Today will be session #4 of the group at Bud Clark Commons, and I know enough to expect nothing. I do hope, though, to see the writers from last week, and the week before. Session #3 of any group tends to turn a corner, and last week followed that pattern. Even though there was only one person from the week before. Even though there were only 3 people. It was sweet. We laughed. We were quiet. We talked about silence.

This evening with its 60+ degrees, with the full moon last night, with the daffodils and cherry blossom buds, who knows what stories or writers will emerge.

     Incantation for the Man Outside

There is no silence like the night by the train station
after trains leave, after moonset, after Venus moves
in an arc across the night to a spot blocked by Earth.

There is no silence like the brown bag, wet, crumpled, worn,
the doorway filled with sack and trash, the way the eye
speaks so loud the man with weather-beaten skin cannot.

There is no silence like the one in the tongue, between fat taste buds
and epiglottis where words wait for tooth and breath and nerve,
where threat floods the brain, knocking thought out.

What silence can there be for him when all sound is threat, when outside
is razor wind, when smell rims the nose with citrus piss, when inside is
forbidden, or more daggers from a daddy’s hand, or food used cruelly?

The desert stretches dawn to dusk. Pray.
The morning is still very dark. Pray.
Pray, make a place for a silence that is safe.

On Sunday, when there was a break in the cloudbursts, I hopped on my bike. Twenty miles for training, but the day was cold and wet. So, I chose flat, north-south, and didn’t think there’d be many folks on the Springwater. There weren’t too many.

After the Steel Bridge, so exciting to ride next to a moving train, all steel and noise, I had to move through a crowd of folks lining up for some free meal beneath the west side of the bridge. There was a gap in the line, so I had no problem riding through.

Awhile later, after potholes, train tracks, loading docks of Front Ave, crossing the rail yard and coming back to NW via Yeon, I came back under the Steel Bridge. There was no gap in the line. But one man saw me, yelled ahead of me at the men in line, “Move aside. Taxpayer coming through.”

His gristled face, my cold face, we shared a laugh, big, full, the joy in his words.

If I were just an English instructor, I’d ask, “Inside what?” and my mind would grind and whirl on prepositions and their dependence on objects, the way they finish each other’s sentences, the coffee ready in the morning and left in the thermos, hot and ready.

But instead I heard, “It’s been a long time since I’ve been inside,” and the Land of Inside spread out before us last night, the writers around the table: carpet, painted walls, chairs. And heat and doors that lock and clean water. And lights that make waking and sleeping their own thing. The Land of Inside keeps some out, can give some such dignity.

random inside space

When you’re not from the Land of Inside, you enter as a stranger, and sounds can knock the lid off, can pry open. Especially electronic sounds, like TVs and fans and central heating vents, the smallest rattle because what’s Outside is bigger.

I didn’t know. Being an Insider, I haven’t known Inside.

It’s taken a week to be able to write about the first session of the Write Around Portland group I’m facilitating. I was right: this group will change me.

The first meeting was more challenging than I had imagined it would be. I’ve never facilitated a group with so many folks managing so many things pulling on them, tugging from the outside and the inside. Unfortunately, one writer couldn’t manage the strain of those forces, and I didn’t know how to help him. The group unraveled.

But they wrote a lot.

This week the sun is out, and I have support coming to the group, and I have more plans, a better idea of who and when and where and how much. It’s such a privilege to be able to walk in.

This morning the view across the water is dark teal, a little muddy, maybe silver here and there. I’ve stood at a ferry dock before, stood on the deck of the ferry, rumbling with huge engine power, and understood: the shoreline ahead will change me. Fact. No doubt. And I’m choosing to move right into whatever I will be, after the crossing.

Today I meet with someone from Bud Clark Commons who will answer questions, show me around. Today I head into change.

Have a sweet Valentine’s.

Last Thursday I found out that I will be facilitating a Write Around Portland group at the Bud Clark Commons, for chronically homeless men. I’m very excited.

And on Friday, Cheryl dropped me off to bike around Sauvie Island and back through NW Portland, in the sun, in the wind. On parts of the island I was biking sideways, the east wind gusting probably 35 miles an hour. A little crazy, but it was the first longish ride of the season, a long season. It was good to be out, to hear that crackly throat of the Sandhilll Cranes, to see a dozen Snow Geese, white and tall in a field.

