Sunshine in a Jar

Archive for the ‘Articles on the Writing Life’ Category

As the return to work creeps closer with each sunrise, I think about time. I’ve always been a time management junkie, reading Stephen Covey for strategies, reading Wayne Dyer for balance, experimenting along the way.  I bought a Blackberry mostly for its calendar!

I long for the feeling of time I had as a child, when the days seemed to stretch across continents.  William Wordsworth writes: “Sweet childish days, that were as long, As twenty days are now.” 

The spirit of sunshine in a jar is to honour our time with meaning and joy. 

Last week, I turned off the Internet and the television to write.  I went for walks. I read. I went on retreat. This is the third summer I go on retreat. Four writers and I rent a space in the Madawaska area and we write and share and give feedback.  It’s like spending a week in a literary wonderland.

Now that I am home, I wonder how to hold onto my writing routine, how to resist the television and facebook and twitter and online news, how to be present in my writerly mind and in my relationships.

Alexander Graham Bell says: “Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”

My plan is to focus on two major writing projects:

• Anthology of Cottage Stories
• Sunshine in a Jar: A Life History

The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.  ~Agatha Christie

How do you decide where to focus your creative energies?

Reading Anne Michaels’ novel “The Winter Vault” makes me want to be a better writer. Michaels swirls ripe words and decadent phrases and electric paragraphs into an imaginative, provocative story. I read slowly, to linger on an image or an idea.

She writes: “I’ve been reading about rain, said Jean” (page 86). Michaels expertly dips me into the theme, to feel, to see, and to know water.  I’ve never read about rain. I’ve never thought about reading about rain. Michaels connects two elements, reading and rain, to reveal Jean as an intellectual, a naturalist, a passionate woman who sees beauty in simplicity. 

Michaels inspires me to see my world in slow motion, with care.

For the next 50 days I plan to explore Roy Peter Clark’s book “Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer.” Guy Allen included it on the reading list for Expressive Writing at OISE. I took the course in Winter 2010 as part of my Grad program. We used a few of the tools, but I didn’t get a chance to try them all.

So, I plan to  read a new chapter each day and post my writing practice. I’ll begin tomorrow, July 22. So, my project will end September 10, 2010.  50 days, 50 writing strategies.

Why?

• To improve my writing
• To have a reason to write every day
• To read the whole book (I’ve read part of it and loved it)
• To blog (because it’s addictive)
• To see if this is a reasonable challenge for my students
• To finally prove to myself that I can be a disciplined person

The title of the post will be the writing tool Clark lists in his book.  I will move through the book chapter by chapter.  My goal is to integrate the tool into a writing piece. 

Summer is my time to drown in the delicious delights of the life of a writer. Over the next seven weeks I want to sip from a chocolate fondue fountain of words!

My other big writing project this summer is to work on the third draft of my YA novel. I hope these exercises infuse some new life into my rewrite. And so a new adventure begins!

Published in the May/June issue of The Word Weaver.

My grandfather grew up playing on an island on Georgian Bay. He lived in a lighthouse. My great-grandfather was the lighthouse keeper.

A light provides hope for boaters when they lose their way. Lives depend on seeing the light beam through the fog and the waves and the darkness.  Some describe “light bulb moments” in learning.  I have lighthouse moments.            

As a teenager, I wrote poems about heartbreak and tragedy.  Like a young child playing dress-up, I tried on different scenarios through the writing.  I learned how to use emotion for effect in my writing. I learned the therapeutic benefits of writing about what I feared. And I learned how to create without audience. 

Play is process. Children know how to play. When children play, they use imagination, build social and intellectual skills, make new connections, learn from the inside-out, and problem-solve more effectively. 

 We play when we engage in a project without expectation, experiment with alternatives, and embrace the moment.  We know the rules to the game, but adjust the rules to make the game more fun.

In 2003, I began a novel.  Midway through the project, I crossed paths with an editor and pitched my idea to her. She loved it! 

I imagined my debut as a ‘chick-lit’ novelist. I dreamed of book signings, million dollar contracts, and a glamorous life. Then, writer’s block walloped me.

I had lost a sense of play.  Julia Cameron explains the dangers of fame: “Fame is a spiritual drug. It is often a by-product of our artistic work, but like nuclear waste, it can be a very dangerous by-product…The point of the work is the work” (Cameron, 2002, p. 171).   

I needed a lighthouse moment to guide me through the fog.

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way encourages play. The exercises reminded me of childhood adventures, suggested fun artist dates, and insisted upon writing Morning Pages. 

