Writing from the Senses - Writing from the Senses - Readers' Writing

Exercise: My Grandfather's Voice

7/4/2016

I received a wonderful email from Brianna Lyon, who discovered my book, Writing from the Senses, in Australia, before she moved to Germany. Brianna submitted this piece in response to one of the prompts: My Father's Voice.

Author: Brianna Lyon

The Voice of Granddad Lyon

I bet your voice was calming and gentle, like my father’s. I’ve seen what you created with your hands, like the kitchen you made for Aunty Margaret, and I can hear the hammer in your daily life. I wonder how you felt when you heard the voices of your three children, and that of my father in particular. I wonder if your voice sounds like my brother’s. You have so many similarities to my brother and father. Your eyes and stance are so alike. You often visit me in my thoughts; I hear your infectious laugh but not your voice. I wonder if you could fathom the longing have for your voice — just to hear you would soothe my family enormously. I wonder so many things about you, most of all about the sound of your voice.

Exercise: What instrument are you?

3/4/2016

At a workshop at Dominican University, Nancy Spring came up with this wonderful freewrite in response to a prompt from Writing from the Senses. When she sent it to me, she included this kind message: "You and your prompts have gotten us all bursting into song. I loved being in your class!"

Author: Nancy Spring

I'm the piano – wide expanse of ivory teeth, largest in the band, up and down many octaves, taking up lots of space and air time. I'm soft and sweet and barely audible. Loud and raucous. I can pound the living daylights into you. I can also soothe, stroke your hair, sing you to sleep. I'm Dixieland saucy, sexy. I play dark soul with the best of 'em. I'm a little spinet in your grandma's parlor, gathering dust. I'm up on stage: black, grand, spotlight only on me as you take a seat. Oh, and that's the most important thing about me – I don't make a sound unless you're with me. Unless you come, sit, reach out a hand to me. I'm nothing but for you.

Exercise: Write about the wind.

1/31/2016

It was a blustery afternoon at our writing workshop in Petaluma. Looking out the window, I gave the prompt "Write about the wind." Writer Tommie Whitener wrote about The Caine Mutiny and went on from there.

The wind described as a typhoon in The Caine Mutiny was a dastardly devil; a thriving thing trying to destroy all in its path.
I prefer to think of a soft, gentle wind on a tropical beach, probably much like the Hawaiian beaches the Caine sailors enjoyed after the typhoon. Such a wind would be loving, caressing.

Why don’t we have two different words to describe two different winds? Probably because we are not in touch with nature as much as we should be. When word nuance is important to a culture, the culture comes up with different words to describe each nuance. For example, I have heard that where the quality of ice and snow is a matter of life and death, indigenous peoples there have descriptive words which categorize each by quality. So it should be with wind.

Exercise: Listen deeply to someone who talks to you and write what you heard.

9/14/2015

This freewrite comes from a member of a circle in which I participated in Point Reyes. He was my writing partner that day, and we read to each other what we had written about listening. Tom is a lawyer, who specializes in nonprofits.

Author: Tom Silk
silknonprofitlaw@gmail.com

When I think of the word “listening,” the picture it evokes is my law office, where I am conferring with a client. I am listening.

It is a particular type of listening, a goal-oriented process I call focused listening. Typically, the client has come to me for a particular service I perform, for example forming a nonprofit corporation. I know what information I am looking for in the discussion with my client, the pieces required to properly advise my client. In this case, it includes the purpose of the client, the mission of the organization, the principal actors, the funding.

When my listening goal is not to focus on gathering pieces of information, but to hear what the speaker is saying and perhaps not saying – when I am listening exclusively for the meaning of what the speaker is wanting to communicate – I am engaged in “deep listening.”

Deep listening can be exhausting, and I find it is rarely possible to maintain the high level of focus and intensity that fully qualifies as deep listening for more than a few minutes at a time. But the benefits can be profound.

Exercise: Draw a card from the deck

6/5/2015

This exercise is about the connections triggered by sight. Nikol Peterman, a writer/choreographer, was in a workshop I gave at the Zen Center of New York City.

Exercise: Draw a card from the deck and write about any association it has for you. At one workshop a participant who was a Buddhist priest drew a four and wrote about the Four Noble Truths. Or you could write about the four directions, north, south, east and west, or about your four siblings. Diamonds could make you think about jeweled rings. Hearts could prompts thoughts about love or heartache. Whatever springs to your mind is perfect.

Author: Nikol Peterman

As soon as the deck was opened, I felt it rising, all the games I played with my grandfather, wanting to win, wondering what his secret was. My grandparents came to visit us when we lived in England and we took a train to Scotland. Of course we played cards: Gin Rummy on the train, the English countryside whizzing by, as I sat in the large cushioned chair, warm and wonderful. The whir of the cards, formed into a deck, shuffled and ready, then dealt. My grandpa? He went out on his first turn, simply laying his cards upside down and smiling. I was amazed, infuriated, intrigued, in awe. How did he do that? Never complicated answers, always that deep smile.

When he passed in 1999, I remembered him. Weeping, I couldn't attend the funeral. I was doing Rockettes at the time and my Grandma said, "Kick for your Grandpa, he would want that." So I looked up into the lights and did just that.

