KaBooM WritersKaBooM Writers

Welcome to the online presence of KaBooM, a writing group that has sustained the creative lives of a diverse group of women for over a decade. We hope that getting to know us will inspire you, too!Welcome to the online presence of KaBooM, a writing group that has sustained the creative lives of a diverse group of women for over a decade. We hope that getting to know us will inspire you, too!

Welcome to the online presence of KaBooM, a writing group that has sustained the creative lives of a diverse group of women for over a decade. We hope that getting to know us will inspire you, too!

The KaBooM Writers Notebook: Our Blog

Still sneaking up on the muse ….

By Gail, August 20th, 2012 | Click to Comment
"sneaking suspicion" -- cat at the wall

(Photo from: http://bit.ly/CatSq1)

This Monday morning when the muse again felt so many miles away all my inspiration might as well have taken off to Mars, I finally quit banging my head and — miracle — mercy dropped in.   An entire stream of thought, from nowhere I could have seen coming.

Well.

On reflection, this development shouldn’t be surprising.  Yet an old truth, newly rediscovered, certainly feels like revelation.  Writers have long known that the muse, like happiness, tends to flee direct pursuit.  There is a part of my conscious brain that knows this.  And yet.  And yet…still and again, I need to discover this truth anew.

As I read in a post by Misty Massey years ago, the best course of action is to remember that the best bait for inspiration is to “… lure it out into the open by pretending you don’t care. Before you know it, it’s curling up at your feet.”

At one level that doesn’t make much sense, does it?  Pretending you don’t care about your creative product can feel dangerous.  And sometimes, you may be so emotionally invested in the work that you cannot see anything but frustration at what you perceive as failures.

Every now and again, though, I can get just exhausted enough to learn something new—by finally letting go of the struggle.

(Photo from: http://bit.ly/Senv6b)

 

Turns out, all ll I needed this morning was to tell myself I had no time for the project that’s recently been frustrating me,  to sort of turn my back on it, and—sneaky, padded cat feet— it crept up behind me, purring to make its presence known, in a way I’d have killed for days ago.  Between its teeth was a tasty morsel; oh, sure, stolen from something else.  But I’ve got no scruples when it comes to such treasures.  I’ll take them however they arrive.   I simply need to remember that the arrival is more likely to happen when I can turn my back on my anxious, demanding mind and instead settle quietly,  entering a gentle waiting-that-is-not-quite-doing-nothing; entering an expectant interlude, a sympathetic distraction.

It was Kafka who famously said: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet” (from his translated Reflections on sin, pain, hope and the true way).

Here’s to finding ways, always, to welcome the world,  and then, to finding it rolling in ecstasy at our feet.

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Kindle as Revision Tool

By Jan, June 6th, 2012 | 2 Comments

I wasn’t sure I could learn to like a Kindle, much less love one. Sure, after a week or two, I was ready to acknowledge its well-advertised charms: the ability to load a shelf’s worth of choices onto a device that fits neatly in my purse; the capacity to share purchases with my husband’s iPad; the option of virtual ownership when one of my book groups selects a title I don’t want to make physical space for on my overcrowded shelves.

I also voiced criticisms I’d heard before: the reading experience isn’t the same. I miss not being able to flip through a book. Like many booklovers, I have a spatial recall that startles even me, although I know I’m not the only reader who experiences it. When I want to double-check a characterization or a plot point, I’ll think to myself, “I saw that mentioned on the lower left side about fifteen pages back.”

Clicking through a Kindle book, which negates the left/right spatial orientation, is nothing like this, nor is using the keyword search feature, which with its laborious button-pushing seems as antiquated as a card catalog compared to the computer-like quickness of my brain. Reading a book on Kindle is not a recursive experience; I’m not manipulating a three-dimensional text, not constantly flipping pages through space to recheck the epigraph and/or the dedication, to consult the index, or to linger over accompanying photos. I won’t even bring up Kindle’s way of charting your progress through a book. The percentage tally makes me feel as if I’m participating in an opinion poll. The location number method makes me feel as if I’m having an extraterrestrial experience.