I filled journals with wordplay, babblings, stories, and thoughts. I relearned how to engage in the process of writing without getting lost in the potential glory of a finished product.  Slowly, I learned how to let go of expectation. 

The routine of playful writing acted as a range light guiding me home.  I learned how to create with joy. My creative life was richer than ever.  My journals glowed with an abundance of ideas. I had learned how to take the lid off the jar and play with the sunshine that danced all over the page.  But, when would I become a writer?

When a boater is lost in a storm, her best defense is to focus her attention on the range light and seek shelter at the lighthouse until the storm passes.  My novel was not working, so I decided to shift my attention to another writing project.  Then, when the conditions improved I could return to the project. 

I decided to write a play. The lighthouse, and a fictional story about the effects of a young girl’s rape there, became a central storyline layered over the stories of the women at Girls’ Week.

The writing streamed out of me with the intensity of a fire hose.  I welcomed inspiration, trusted my ideas were sound, and let the play unfold without expectations.  I played with character, structure, technique, and setting. 

The two big lessons I had learned about inspiration and playfulness allowed me to finish “Once Upon a Rocking Chair,” my first play.   And when I learned how to finish one project, I began to finish more. 

Writing is a process, a moment, a relationship between me and the words on the page, a relationship between the words on the page and the reader.  

In becoming a writer, it was important to me to finish a project because it would signal my capacity to generate an idea and communicate it. 

Playwright. Play write.  These two words have come to identify my work as a writer. Play.  Write.  And they are my wish for you: play, write.

By Jessica Outram

Once upon a time there was a boy named Sabastian. He dreamed of becoming a writer. From the time he learned the Alphabet song, he recognized the power of letters. While other children played with blocks, Sabastian played with letters, building words and phrases and sentences until he was writing whole stories. From lost snowflakes and found puppy dogs to ferocious dinosaurs and sleeping turtles, he wrote.

Sabastian’s mother called his gift sunshine because whenever Sabastian was lost in the thrill of a story, sunshine radiated out of him. He glowed. ‘The sun always shines for Sabastian,’ she chimed.

One day it rained. It rained so heavily that Sabastian didn’t write for days. Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. Sabastian, now a forty-year-old man, had a family of his own. He ached to write. At nights, after his family was asleep, he would sneak into the kitchen with his yellow pad of paper and stare at it. After an hour, he sadly put the paper away, writing nothing. For years he couldn’t figure out how to recapture his sunshine.

Something drastic needed to be done. A month later, Sabastian kissed his wife on the forehead, squished his children close to his heart, and set out on a pilgrimage to find his sunshine, using the money he had saved for a rainy day.

His first stop was London, England. When he arrived at the theatre, his heart skipped a beat. The whispers of great playwrights danced on his shoulders.

“What brings you to the Globe, love?” A woman wrapped in a turquoise shawl slipped beside him as he admired the grand stage.

“Shakespeare. You?”

“I’m not visiting, love.” Her brown eyes were electric and piercing.

As she turned her lips up to smile, he knew. It was the great Dame–the most illustrious actress in

London.

“Where do you find it? How can you capture magic onstage every night without fail?”

“It’s all right here.” She tapped her heart.

His next stop: Florence. From statues to architecture to paintings in the Uffizi, sunshine greeted him at every turn.

“How did you do it?” He whispered while relishing the glory of Michaelangelo’s David. “How did you create so much? How could you hold onto your passion and vision?”

In the quiet of the gallery, the answer came to him. Diligence.

Finally, Sabastian journeyed to Greece. Sunshine blanketed him as he reread his favourite myths from the top of Mount Olympus.

“How have these stories lived for centuries?”A scrunched flyer tumbled to his feet. ‘Understand the mystery of life and humanity.’ He didn’t need to read further. Returning home, Sabastian felt inspired to write. Late that night, after everyone was asleep, he tiptoed to the kitchen with his yellow pad of paper. He sat. He stared. Nothing.

Then, he looked up beyond the page. The kitchen was bathed in a most peculiar light. He saw colourful letters dancing in the orange juice on the counter, stories swimming with the goldfish on the shelf, and beautiful phrases glowing in the artwork on the fridge.

Sabastian closed his eyes and listened to the words tumbling from the sunshine in his heart. He began to write, surrounded by the most valuable treasures in his life.

