Write it Forward

This week MFAC alum Maggie Moris* shares a story about the power of taking the time to write something by hand and how stumbling across a long-forgotten letter can bring important memories surging back to life.

I miss her.

My maternal grandmother, Mary Jane Swan, took me in to live with her at a time when I needed out of a toxic relationship. On a late November night nearly twenty years ago, I called her in desperation. I barely spoke three words before she said, “You don’t have to explain. The front door’s unlocked. I’ll wait up.”

I miss her for that large love gesture. I miss her for the countless smaller acts that made her an enormous presence in my life. I miss her small kitchen and the tiny table by the window where love was offered up alongside warm slices of homemade bread shimmering with melted butter.

So when, earlier this November, I stumbled upon an old forgotten card from her – found in a completely unexpected place – it was as if she found a way to reach across the great divide between us and offer comfort and love all over again.

Packed over the three blank panels of the greeting card, her strong upward-tilted hand marched through seventeen sentences, each one a declaration of the dearest pieces of her world. Her unique choices for spelling and punctuation trumpeted her fierce personality.

“Dear Maggi! What a nice surprise! To hear from you.”

She wrote about baking bread, about her gardens and of preparations to overwinter plants.

“… putting them in the garage, temporarily to get used to coming indoors.”

She mentioned a cousin living in Toronto with a new husband and their limited finances. 

“Bob can only take a few classes this year.”

She touched upon the Brazilian foreign exchange student that she and grandpa hosted when they were in their late sixties. Then, she noted her plans to go to church later that day before having dinner with my parents. Finally, she ended the card with news that she had attended a wedding reception the nite (sic) before:

“…so many of our neighbors were there. Danced, too.”

Danced, too…

Seventeen sentences and the whole heart of her life was offered up, a condensed remembrance of hearth, home, family, faith, community, hospitality, and dancing …

Which brings me to now and to you.

In this season of mostly mass-produced holiday missives, can we choose to write one hand-written note? Pick a child - any child – or anyone near and dear, close or far, and send something of yourself via a paragraph or two with your scribbles and scratches. Start a conversation. Open up a dialogue for later. (Replace, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with, “What world problem would you like to solve?”)

A written-by-hand note, with its stamp, postmark, fold and seal is a tangible time capsule. It fixes the here and now in place with heart-meant-ness. Something written by hand bears your unique script in a way that a typewritten font simply cannot. 

Can Not.

Even if Grandma Swan had written her seventeen sentences in an e-mail and even if I had printed that e-mail and saved it, the experience of reading her words would not be the same.

I believe that something elusive and ethereal attaches itself to our squiggles and loops, slashes and dashes. We impart an invisible energy through our physical touch, even if only through pen to paper. As writers we are uniquely – if not exclusively – positioned to send many such small emissaries out into someone’s future moment – moments we can’t see or anticipate, but important connections nonetheless.

Grandma Swan died on December 14, 2005. Ten years have passed since I last held her hand. Yet, those five or ten minutes she took to compose her thoughts on that day, on this card, ensured that the future me could one day feel her touch again.

A present day spirit created with the corporeal hand of the past … a lost letter full to the brim with tidings of comfort and joy.

Happy Holidays, dear friends.

I hope you write.

I hope you dance.

*Maggie Moris (a.k.a. M. A. Moris) writes middle-grade novels. She plans to write a personal card to all four of her nieces and nephews this Christmas. She is a 2009 Hamline graduate and has asked Santa for a few more Twitter followers @maggiemoris. Her website is http://www.maggiemoris.com

A Bigger Boat

Today's blogpost is from the fantastic *Maggie Moris (a.k.a M. A. Moris), a 2009 alum of Hamline's Writing for Children and Young Adults program. In this post, she talks about one of a new (or well-established) author's greatest fears.  When you're done reading it, ask yourself if you know any "Shirley Sharks" and how you deal with them?


Most of my family and friends have stopped asking me the “P” question.  They know and trust that if I have news to share about the status of my books, they’ll be the first to know.

Not so, Shirley Shark.

