Homegrown Authors! KaBooM at the Lexington Farmer's Market: photo by Susan C. Brown

This past Saturday members of KaBooM were at Lexington’s Downtown Farmer’s Market at a booth cosponsored by the Morris Book Shop and the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning called “Homegrown Authors.” The event turned out to be one of the most successful sales days ever for our group; you might want to check out the Morris Book Shop site for details on more selected Saturdays this summer when you can meet area authors and buy signed copies of their books.

But as Jan said in her immediate previous post, these days are not only about selling the book. Continuing her theme, I’d like to reflect on what I learned from our time at the book table on Saturday: many of the folks we met at the Farmer’s Market are hungry not only for fresh, locally grown produce.

They are hungry for good writing.

We set up the sewing frame to let people know that the object we were selling was hand-sewn, and a number stopped to have conversations about book binding and the beauty of hand crafts.

Sewing Frame entices passersby to see hand sewn signatures: photo by Susan C. Brown

But an even larger number of passersby were fascinated by the content of When the Bough Breaks.  One person who read through the table of contents was completely stopped by the title of Lynn’s short story.   “Heartichoke!” she called out: “Oh, isn’t that just perfect, that’s exactly what it’s like!”  She bought three copies.

A retired English teacher stopped to tell us of his frustration that high school students are not guaranteed opportunities to do their own writing in English classes.  We showed him the structure of our book: the brief essays after each entry that reflect on the creative process and the role the group plays in our continually developing craft; followed by individual writing prompts—“Try this”—to encourage written responses.  At that, he was sold, too.

And a number of folks were simply pleased as punch that this joint venture meant they could buy literature with their produce: “that’s fantastic,” they said.

We couldn’t agree more.

Recording a Season

Late March in Kentucky

Clatter of squirrels’ nails

on tree bark pulls me to perform

a busy scramble—

theirs for lost nuts, mine, the usual—

all folly, I know.

Slow…slow…

listen for the quickening,

catch it, post it.

Buy paper heavy with tooth,

pastels pregnant with landscape;

smooth with fingers

until pigment enters your skin

feel the green,

its velvet resurrection

hear the sky shout

its white, then blue

see worm track, lichen patch

on earth and rock.

Record the slow destruction

of the indestructible—

slow as centuries and as sure.

But the newness,

catch it, post it,

Get it down.

Quick. It’s glory.

Pam Sexton

March 2010

The point is to commit to write without stopping, without thinking through labored connections; to write quickly and from our deepest places, burning through false starts and second guesses because there simply isn’t time for unproductive dithering.  Often, writing this way captures an energy of mind our more considered writing lacks.  Frequently, small bits of real treasure are uncovered.  We immediately read these pieces aloud.  Because these pages are raw,  critiques are not appropriate.   Instead, reading aloud releases the words, provides a small public place for them to be heard, and allows some all-important distance between the writer and the pages that have just been filled.  Sometimes what’s read is so fresh and sharp it surprises everyone in the room, including the writer.

And that treasure I mentioned?  Many of us take it away and, in private writing spaces, allow it to open even further.  Award-winning poems, serendipitous solutions to narrative problems, and satisfying essays have all had their beginnings in writing practice.  This is the kind of practice that keeps a word-yogi limber.  At their roots, the words practice and practical come from the Greek praktikos which means ‘concerned with action.’   Writing practice is one way to make our commitments to writing active, to take them from vague good intentions and transform them into embodied reality.

But you don’t have to wait to find a group to try this kind of “capture.”   One of the reasons we chose to include our “Try This” exercises at the end of each piece in our anthology When The Bough Breaks was to encourage our readers to engage in their own creative process.   Our “Try This” pieces are full of questions designed to nudge, suggest, and encourage the reader to pick up a pen and let that ink flow.

Why not make an appointment with yourself this week?  Come on—set a timer, pick up a prompt, and Try This.

A further note: Writing Practice is a tradition Laverne Zabielski initiated more than a decade ago, indebted to Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones, where in her chapter “First Thoughts” she lists “rules” to make timed writings a place where one can “explore the rugged edge of thought.”