This story was first published in the Word Weaver in February/March 2004

Published in The Word Weaver, January/February 2010

Learning is a fiery force in my life. Sometimes it burns through what I’ve always known to be true like a forest fire and it isn’t until the smoke clears that I can see the opportunity for new growth. Sometimes it lights me up with joy like the sunshine because I finally understand something I didn’t understand before. Sometimes it’s more like a lighthouse, blinking through the fog to guide me to see a part of myself or the world I hadn’t realized worked that way. Fire, sunshine, and the lighthouse are metaphors that connect to the learning processes in my life.

This is how my paper began. I was taking a grad course entitled ‘Adult Learning’ at OISE, University of Toronto in Winter 2009. On the first day, our professor posed a question to us: What’s the difference between I’m learning to play the cello and playing the cello?

As writers, when is it that we go from writing drivel to wanting to write better to learning to write a story to writing a story? In one moment we are doing something (writing) and the next we want to learn how to become something deeper (a writer). Then we write and rewrite, attend workshops and rewrite, read books and rewrite, network at WCDR breakfasts and rewrite, and emerge with—ta da!—a finished manuscript. But what did we learn? How did we learn?

This is the first in a series of three articles on learning to become a writer. The articles will weave my personal experience and research with a focus on how I learn, and I’ll admit some snippets are taken from my paper Reflections on Becoming a Writer: The Metaphors Weaving Through My Learning and Life. Please feel free to share your learning journey with me too via email or my website. We can learn together.

In the mid-1980s David A. Kolb provided a model of the adult learning process. He suggests that when we learn we move in a cycle that includes experiencing, reflecting, theorizing, and applying.

I remember the experience of deciding I wanted to learn more about writing. I was working on a science fiction story about a futuristic city that removed all playgrounds and banished all forms of play. Although I was in the act of what I wanted to become, writing, the spark was a moment of insight that signalled to me I wanted to learn more.

As the cycle indicates, my next step was to start making meaning. This is a time where we reflect on what we have and determine what we need to move forward. I joined the WCDR, attended informative breakfast meetings, took tons of notes at workshops led by members (like Dorothea and Rich Helms, Sue Reynolds, and fabulous guest instructors), signed up for Advanced Creative Writing with Ruth Walker at Durham College, and read as many books on being a writer and writing that I could find.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott explains the transition: “Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up” (Lamott, 1994, p. 13). My perspective began to change and I started to see the world around me differently: like a writer.

The idea of being a writer began to weave its way through the fabric of my life. The pressures that come with deciding to become something seeped into the blank spaces on my page—the spaces between the lines and the letters grew until writer’s block set in.

Suddenly, I could see that the learning was just beginning. I had moved in a circle beginning with the writing, moving through my intentions and how I could improve the work. When I returned to the work, the act of writing, a new experience emerged and another cycle of learning began.

In Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way, Mary Catherine Bateson describes learning as a spiral: “Lessons too complex to grasp in a single occurrence spiral past again and again, small examples gradually revealing greater and greater implications” (Bateson, 1994, p. 30). Placing this idea alongside Kolb’s learning theory I can see how similar cycles and spirals can be. I can see Kolb’s theory spiralling through my relationships, career decisions, awareness of self, and through my learning about writing. Everything is connected in the spiral; everything is a part of everything else. Even in Kolb’s learning cycle all of the learning is informed by prior learning, everything is connected.

Take some time to reflect on the lessons spiralling through your writing. How do they connect to your life?

Gather your favourite beverage, a pen, and your journal in a quiet spot. Begin with: I remember deciding to learn to write…

Imagine a Friday in April. Imagine a crystal blue sky. Imagine the warmth of the sun on your skin. Your skin feels like it moves of its own will toward the sun like a sunflower.

I chose to become a writer because of the joy I feel writing.  Shaping words on paper felt as good as the warmth of the sun on my cheek—until I experienced writer’s block.

July, 2002.  I signed up for a one week writing program at Centauri Arts. I desperately needed inspiration.

Imagine we collect joy and stories and experiences and creativity in a jar. Writing becomes as easy as taking the lid off the jar, catching the streams of inspiration as they swirl above our heads, and then scattering stories down onto the page into a masterpiece.  Writer’s block abolished forever. 

Is it possible to collect inspiration in a jar? Can writers learn inspiration?

As a child, I loved to play dress-up, to write in my spiral bound Return of the Jedi notebook, and to sing along with Anne Murray on my Fisher Price record player. Inspiration, creativity, and joy amused me daily.

As I grew up, fear tip-toed its way into my spirit.  Anne Lamott explains: “Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.”  I feared criticism and praise, failure and success, and the immensity of the creative spirit at work within me.