Shirley Shark – as I like to think of her – enters my social sea about twice a year. Every time she locates me during a party, my heart hitches, my belly tenses and my breath turns to sludge in my chest.  Short of full-blown eye-twitches and seizures, I’m a physical and mental wreck. My dread of her approach pools around me as clearly as blood in the water. Shirley Shark likes to circle in with a wide schadenfreude smile. My middle name turns to “Chum.”

A few weeks ago our exchange went something like this:

M.M.: Murmur, murmur, weather, weather, nicety, nicety, and …

S.S.:  “So, any publishing news? Sold anything yet?” Twenty-two rows of teeth gleamed.

M.M.: “Oh, you know …” 


I’m not proud about what happened next. I swear to God, I meant to tell her what I’ve told her 31 times before, but to my mortification, I stuttered the one word I shouldn’t have: “P-P-Published.” 

The “P” word left my mouth like a verbal fart. I couldn’t call it back. A dear friend standing at my side looked as surprised and horrified as I felt.  She knew this was a lie and she understood how much I dreaded talking to Shirley Shark about my writing.

Shirley Shark’s smile dipped. Her shoulders dropped. The predatory gleam in her eye dimmed.  “Really? You did get published? When? How?”

Whatever nano-second of self-satisfaction I enjoyed was snuffed out as I back-stroked and retracted the statement – badly, awkwardly, but as quickly as possible. Shirley Shark then brightened and spoke a few condescending words of encouragement before she swam off while I tried to figure out what in the world had possessed me.

The mystery of this whole scenario is that I’ve fielded this same question from countless people over the years and I can answer with truth, grace and goodwill.

For me though, Shirley Shark is “The One.” She’s the one person in my wider social circle who consistently unseats my self-confidence and reduces me to worm status. 

So. What’s the point of this story? 

Writing + Time = Insight


I had a sudden epiphany after I finished my second novel. Both books had the same underlying theme, even though I thought they were wildly different stories. Both narratives had something to teach me about forgiveness. Not just forgiveness in a general sense, but specifically in regards to a child forgiving an adult. Writing those books and getting to know those characters opened up a path to compassion and revealed a place inside me that needed to be healed.

In the movie “Jaws,” Roy Scheider’s character, upon seeing the size of the man-eating shark for the first time, says, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”  As writers, we get to build that “bigger boat” for ourselves. Be it sharks, monsters, bullies, neuroses, self-doubt – we can craft the vessel or fort or castle or hot-air balloon we need to find a safe vantage point to explore what haunts or hunts us. 

I don’t have a profound insight on my ongoing issue with Shirley Shark quite yet.  My hunch is that something inside her touches upon an unresolved or unenlightened piece of my own psyche. I could try to psychoanalyze the issue, but I’d rather keep writing. I may not understand Shirley Shark, but I bet there’s a future character inside me who does.

Whether we will it or not, know it or not, intend it or not, our characters often appear to show us what lurks in our personal shadows. Sometimes, our characters come to light for our own benefit. Sometimes, they show up carrying tender blueprints.

Real sharks have a bad rep. No real sharks were harmed in the writing of this essay. 


*When she’s not torturing and mixing metaphors, Maggie Moris (a.k.a. M. A. Moris) writes middle-grade novels.  She received her masters in 2009 from Hamline University and will answer any question you have about a different “P” word: Perseverance. Visit her website to learn more.

Alumni Voices with Maggie Moris: Five Senses Worth

Let’s say I sit at the top of the mountain. You claw your way up—you with your split, bloodied fingernails, blurred vision, parched lips, wind—numbed ears and the scent of hot stone flaring your nostrils. You reach me and gasp, “What is the secret? What is the best craft tool?” I lean forward and whisper two words. “Sensory details.”

Maya Angelou is quoted as having said, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” To slip a reader inside a character’s sensibilities, there is no more powerful means for melding one with the other than the transformative powers of the five senses.

Think of the five senses as the nickels of your craft, a five-part coin that should be spent as early and often as possible.

Here’s why.

In Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, Janet Burroway advises:

Fiction offers feelings for which the reader doesn’t pay—and yet to evoke those feelings, it is often necessary to portray sensory details that the reader may have experienced … if the writer depicts the precise physical sensations experienced by the character, a particular emotion may by triggered by the reader’s own sense memory … to dramatize [a character’s emotion] through physical detail allows a reader to share the experience. (31)

Of course, compelling stories are made up of more than just page after page of sensory description, but if you commit to work all five senses into your writing—sight, sound, touch, taste and smell—you truly can hook and hold your audience.

