Weekly assignment for Cultivating Voice:

This week I am trying an exercise employing techniques from “Writing as Cooking” by Peter Elbow. This version is a couple steps after the original “external cooking” I did in my notebook, but for the purposes of this exercise, it is fairly similar:
I feel that, my first step is to open myself up. Write freely. I should know how to do this… although, I censor my blog a lot too now. And I have never been able to do it for an assignment because I so often feel that my words will stick to the page, to the piece, even if I discard them later. (Maybe that is the point…) Anyway, I wish to make this cooking process work for me. I edit out too much too quickly, as my mind and my hand filter and scratch out anything less than my supposed best. For this reason, I always have trouble starting.
I write as I stare out a train window. Writing, while traveling across the grey-green country, and sipping a too-hot cup of cocoa, listening to a beautiful song I had long forgotten; this is heaven. I am distracted, I am thoughtful. I am not fluent, and well, that isn’t the point. But I pause every few seconds searching for the thoughts, and each word as though they are strewn across the landscape, or hidden in the signs that briefly enter my life, and vanish more quickly. A new song starts. “Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box. They tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe.”

(Wow, I feel like I am really bad at this “external” thing because of how much I am thinking. …But then again, everything is a process--even learning a new process.)

I found this week in Cultivating Voice to be especially profound. The three sections I have divided in my mind, have each provided their own unique insights to me, helping me relearn how to project myself and my feelings onto the page; how to be open and expressive and honest with my writing. Joe Tougas’ presentation is the first of these sections. He captured me with his soft, but powerful approach. I watched as he turned a circle of people into a thoughtful crock-pot of idea, insight, truth, and questioning. He opened us up.


That was class.
On Wednesday I went to the center to work with a tutor. When I signed up, I made sure to get a different guy then I got the first time I went there two whole quarters ago. I had seen him lurking around, and I really didn’t want to encounter him again. I needed an experience that would get me cooking, rather than shoving me down the garbage disposal.

Dear Skye,
I will never forget this first session with you. When I had started to reduce myself, my writing, my art, my life to nothing, you sat with me, talked with me, and opened me up, exposing my reclusion. You stimulated my passion, my meaning. And you talked and questioned until I again knew all the things I had once found in myself through writing, but that I had lost along the way.
…I lost them through my writing too, because I had lost the art. Well, more accurately, I had given up on the art. It was no longer art for me, even if I wanted it to be, because I refused to see myself as an artist, or even as a person with the ability to be artistic.
That is wrong.
I have been creating, and what anyone creates is art, because it has the properties and involves the process of art: expression, perception, chance, meshing, molding, thought. Creation is art, and creators are artists. You, Skye, helped me remember.
Thank you,
Alex

We have just emerged from a long dark tunnel, and I look out the train window. The view opens up into a wide, bright body of water. Choppy. Waves cresting and breaking to the tune of the song that started playing through my headphones just as the darkness fell, and the clouded sunlight reconnected to this page. I stare. The train is hardly moving and I have time to see and hear, or at least imagine, a million symphonies in this particular texture and motion, this area of the water; the boundless inspiration in one site. And I can be a composer.


My final “enlightenment” this week came from the very reading that inspired this exercise: “Writing as cooking.” I am a better writer just having read it. That must be because it made me, again, look at my relationship with writing. Seeing that other people struggle with the same exact problems as I do, and discovering the techniques I need overcome those difficulties. I feel like exercising some of those techniques in this paper has already helped.