is a 'list poem', which my poet friends mostly sneer at as a form.  Hoping it will inspire someone else to write their own medicine.

Witnessing the Self

Grinding doubts inside my jaw,
heavy sacks of rain soaked sand.

Inflamed fear inside my face,
swollen passages
with doors on fire.

fingers and toes,
dried leaves possessed
in a windstorm.

Grief-- my heart, no more words for it.

Strong limbs,
ancient oaks unfurling green.

faith-- my breath,
open windows with white curtains
blowing into mystery.

My upper back,
wide oval lilies floating
on a glassy lake the hue of sky.

Passion-- my heart,
blood roses blooming
out of wet earth,

even with the grinding doubts inside my jaw,
heavy sacks of rain soaked sand.

Milestone

Don't tell anyone, but I'm having a staged reading of a play I've been working on for awhile.  I decided that I wanted to write this play five years ago.  I scaled back on my directing gigs in order to write, because I knew that in my 'heart of hearts' I had to do it, even though I had no idea how to sit down at the desk with enough regularity.

Somehow I kept the story alive, but at a snail's pace, writing in fits and starts.  It  took a good three years to figure out how to get my butt in a chair often enough-- actually that isn't quite true-- I adopted the Truman Capote method and do first drafts by hand in bed.  In the meantime I was busy becoming a fierce herbalist, which is the only work I love to do that is not writing, and then it took two more years to actually get the thing written.

Anyone who says they don't believe in writers block should add the words 'for me' after making that statement.   I'll work hard to never ever ever have that kind of a block again.  Its why I write every day, even if I have a fever of 103.  Even if I'm just making lists of words I like, and words I don't like.  (As it turns out, this is a very fun game.  Besides being revealing, when I'm feeling stuck at some time in the future, I can turn to the lists and try to write something incorporating all of the words.)

I have a kick ass cast but I can't tell you about them, or advertise the reading due to union rules, but if you  email me it means that we are friends and I can invite you for free to the reading at a famous Greenwich Village theater. 

I think its kosher for me to share this much:

All the Devils are Here

Hallucinations, jazz cats, dancing demons, and the Mad Bomber set the backdrop for a journey through the Beat Scene of Greenwich Village circa 1958. Welcome to the dark roots of the soul.

Written and Directed by Kate Temple-West

Monday, January 18th, 8 PM

  RSVP katetemplewest at gee mail.com

Defeating My Red Knight: Best Challenge 09

Day 9 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge:  Best Challenge 09

In Terry Gilliam's film The Fisher King, Robin Williams plays a homeless man named Parry who cowers in mortal terror at the sight of an imaginary red knight, the embodiment of his fear.  The film consistently blurs the line between imagination and reality, suggesting that the line is not that important.  It doesn't matter whether or not the Red Knight really exists, it matters only that he be defeated.

My greatest challenge of 2009 was imaginary.  It was all in my head, and it was as real to me as the Red Knight was to Parry.  2009 hasn't been the easiest year.  There were deaths of people I loved, break ups with friends, job losses, but nothing was more difficult for me to handle than this:

After much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, on a sweltering day in August with my back sticking to the leather desk chair, I proofed my script one last time before dripping through streets radiating with thick white haze blooming with sulfur, to get to Kinkos.  Then I handed my packaged script to a kind Fed-Ex worker after checking the address one last time.

That was it.  Red Knight defeated.  Heavy iron armaments fell off my body and clattered onto the concrete.  It was the first piece of writing I had sent out in over fifteen years.  It didn't matter whether or not it was accepted.  I had sent it out.  I would send out more work in the future.  I was free.

If you like this post, you may like this one too.

lovedrunk freewrite in which I do something that scares me

I have no idea what I am going to write about.  None at all. I am writing about the blank page.

The last hour or so has seen me flitting around on twitter, peeling at my cuticle, reading the New York Times Sunday magazine, and thinking about working on the novel.  A procrastination snarl.  I am fairly famous for them.  They feel usual.

This is unusual, though, this blogging 'off the cuff' about nothing when I have at least 10 blog ideas in my mind.

What is really interesting me right now is my novel, and the play I am getting ready to workshop, and the opera I am dramaturging.

