rosslaird's blog

Upcoming Workshop: Creativity, Path of Illumination

Posted Mon, 2010-01-04 11:32 by rosslaird

Hollyhock, May 10-14, 2010

Creativity is an authentic devotional and healing path. Its flavors and shades and peculiar demands assert, at every turn, the work of hands as an exemplary guide in the unfolding of awareness. Explore — collaboratively, playfully — creative work as devotion, as revelation, as a gentle opening polished by the shapes of beauty.

Through the work of hands — in art, poetry, movement, sculpture, music, and ritual — you’ll reach for the essence of creative endeavor. Become familiar with various creative approaches, including those in Ross Laird’s book, Grain of Truth: The Ancient Lessons of Craft. Learn how to follow the simple alchemy that begins in the hand as it opens the palm and reaches, with supple fingers, outward. This reaching, in which the hand and heart together grasp the world, is the core of creative work. No prior creative or artistic experience is expected or required.

Tuition: $495 CDN.
Four nights; meals and accommodation extra.

Breakwater (In Memoriam, Tony Milobar)

Posted Wed, 2010-02-10 13:55 by rosslaird

In springtime, snow melt from the surrounding mountains gathers in streams, cascades down verdant slopes, and swirls across the surface of the lake. The waters rise, nudging ever closer to the stones first laid down by Tony and his children. A wheelbarrow full of stones for each of them to haul, before breakfast, from the forest out back with its birch trees and singing frogs and moose that sometimes came to drink at the water’s edge. This was long ago, during languid summers when the cabin was young, the kids were small, their parents new to the rush and tumble of family life. Everyone was young then.

Together they built a low wall, with stones and slabs of shale hefted into the station wagon from alongside the highway that brought them across the Rocky Mountains in summer. The wall grew larger and stronger. Over several summers it was widened and made more secure. It became a breakwater, a perch, a resting place. It offered sure footing to a generation of children who walked upon its stones, smoothed by the highest of the spring waters and warmed in the summer sun. Then another generation came, and they too walked upon it. My own children walk upon that wall, and they do not forget who built it.

The wall now stretches most of the way across the beachfront. It divides in the middle to offer a walkway to the shore. On the west side, it borders and provides space for the plum trees that feed bears at the end of summer. On the east side it edges a grassy slope casually dotted with armchairs — a place for gathering. The wall continues to shape, and to provide space for, the activities of all who visit that family summer home. It has held.

Some years ago, when my kids were small and Tony and I worked on repairs to the wall, I came to understand that these stones are a perfect expression of his life. For he brought them all together — the stones, the children, the family — and he held them. He gave both containment and room for growth. He held fast when the waters rose and when they fell back. He was smoothed, over time. He was purposeful. He did not talk about this. He persisted, he held fast.

On the day that I married Elizabeth, Tony seized my hand firmly and looked me in the eye. With one direct glance, he conveyed that I too should hold fast, that I must persist through the rising and falling waters, that I would be made stronger by family and time and the persistence of purpose. He welcomed me into that space, invited me to find sustenance as a wandering bear finds the summer plums.

This summer I will repair the wall again. The masonry of the eastern edge has begun to fray, and the stones there are loose. A few have fallen shoreward and now lie upon the soft sand. Once again, the waters will cover them this spring and smooth them, but will not move them from beneath the wall that is their home. I came to Tony and his family as a loose stone, drifting and wayward. I was brought forward into a place of belonging. I was lifted into place. That was his way. He knew — without speaking or cajoling — how to find the fit of things, of people, of moments. He knew how to hold fast, to let the waters rise and fall, to persist in quietness and purpose until all was fashioned, tight and true.

The wall parts, and grants access to the shore. Sand gathers here, washed up by the restless waters of spring. Soft, white sand, warm underfoot in summer. At the shoreward end lies the largest of the stones: flat, tinged with blue and gray, situated at the perfect height for Tony to sit and gaze, as he often did, out upon the ruffled waters of the lake. This is how I see him: the capstone, watching the waters rise and fall, finding for each thing its place among the enduring stones.

For Creative Writing Students: Starting to Write

Posted Mon, 2010-01-25 17:24 by rosslaird

Stop whatever else you are doing. Close your email application and Facebook, turn off the background music, silence your cell phone. Put it all away. Do it now. I’ll wait.

