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.
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.
Many writers talk about the idea of place as character in fiction or nonfiction, where the setting of a story may reveal the tone or even deeper insight into a main character. In Mary Fleming’s guest post, she writes on place and the bigger role it plays in her new novel, The Art of Regret (just released from She Writes Press). You can read an excerpt below, and, courtesy of She Writes Press and Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity, there’s a book giveaway! Enter the giveaway by Tuesday, October 29th for a chance to win a copy of The Art of Regret. Now, welcome Mary Fleming!
It’s no accident that Paris takes up so much space in the opening paragraph of The Art of Regret. The book actually has two protagonists. There’s the narrator Trevor, who has undergone more than his fair share of personal tragedy but who has yet to come to terms with those crippling events. The novel recounts his long road to redemption.
The other main character is Paris. She is as present in Trevor’s life as his family and friends and the novel is also the story of his relationship to the city. It traces the way boyhood feelings of resentment and alienation grow into a more positive force so that by adulthood she provides solace and a reminder that life goes on, no matter his own suffering.
The city’s complications contribute to this sense of Paris as a character, as more than a mere backdrop to everyday life. Like a friend she is multi-faceted and can continue to surprise you, even after many years. My breath still catches when I see the morning light on the Seine and its bridges or look down a yet undiscovered little street. Trevor too, later in the novel, is taken aback when he visits a friend who lives in a house surrounded by the remains of a vineyard, all hidden from street view by a perfectly ordinary building in Montmartre.
As someone who has also lived in Paris for
many years, I can testify that Trevor is not the only one to feel that symbiotic
relationship. Whether it’s her long history or her great beauty, there is
something close to human about the city. She is in fact one of the reasons I
wrote the book, as an ode to this great lady.
The monuments become like friends, which goes some way to explaining why Parisiens were so upset by the burning of Notre Dame earlier this year. For Trevor the iconic relationship is to the Sacré Coeur that sits atop the hill of Montmartre and pops up on the horizon from many points in the city. Since he first caught sight of the church as a child, he associated the towers with his family before his father and sister died. The one big and the three small ones that were visible represented his mother and the three children, the basilica his father. As a young man he saw it from a room he rented. Now he sees it every day when he walks out of his bicycle shop Mélo-Vélo.
Like a friend Paris helps in times of
trouble. While recovering from an accident and a betrayal as a young man,
Trevor finds that the city coaxes him out of his pain and misery. Ditto in the
second half of the novel, when walking becomes an integral part of his daily
routine. The city helps him see beyond his own troubles, to feel part of a
bigger story. It’s done the same for me on many occasions.
All of which doesn’t mean the city is
static. She continues to evolve. Fortunes change; quartiers rise and fall. The rue des Martyrs, for example, may have
been deemed unremarkable by Trevor in 1995 but it’s since been gentrified, has
moved upscale.
Change or no change, Paris remains a steady friend to the end.
Excerpt: The Art of Regret, Part I, Chapter One
For many years, in what might have been the prime of my life, I lived and worked on the rue des Martyrs. This narrow market street, which begins its climb at the northern edge of the banking and insurance district and ends in the skein of streets that wraps around the Sacré Coeur at the heart of Montmartre, is not on the tourist circuit and has no pretensions to Parisian grandeur. Behind and above its modest shop fronts are forgettable lives. Lives like my own, which I had reduced to a box, a one-room apartment on top of a one-room shop. Though the two were once a unit, at some point and for some reason—to make more space, to rent the shop and studio separately—the connecting stairs had been disconnected and my room could only be reached by an enclosed stairway in the courtyard. It’s not unusual in a city with a long history. Buildings change their function and configuration, and one structure is squeezed in front of, behind, or beside another. It’s just such quirks that have made Paris Paris, a city of endless layers and perspectives, a city of story upon story.
Though my story began in New York, the firstborn son of two Americans, it was moved across the Atlantic with a mother and a brother, minus a father and a sister, when I was eight. There on European soil the story reluctantly remained, until near the end of a resentful adolescence. Unfortunately, the long-awaited return to the United States of America, via a small college, proved a disaster, and back the story came to Paris, where it drifted into young and not so young adulthood. By the time it had settled on the rue des Martyrs, I had hoped that that was where it would end, the unremarkable tale of a not-so-proud bicycle shop owner.
One October morning in 1995, I pulled up the orange security grille to Mélo-Vélo. No matter how carefully I coaxed it, the clang of juddering metal scraped my nerve ends. It seemed such an offensive start to every day, I was thinking, as I walked to the back of the shop and assessed my morning’s work, a bicycle that had spent the last twenty years in a basement. The airless tires were cracked, the handlebars rusty. Cobwebs draped every spoke, and the leather saddle was speckled with mold. The wheels squeaked and wobbled. A complete overhaul was in order, but for Camilla Barchester, the name I had noted on the repair slip, it might prove to be worth the trouble. I turned the bicycle belly up on the repair stand.
The Tibetan chimes jangled while I was contemplating which bit of the wreck to attack first. It was Madame Picquot, the concierge, with the morning post. Though I had long ago made it clear to her that I was not receptive to morning chatter, that I had no interest in the secrets and rumors, the scandals and grievances that scurried through the building and up and down the street, that I wished she’d just drop my post at the bottom of the stairs to the studio, she passed by the shop every morning to deliver my letters in person.
“Voilà, Monsieur Mic-fa,” she croaked. “Registered letter. I saved you a trip to the post office and signed for it. Ca va?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Normally, since I received little of interest, registered or otherwise, I would have been in no hurry to look at my correspondence, but for some reason—perhaps a fundamental lack of interest in the task at hand—I went straight to the counter and looked at my misspelled name: “Monsieur Trévor MACFARQUAHAR.” If my name is systematically shortened when spoken in French, it is lengthened when written, unfailingly adorned by superfluous vowels and unnecessary accents, and forever a reminder of my general square-pegged existence in a round world.
I sighed, ripped open the envelope, unfolded the slim sheet of white paper, and in the few short paragraphs saw my life crumbling before me.
Mary Fleming, originally from Chicago, moved to Paris in 1981, where she worked as a freelance journalist and consultant. Before turning full-time to writing fiction, she was the French representative for the American foundation The German Marshall Fund. A long-time board member of the French Fulbright Commission, Mary continues to serve on the board of Bibliothèques sans Frontières. Having raised five children, she and her husband now split their time between Paris and Berlin. THE ART OF REGRET is her second novel. Find her online at https://www.maryfleming.co/.
Don’t forget: Enter the giveaway by Tuesday, October 29th, for a chance to win a copy of The Art of Regret!
