Posted on

Sunday Series: Kari O’Driscoll on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Kari O’Driscoll, who sees writing as “a form of alchemy.” 

Photo by Kei Scampa from Pexels

These days, asking me why I write is like asking me why I breathe. It has become such a part of who I am, such a daily practice, that I am often ‘writing’ in my head as I experience the world – walking my dogs, preparing a meal, talking on the phone to a friend. Ultimately, writing is a form of alchemy for me, a way to find or make meaning out of something that is seemingly without any, or that is complicated and tangled and often overwhelming.

One of my odd talents is a skill for unraveling knotted necklaces. My kids both learned, early on, that if they had a chain they wanted to wear that was hopelessly twisted and matted, they could bring it to me and I’d set to work. No matter how little patience I had with anything else going on, there was something about slowly picking at the strands and knots that put me in a zen state.

I don’t know if it was the certain knowledge that there was a solution if I just kept at it, or if the consequences seemed so innocuous if I didn’t manage to undo the mess, but somehow I could settle in to a peaceful, methodical rhythm and restore it to its desired state. That’s what writing does for my head and my heart and my spirit – allows me to come to a place where I know there is meaning if I trust and if I focus and spend time looking at something from all angles, turning it over and over again in my mind but not forcing it, picking at one strand and then another to see what happens, gently loosening one loop from another.

As a kid, I believed life happened to me. The combination of traumatic events, authoritarian parents, and being a certain age meant that I felt as though I had no control over the things I experienced, no matter how much I tried to make meaning of them. Talking to adults never seemed to help; either they couldn’t explain things in a way that made sense to my youthful brain or they were impatient with the questions and refused to engage. For decades, I accepted that there were things that I would never be able to make sense of, and I resigned myself to studying the things I could, like math and science, and ducked to avoid the others. But in my late 30s, I began writing as a way to release some of the constant chatter in my brain. If I couldn’t untangle the knots, at least I could get them out of my head and on to paper so I didn’t have to hold them all inside any longer. And that’s when I discovered the magic of transformation.

Our bodies aren’t designed to hold emotion. But when we let our brains grab on to emotional responses – especially the big ones like fear and anger – and wrap stories around them, they become stuck. The more we tell ourselves those stories in our own heads, the bigger the knot gets and the heavier it is to carry. But when I write those things down – even if it’s a jumble of words – scared, sad, overwhelmed, why, angry, painful, broken, willitalwaysbelikethis, whatiswrongwithme, idontknowhowmuchlongericandothis, listening to her cry is breaking my heart, helpless, birds singing outside, the cat came to head-butt me just now – the knots start to come undone. And if I walk after writing or I talk to a friend, they release and relax even more. And if I string together more observations and more messy piles of words and feelings and observations, the patterns begin to reveal themselves and my heart and my head and my spirit find peace. Alchemy. Transforming fear to wonder. Rage to realization. Confusion to harmony.

Writing is the vehicle that takes me there as long as I surrender to it, as long as I trust that I will eventually get to a place of understanding and acceptance, as long as I sit down quietly and begin unraveling the knots.

KARI O’DRISCOLL is a writer and mother of two living in the Pacific NW. She is the author of One Teenager at a Time: Developing Self-Awareness and Critical Thinking in Adolescence, and the recently released memoir, Truth Has a Different Shape. Her other work has been featured in anthologies on parenting, reproductive rights, and cancer as well as appearing online in outlets such as Ms. Magazine and Healthline. She is the founder of The SELF Project, a comprehensive social-emotional health site for teens and parents and educators of teens.

You can find links to her work at  kariodriscollwriter.com. 

*Hidden Timber Books is hosting Kari O’Driscoll as part of their Small Press Author Reading Series on Saturday, May 9th, at 11am Pacific (1pm Central). She’ll be reading from her new memoir, Truth Has a Different Shape. This event is FREE. Register HERE.

Posted on

Sunday Series: Ruby McConnell on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Ruby McConnell, who write about lessons learned from manuscripts called “boring” and how writing for a small audience helped her find her voice.