Sit in silence, without distraction, and read this post. Silence the part of you that makes false claims about the utility of background music or the necessity of leaving your cell phone turned on. Silence the part of you that wants to argue with me, right now, about my unreasonableness, the part of you that makes claims for this or that distraction. Still the monkey mind that never shuts up, never stops talking, never ceases inventing new ways to jostle, cajole, argue. Stop arguing and listen: the voice of a writer can only be found within silence.

Silence.

Start with that. Stay within it. Allow it to grow around you, to blossom, to disclose the images and words that inhabit the landscape of your inner life. Don’t control it, or direct the flow of that nascent energy. Sit, and read, and watch yourself.

Forget that you are enrolled in a course in Creative Writing. This fact is irrelevant to the creative process. It is a curiosity. A writer finds and follows the creative voice. The means by which this happens, the structure in which it unfolds, the particulars of the path: these are secondary and inconsequential. A writer follows the path, whenever it appears and wherever it leads.

A writer does not invent or create the writing. Instead, the act of authentic writing leads the writer. Accordingly, the task of the writer is to find — within — the stream, thread, and path of creative energy. Writing inhabits its own life, is its own animal, is a being struggling to be free of the cages we build around it. Don’t take my word for it. Find the cage, find the animal.

Listen.

Stop arguing. Your arguments, like mine, only serve to strengthen the cage. The animal of the creative is not swayed by our smartness, our wit, our experiences. It does not care how many books we have read or how many fancy words we know. It is not interested in our expertise and the many ways in which we layer our insecurities one over the other.

The animal of the creative wanders the landscape of gods and heroes. The animal has seen things we no longer remember. The animal is what we once were but have chosen to cage as a means of protecting ourselves from the vastness of what we cannot grasp, the depths into which we no longer dare to gaze.

The creative animal is primordial, eternal, wise beyond our knowing. It has been waiting for us, all this time. Listen to what it has to say.

Write.

Allow the creative animal to write for you one good word, or sentence, or paragraph. Don’t mess up the writing. It is difficult to say what this means, this messing up. Perhaps you are cool, or smart, or — like me — erudite. Forget all that crap. It is meaningless. Write honestly. Let the creative animal speak through you.

If, as you write, you start to worry about what people might think of your writing, you may as well not start. Give it up now, before you waste any more time. Or tell the part of you that wants to be a rabbit rather than a wolf to shut the hell up.

Write something. Don’t worry about what genre it is. Genres have no meaning. Writing — all writing — is, at heart, an extended negotiation with the creative animal. That animal is partly you, yes; but is also not you, is wholly an emissary of that mystery we run from and slide toward.

And the animal is — for the most part — silent. Do not forget this. Words are not the creative, cannot be the creative, will never be the creative. They are echoes. Treat them as such. Find the source of those echoes.

Find the cage. Find the animal.

Sentence Composition Checklist

Posted Mon, 2010-01-18 12:48 by rosslaird

This is a short list of considerations to use when seeking to write well. Review the following items in order, after writing the first draft of every sentence.

  • The sentence contains no extra words.

  • The sentence is written in the present tense.

  • The sentence is written in active voice, using I if suitable.

  • The order of items in the sentence suits the relevance of those items. (The most important item is either at the beginning or the end.)

  • The sentence contains adverbs (-ly words) only where necessary.

  • The sentence avoids gerunds (-ing words) wherever possible. (“A dog runs” is better than “a dog is running”.)

  • The words within the sentence are strong and descriptive.

  • The imagery of the sentence is concrete and specific.

  • The sentence avoids awkward constructions (such as “there is…” and “would…”).

  • The sentence is clear, and communicates precisely what I wish to say.

  • The sentence hints at larger themes, perhaps universal themes, but is not preachy, pedantic, or pretentious. (Show, don’t tell).

  • When I read the sentence aloud, the rhythm is appealing and poetic. (If I separate the phrases of the sentence into separate lines, the sentence becomes a non-rhyming poem.)

Exemplary Sentences

Posted Mon, 2010-01-18 12:44 by rosslaird

Exemplary Sentences

  • It may be that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors. (Jorge Luis Borges)

  • The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. (Stephen King)

  • He walks down the street. (Keri Hulme)

  • The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. (Joseph Conrad)

  • I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. (John Fowles)

  • Our house was haunted. (Sharon Butala)

  • Leave where you are and come stand beside me. (Phil Jenkins)

  • All this I saw. (Carlos Fuentes)

  • I was born in the city of Bombay… once upon a time. (Salman Rushdie)

  • The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. (Amy Tan)