However a recent discovery may redeem the Kindle. I’ll share it with you under the assumption that if I took six months to find it, you are also clueless (plus I tested the discovery on ten Kindle-using friends and none of them knew about this feature).

While searching for something else on the “Settings” screen, I noticed an email address I’d never seen before: myname@kindle.com. I read the paragraph that included this never-before-seen address and discovered that I could send documents to my Kindle in a variety of forms, including .doc or .docx. I pasted a chapter of my novel, which I’m revising, into an email and sent it to myself. Quick as a flash, I received a reply. No dice. Your email doesn’t have a document attached. This response included lots of other useful information, as well as a link to a Help screen. I tried again, this time attaching the chapter. In less than five minutes, the document showed up on my Kindle.

So good. I’ll be able to send my novel to readers. They won’t need to spend ink and paper printing it out or sit for hours reading on computer screens. And in fact, friends with agents confirm that their agents are using e-readers for exactly this purpose.

However, the real advantage to me, the writer, lies in Kindle’s usefulness as a revision tool. I read my sample chapter on Kindle—a chapter I’ve examined several times during the revision process. In one quick read, I saw six infelicities: two consecutive sentences ending on the flat note of the same prepositional phrase; several unneeded adverbs, a comma splitting a compound predicate; a monster paragraph that straddled two screens; an inconsistency in the spelling of a character’s name; the pronoun “her” repeated ten times on one page. In several cases I noticed that paragraphs had lost their indentations, making the text blobs frequent and daunting. So much for impressing a prospective agent.

How was it possible that I had missed these items? What made them apparent when I read my manuscript on Kindle?

I concluded that space between lines, or leading, matters. When the sentences containing the prepositional phrases were no longer double spaced, they drew together on the page, and I spotted them. The monster paragraph also became apparent with book-style leading. I missed the relief of a paragraph indent when I looked at the screen.

The proportion of the page also matters. The Kindle page looks like a page from a book. Its proportions, its ratio of text to margin, mimic a physical book. As I read, I noticed words differently.

I ran into a couple of problems sending a file to my Kindle, problems that were solved by asking Google. Not every paragraph was indented for example. I learned that it’s best to delete tabs and to use the paragraph indent feature (under format/paragraph or on the ruler bar at the top of the window). The same website recommends saving the document with an .html extension rather than .doc or .docx. I followed both suggestions and the resulting document showed up on Kindle formatted as I wished.

Maybe, just maybe, reading on Kindle provides more of an actual book-reading experience than I realized. When I read my manuscript on Kindle, it was formatted like a book. I noticed all the features that called attention to themselves as they slouched across the screen, reminding me that I don’t yet have a book, but a manuscript undergoing revision. Kindle’s real value may be as a revision tool that helps me see my work again.

Comments (2) — Categorized under: Jan Isenhour,Uncategorized — Tags: ,

Enjoying Daffodils in the Lake District: Updated

By Gail, March 16th, 2012 | Click to Comment

Today at writing group I brought in a vase of daffodils from my yard and shared the classic “I wandered lonely as a cloud” William Wordsworth poem.  Many of us know the lines from school.  It is something to read them with fresh blossoms in front of you.  Like so many things that have become cliche because of frequent exposure, it’s worthwhile to re-experience them as close as possible to what an author’s intent might have been.

Another way to re-vision a familiar piece of writing is to have a young person re-imagine it.  In that spirit, I wanted to provide a link to this video of a “daffodil rap.”Beside the Lake and Beside the Tree, a Crowd of Daffodils.

From www.golakes.co.uk/wordsworthrap

According to the tourism webpage, the rap treatment was commissioned not to “dis” Wordsworth, but instead as a celebration.  It was created in the “bicentenary year of [the poem's original] publication to help the next generation of Lake District visitors connect with his work” (for more details you can see the tourism page that supplies some background).

