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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

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Guest Post: Marjorie Pagel on Poetry & Writing

Pagel's newest collection, Where I'm From (cover image): painting of red barn

In Milwaukee writing circles, Marjorie Pagel needs no introduction. She is a powerhouse with the pen (I’ve seen her in action), diving into writing with little hesitation, bringing amazing insight to the page, and then publishing great poems and stories.

Today she guest posts, sharing about her long relationship with writing while introducing us to one of her poems, “The Corn Crop” (one of my favorites). You’ll find an immediate connection in all she writes, so enter the giveaway to win a copy of her latest publication, Where I’m From: Poems and Stories. Deadline to enter is Sunday, May 19th, at noon. Now, welcome Marjorie!

Let’s Write!

Marjorie Pagel, standing next to a tree with fall colors in background.

My first poem was inspired by the sight of a robin while swinging outside our family’s farmhouse the spring of 1950. I was nine years old. In the next two years I had composed enough original poetry for my first book.

I used my best cursive handwriting on the lined 4×7-inch tablet, decorated the cover with a construction paper design, and dedicated it to my grandmother, Mary Johnson, who lived in Minnesota. I still feel a bit guilty that I never made a similar gift to my other grandmother, Ella Ellingson, in Milwaukee. I actually loved her best.

Since I’m talking about “one” writer’s beginnings (the other, more famous one, was Eudora Welty) I may as well mention the two books of original writing that won blue ribbons at the Marquette County Fair when I was in seventh and eighth grade. They both bore the title, “Let’s Write,” in recognition of the radio program that inspired them. Everyone in our one-room country school would sit quietly at our desks to listen to this broadcast from Wisconsin School of the Air. When the radio was turned off we would write – a little essay, a story, a poem. For the county fair I neatly copied each week’s assignment from the school year into a 9×12 notebook.

Here’s what I find interesting. Some years back when I was writing a blog for Community Newspapers, I wrote about my “Let’s Write” classroom experience, which became part of a Wisconsin history project for a girl at Nicolet High School. The two of us are still Facebook friends.

Flash forward to 2016. I was 75 years old with hundreds of accumulated essays, poems, and stories – most of them sitting unpublished on my computer. Okay, I said to myself, It’s harvest time. Just as my father had harvested his crops each fall, I would harvest some of my best writing in the autumn of my life. It would be a gift to pass along to family and friends. My first book, The Romance of Anna Smith and Other Stories, was published in 2017 with the help of David Gawlik, Caritas Publishing, before my 76th birthday.

Marjorie Pagel holding copies of her first book. The Romance of Anna Smith and Other Stories

“When are you going to publish your next book?” people asked me, so early this year, at age 77, I published Where I’m From: poems and stories.

Meanwhile, I keep writing. I’m a regular participant in the roundtables at Red Oak Writing in West Allis, Wisconsin. I’ve been gaining inspiration and craftsmanship from Wisconsin’s poet laureate, Margaret Rozga, at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha, and I’m learning new skills in flash nonfiction with Christi Craig. It’s an online class, which means that writers from everywhere are connected. It reminds me of those grade school days when the voice of Marie Applegate in Madison, Wisconsin, reached the listening ears of kids like me in classrooms all across the state.

The message remains the same: “Let’s Write!”

The Corn Crop

That first spring, when my father was just a weekend farmer,
he drove out into the sandbur fields to plant corn.
He rode like a conqueror on the seat of his new Farmall tractor.
It was shiny red, like the little coaster wagon I admired
in the Gambles store window.

When all the corn did not come up, my brother and I marched along
with our buckets of seed corn. We placed three yellow kernels
in each scooped-out hollow and covered them over with smooth dirt.
My father figured one out of three ought to grow
but sometimes all three did, and so we’d trudge along again
thinning out the corn.

One year, the year it hailed, we had a good crop, growing way higher
than even my father’s knees by the Fourth of July.
Someone said it was the best crop of corn in Marquette County.
My father never said that, of course, for he was not given to bragging.
Still he had a fierce proud look on his face and his eyes were happy.

When the hail came that summer
he was away in the city working his factory job.
My mother collected a cupful of the ice marbles
and put them in the freezer box of our little Frigidaire.
That Friday night when my father came home on the train
she showed him the hailstones, her offering of proof
that the hail had really happened, that the corn now lay in shreds
and there was nothing she could have done to save it.

ABOUT the AUTHOR

Marjorie Pagel grew up in rural Wisconsin where she attended a one-room country school and graduated with a high school class of just fifty students. She moved to Milwaukee for college, earning both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UWM. Meanwhile, she was married, had a family, and worked as a reporter/feature writer for a local suburban newspaper. She is the author of two books and five one-act plays, which have been produced by Village Playhouse in West Allis, Wisconsin.

She continues to participate in writing workshops and is affiliated with local and state writing groups. Writing is part of her daily routine. “It keeps me grounded,” she says. “I want to always remember where I’m from while paying close attention to who I am today – this moment – and my connections to all the people who continue to enrich my life. Although many of the people who have shaped my life are gone now, I celebrate their continuing presence through the gift of memory, and I savor the daily adventure that even an ordinary life has to offer.”

DON’T FORGET! Enter the giveaway by Sunday, May 19th, for a chance to win a copy of her newest book, Where I’m From: Poems and Stories!