  • I learned about the other Philip Roth in January 1988, a few days after the New Year, when my cousin Apter telephoned me in New York to say that Israeli radio had reported that I was in Jerusalem attending the trial of John Demjanjuk, the man alleged to be Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. (Philip Roth)

  • I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

  • In wartime the state seeks to destroy its own culture. (Chris Hedges)

  • It is your day, patient one. (W.S. Merwin)

  • Why do I feel compelled to attribute all that I have to something outside myself? (John Terpstra)

  • The first story that I have to tell isn’t exactly true, but it isn’t exactly false, either. (Lewis Hyde)

Words and Wells

Posted Wed, 2010-01-13 22:10 by rosslaird

My recommendation for beginning writing is as follows: do not start with sentences, with the easy and fluid liaisons of phrases, with the heft of lines upon lines stacking up. Instead, start with words, or perhaps with a single word. Find the words first. Then make of them a haiku. Then write a single sentence that fills the space of your creativity. But words first, always words.

Writing and the Politics of Language

“Our words are similar to wells,” says the poet César Calvo, “and those wells can accommodate the most diverse waters: cataracts, drizzles of other times, oceans that were and will be of ashes, of human beings, and of tears as well. Our words are like people, and sometimes much more, not simple carriers of only one meaning.”

Words have power, and presence, and a history of which we are sometimes unaware. It is prudent, as a writer, to use language consciously, to be as intentional as possible about tones and moods and the colors of the page.

The following list is cautionary: yes, feel free to use the words on this list, and perhaps builds tropes (a hifalutin’ word) around them; but be aware of the impact such words may have, of their sharpness or fuzziness, of the surprising ways in which readers might respond.


Slippery Words… 
have the peculiar quality that all definitions are provisional: creativity, multicultural, objectivity Self/self, universal, subjectivity, objectivity, consciousness, Mind/mind, culture, art, mind-body, bodymind, minority, cognition, fulfilment, dominant, soul, mainstream, gender, spirit (and spirituality), transformation, truth, internal, external, healing, enlightenment, growth.

Flag-Draping and Eyebrow-Raising Words… 
telegraph particular political perspectives: corporate, colonial, anything-centric, mindset, postcolonial, deep, ecology, liberal, conservative, radical, ahistorical, postmodern, therapeutic.

Hifalutin’ Words… 
are often used improperly in service of erudition: Cartesian, Newtonian, aesthetic, duality, modality, schema, construct, notion, praxis, hegemony, structural (con/de/post), pedagogy, liminal, archetype, paradigm (/shift), positivism, hermeneutic, teleology.

Hand Grenade Words… 
tend to provoke strong reactions in readers: oppression, prejudice, marginalized, race, conspiracy, agenda, supposed, aggression, trauma, wound, academia, terrorism, tyranny, shame-based. (Hand grenade words have fuses of roughly fifty pages.)

Blinking Cursor, Blank Page

Posted Mon, 2010-01-04 17:59 by rosslaird

Late in Heart of Darkness, after Marlow has meandered deep into the jungle but before he meets Kurtz, who utters his now-famous judgement upon human nature, The horror! The horror! -- before this, the most famous scene in twentieth century literature, Marlow finds himself making necessary repairs to the ship. He ruminates on these activities as distractions from the shadows around him, from the haunting underbelly of his own nature that he sees in the wilderness around him, in the passionate abandon of the local tribes-people. Here's the full passage:

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there-- there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity-- like yours--the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage--who can tell?-- but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder--the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff-- with his own inborn strength. Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags--rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row--is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe. Who's that grunting? You wonder I didn't go ashore for a howl and a dance? Well, no--I didn't. Fine sentiments, you say? Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on those leaky steam-pipes--I tell you. I had to watch the steering, and circumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook. There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man.

Marlow employs seamanship as a kind of shield against the chaos, against the frightening shapes of his inner life. After all, he is a civilized man, an Englishman, for whom the shadow must be contained. Marlow is a sailor, one who traverses the waters but remains above them. Writers, conversely, are involved in plumbing those depths, in encountering their lights and shadows, in struggling with the full breadth of human propensity. But we distract ourselves too, and the most common method of doing this is to allow the electronic world to continually divert us from the blank page and blinking cursor. Email alerts, news feeds, blogs: there is enough distraction in these things to doom the wisest writer. We must go into the darkness, into the bardo, to discover our treasures. That we often have difficulty doing so is, in part, due to the persistent emphasis of our environment upon the facile and the transient and the ephemeral. Always an update, a flashing notice, a clamoring icon which seems to confirm our importance  -- but in fact belies our addiction to the inconsequential.