Here’s to the constant re-experiencing of great writing.

Comments (0) — Categorized under: Creativity,Gail Koehler — Tags: , , , ,

Word Snacks for the New Year

By Gail, January 3rd, 2012 | 1 Comment

After the seasonal food-and-time-off debauch, I’m grateful for the turning of the year, though it’s slow going these past few days.  To ease back into regular work,  my practice is to turn to poems of the new year.  This morning it’s these lines:

“     … Gentle and just pleasure
It is, being human, to have won from space
This unchill, habitable interior
Which mirrors quietly the light
Of the snow, and the new year.”

“New Year’s Poem” by Margaret Avison.

Margaret Avison was a Canadian poet I had the good fortune to actually meet years ago.  She died in 2007 after leaving a valuable legacy to those to closely observe small moments.  Often, her poetry demands much of me as a reader so I take her words in small sips, remembering a comment made by Joseph Zezulka, an English professor at the University of Western Ontario and friend of Avison, who famously said: “Her poems were not snacks, they were full meals.”  Stuffed full of too many holidays, my writing self needs Avison, along with everything else, in tidbits at the moment.  But how necessary is the return  to words and work.

Not sure my digestion could handle a full word meal just yet,  I am also grateful to Lexington poet Sherry Chandler and one of her first blog posts of the year where she mentions “small stones” as a way to write our way into January.

There, she links to  “The January Mindful Writing Challenge: A River of Stones,” a call to write a daily “small stone” during the month of January.

What are “small stones”?  The site says: “A small stone is a short piece of writing (prose or poetry) that precisely captures a fully-engaged moment. …The process of finding small stones is as important as the finished product – searching for them will encourage you to keep your eyes (and ears, nose, mouth, fingers, feelings and mind) open.”  This sounds like a good way to enter back into the work after a time away.  In a testimonial, one of the people who adopted the discipline of small stones says:

“…Several times I’ve had the thought that I absolutely don’t have the time or mental space or energy to stop and notice something outside my driven daily preoccupations, to compose even this tiny ‘small stone’ of words. But I keep finding that it doesn’t eat up time or mental space; on the contrary, time stops and new space is created.”

Here’s to each of us finding ways to create new space in this our new year—the best way there is, through our words.  Even beginning with sips or snacks, we’ll soon be back to those satisfying, full meals.  And as we get our creative momentum back, those words  really will build slowly, helping us create the new year.  What an image it is:  to conjure up that whole river of words our regular work will become.

Comments (1) — Categorized under: Creativity,Gail Koehler,Setting Goals — Tags: , , , , , , , ,

The Power of Story

By Jan, June 21st, 2011 | 3 Comments

It’s a hot Friday afternoon in summer, after five o’clock, and already cars and people have moved away from downtown Lexington. I’m walking uphill toward the Carnegie Center with one of the many writers I’ve worked with during my time at the center.

We blink as our eyeballs adjust to the light, bright after the hour we’ve spent in the StoryCorps recording booth, an Airstream trailer parked next to the old courthouse.

This interview, as much as any other event of the past months, seems a clear dividing moment, marking my Carnegie Center life from the new one I’m going to live, the one I don’t yet know much about.

I have a long history with this particular writer, a Vietnam veteran who first walked into the Carnegie Center in 1993. He wrote his manuscripts on legal pads and never used punctuation; I was a former copyediting instructor who had recently learned how to lay out books using desktop-publishing software. I read literary novels; he preferred westerns. He had done time in reform schools and finished fifth grade; I had a wide-eyed optimism for life, a belief in the opportunities provided by education.

We are twelve days apart in age.

Over the years he’s learned to use a computer, tried voice-activated software, started more books, devised a plan to employ the unemployable, written dozens of letters to celebrities and politicians, found a home.

I’ve learned to set aside the assumptions I make about people I pass on the street and to be delighted by the surprises in what they have to teach.