Photo by Liam Simpson on Unsplash

If I am to be honest, I never meant to write. It just kind of snuck up on me.

First, I was a reader, one of those ravenous inhalers of the written word, willing to pick up anything, gulping in fiction, literature, beach reads, newspapers, and backs of cereal boxes. Backed up with a family of readers, the reading of books in particular, played an outsized role in my world from a formative age.   

Then, for the longest time I was an academic. In school I wrote mountains of short question answers, term papers, and lab reports until I worked my way up to theses. As a student geology and environmental studies, little of what I wrote was evaluated for construction, readability, or beauty. More often, I produced technically correct exposition that teemed with the minutiae of laboratory precision and descriptive science­– I have a 300-page tome on pumice sitting on a shelf that an advisor once called “the most boring thing he’d ever read.” Boring? Definitely. Instructive? Yes. Aside from some things about eruption dynamics, I learned a lot about the craft of writing. Academic writing taught me how to work with large drafts, about research, organization, and, thanks to one supremely diligent advisor, grammar. Maybe most importantly, I experienced the real but somewhat unquantifiable expenditure of time and energy required to bring to fruition a book-length work. For me, unlike many of my colleagues, the actual writing of the manuscript felt, actually, kind of good. Satisfying, somehow.

That experience, the path to that first real book-length work, and the whole of my graduate studies, became foundational to my future writing. Geology exposed me to unique and interesting people and experiences and taught me a specialized way of observing the world and a rich and vivid vocabulary to put to those observations while my environmental studies made me familiar with what then were problems that most people considered only in the abstract, sea level rise, storm hazards, drinking water quality, logging. I finished school with an ability to complete things and a lot of non-real-world knowledge. I had a foundation, but I wasn’t a writer.

I was, though, still writing. As a working environmental scientist, I wrote templated reports, sometimes a dozen a week, describing contaminated properties ranging from fifty-year-old beach houses to industrial plating facilities. Still technical and boring. But now, at least, the work had import. These places were making people sick.

And then one day, I just felt like I had something to say. Maybe it had to do with maturity. Maybe not. But I had reached some kind of threshold in my life where experience and knowledge had converged and my response to that convergence was to begin to write.

For years, my writing was confined to an obscure blog in a quiet corner of the internet. There, I wrote short observational pieces about art, social justice, foodways, and, always, the environment. Eventually, I found my voice. By then, the issues I held a passion for and expertise in, the outdoors, the environment, climate change, were no longer abstract. I started writing essays, longer pieces centered on place and personal experience and the value of the natural world. My first try was, shockingly, published on the first submission. So was the one after that. Something, some dam inside me that was so concerned about all that I had learned and seen, had broken. With that momentum, I turned to bigger projects. Alarmed by deteriorating wellness and dwindling outdoor participation among women, I started writing prescriptive books to empower women and girls to be brave, explore, and heal themselves outside. I found a home for this work at Sasquatch Books.

And just like that, I was a writer.

RUBY McCONNELL is a writer, geologist, and environmental advocate living and writing in the Pacific Northwest. Her work examining the relationships between landscape and the human experience won an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship in 2016 and has been published in Grain Literary Magazine, Entropy, Oregon Humanities, Complex Online, Huff Post, Mother Earth News, Grow Magazine, Seattle Backpackers, and Misadventures Magazine, among others.

Her First book, A Woman’s Guide to the Wild, was published in 2015 to overwhelmingly positive reviews. The companion volume, A Girl’s Guide to the Wild was released in 2019. A collection of her essays entitled Ground Truth is being released in April of 2020 by Overcup Books.

You can almost always find her in the woods.
www.rubymcconnell.com | @rubygonewild

Hidden Timber Books is hosting Ruby McConnell to read from her newest book, Ground Truth (published by Overcup Books) on Sunday, April 26th, @ 2pm Pacific. This event is FREE but registration is required.

