Living the Comma #42

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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Living the Comma #42

Curiosity. Pianos. Dani Shapiro.

“When I think of the wisest people I know, they share one defining trait: curiosity. They turn away from the minutiae of their lives-and focus on the world around them. They are motivated by the desire to explore the unfamiliar. They are drawn toward what they don’t understand.” ― Dani Shapiro

There is a connection between wisdom and curiosity. Paying attention to the world. Exploring the unfamiliar. Being drawn toward things we don’t understand. Creating is a path to all that. Writing is a path to all that, too. Peace felt in presence. Comfort found in details. Life built between the center and the edge.

I have always seemed to know this. Writing as imagination. Writing as way. Writing as the as if. Writing as the not yet. Writing as the I am. Writing as thinking. Writing as chewing. Writing as digesting. Writing as breathing.

I remember writing a paper about Shirley Chisholm in high school. I followed my curiosity, and the suggestion of my English teacher mother, to learn about this courageous political leader. I tasted the power of storytelling. I felt the pen between my fingers exploring the possible. I let my mind connect dots, create a narrative, get knee deep in gender and race and politics. Chisholm asked why not? That question still haunts me today. Writing lets me explore the elastic relationship between what is and what can be, which might be the point of curiosity.

A Living the Comma Writing Group Update

What? The group is a journal club, reading group, and writers community seeking to connect people with a creative process, a writing practice, and a spiritual path.

Where? We will meet in-person at Virginia Highland Church (a link will be provided for each meeting so people can join us virtually, too.)

When? We will meet the first Tuesday of the month. We will meet from 6:30 — 8:30 for food, community, and writing.

Dates: September 1, October 6, November 3, December 1, January 5, February 2, March 2, April 6, and May 4.

Who? No writing experience is necessary. All are welcome.

** First Meeting Tuesday, September 1st at Virginia Highland Church at 6:30 **

Conversations with Authors — Dani Shapiro

Totally Booked — A Conversation with Dani Shapiro

A writer is writing at the height of her ability it has to do with having found that place like the essential authentic place from which the work Springs as a teacher I mean I can certainly offer my students a lot of tools there definitely is a whole big box full of tools in terms of craft but the the truly gifted writer never thinks about tools and that’s a paradox right. — Dani Shapiro

Listen to the conversation.

Save Nothing

I believed the page, above all, to be the locus of my self-knowledge. In book after book, whether fiction or memoir, I had followed the line of words, Annie Dillard’s beautiful phrase, like a trail of breadcrumbs, trusting, or at least attempting to trust, the capacity of the unconscious to reveal itself through pattern, image, language, character, and metaphor. Stick with the page long enough, stumble bravely along, and eventually a coherent narrative will reveal itself. — Dani Shapiro

Read the entire essay here.

Piano

My piano lesson was the punctuation—a comma, perhaps, or better yet a semicolon-in the middle of my week. The rest of life paused on either side of it. Mr. Tipton was passionate, exacting, wounded if a student came to a lesson unprepared. He had bright red hair and a ruddy face, as did Mrs. Tipton, and they had a brood of red-headed Tiptons. I cared a lot about what Mr. Tipton thought, and I tried never to be unprepared. When I practiced piano, my usual fears and anxieties fell away. Did Sol Kimpinski really have a crush on me? Did I have a crush on him? Had I studied enough for my American history exam? Was my father—so pale, so overweight, so unhappy-about to have a heart attack and die? — Dani Shapiro

Read the entire essay here.

A Writing Prompt —

When you have written something—whether part of a story, a poem, an essay, an opening for a longer piece, anything that feels like it might be a keeper-listen to it. What does it sound like? Read your words aloud. Even if you look like a crazy person, it doesn’t matter. No one’s watching. Pay attention to the way the language moves. Is it creating the effect you’re after? I think of some of Nabokov’s sentences, or the end of Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Fluid sentence-rivers, carrying us along on a current of commas, faster, faster until we are nearly breathless. Or the atonal juxtapositions of Don DeLillo’s. Or the clean, staccato beats of Hemingway, a period like a knife jab in the gut. What instrument does your language call to mind? A cello? An electric guitar? An oboe? Are you writing a concerto? A symphony? A lullaby? Listen and you will begin to hear the rhythms of your own voice. — Dani Shapiro

In her beautiful book about writing, Still Writing, Shapiro explains, “If we are artists- hell, whether or not we’re artists— it is our job, our responsibility, perhaps even our sacred calling, to take whatever life has handed us and make something new, something that wouldn’t have existed if not for the fire, the genetic mutation, the sick baby, the accident.” She reminds me to approach creativity as sacred work. To see creativity as a divine purpose. To be changed by the new every day.

From the heart of the comma,

Katie

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