We celebrate all these moments in the StoryCorps trailer. In the panel-lined quiet, seated across from one another at a café table, speaking softly into the microphone, we start with our prepared questions, but soon find ourselves moving from interview to conversation, agreeing on the power of the written word to bring human beings together, to show us how similar we are, even in the midst of our differences.

Sealed away in the dim quiet, with late afternoon traffic moving past us just a few feet away, we affirm the value of sharing stories.

 

 

Comments (3) — Categorized under: Jan Isenhour,Uncategorized — Tags: ,

National Poetry Month—there’s one week left!

By Gail, April 22nd, 2011 | 1 Comment

If I were a poet, celebrations of  National Poetry month would likely include the writing of some really great poetry.  Since I am not a poet, every year I use the celebration as an excuse to write some really bad poetry.  This may seem an odd way to celebrate the art of making, of poesis, but because these scribbles require attention, they produce increased respect for craft.  By treating the writing of poetry like inquisitive play, I’m given a gift: every happy failure committed to paper causes my appreciation for the really good stuff to go up like a bottle rocket.  So even the playful writing of bad poetry feels like one “right” response to the month’s intention.

One way to think of poetry is it’s a making that captures in literary form what might otherwise run down the drain with the dishwater.  Moments.  Images.  A glance.  New ways of seeing something familiar.  Considering that a miniature form might suit my non-poetic soul, this year I turned again to Gail Sher in her lovely book  One Continuous Mistake: Four Nobel Truths for Writers and her suggestion to write a haiku a day.  She suggested six months.  Fearing such a commitment too deep for a dabbler, I tried six days, and even in that brief span found myself growing more aware and open to fresh perceptions.

Sher’s introduction “Guidelines for Beginning Writers of Haiku” is elegant, simple, inviting.  She sketches the three levels on which a haiku works, and suggests a writer capture the “instantaneous now.“  Ah, I thought.  This is welcome discipline in the midst of my “too-much-to-do-in-too-little-time” daily race.Today I noticed the rain puddling—intense colors in the gray light—and a swelling gratitude for reminders to breathe deeply, settle, aim for clarity.

Which poems have you tried writing, or carried with you, to celebrate the month?

Comments (1) — Categorized under: Creativity,Gail Koehler — Tags: , , , , , , ,

Yarn. Tale. The thread of story.

By Leatha, March 29th, 2011 | 1 Comment

As a writer who knits – or, on some days, a knitter who stops to write –yarn is, for me, a way into memory and story. One leftover ball, the colors of dusk sky, a fringe of evergreens wound into the horizon, bought at the Midway fair and intended for a baby’s hat, evokes a strand of words, a yarn to carry memory forward.

As I made the hat, the yarn bled onto my hands, onto the bamboo knitting needles. I called the alpaca farm and spoke to the woman who had sold it to me, who said to saturate the hat in salt water, then heat it in the microwave. Soaked and zapped, the seeping color stopped. Poor babe got a blurry, irradiated hat — proving that the harder I try to get some thing that will be so perfect (Kentucky alpaca for an expat infant in Salem, Mass.), so special (I met the alpaca!), so much beyond the generic, store-bought gift (hand-made, stitch by stitch, hand-dyed yarn), the more, in short, my pride demands I be beyond outstanding (is it pride or some other need?), the farther I have to fall.

And yet the baby wore her hat, her mother sent me a photo of her in it, and I have this part-ball left to knit into something else. And the colors still call to me, though I wonder if at the heart of this ball, the dye might still bleed.

And all this talk of bleeding and of winding takes me back to yarn as a tale, a thread of story coiled around itself and holding its heart hidden in the turning of its lines. Like a poem I’ve put down on the page or the turning of calendar pages reaching back and back. There never was a place that wasn’t tightly coiled and threatening to bleed. Even in the womb I was a curled bud wrapped in a cord of blood. “Wee weare within the wombe a wynding sheete” one of the Renaissance poets said, and when I read that line at nineteen, how I hated this assertion of our death beginning with our life, preceding even breath. Yet in that time of plague and filth and language lovely-harsh enough to catch it all, those poets spoke the truth.

