Posted on

Meet me at the podium.

Today, the writers at Harwood Place held their annual reading showcase. Spending time with this group always inspires creative thought and conversation.

The Harwood Place Writers of 2023. Bottom row (left to right): Jean, Toni, Carolou, Mary, Ruth.
Top row (left to right): Warren, Milton, Carole, me.

I WRITE. In journals. On screen. In countless notebooks. I WRITE to-do lists. Plans of action. I record the date and the day of the week and where I am. Some days the page is filled with notes on nothing. Still ….

I WRITE for some of the same reasons Margaret Atwood writes:¹ To set down the past before it is forgotten. To excavate the past because it has been forgotten. To produce order out of chaos. To say a new word. To cope with my depression. To bear witness…

TO BEAR WITNESS speaks to why the Harwood Place Writers and I meet once a month.

Harwood Place is a retirement living center in town. It’s been several years since the we have held the annual reading event. A small pandemic got in the way, cut us off and kept us apart for months on end. Kept us hidden behind masks when we did return to routine. Kept us suspicious of anyone with a slight cough or sneeze or clearing of the throat. (We were never so suspicious before!) The fact that we are still here is a testament of miracles.

I’ve been spending time with this group for a while now. The first time I met with them, in the summer of 2012, I was very green and very uncertain as to how I might teach men and women of a different generation – of several generations apart. But I quickly learned that there is no great divide when it comes to writing or to telling our stories.

Stories bear witness to our experiences and in turn, no matter the age, they pave the way to connection and community. I’ve seen it happen so many times: when one person shares a story they have written, and the group sets off on a discussion of similarities and reminiscing and (more often than not) laughter. That connection and community and laughter! is the reason I return again and again.

Today’s event was a celebration of all their stories and poems they have written over the past year. Reading their stories aloud reminds them — and all of us who listen — that their stories matter.

Posted on

Sunday Series: Marjorie Pagel on Why I Write

For the next several Sundays, I’d like to introduce you to writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, meet Marjorie Pagel, a poet and writer of essays and stories. She’s been on the blog before, and I’m thrilled to have her back again.

I’m a great believer in freewriting. Just leave the nagging editor outside the door and write whatever is on your mind – mundane things like what happened yesterday, the goings on planned for today, ruminations of life’s many possibilities. And, of course, creative writing. One of my favorite characters, Lisa Mullarkey, was born during a freewriting session, and many other fictional folks are lurking in my files waiting to be fleshed out.

Judy Bridges of Redbird Studio (author of Shut Up and Write) may remember when I entertained her roundtable groups with MP’s MPs (Marjorie Pagel’s Morning Pages); these were edited pieces which originally came to life in my morning freewriting sessions.

Oftentimes I discover what I want to say when I let the words tumble out. Reading it over later, I’m sometimes amazed at my own thoughts, my own words. I’ve learned to trust this inner self who has important stuff to say. And, in the process, I’ve discovered my voice. My writer friends recognize it. I originally fell in love with freewriting when I read Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. Although I occasionally write longhand, as she advised, it’s difficult to decipher my handwriting and too much “good stuff” gets lost. Yes, I love my keyboard! An earlier draft of the poem below was written shortly after the miracle of word-wrap on my very first computer.

                        freedom in lower case

          whenever i want to feel creative i simply start writing
          the way i’m doing now without depressing any shift levers
          so that everything comes out lower case
                        like e e cummings

          abandoning the routine of shift/capital/release
          takes a little concentration at first but once i’m in the groove
          i feel recklessly free defying tradition
          spelled out like god’s holy law by my english teacher
                        imagine her reaction to that uncapitalized e
                        which defines her profession

          when i think of e e cummings i remember
          whatifamuchofawhichofawind and
          how his mountains kept dancing and dancing
          the carefree images of childhood return
          and i know what it is to sail through the sky
                        with or without my keyboard

Marjorie Pagel learned to type as a sophomore in Norbert Kaczmarek’s class at Westfield High School, where Mr. Kaczmarek was known to drape a cloth over the hands of any student who tried to sneak a peek at the keys. This was back in the day when you had to reach up your left hand to return the carriage at the end of each line of typing. With all that manual whacking, it was a noisy class. To this day Marjorie prefers writing without looking at the monitor until after she’s completed her first draft efforts.

