Surprise Bones as Writing Process – Part 1 of a Travelogue by Michael G. Smith

Editor’s Note: When my friend Michael set off, I encouraged him to write up some of his thoughts and adventures for Miriam’s Well. I’m delighted to present: Surprise Bones as Writing Process – Part 1 of a Travelogue.

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I am on a six-month road trip through Utah, Nevada and along the Pacific Coast north of the Bay Area. Ultimately I will arrive in Bozeman, MT where I do chemistry research at Montana State University four months per year. One reason for the circuitous route is to shake up my writing practice and skills. The process feels stagnant. My poems have lost zip and creativity. It seemed to me a diverse range of terrain, ecosystems, ecotones, climates, towns and people would be good medicine. Surprise and uncertainty these medicines’ healing properties, I am going to trust providence, karma and kismet.
 
Today I am in Hanksville, UT, a sneeze-through town forty miles east of Capital Reef National Park. On my way to the park several days ago I stopped here for breakfast. While eating at Duke’s SlickRock Grill my waiter asked me about my road trip plans. A couple at the next table overheard the conversation and started telling me about a nearby dinosaur fossil dig, the Hanksville-Burpee Dinosaur Quarry. I had never heard of it, but Bob and Nancy, whom are volunteers at the site, encouraged me to spend time there later in the week when they would be digging.
 
I was a little irked someone suggested I change my westward plans. Nothing about the portly appearance of Bob and Nancy indicated they would be comfortable or enjoy hours beneath a hot sun chipping through hard sandstone. But as I listened to them it became clear this Houston geologist and paleontologist couple knew the terrain and dinosaurs. And this was their tenth consecutive spring dig season.
 
Other fossil hunters joined the conversation. The restaurant was full of them! Retired volunteers, university students, and interns and staff from natural history museums chimed in with tales of river basins, floods and sauropods – tales from a former world brought alive to the present. The magnitude of their enthusiasm hinted their quarry was special. The cardboard cutout of John Wayne behind the bar suggested I did not need to spend much time indoors.
 
I then remembered a rule I set before departing Santa Fe – if a detour involved the natural world I would readily apply the brakes and turn. Something 150 million years old and still revealing itself is something to brake for. My dinosaur-loving niece, whom I would see a few weeks later, would love the stories and pictures. I modified my post-Capital Reef westward plans, vowing to return in a few days.
 
Now at Duke’s campground I jot down bones I have unearthed that help my writing process – keep eyes and ears open, ask questions, take notes, know that I know little (which is true!). Be willing to explore. Take the unexpected turn when offered. Dismiss nothing, including exuberant fossil-hunters. Backtrack when necessary. Read maps. Accept, accept, accept. Use a real compass with real magnetic needles – the smartphone app may lead you astray. When hiking up and down graveled hills to take pictures remain mindful of rattlesnakes – they are camouflaged. Each sentence is metaphor.
 
Next up – Fossil Digging as Writing Process

Revision Process Based on Physical Limitations

I originally wrote this poem for the geocache Iz and I are doing inside the painted eggs:

shell of the cosmos
cracks with light
yolk of suns

chickens in the yard
cluck over their bit of earth
beneath the rooster’s comb

follow the trail
with your dog, taking a stroll
with your heart on a leash

things also allow us—
the report of rain,
raven feather, the past

a deathless ogre in the fairytale
store a soul in a needle
in a nest in a tree

in an egg
in a Canadian goose
in a jackrabbit

locked in an iron chest
buried beneath a green juniper
in the Chihuahuan desert

it’s dangers
to hide all of your spirit
outside of yourself

and yet this land
compels all of those
who walk it.

But then we realized it was too long, we weren’t looking for that many sections So I reduced it:

shell of the cosmos
cracks with light
yolk of suns

follow the trail
with your dog, taking a stroll
with your heart on a leash

a deathless ogre in the fairytale
stores a soul in a needle
in a nest in a tree

locked in an iron chest
buried beneath a green juniper
in the Chihuahuan desert

it’s dangerous
to hide all of your spirit
outside of yourself

and yet this land
compels all of those
who walk it.

It’s obviously better for the project, and it is tighter. A little something has been lost–maybe in terms of music–but such is revision. Your thoughts? Have you ever experienced this?