I was a foolish girl, determined to reflect only the sun and deny the taste of earth already in my mouth, the sluggish drift of it in my very veins. I am wound up in this ball of yarn in ways I haven’t even come to yet. Its failing, its tendency to bleed or break under stress, its messy stain of color, even its softness and its lovely mix of shades are in my days. It sits in my wicker basket waiting to be taken up and used; if it is lucky, something will be made of it and that something – hat, afghan – will have its uses, elegant, unforeseen, ordinary, then will be tossed onto the trash, burned up in a fire or ruined in flood, folded into a trunk, a cardboard box, and stuck in some unused space.

As I knit (and when I write, as well), the lived experience and emotions of my days and hours are looped and caught into what I’m making. A scarf or hat can bring back the worries or the musings that overlay its creation, as this ball of yarn holds the October day and the fair at Midway, my daughter home for a weekend, our hours in the blue air, how I tried to just soak it up, to believe I really was there, and maybe tried too hard, as with the hat. This yarn holds my daughter’s tall form, her clear blue eyes, her laugh, and the long black eyelashes of the alpaca tethered in the shade beside the crafter’s tent, the percussive rhythm of the steam engine grinding corn into the grits we bought, the breakfast we shared the next morning, her driving away.

This ball of yarn, these words reach all the way back to her baby self and forward to the baby, then unborn, who has already outgrown her hat — and outward now, as story travels.

Comments (1) — Categorized under: Leatha Kendrick,Setting Goals,Writing Exercises — Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Just Looking—Notes from Normandi

By Gail, March 1st, 2011 | 1 Comment

Note: In the 13 years KaBooM has nurtured writers, some of our members have taken leaves of absence.   Normandi Ellis is one such member, recently returned and contributing again.  Today she posts from Gail’s account.

I had an A-ha moment in the Louisville Barnes and Noble Bookstore one morning last week. I had gone to Office Depot to print out some copies of a manuscript I am working on. That process was going to take a little while, so I popped over to the bookstore.

I’d never been to this particular store and so everything was a bit turned around. I walked in circles, got lost in the cookbooks and travel books. I went through the aisles looking at this and that, stopping to pick up a cover that intrigued me.  Then I’d move on.  A nice young clerk came up to me at one point and asked me if he could help me find something.

I said “No, but thank you.” I merrily went on my way looking around, walking through a maze of shelves, lost but happy.

After about 30 minutes I walked up to the counter with a magazine, Isabel Allende’s memoir (My Invented Country), a book of W.S. Merwin poems (The Shadow of Sirius) and a Ted Andrews book I’d never read before. The clerk asked me if I had found everything I’d been looking for. “No,” I said, “but it didn’t matter.”

“Well, I could have helped you find it and saved you some time,” he said.   I laughed, saying “Well what would be the point in that? How would I ever have found these books if I knew what I was looking for?!”

I think that is also true about writing. I sit down thinking I know what I’m looking for, but then suddenly something else grabs my attention as I write and I find myself off on a tangent. Sometimes I have to go back and start over, but most of the time I find that being willing to be a little bit lost in the process allows the writing to pleasantly surprise me. The discoveries then, the synchronicities, and the recurring symbols that I hadn’t seen the first time, become a beacon for the writing rather than my imposing a form on it and strangling it into submission.

There are many books on the flow experience including the work of Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg. I like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention and John Briggs’s work Fire in the Crucible as inspirational texts on the writing process.

I hope you find time to follow your nose and keep writing even though you don’t know where you are going. I think I could adapt a poem by David Wagoner called “Lost”.   He suggests that when lost, one must “Stand still. The forest knows/Where you are. You must let it find you.”

Stand still. Let the words find you.