Although she herself was an English teacher for much of her life, beholden to strict rules of grammar and punctuation, the act of snubbing her nose to such restrictions is a bit like shedding one’s clothes to go skinny dipping.

Some of Marjorie’s freewriting was shaped and refined over the years in workshops and writing groups, such as Kim Suhr’s Red Oak Writing in West Allis, Wisconsin; Christi Craig’s online classes in Flash Nonfiction; and Margaret Rozga’s poetry workshops. She has published two collections: The Romance of Anna Smith and other stories and Where I’m From: poems and stories. Both are available on Amazon. You can find Marjorie at “Meet Me at the Corner” and on Facebook. Or write to her at Marjorie.Pagel@gmail.com.

*Photo of typewriter and mac by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Posted on

Sunday Series: Kathy Collins on Why I Write

For the next several Sundays, I’d like to introduce you to writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, meet Kathy Collins, an amazing flash nonfiction writer from the west coast. (This is her second publication!)

Where there is smoke there is fire. As a kid, I devoured my brother’s Cub Scout magazine, Boys’ Life.  The mystery of flashing a fire with a spark from two sticks. It was beyond my ten-year-old ability to understand. It was magical.

I read everything. My if I had gone missing would have included these details: freckled nose lost in a book, spare book grasped in other hand. I diligently listed every book I read on lined notebook paper. My young life was enhanced by wrinkles in time, a little Prince and that silly old bear. With my ten-year old tears, I watered where the red fern grew. I lived in the little house on the prairie and captured the castle. I went through the door in the wall and into the secret garden. One summer I solved 56 mysteries with Nancy.

My brother could build his little boy world out of Lincoln Logs. He would dump them out of the cylinder container. The two-inch wooden logs would notch together at right angles to create little buildings. Hours and hours later a compound of green roofed forts popped up on the beige carpet prairie. I was excluded from the world he built. Construction of my world happened in my brain and was cobbled sentence by sentence, page by page, chapter by chapter. Construction lights flashed Morse coded stories again and again waiting for release. I journaled the angst of being a brunette with braces in a blonde Wisconsin world. I wrote a story for my ninth grade English class. It was a glorious middle age love story. In my mind middle age was 40. I knew nothing of love. My characters had a housekeeper and a Picasso. I have no memory of how this story was conceived. The rural High School English teacher gave me public recognition.

I didn’t write again until college. I wrote a story about the end of my first romance. Well received by my teacher. The next year I took a creative writing class. The professor disclosed that A’s were not part of his grading arsenal. I have no recollection of what I wrote but still cherish the A+ grade.

The life that followed college was stressful. In retrospect unauthentic. I wrote the things that needed to be written. The rhythms of life. Love notes, Thank You notes and obituaries. Weekly letters home in a pre-email world. I ghost wrote speeches and letters and resumes. I wrote dating profiles for friends seeking soulmates. Memos, Regulatory filings, and employee reviews at work. I wrote my own divorce.

An old friend sent me a packet of poems. They were written by me during my second serious romance. I had no memory, but it flashed a flicker and I wrote a poem about surviving breast cancer. I submitted it to poetry contest for survivors. I won and my poem was published. My heartbeat accelerated fueled by the music of joy.

Two years ago, 1,788.9 miles from home on Halloween Eve a seemingly random encounter altered my life. I could have turned left but I went right. I opened a door and entered a book sale. I stopped at Christi’s table and we chatted about books and writing. She gave me a packet of writing prompts. Something flared within me – soul kindling that sparked a dormant fire. I signed up for a class and kept signing up, as the fire illuminated the stories patiently waiting a very long time to be told. I wrote of joy and despair floating on a sea of resilience. My heart’s inhabitants. Birth and death. Surviving and letting go.

It turns out I always was a writer. I just forgot.

Kathy Collins lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her neighborhood sits on the cusp of the desert nestled in a ring of mountains. This beauty is the price she pays for extreme summer heat. She started writing three years ago after escaping from three plus decades of a telecommunications career. She has lots of stories to unravel. She is married, a mother of one, and Nana to two. Her favorite memories are woven from travel and a life filled with love and laughter.