Poetic Process by Miriam Sagan

Poetic process isn’t always easy to engage with, no matter how long you’ve been writing. Mine changed in startling and unlooked for ways in the past year—and surprisingly it took me quite a while to notice.
Last October I was at Wildacres in the Smokies, working with my daughter Isabel Winson-Sagan. She taught me to do suminagashi—Japanese style marbling, which works as a kind of mono print of ink on water. In the week there, we worked at full throttle. I wore all the poems that appear in our collaborative book Spilled Ink.
Then, I didn’t write another poem for five months. This is unusual, as I try to write about 8 poems a month—even if they are bad, or off the cuff haiku that don’t quite work. I like to keep warmed up.
Instead, I was working on a novel, The Future Tense of River, entranced by the fun and difficulty of getting the first draft underway. I started another project, 100 CUPS OF COFFEE, a mix of poetry and prose, but the poetry was diary-like, not meant to stand alone.
In the spring, I had a horrifying “oops” moment. I wasn’t writing poetry. I was as startled as if I’d suddenly realized I hadn’t brushed my teeth in five months.
Experience has taught me not to panic about writing, so I figured—hey, just write some poems. I started, and these poems were really different. They were long and skinny (a form I’d been soundly criticized for as a Freshman in college and have avoided since.) They had no capital letters—something I usually think ill of. And they had very little punctuation. This last bit I’ve had to re-think, as editors keep asking for it.
They feel fast, impressionist, associative. They need one solid pass or draft. If that doesn’t work, they don’t seem revisable, I just throw them out. I can do detail edit, but the shape is fixed for good or ill by the first draft.
It’s kind of scary, but they seem to work just like mono printing or suminagashi.
I don’t know what to call them, but I’m writing a lot. And publishing. Editors seem to really like them, and most acceptances are coming in batches. Sometimes the poems cluster, or seem to make one larger poem. They might be a sequence, a book, or something else completely.

Here is an excerpt from a group just published in Apricity—a lovely e-zine.

the red neon SANTA FE
on the top of the Gothic Revival
railway building
across from my hotel room
on a rainy night in
Amarillo, Texas—
my love for you is pure,
an unusual
thing in this world,
and I’m perfectly happy
with you in my bed,
and although
the news of another poet’s
fame made me jealous
I count myself lucky
to not be translating
out of my native tongue.

Check out the rest at http://www.apricitymagazine.com/literary-submissions-1/2016/10/15/untitled?rq=Miriam%20Sagan

And do explore the magazine—http://www.apricitymagazine.com/. They are reading submissions and emphasize the visual arts, as you can see here:

Working New Poems Like Monoprints by Miriam Sagan

I’m so pleased to have work published in The Sunflower Collective. Here is a section, and the beautiful image chosen accompany the poetry. Click on the link to see it all.

in the ruins
of the lost city
you ask—where
did these people go?
and the dead
open one eye
surprised for just a moment
by our footsteps

Beat inspired Artwork by Divya Adusumilli

Have been working very differently of late. Last October was productive, when my daughter Isabel and I were collaborating at Wildacres in NC. Came home and plunged into prose—draft of a speculative novel, 1000 cups of coffee project, Bluebeard’s Castle material on my father. By mid-spring, I realized i had written NO poetry at all in almost six months, with the exception of haiku as part of a collaboration with my friend Michael Smith. I was stunned, and a bit scared. Well, maybe not that worried as I have many decades of trust in creative process, but surprised.
I started writing poetry in a different manner. I think of the current work as mono prints—I get one pass. The motion is very rapid, associative, and I’m hoping—lucid. Working on making the syntax authoritative even if the meaning is mysterious. Anyway, magazines seem to like them!
The eight poems or sections here are present as one work, which looks good, I think. They were written individually. There are clusters and sequences in the entire project that I can’t see yet.

Novella Question: Does A Dying Woman Get Her own POV?

Right in the middle of the semester, I got hit with an idea for a novella. I saw the whole thing laid out clearly. Terrible timing though, as I’m really busy. But I started writing a bit anyway. Almost like taking dictation at first. But as I get deeper into the first draft, I have some questions.
Set-up—five very different women meet in a new mom’s group about 30 years ago. Flash forward to the present. One has a terminal disease, and has asked the others to assist in her suicide. The time line is twelve hours–the day they help her. Back stories are told as reminiscence/flashback.
Of the group, the ill woman is the one secretly liked the least by the group. She is elusive (or private). Not an engaged mom, and given to romantic entanglements. But beautiful, intelligent, and caring in her own way.
The question–do I give her a pov? At first I thought not–four characters is already a lot, and they have children, partners, exes. Then she wanted a chapter of her own–a kind of suicide note. Then I realized she might have left a will. Then a man who’d loved her wanted to speak.
What to do? I don’t want to have to re-read AS I LAY DYING. Ideas?