Comments (1) — Categorized under: Creativity,Normandi Ellis — Tags: , , , ,

Rush Slowly

By Jan, February 10th, 2011 | Click to Comment

At the beach bar and restaurant near our rental unit, this motto is printed everywhere: on the backs of t-shirts, on the menu, as the name of the boat moored in the shallow bay. Most comically it’s scrawled across the screen of a pink cell phone nailed to the post that supports the bar’s canopy. You can’t help but come face-to-face with this piece of island wisdom as you place an order for rum punch or an iced bucket of Carib beer.

The barkeep exemplifies the motto in action. He blends pina coladas and gets them to the table in seconds. His rush is a controlled one, an economy of movement appropriate for a tight space. His eyes, however, stay fastened on the Caribbean and the distant cloud-covered vista of Nevis.

“Rush slowly” tantalizes like any other oxymoron, with its easy wit and mild tension. What might it mean? Is it good advice to take home, to pack in my suitcase next to the sack of nutmeg, the batiks, and the new recipes for Caribbean stir-fry?  Or is it a vacation platitude that resonates most strongly read on the back of a t-shirt through a beery gaze?

What does it mean to rush slowly? There’s the possibility of rushing to accomplish, to load a life with people, places, sensory observations, books, art, movies and other artifacts of culture, to engage in thoughtful conversations, to do meaningful work. To pack it in, to open it up, to be busy not for the sake of busy-ness, but for the sake of a full life.

Then there is the reminder to do it slowly, not with a hesitant or lazy step, but with a thoughtful one, with a mind that savors and reflects, considers and adjusts, takes in new information, processes and assimilates, seeks not just experience but also improvement and change.

From my terrace overlooking Turtle Beach, I hear one man call to another, “No problem.” I knew this island motto already and saw great wisdom in it. But as a general directive for living, there’s probably more to be gained with “rush slowly.”

Comments (0) — Categorized under: Jan Isenhour — Tags: ,

Learning in Retrospect

By Susan, January 19th, 2011 | 1 Comment

To our delight, Normandi Ellis has moved back to Central Kentucky and rejoined KaBooM. She’s a gifted writer, an inspiring teacher and workshop leader, and a woman of wisdom. We’re happy to have her with us again.

As we embark on a new year, she’s leading the group in a series of exercises looking back at the year behind us and ahead to the year to come. These are taken from a workshop she offers at the beginning of every year, called The Night of the Mothers. It’s an energizing way to assess where we’ve been and discern where we want to go.

This week we considered which month of the past year was our “lead month,” the one that gave the year its direction. We sifted through twelve months of calendars, checkbooks, or emails to find the place that held some kind of shift: a birth or death, a beginning or ending, a change in finances, work, health, or family. We then spent ten minutes each writing about that month, the previous month, and finally the month following.

As I paged through my calendar, I realized that I almost never take time to do this. Trying so hard to move forward, I rarely look back with this kind of intention. Moments from the past remain with me, but patterns are much more clear with a review of days I might otherwise forget.

Those patterns can teach us about ourselves. We learn what helps us respond to challenges, and what helps us live a full life. In becoming familiar with patterns that have unfolded in our lives, we can better recognize them when they show up again. And we are better able to choose whether to repeat them, or not.

Looking back can reveal surprising insights into the conditions that allow us to work creatively and productively, which is step one in trying to recreate them as best we can. In looking at how we spent our time, who we were with, how quiet or busy our days were, and what captivated us, it’s easier to see what worked and what didn’t. The things that energize and those that weigh us down become clearer.

It took an hour or so to do the exercise and for each of us to read back some portion of what we had written. It led to a deeper understanding not only of our individual lives, but the collective energy of the group. Sharing those words allowed us to hold the year with the support of one another, witnessing the change, loss, learning, and growth we experienced.

It was one of the richest hours I’ve spent this year.

Comments (1) — Categorized under: Susan Christerson Brown — Tags: , ,
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