Writers have not been well-served by technology since about 1990, when the last console versions of WordPerfect showed us a black screen upon which a small, blinking cursor waited patiently for us to dive into the waters. Since the advent of graphical user interfaces, the blackness has been hidden, has been replaced by smilies and floral wallpaper and pastel icons. I'm not against the GUI; but for writing, it's a serious impediment, the modern equivalent of Marlow's leaky steam pipes.

The confrontation with what lies behind, or beneath, or hidden, is the essence of all good writing. And whether one perceives that hidden-ness as darkness, as Conrad did, or as a terrifying whiteness, as did Melville, the mystery is the same. Here's Melville describing the peculiar terror evoked by the whiteness of the whale:

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows--a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues--every stately or lovely emblazoning--the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge--pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

The writer approaches mystery by way of the white page or the black screen. That is our task, nothing more. Not to explain the mystery, or to resolve it, or to erase it; but to encounter it, struggle with it, allow it to enter and change us. This will not happen, cannot happen, if we are checking our emails and news feeds all day long. We must sit in silence, waiting for the mystery to descend.

Now, from the mystic to the concrete:

  1. Turn off all email notification.
  2. Turn off all news notification.
  3. Turn off software update notification.
  4. Configure all desktop panels to "auto-hide."
  5. Remove all icons from the desktop (organize yourself!).
  6. Choose a wallpaper that will not scream at you (I use this).
  7. Close all browsers.
  8. Do not use Microsoft Word (of which, much discourse elsewhere on this site).
  9. Use a text-based editor such as cream, vim, or  emacs.
  10. Learn to use the editor with keystrokes only (this takes time).
  11. Choose a color scheme for the editor that has high contrast and, ideally, a dark background (I use Zenburn for Vim).
Write from the blinking cursor, with no other distractions. Just you and the waiting blackness (or whiteness, which amounts to the same thing). Reclaim the mystery.

An argument for minimalist writing tools

Posted Mon, 2010-01-04 17:56 by rosslaird

In a recent workshop on the materials and tools of writing, I asked the group to indicate which method they used to input text on a computer. Almost everyone used Microsoft Word — with the exception of a sole advocate for the OpenOffice word processor (an excellent word processor, in fact).

This homogenization of word processing, whether on the Mac or PC, inevitably delivers a consistent — and therefore conformist — experience to the act of typing on screen. The method of input unquestionably influences the output. By way of subtle cues and imagery (icons, menus, procedures), word processors inculcate a particular type of consciousness. Works of writing from different authors but produced on the same word processor will be more similar than those produced using separate tools. The differences will be subtle but not inconsequential.

Moreover, all word processors introduce a level of aesthetic abstraction that is perhaps not useful to the writing process. Word processors encourage us to fiddle with fonts and spacing, with countless page layout options, with the visual aspect of work that in its initial stages should be primarily visceral.

And word processors are ergonomically inefficient. The mouse, which requires the full use of one arm, is a primary tool in word processors, as are menus and keystrokes assigned for mnemonic rather than ergonomic functions (control-S to save, for example, requires the removal of the left hand from the home row of the keyboard). As I begin to understand that my persistent arthritic aches are essentially caused by mouse and keyboard use, ergonomics becomes a core consideration.

Now, to alternatives and solutions. Take a look at Bram Moolenaar’s seven habits of effective text editing. Learn to reduce the number and increase the efficiency of the keystrokes you make. Wean yourself from the mouse. And notice that Bram uses vim, unquestionably a most robust and efficient text editor (Bram is Vim’s main creator). Vim was originally designed for the Unix operating system, but its current version is used mostly by Linux users (like me; I use Ubuntu Linux). However, cream is a vim equivalent for Windows. Vim is cryptic, it has a steep learning curve, and some of its functions are improbably arcane. In this sense it mirrors the writing process — unlike word processors, which blanket that process, covering it with neat type.

Although Vim and other minimalist tools such as BBEdit (for the Mac) are used mostly by programmers, writers are increasingly recognizing the advantages of such tools: less is more (see Charlie Dickinson’s essay on Vi).

Neal Stephenson (author of Cryptonomicon) puts it nicely:

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer—i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed—emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. For page layout and printing you can use TeX: a vast corpus of typesetting lore written in C and also available on the Net for free.

(I also use Emacs.)

In its beginnings and its evolution, the act of writing is about the bare bones, the essential, the elemental. Use a tool that delivers, rather than distracts, from that wonderful trajectory.

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