As we all started eating dessert, she turned to me and said, But how will you tell it? Before I had a chance to answer, she told me about some friends she had in New York, people her age, whose family had stories--terrible stories, she said--about the war. Now these people had a child, Alena went on, a daughter in her early twenties, who'd just taken a degree in literature, and who had written her thesis about her grandmother, the one who'd suffered those terrible things. Alena said that this young woman had given her the thesis to read, and while reading it she had been struck by something.

She said, It was like what she was interested in was not so much the story of her grandmother but how to tell the story of her grandmother--how to be the storyteller.

-- Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

I gave my students a sheet of paper with the phrase "Eating the Honey of Words" written at the top, taken from Bly's collection of poems. The students were then to "collect" words throughout the semester--both ones they loved and hated, and we discussed them occasionally, and traded too, creating various prompts with the sheets. I also had a sheet of butcher paper stapled to the wall in the front of the room and invited them to write some of those words on the paper, which they loved to do. This, of course, was while I taught creative writing in high school, though I did do the paper in a pocket part with my college students in Intro to Creative Writing.

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.