Taste and smell—the most potent trigger of memories and associations—are ironically the least used sensory descriptions. In A Natural History of the Senses Diane Ackerman explores the ability to connect what is seen in the mind with what is felt in the body:

Nothing is more memorable than a smell … Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines … Hit a tripwire of smell, and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth. (5)

Additionally,

In our mind’s eye, that abstract seat of imagining, we picture the face of a lover, savor a kiss. When we think of him in passing, we have various thoughts; but when we actually picture him, as if he were a hologram, we feel a flush of emotion … The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions. (281)

You can create that hologram and trigger an emotion with a detailed, multi-faceted sensory offering. The more senses you describe, the clearer the mental picture formed in the reader’s mind. The stronger the mental picture, the stronger the emotional connection with the character.

It’s so simple really. Your favorite best-beloved books are the ones that make you feel something. The key to triggering emotions is to engage a reader through sensory description.

Here are just three examples of acclaimed award-winning writers who spend that whole nickel as early as possible.

The Midwife’s Apprentice by Karen Cushman:

When animal droppings and garbage and spoiled straw are piled up in a great heap, the rotting and moiling give forth heat. Usually no one gets close enough to notice because of the stench. But the girl noticed and, on that frosty night, burrowed deep into the warm, rotting muck, heedless of the smell. In any vent, the dung heap probably smelled little worse than everything else in her life—the food scraps scavenged from the kitchen yards, the stables and sties she slept in when she could, and her own unwashed, unnourished, unloved, and unlovely body. (1)

Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary Schmidt:

Turner Buckminster had lived in Phippsburg, Maine for fifteen minutes shy of six hours. He had dipped his hand in its waves and licked the salt from his fingers. He had smelled the sharp resin of the pines. He had heard the low rhythm of the bells on the buoys that balanced on the ridges of the sea. He had seen the fine clapboard parsonage beside the church where he was to live, and the small house set a ways beyond that puzzled him some. (1)

Last, but not least, Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury:

The grass whispered under his body. He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and, far away, below, his toes creaking in his shoes. The wind signed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere … His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Insects shocked the air with electric clearness. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing his wrists, the real heart pounding his chest. The million pores on his body opened.

I’m really alive, he thought. (10)

Now it’s your turn. Find your favorite books. Look for the passages that most moved you. What do you see, hear, taste, feel and smell?

If you want your readers to journey as your characters, deploy sensory details. But remember, this craft nickel has 5 sense(s). Spend the whole coin.

Be generous.

Works Cited

Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Vintage Books-Random House, 1990.

Bradbury, Ray. Dandelion Wine. Rev. ed. New York: Bantam, 1975

Burroway, Janet and Elizabeth Stuckey-French. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft 7th ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007.

Cushman, Karen. The Midwife’s Apprentice. New York: Clarion-Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

Schmidt, Gary. Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. New York: The Penguin Press, 2005.

*

M. A. Moris is a 2009 graduate of the Hamline MFAC program. She suggests that if you wish for a better understand of the physiology behind this phenomenon, read “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,” by Maryanne Wolf.

Alumni Voices with Maggie Moris: Giving Thanks

We’re all well versed with the usual reasons to be grateful that we’re writers.

          Writing teaches us about ourselves.

           

            Stories have the power to change lives.

            Writing can open, deepen and widen our understanding and appreciation of the world.

            (Insert favorite platitude, motivational quote, or advice from favorite authors that you’ve scribbled on scraps, wedged in your wallet or penned on your person.)            

Today, I offer up a new reason for giving thanks.

Months ago, when Marsha Q. put out a request for guest bloggers, I ran to the calendar and offered to take the November 27^th slot.

I hoped back then that there would be something related to giving thanks and gratitude that I could share with you, even if nothing “news worthy” had transpired around my writing life.

Heck, I figured I could only be in one of two places by now: Either my first book would have sold or I’d be depressed because it hadn’t and would need to shift my attitude away from anxious hand wringing to one of hand holding - as in, please gather with me around the “It’s Just A Writer’s Life” table.