Posted on

Sunday Series: Michelle Cameron on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Michelle Cameron, a historical novelist, who sees the gift of discovering story in research.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

“Something about numbers mesmerized her, made the world fade away. The bustle of the ketubah workshop, the messiness of the artists’ desks, the fanciful decoration and sketch work she had no gift for were replaced by a world that seemed logical and fixed, firm around the edges.“

This passage is from Beyond the Ghetto Gates where my heroine, Mirelle, contemplates her love of numbers, a love she employs daily to help manage her father’s ketubah (Jewish marriage certificate) workshop.

It’s ironic that I chose mathematics for Mirelle to excel in, considering my own lack of skill. I constantly mess up dates and the simplest of calculations eludes me. But I was able to imagine how someone could love them because of how writing captures me. So let me apply that first sentence to my own passion: Something about writing mesmerizes me, makes the world fade away.

When I’m in the zone, one world truly does fade away – our mundane present day – and is replaced by the world of my imaginings and the characters who speak to me, often taking the action in unanticipated directions. In Beyond the Ghetto Gates, I was transported to Italy during the period of the French Revolution. I loved bringing the harbor city of Ancona to life:

“The walk to the cathedral was steep; it made Francesca, burdened by her pregnancy, gasp for air. The women rounded a bend in the road and paused, looking over the panorama spread before them. The red, white, and pink stone buildings with their red-tiled roofs were bathed in a golden glow. In the harbor, multi-masted cargo ships with furled canvases were anchored in the bay. “

In The Fruit of Her Hands, my previous historical novel, I entered medieval Europe and lived the lives of a Jewish family coping with mounting antisemitism; in my first published work, In the Shadow of the Globe, I stood backstage at the Globe theatre, watching my literary love, William Shakespeare, as he embraced a full-blooded Elizabethan life – all the while writing the masterpieces we still marvel at today.

As a historical novelist, I love delving into these different periods, figuring out what people ate, how they dressed, what they did to survive. Honestly, there can be a bit of terror associated with this, especially in the newest novel, where I describe Napoleon’s military battles. I know that someone, somewhere, will point out what I got wrong. But I reassure myself by recalling that I’m a novelist, not a historian. It’s the story that’s important.

But when I discover in the research ways to shape the plot, it can be an astounding gift. The ketubah workshop, for instance? That arose from a discovery that Ancona, Italy – the harbor city where Napoleon first demolished the ghetto gates – was also the world center of ketubah making. In fact, it was where artisans and scribes first illuminated these documents.

And as I learned more about the city, a strange tale came to light. It seemed – based on Vatican documents – that a portrait of the Virgin Mary in Ancona’s cathedral turned her head and wept. The devout took this miracle to mean that the Madonna would protect them from the French invaders. There was a particularly juicy anecdote that Napoleon himself, while looting the cathedral, faced down the portrait and was unnerved by it. How could any novelist resist such a story? Resist using it fictionally to inform her plot?

So why do I write? Well, any day when I don’t, I’m unsettled and deeply unhappy. Something drives me to the page, where I bring life to distant worlds and hear a chorus of invented people clamoring to be heard. Like my heroine above, I’m as consumed by words as she is by numbers.

MICHELLE CAMERON is a director of The Writers Circle, an NJ-based organization that offers creative writing programs to children, teens, and adults, and the author of works of historical fiction and poetry: Beyond the Ghetto Gates (She Writes Press, 2020), The Fruit of Her Hands: The Story of Shira of Ashkenaz (Pocket, 2009), and In the Shadow of the Globe (Lit Pot Press, 2003).

She lived in Israel for fifteen years (including three weeks in a bomb shelter during the Yom Kippur War) and served as an officer in the Israeli army teaching air force cadets technical English. Michelle lives in New Jersey with her husband and has two grown sons of whom she is inordinately proud. Visit her website for more information.

You can also find her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can purchase a copy of Beyond the Ghetto Gates from IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, Indigo, and Amazon on Kindle or in paperback.

Subscribe to christicraig.com for future posts & giveaways.