And weaving through the streets of NW, I was tired from fighting the wind. There were many people in the shadows, doorways, walking on the dried mud of the sidewalks, where last week there were rivers. And about the woman who raised her head as I rode by, her face flat without her teeth, I wondered if I’d be writing with her. And to the man walking in the bike lane toward me, his wool hat low on his face, his Carhart jacket doing little against the wind, I nodded. Will we write together? 


Now we all have pens. Before, we were so different.

It’s been quite awhile, and I’m sorry to say I haven’t ridden much this year, really. Most of the winter and spring I trained for the Pedal Petal Century, but the weather was sideways rain and cold. I made it through the hills, the first 35 miles, but then bailed. Doh! And over the summer and fall, I didn’t do many rides. Now, the STP calls to me. I may start training in February.

Reviving this blog means writing sporadically. One of the reasons I want to start again is to record thoughts about writing, about change, about the interaction between creativity and activity, and more.

Returning to a piece of writing is like returning to a place. The rocks are still covered with lichen, the trees still textured, the Pondersosa towering over the Scrub Oak, and the sun makes its swing through the seasons. A piece of writing, like the first draft of a novel I started about Sylvia Plath and my Aunt Maureen, is still 160 pages long. It still moves horizontally through crisis and resolution, through complications brought on by jealousy and pride of characters bent on defining themselves in opposition to others. The metaphors are still fresh or mixed or flat. But I’ve changed.

In the 70s, On the Loose, a Sierra Club book about brothers who hitched across the country and wandered into wilderness, shot amazing pictures, and kept a journal, captured the imagination of those of us who felt trapped by cities and families. There was one piece, in particular, that stuck in my body. It was about returning to Big Sur. They wrote that returning to a place again and again showed you how you had changed, not how the place had changed.

In returning to the Plath novel, I can see how my writing has changed. At the time I had no clue how to write a novel, and so, I dove into the dangerous writing community and learned how to slow down, how to break syntax and create character, how to drag the nuance out of a gesture. I’ve learned to observe complicity. In some ways I’ve learned to see more like Plath, to see the complicity the observer has in the action observed. I’m a different person from the writer who wrote the first draft: I’m more willing to be vulnerable, more willing to blame and forgive and expose and deny.

I’m hoping I can write in the place I am now.

Well, I can’t stand it. Here’s a little bit that isn’t riding or writing:

We have walls!!

Today in Mosier, we were blessed with heat and walls and views that unveiled some of what is to come. Blessings to all.

Today was another one of those October days in Oregon, sunny, crisp, dry-grass smelly. While I broke no world records coming or going to school (my bike held about 20 extra pounds on the way to school because I brought leftovers from Hoda’s catering the Friday event. YUM!), I broke through many different subjects: typesetting and letterpresses, novels and storylines, and biking.

Writing is so different if you have to think about setting each letter. Over the weekend 4 intrepid students worked with a most patient instructor, Michael D’Allessandro, and set a line or two of type and printed their very own creations. We worked with tiny presses which print on a 3×5 surface. I can’t tell you how amazing it was to use the composing stick, load lead letters into the left hand, write upside down and backwards, lock the words into the chase, load it into the little machine, watch the doghead turn the ink plate, and feed the Rive paper in. It was magic.

As Joanna Rose said today, she was still “letter-y.” No kidding.

And besides that this weekend, I spent an hour on the phone with Hannah Tinti, my good friend who has adopted my novel. She has sent me 7 pages, single-spaced, of notes, both line-edits and big ideas. She knows my novel better than I do at this point, and I am in this haze thinking of what to do, or how to do what she thinks I should do. Her comments and suggestions are brilliant. Rarely has anyone had such a friend. So, I’m letter-y and thinking about Kyle and Jack Song and Carla and their stories.

Interrupting this autumn euphoria are some odd people in cars. Today some workers in a big truck whistled as they passed me, not a hubba-hubba whistle, just one meant to freak me out. I was going about 30mph down a very busy 4-lane highway, and this time, it was more comfortable and easy to get my hand in the right position to flip them off.

All of these actions and stories were in the leaves my tires shredded. They were in the headwind, the warming fall of evening.
(for more pictures of the 24-Hour Story Jam, go here.)