11/ Now

(special thanks to the gathering of quotes from poet Michael Dennis Browne)

NOW

"Forgiveness of the present is even more important than forgiveness of the past. If you forgive every moment--allow it to be as it is--then there will be no accumulation of resentment that needs to be forgive at some later time.

To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be."

-- Eckhart Tolle

"We have to pay attention to this very moment, the totality of what is happening right now.... we never see this right-here-now, this very moment. We can't see it because we're filtering.... all we must do is constantly to create a little shift from the spinning world we've got in our heasd to right-here-now. That's our practice... It's always a choice, moment by moment, between our nice world we want to set up in our heads and what really is.

Just be patient. We might have to do it ten thousand times, but the value for our practice is the constant return of the mind into the present, over and over and over... opinions, judgments, memories, dreaming about the future--ninety percent of the thoughts spinning around in our heads have no essential reality. And we go from birth to death, unless we wake up, wasting most our life with them."

--Charlotte Joko Beck

"As we awaken we discover that we are not limited by who we think we are. All the stories we tell ourselves--the judgments, the problems, the whole identity of the small sense of self, 'the body of fear'--can be released in a moment, and a timeless sense of grace and liberation can open for us.

The mind dismisses the present moment."

--Jack Kornfield

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable it is nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.

Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive."

--Martha Graham

These quotes are particularly nice to go along with the Change of Venue exercise, and though they speak to more general terms, being present to the moment is incredibly important with regards to writing and thus, can spur all kinds of discussion / advice.

10/ The Delight Song of Tsaoi-Talee

(a special thanks to poet Michael Dennis Browne for this exercise!)

The Delight Song of Tsaoi-Talee
- by N. Scott Mamaday

I am a feather on the bright sky

I am the blue horse that runs on the plain

I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water

I am the shadow that follows a child

I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows

I am an eagle playing with the wind

I am a cluster of bright beads

I am the farthest star

I am the cold of dawn

I am the roaring of the rain

I am the glitter of the crust of the snow

I am the long track of the moon in a lake

I am a flame of four colors

I am a deer standing away in the dusk

I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche

I am an angle of geese in the winter sky

I am the hunger of a young wolf

I am the whole dream of these things

You see, I am alive, I am alive

I stand in good relation to the earth

I stand in good relation to the gods

I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful

I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte

You see, I am alive, I am alive

Writing exercise (in several steps):

- Begin by writing a series of "I am" statements. Be free, let this go for five, ten minutes.
- MDB likes to have the writer cut one line completely, change a word, and give specific instructions for small edits.
- The second step is to re-write the poem by shuffling the "halves" of the poem. For instance, in the first line, "I am a feather on the bright sky" and the second line, "I am the blue horse that runs in the plain" could become "I am a feather that runs in the plain" or "I am the blue horse on the bright sky." One does not have to make those shifts with phrases that are adjacent, but rather, let the eyes wander (quickly) and see what comes up.

Share. (MDB would then ask, "What's your pleasure, what's your pain? What was that like for you? Feed the monster.")

9/ Things to do Around Seattle

(a special thanks to poet Michael Dennis Browne for this exercise!)

Things to Do Around Seattle
- by Gary Snyder

Hear phone poles hum.
Catch garter snakes. Make lizard tails fall off.
Biking to Lake Washington, see muddy little fish.
Peeling old bark off Madrone to see the clean red new bark.
Cleaning fir pitch off your hands.
Reading books in the back of the University District goodwill.
Swimming in Puget Sound below the railroad tracks.
Dig clams.
Ride the Kalakala to Bremerton.
See Mt. Constance from the water tower up by the art museum.
Fudgsicles in Woodland park zoo, the Eagle and the Camel.
The mummy Eskimo baby in the University Anthropology museum.
Hung up deep sea canoes, red cedar log.
Eating old style oatmeal mush cookt in double boiler or cracked wheat cereal with dates.
Sway in the wind in the top of the cedar in the middle of the swamp--
Walking off through the swamp and over the ridge to the pine woods.
Picking wild blackberries all around stumps.
Peeling cascara
Feeding chickens
Feeling Penelope's udder, one teat small
Oregon grape and salal.



Assignment: Write your own Things to do Around _______ (campus, your hometown, the town we are in now, Uptown, the dorm, a place you vacationed, this classroom, your friend's house, etc.).

8/ Things I Learned Last Week

(a special thanks to poet Colleen McCarthy for this exercise!)

Copy + read the following poem aloud in class:



Things I Learned Last Week
- by William Stafford

Ants, when they meet each other,
usually pass on the right.

Sometimes you can open a sticky
door with your elbow.

A man in Boston has dedicated himself
to telling about injustice.
For three thousand dollars he will
come to your town to tell you about it.

Schopenhauer was a pessimist but
he played the flute.

Yeats, Pound, and Eliot saw art as
growing from other art. They studied that.

If I ever die, I'd like it to be
in the evening. That way, I'll have
all the dark to go with me, and no one
will see how I begin to hobble along.

In The Pentagon one person's job is to
take pins out of towns, hills, and fields,
and then save the pins for later.



Discuss and have students write their own poem after "Things I Learned Last Week" by Stafford. (This is good early in the year if you are teaching a freshmen-level class.)

7/ Writers on Writing

New York Times (free) archive: Writers on Writing.

This is also a series of books, and there's a wealth of articles here that can occupy all kinds of discussion topics.