And this.   I've been thinking about my spiritual path.  I'm a Sufi.  To me, this means a seeker who is lovedrunk-- not just with the Divine, but with the world.

It has taken me four years of deep practice to define myself as Sufi.  A novice.  Learning slowly.  Its great, this slowness, learning something that takes many years to deepen into instead of something I'm supposed to 'master' after some six week course.

But  I'm not very comfortable with labels, and I'm even less comfortable discussing my spirituality.  That said, something has shifted and it feels innate.  Permanent, somehow.  A part of my core self.

To be lovedrunk is just what it sounds like.

Let's say I find myself holding a grudge.  For example, a woman I respect belittles a child in a crowded room.  I'm too shocked to respond before the moment passes.  I want to forgive her, but I simply can't.  She's made me feel powerless.  I can't shake it.  I want to shake her instead. 

Then one night I have a glass of wine, and another, and maybe one after that.  My heart is like a singing bird.  I happen to think about the person and find that the grudge is gone.  The love has returned.

Tipsily I dial, the phone is miraculously answered, I gently tell her how I felt and we make up.

Sufism finds ways to get to compassion, forgiveness, and love without the actual wine, and eventually embody those feelings not just in ecstatic states, but always.

The process is not always pretty or pleasant.  It can feel tough, though it can also be blissful.    I am a Sufi.  I needed to say that. 

Now to work on the novel.

*painting by Pakistani artist Shafique Farooqi

A Fabulous Hat or How Limitations Can Increase Creativity

I used to tell myself, 'I'll write when I have more time'. The opposite is actually true. The less time I have, the more feverishly I work. There is no time to second guess myself. Deadlines are genius. I love other constraints, too. They push my creativity in directions I wouldn't think to go.

The hat in the picture recently won first prize in the Garden Club of Virginia's 2009 rose show, category creative. The constraints were: make a modern creative arrangement using roses as the predominant flower and involving a hat. Take inspiration from the life of Richmond philanthropist Grace Arents, 1848-1926.

There is a haunting, ghost-like quality in arrangement's use of negative space. The choice to use a metal mesh hat form with a cloche shape evokes a bygone era, but the sweet pink roses and silvery leaves hint at something enchanted and hopeful. This hat tells a story.

It was made by my mother, Rosanne Temple-West Jones. She says that she wanted to invoke a sense of spirit and memory.

I'm giving myself one week to make some art involving this hat. I invite anyone else who feels like it to do the same, or make up your own constraints.  Write a story, poem, painting, etc. and I will post it on the blog. Thanks for the inspiration, Mummy!

A Book That Will Get You In The Mood... to Birth Freaky Brilliant Brain Children, a.k.a. Lynda Barry Rocks!

Last fall my fantastic friend Simone and I went to the New Yorker Festival and listened to Matt Groening and Lynda Barry chat about the artistic process. Simone and I walked away high on ideas, clutching our newly signed copies of Lynda Barry's book, WHAT IT IS, to our chests, clicking our heels all the way home.

Barry is an acclaimed comic strip writer and novelist, best known for Marlys from Ernie Pook's Comeek, as well as a playwright. I hope that sooner or later she will be just as well known for What IT IS, because it is one of those rare books I want to give to everyone I meet.

What excites me about the book is Barry's understanding of the interplay between visual creativity and writing. Like other mammals, humans tend to think, imagine, and remember in images, and yet when we write, we often forget about that. Playing with images helps us remember. The book is part graphic memoir, part creativity workbook, part exploration of the nature of art. It is impossible to read the book and not feel inspired.

After reading it for a bit I wanted to pick up a glue stick and some images and dance a little jig and then do some writing. It reminded me just how much fun the creative process can be. Whenever I open it, it feeds my desire for stories and fresh ideas while my eyes feast on Barry's deceptively simple ('I can do that too!') artwork.

It feels wrong to flatly state the shimmery ideas inside the book, presented like treasure in a child's pirate game. Here is something from my journal that I was inspired to write in watercolor, without stopping to think, on Barry's suggestion.