To be inspired, we need to conquer the dragon of fear. Julia Cameron agrees “fear is the true name for what ails the blocked artist.”

In my Centauri Arts course, we read aloud Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Marie Rilke each morning. Rilke reminds us to create for ourselves. He explains the work as an artist as inside-out.  Inside, I worried about losing balance when I lost track of time. I obsessed about what others thought of my writing.

Julia Cameron writes: “Most of the time when we are blocked in an area of our life, it is because we feel safer that way.”

In 1999, I began my first novel. It became difficult. I stopped writing. At Centauri Arts, I reflected on what went wrong with the creative process. I asked questions about why I was afraid.

In his eighth letter, Rilke writes that only someone who is ready for anything can be alive.  To write, I needed to be ready for anything.  “We have no reason to mistrust our world for it is not against us.” This line pierced through my understanding of fear and served as a catalyst for change. 

That week, I wrote a poem called “Art in a Jar.” The phrase sunshine in a jar arrived on my page.

Sunshine: Joy, spirit, imagination, happiness, creativity, inspiration, love 

Jar: a glass container with a lid often used for preserving or collecting

Writers love metaphors.  Metaphors weave experiences and relationships. Metaphors are evocative. Metaphors deepen understanding. Metaphors engage possibility, open hearts and minds, and invite multiple perspectives. Metaphors connect. Metaphors reside deep within our souls. We use metaphors to teach and we use metaphors to learn.

Sunshine in a jar captures my relationship with inspiration.

Writers collect names, experiences, stories, perspectives, and words, like a child collects caterpillars in a jar. We treasure our collections. We check in on them. We poke holes in the lid to make sure our collections can breathe until it’s time to play with them. 

Writers rely on inspiration and creativity. We yearn for the chance to spread story with the reach of the rays of the sun.  When I take the lid off my jar, inspiration streams out.

Welcome inspiration. Keep paper nearby to jot notes. Spill an idea on the page without judgment or expectation. Limit writing time to five hour blocks to ease the return to reality. Quiet the censor.  Write energy.  Play. Make the effort to come to the page and words will follow.  Take long walks. Capture sunshine in a jar.

What inspires you?

By Jessica Outram

Published in the March/April 2010 Word Weaver

“You’ve got to keep the child alive; you can’t create without it.”—Joni Mitchell

I’ve devoted the last ten years to actively researching creativity in the classroom.  Imagination is a fundamental teaching tool.  This is what I have learned about creativity:

• Creative thinking is an essential skill.  Fresh and original ideas encourage further insight into the mysteries of humanity, make connections among the past, present, and future, and promote innovation in our world.
• Creativity involves risk. Risk is scary and it can limit creativity.  Encourage students to look beyond the surface, delve bravely into the unknown, and act fearlessly.
• Teachers need to model creativity if they want their students to be creative.
• Spark creativity by giving clear instructions and few restrictions.  Creativity can breed in both free-flowing and structured activities.
• To encourage creativity connect to imagination, pull down boundaries, and explore options.
• Your classroom is your creative playground. Remember to provide the equipment and encourage free-play at recess.
• Creativity begets creativity.  Students care about creativity.  Creativity can dance alongside academic study.
• To nurture creativity you must provide constant encouragement, swift recognition, and continual raising of the bar on creative achievement. This process is key.  I’ve tested it thoroughly and it works in any time increment.
• Include creative moments in each workshop—a moment for you to model creativity and a moment for students to demonstrate creativity.

Here are some books that have helped me teach writing and reflect on being a writing instructor:

• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
• Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
• The Write-Brain Workbook by Bonnie Neubauer
• The Pocket Muse by Monica Wood
• The Practice of Poetry by Robin Behn & Chase Twichell
• Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times
• The Right to Write by Julia Cameron
• The Writer’s Digest Writing Clinic Edited by Kelly Nickell
• How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch
• On Writing by Stephen King
• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Marie Rilke
• If…Questions for the Game of Life by Evelyn McFarlane and James Saywell 

You can’t help but be inspired when you are on Georgian Bay.  I’ve travelled many places and it remains the most beautiful landscape in my mind.  I’m not sure who took this picture…I found it on my dad’s desktop this morning but it is stunning.  It’s a picture of the lighthouse my grandfather grew up on.  Although the actual structure he lived in has probably been replaced with this building it is on the same island.

So far, three of my biggest writing projects (two plays and a novel) have been set in Northern Ontario. My parents moved here permanently last month.  I’m looking forward to spending more time luxuriating in this landscape.