(I'm fairly sure the instructor's name was Dominic Saucedo, a (then) fiction MFA at the U of MN, who introduced this site to me when I was an undergraduate taking Intermediate Fiction.)

6/ My Name

Have students read the following piece from House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros aloud:

My Name

In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.

It was my great-grandmother's name and now it is mine. She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse--which is supposed to be bad luck if you're born female-but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don't like their women strong.

My great-grandmother. I would've liked to have known her, a wild, horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn't marry. Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. That's the way he did it.

And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window.

At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not quite as thick as sister's name Magdalena--which is uglier than mine. Magdalena who at least- -can come home and become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza. would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do.

Discuss piece as you see fit. Prior to class, look up students' names on a baby name website and find what origin and definition there are for each student. (Ex: My name, Molly, means "bitter." My husband's name, Ryan, means "little king.") Read these out loud also--the students get a kick out of finding out whether or not they believe those names fit their classmates.

Assign a vignette to the students: They are to write their own my name piece. If this is a homework assignment, they also will need to speak with their parents to find out how their name came about; if you are doing this as a warm-up, make sure to have the students do this ahead of time. They can include last names too, if they know the origin of that. Let students know they can include emotions regarding their names too--Did they have nicknames as children? Had anyone made fun of them because of their name? Did they ever wish they had a different name? Etc.

This exercise was originally designed when I found the vignette in my ninth grade textbook; I used it to teach denotation (literal meaning of a word; we talked about "home," and we talked about the baby names definitions) and connotation (emotional meaning of a word; again, the return to "home" and the stories behind the name, the nicknames, the love-hate relationships). I used it last semester with my university students in Intro to Creative Writing in the non-fiction unit. In both instances, as a literature tool and as a creative writing tool, it went smoothly and revealed a lot about my students, which makes it a good early-on assignment.

5/ Five Senses

As an M.Ed student, my co-teacher Mandy and I had to come up with a series of exercises for the middle school intersession course on creative writing we taught, and this is one that was essentially her idea. We had to practice the teaching with a group of our peers, other pre-teachers, and I'm going to present it as such, though you can adapt it as you see fit:

- Write the five senses at the top of the board. Go through each one slowly, eliciting specifics from students--give them a place (with the pre-teachers, it was a bar; with my high schoolers, it was the cafeteria) and have them shout out responses. Make the list as long as you can with as many nouns, verbs, and adjectives as you can. Emphasize how you haven't been in X place in a long time and really want to imagine what it is like being in that place.
- Review the lists you've created on the board. What words are strongest? Why? Discuss.
- Create a writing assignment around this list--I usually had them write a poem evoking a sense of place using rich sensory details, but you can also have them create a narrative, etc.

4/ Story Pass

One cannot discuss the exquisite corpse without following up with a similar exercises, this time in fiction. My students have generally enjoyed this particular exercise:

You can give them a premise, or not. But start a story and work on a timer. For every three, five, varied minutes have them pass the paper along and pick up where the story left off. Sometimes I have them start with a line: "It was dark in the house; I heard a door slam." It's interesting to see which directions the stories go in.

For high schoolers, depending on the age group, the stories can get a bit ridiculous, but it's a nice activity if taken moderately seriously. Reading aloud is always fun at the end of this one.

3/ Exquisite Corpse

There are several variations to this exercise, but the one that has been the most popular (both as a student of writing and as an instructor) is the following:

- You can start each student with the same line, if that seems easiest, or you can have the students come up with their own first line of poetry.
- Pass the sheet to the left, and the next person reads that line, writes a subsequent line, and then folds over the first line so only the most recent line is showing. Continue to do so for however long you wish, making sure each time, the paper is folded back so only one line of the poem is showing. You can switch directions, collect and pass back out, etc., so that students don't have to continue to respond to the same person's lines.

This is a fun one to read aloud, to see which directions students have gone.

A word of warning: If you have sensitive issues in the classroom, or if you believe they need to be told, make sure you let students know what is inappropriate and what is not. I haven't had issues in university classrooms, but doing this as a high school teacher, there is an opportunity for slight anonymity in responses, which some kids might take advantage of in a not-so-poetic way.

2/ Change of Venue

Students love any opportunity to leave the regular constraints of the classroom. When I taught CW in high school, I simply assigned the students to various areas of the building, especially emphasizing those high traffic "interesting" areas, such as the music corridor, the commons / cafeteria, the office, the library. When I taught CW at the university level, we went into the mall area of campus, a high traffic spot with many stone benches and swaths of lawn (complete with Frisbee players and squirrels).

You can have this change of venue be accompanied with instructions as simple as: "Write for the twenty minutes we're outdoors. See what you come up with."

When doing this activity with high schoolers, I gave them a chart, and they were to track what they specifically observed, paying attention only to the sounds they heard. They would block off certain time periods, and pay close attention to what was being said, what extra sounds were heard, etc. with the strict instructions of not being involved in any scene--they were to be invisible, so to speak.

1/ Three Objects

This can work as a good first-day exercise to help students get to know one another.

Have students pair up and pull three objects from their backpack / purse / pockets, etc. You can lead them by saying, "Find three objects that tell something about you," or "Find three objects that are important to you," and pass them to your partner.

Students can then:
- Write about what is revealed by those three objects. What assumptions can be made with those three objects? You can have students introduce each other with those three objects and the guesses as to what is a significant part of the partner's life / personality. (This can be a kind of character building exercise as well.)
- OR, students could create a story which involves those three objects in some way.