'I bought a blue rose on Avenue A today with Eve.
It was expensive, but I was thinking about...making friends with death.
How to do that?
'Blue roses' reminds me of Tennessee Williams, of course,
and my grandmother
who lit her hedges with blue lights
in honor of Mary, goddess of the sea, at Christmastime.
It is clearly unnatural, this blue rose.
I carried it with me,
poking out the top of my green shopping bag
unconcerned, like it was somehow tougher than other roses.'


Here are some of the questions Barry asks in the book:

When images come to us, where do they come from?

Does your imagination know what year it is?

What is the past made of?

When we imagine things we don't want to imagine, why can't we stop ourselves?

She expresses many of her ideas obliquely through her graphic memoir, suggesting fun games to strengthen her readers' imagistic powers in the fourth quarter.

Lynda Barry has a website that has said it is 'coming soon!' for at least a year. There are some great images of What IT IS on her myspace page, but I find that format really difficult to navigate.

She typically teaches writing classes at least a couple of times a year, and I hope to have the chance to take one sometime for the hit of inspiration I know I'll receive.

And yes, I know I'm frothing at the mouth about her, but she and What IT IS are worth the froth.

Green Angels and Jabberwocks: Overcoming Fear

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms my beamish boy!
O Frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
He chortled in his joy.’
--Lewis Carroll from ‘Jabberwocky’ in Through the Looking Glass



A woman who is an actor, screenwriter, ex-cop, and lesbian once told me that she had no fear. ‘Really?’ I asked, trying not to sound too incredulous. ‘Nope,’ she answered.

This made me think. I’m not afraid of rats or snakes or spiders, and when I was held up at gunpoint I was able to focus on the robber’s scrawny shape, wide-set eyes, and large ears so that the cops got a good description. But I do have fears, deep and strange ones.

At one point I was writing a story about a woman who becomes unhinged. I used material from my own nightmares, family traumas, skeletons in the closet, hauntings. The first draft was difficult. I found myself experiencing the emotions of the character as I wrote. I know that suffering for art is a silly notion, but my pain seemed to prove that I must be doing ‘real’ work.

The despair and hopelessness that had racked me as a teenager began to resurface raw. I confided in a close friend, who later told me she was so worried that she had almost called my family; afraid I might take a dive off a high pier. I put the story down for a few months. In the second draft I glossed over those scenes, working instead on the less emotional material.

I wasn’t sure how to approach the piece. I wanted to do it maturely, with my center intact. I thought of a successful, grounded novelist I know through meditation work. She must have a method, I figured. ‘Maybe I should ask her’, I thought one night before bed. Then I went to sleep.

My novelist friend showed up in my dreams that night. She read two poems. One was about her cat, entitled ‘Green Angel’. It felt like an exhalation, an unwinding. The other was about some past trauma. I remember colors: bruise purple, jaundice yellow and cut red, a water color of pain that was rich but contained. I woke up feeling like I had a plan.

A mutual friend of ours had recommended a book by Alice Hoffman several years prior to this dream reference entitled Green Angel. It is a young adult novel written in simple, elegant prose that chronicles the journey of a girl named Green after she loses her family and the world as she knew it in an apocalyptic event.

I had picked it up in a bookstore once, putting it down again quickly because the subject matter seemed too depressing. But the day after my dream I found a copy and devoured it. The story is an inner map for healing the psyche written as a modern-day fairytale. The girl Green must find a way through her grief or else die of despair. She gradually begins to grow again after taking in a thin white greyhound who becomes her guardian.

That was it. I remembered that the ‘Green Angel’ poem in my dream had been about my writer friend’s cat. The dream’s message seemed to be that I couldn’t go into the nightmare realm alone. I needed a guardian. Luckily, I have a pack of dogs. There are the two bright-eyed waggers who whine for their dinner every night, and then there are other beloveds from earlier times who still show up in my dreams when I need them.

I know something about the special ability of animals to nurture the soul. Mired in my own depression soon after September 11th 2001, I found a ghost white, ancient, starved down dog in the New York City subway system who led me and my life partner slowly back to daylight.

I named the dog Beamish Boy from Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky because though his frail body and thin white coat revealed battle scars, he had made it through his ordeal, triumphantly snuggling into our arms. The three of us lived together for almost four years before Beamish passed away, very well loved.

