Women Writing for (a) Change
Semester 29 - Class 10
Agenda - Monday Evening, Oct. 31, 2005

Write fast, write close to the bone, write for ten hours straight until you're not thinking in words anymore but in colors, in smells, in waves of memory. Write what you care about. Don't write one more word you don't care about. Don't waste any more of your life on what does not matter to you. Write only what matters to you-those scenes, those dialogues. Get messy. Before you get neat, get very, very messy. Write until you are more alive than you have ever been before.
-Betty Friedman, Writing Past Dark

Applesauce by Ted Kooser in Delights and Shadows
 
I liked how the starry blue lid
of that saucepan lifted and puffed,
then settled back on a thin
hotpad of steam, and the way
her kitchen filled with the warm
wet breath of apples, as if all
the apples were talking at once,
as if they'd come cold and sour
from chores in the orchard,
and were trying to shoulder in
close to the fire.  She was too busy
to put in her two cent's worth
talking to apples.  Squeezing
her dentures with wrinkly lips,
she had to jingle and stack
the bright brass coins of the lids
and thoughtfully count out
the red rubber rings, then hold
each jar, to see if it was clean,
to a window that looked out
through her back yard into Iowa. 
And with every third or fourth jar
she wiped steam from her glasses,
using the hem of her apron,
printed with tiny red sailboats
that dipped along with leaf-green
banners snapping, under puffs
of pale applesauce clouds
scented with cinnamon and cloves,
the only boats under sail
for at least two thousand miles
 
 
7:00 Opening the Circle:  Poem; Pass the stone, say your name and one gift of the circle to you

7:15 Fastwrite #1:  Hold in your hand one of the apples from the centerpiece.  What do you feel, smell, see?  What images come to you?  Take up your pen and write what comes…describe how your senses receive the apple, specific images your senses call up.  Are you reminded of an "apple story?"  Write it now.

7:30 Small Groups:

9:05 Fastwrite #2:  What ideas came to you during fastwrite 1, or during small group?  continue … or begin a new piece based on what inspired you tonight.  Write without stopping, thinking, editing, judging.

9:20 Setting Intentions / Announcements / Soul Cards / Closing the Circle

Here are several writing suggestions & practices for the coming week:

1. Spend 15 minutes OUTSIDE, observing.  Write exactly what you see; try not to craft or edit, just report.  Once you have it all down, then circle whatever on your page feels like a "keeper" and arrange into a "piece" - a short poem, a sonnet, a descriptive paragraph, a song.  Or not…

2. Reread the quote at the top and follow Betty Friedman's suggestion:  Write only what matters…write a dialogue with someone who matters.  Don't think in WORDS, but in colors, smells, waves of memory.

3.  What small, everyday occurrence could you turn into a story? Look around your house this week and make a list of the ordinary things you usually overlook, savor the names of those things.  Think of that list as a poem.

4. Set a goal to COMPLETE one piece of writing this week.  Go back and revisit your fastwrites, journals, or poems you've been playing with.  Shape, revise, re-write; then pronounce it FINISHED.

5. Follow your Muse