Exercise: Describe a Place in Nature

1/1/2015

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen, is a brilliant combination of writing from the senses, adventure, and a spiritual journey. Notice the sound of the river, the colors of the leaves and birds, his use of similes and fresh images. Here’s one of his journal entries:

From deep in the earth, the roar of the river rises. The rhododendron leaves along the precipice are burnished silver, but night still fills the steep ravines where southbound migrants descend by day to feed and rest. The golden birds fall from the morning sun like blowing sparks that drop away and are extinguished in the dark.

Exercise: Choose an event that happens every morning. What do you notice?

12/24/2014

See how many senses you can incorporate into your writing.

This post is contributed by Jeri Metz, an American who now lives on a farm in Umbria, Italy. Which senses can we name here? Touch: The ragged feathers and warmer winter coats. Taste: The eggs now or later. Sight: Huddled together. Sound: Chickens talking quietly among themselves, then hens cackling as they begin to lay. Motion: They dust bathe and peck, head toward their perches. I always look forward to her blog. Visit labellaterra.wordpress.com.

Author: Jeri Metz

I can’t really say that I raise chickens. It’s more like we share the same address. Compared to most of the world’s chickens, mine live pretty much in their natural environment. The hens—in exchange for consistently good meals from our leftovers—give me a constant supply of high-protein food. Well, almost constant. Without heat or electric lights, they follow the habits of their ancestors. From the time of the autumn equinox until the end of November, they slow down on the egg production as they ready their bodies for the cold winter. They molt, a natural process where they ditch the ragged feathers of spring and summer for a new warmer winter coat. As the darkness rises they head toward their perches before five o’clock, a bit naked and bedraggled looking. On a sunny day, they dust bathe and peck about but mostly they stay close to the coop, huddled in small groups talking quietly among themselves, conserving warmth. By December they stop laying all together, keeping their protein to themselves. All chickens living free with natural light follow this routine.

But by the week of the winter solstice the chickens are once again full of feathers, beginning to plump out, more active, more alert. They know that something is about to happen. They are waiting.

Exercise: What's in the bag?

11/19/2014

At a Writing from the Senses workshop, we handed out brown paper bags that each contained a handful of fleece. "Reach in without looking," I said, assuring the group that there was nothing sharp or dangerous inside. "Write whatever comes up."

This "touch" exercise prompted writing on subjects from kittens to ballet.

Author: Carolyn Dow

Lamb’s wool—that's what is in my package. I can tell by the long fibers, soft feel, the way it stretches when I spread my fingers through it. I would painstakingly wrap my toes in it before slipping my feet into my toe dancing shoes. It had to be wrapped perfectly or else my feet would begin to smart halfway through the dance recital. Although I would always soldier on, at the end of the piece, I would often have tears running down my cheeks from the pain.

As a young girl, I dreamed of being a famous ballerina, maybe a member of the Rockettes, the group of precision dancers who performed before they showed the movie at Radio City Music Hall. Then, after spending an hour teetering on my toes with miswrapped lamb’s wool I would be discouraged. I will never make it, I lamented. Of course I was oblivious to the fact that I had absolutely no sense of rhythm.

Exercise: The Hum of Silence

10/8/2014

This exercise comes to us from Cynthia Moore, who has been on writing retreats with me from Tuscany to Santa Cruz. She suggests we write down all the noises we hear, outer and inner, going deeper until we reach the pool of silence. Write about that pool of silence.

After a transcendental experience at Stonehenge, Cynthia posted this piece on her blog.

Author
Cynthia Moore is the author of Spencer's Pond, available on amazon.

At Stonehenge I learned to listen to the universal hum that lies within deep silence. It was an electrifying and heart-wrenching experience. Now I am back in the city where I live and work, and the distractions are overwhelming. There is suffering, there is need, there is conflict and chaos. Everywhere I look, I see something that isn’t working. And yet? Today in meditation I dropped below the turbulence of life’s hundred channels and tuned into that hum that issues directly from the source. It’s still there. It’s always there. All we need to do is move through the portal of silence and listen to the heartbeat of the infinite. Time expands and equanimity dissolves all our worries. Tune into the silence behind everything. Carry it with you throughout your day. Let its healing powers reshape you.

Exercise: Using Your Hands

9/5/2014

After a demonstration of spinning fleece at our Green Gulch workshop, I gave the prompt "Using Your Hands."

Author
Elizabeth Shreeve is the author of The Adventures of Hector Fuller chapter book series from Aladdin/Simon & Schuster and Oliver at the Window, a picture book from Front Street/Boyd Mills Press.

Using Your Hands

Use your hands to be human.

Pull off the covers, pet the cat. Make the bed, boil the tea. Touch the loved one—gentle, strong.

Make the day happen with hands.

Feed yourself, swipe a sponge, drive the car, wave hello. Log on, swipe left, click right.

Fingertip or full grasp. Hold hand, handshake, hold tight.

Brake the bike, open the throttle, change gears, unlock, keep track. Notate, rotate, adjust, reassure.

Express yourself—wiggle those digits! Count up, point out, flip off, come hither. Tickle the ivories, grasp the racquet, hold the oars.

Go ahead, be human. Delicate painting, feather stroke, embroidery stitch, lover's touch, eyelash in eye.

Feed the family, dig in the dirt. Use your hands to be human.