I put a picture of him by the computer as I began the task of tackling my scary (to me) story. I asked my two waggers to watch over me too. The dogs sat on the overstuffed chaise, studying me carefully as I typed. I was able to write that difficult material without being overcome by emotion, feeling instead a flood of compassion for my character. With the help of my guardian dogs I had slain my Jabberwock.

Painting Pumpkins and Bananas

I am having trouble letting go of the play I’ve been working on for a few years. It is the play that has taught me, finally, how to sit at a desk for hours and write.

I tell myself that it doesn’t matter if it is any good. What matters is that I started it, and I finished it all the way to the end. But I want it to be good. I want people to like it. I am afraid that they won’t; that it isn’t.

I also fell in love with my characters. Right now their world is my own secret realm, shared with no one except for one loan, steadfast writing partner who keeps her comments brief.

So it is time to paint some bananas. Actually any vegetable or fruit with a hard fleshy skin would work, but as it is spring not many things like that are in season. I learned this trick from the kids in my local community garden who paint sugar pumpkins at our annual Halloween party every October. They ornament the pumpkins with wild strokes of electric blue and hot pink and canary yellow non-toxic tempra paint, embellishing with poofs and squiggles of glitter glue.

We try to send the kids home with their art, but when they are finished they clamber onto the see-saw or line up to have their fortunes told. They forget about the pumpkins, leaving them to wash clean in the next rainstorm. Then the bare gourds are cooked into delicious late fall soups.

It is good for me to remember the pumpkin's journey when I am finished with a project and trying to let it go. I don’t want to put my pumpkin at the foot of my bed, staring at it every morning until it begins to rot. No. I will eat my pumpkin. Or in this case, my banana. And by this ritual I hope to gently remind myself that the fun part is in the doing. So it is on to new pumpkins, or bananas, or plays. Soon.

Poetry in Hell

I used read my poems, the ones I wrote incessantly, at a bar in Adam’s Morgan, Washington D.C. called Hell. It was in the basement of a club called Heaven, which I never visited. The walls and ceiling of Hell Bar were painted red with Halloween zombie hands sticking out of the light fixtures. The place felt safe: part womb, part pirate hideout. I made certain to be there every Sunday night.

The bartender would turn off the heavy metal screaming from the speakers. I would sit at a tiny round table nursing a beer and let the poems wash over me. 

A rumpled balding man played the dulcimer every week as he recited long poems about herons. A Capital Hill type guy in pressed khakis and shiny loafers read acidly funny treatises in the persona of Wile E. Coyote. 

I nicknamed a Courtney Love-esque punk girl the cum poet because she recited her opus on cum at least once a month. I’d smirk in a dark corner as she spoke, clutching my Sam Adams, a grown-up beer, something a teenager would never order, I calculated, because I was in high school and there illegally.

I usually kept to myself. I listened to the poets, read one to three short new poems that, to quote the founder Greg Gerding, I ‘soberly, painstakingly, worked on’ during the week and left as soon as the heavy metal resumed to catch the last metro train back to Northern Virginia. 

But I felt connected. Over time the hell poets became my congregation. Greg’s poems inspired me to write on bar napkins. We were all there for the love of the word, small w. Clapping at the end, no heckling, and a generous time limit for each poet were the only rules.

When I got to New York to continue my study of theater at NYU, I went to the Nuyorican and was lost. Some of the poetry was phenomenal, but it was all so…. DECLARATIVE! I didn’t see a place in the Slam world for depressed middle-class suburban girl verse full of gentle sadness and a love of the small.  Where was the equivalency of Poetry in Hell? The anything goes kind of place? My studies took over; I never found it. I stopped writing poetry.

This lead in part to a toxic writer’s block which leached beyond poetry into everything else I tried to write. Poetry had been my first church. Time unwound; meanings were illuminated; my deepest self was given voice. Without it I was silenced in ways I hadn't anticipated. 

The block lasted from age 19 to 29. I twisted, cajoled, bullshitted, wept and fasted, wept and prayed my way out of it, along the way finding new congregations of actors, dancers, seekers, gardeners, and herbalists. But I think that I may have bypassed years of struggle if I had simply sought out other people who wrote poetry. ‘They’re doing it. I can do it too.’ I need conspirators. I know this now.