But it turns out there was a third scenario I hadn’t anticipated.

A while back, I came across an interview with Leonard Cohen. (For those who need reminding, as I did, in addition to being a legendary and prolific songwriter, a published poet and a recipient of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, he is also an ordained Rinzai Buddhist Monk.)

When asked whether the hard work involved in writing songs is enjoyable, Cohen had this to say:

"[Hard work] has a certain nourishment. The mental physique is muscular. That gives you a certain stride as you walk along the dismal landscape of your inner thoughts. You have a certain kind of tone to your activity. But most of the time it doesn’t help. It’s just hard work.

"But I think unemployment is the great affliction of man. Even people with jobs are unemployed. In fact, most people with jobs are unemployed. I can say, happily and gratefully, that I am fully employed. Maybe all hard work means is fully employed.” 

(Popova, Maria. Leonard Cohen on Creativity, Hard Work, and Why You Should Never Quit Before You Know What it is You’re Quitting. Brain Pickings, July 15, 2014. )

 Put a fork in me and call me done.

I am fully employed.

Better yet, this state of being has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not we ever earn a red cent, wooden nickel, or two bits for our work. Writing, by its very nature, means that when we write – whether that time flows easy or yields an abundance of perspired blood - we are always fully employed. And folks, there are a lot of people on this planet that cannot say that about their own lives.

Having spent the better part of nearly twenty years in corporate jobs that did not employ me in any way that mattered, I can say with full conviction how blessed and grace-filled is this thing we do.

Think about it. Hold it in your heart. Gaze in tender wonder at this truth. We, as writers, with our finite lives and our limited hours, are also a community of people who live fully in the deepest sense of our words.

When I was a child, I dreamed of joining the table for writers, to one day sit and extend my hands to fellow writers on either side. But, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the work. Or that having a place, meant that the storyteller’s circle spirals back, around and up, through the eons that preceded us, on into the present and will wheel out into the future - all because we do our work.

Today, I bow my head for this writing life, for our community and for the chance to keep doing what we do.

I give thanks for the work.

*

 Maggie Moris graduated from Hamline in 2009. She will be enjoying a little pie with her pile of whipped cream today. Her website is http://www.maggiemoris.com.

Faculty Voices with Jane Resh Thomas: Patience

Jane Resh Thomas

At the Hamline residency's discussion of the writing life in July, Laura Ruby and Claire Rudolf Murphy talked about the virtue of patience. Nothing could be more important to us as we learn the craft, write our books, and struggle to market them.

Writing is a lifelong apprenticeship, yet a woman telephoned one of my writer friends, wanting her to put the woman in touch with a publisher: in the few months since God told her to make books for children, she had written a hundred-odd picture books; the only thing holding her back from publication of these treasures, she assumed, was the right connection.

Writing is a lifelong apprenticeship, yet many people who enter MFA programs in writing believe that, by the end of two years, their work will be publishable, if not already published. Many writers send out their work way too soon, when it still requires several more drafts before an editor will read it all the way through.

The need for patience is borne out by several friends' recent experience. In the face of rejections by the dozen over the years, Cheryl Blackford, who spoke last winter at Hamline, found a publisher for her new novel, Lizzie and the Lost Baby (Houghton). Twelve years after Jane St. Anthony completed Isabelle Day Refuses to Die of a Broken Heart, she found a publisher who will bring out that book and paperback editions of her previous two novels (University of Minnesota Press). Several years after their graduation from the Hamline MFA Program in Writing for Children and YoungAdults, Maggie Moris found an agent for the novel that was her thesis, and Jane O'Reilly landed a two-book contract for her fiction (Egmont). All of these women kept on writing their fiction, despite incessant discouragement for years from agents and publishers.

The kind of patience these writers exhibited was prodigious. In the first place, they had the patience to develop their talent by learning their craft. They all write clear flawless English in distinctive voices. They know how to build an English sentence, a character, a theme, a chapter, a through line, a novel. They stay with a manuscript until they've learned what it wanted to say, what they wanted to say through it. They set aside draft after draft, until their writing sings like a choir, all of its parts working together. People who publish their work, in addition to native talent and skill, have to be drudges, able to persist in a project until it makes them want to flush it and cut their own throats. Then they go on again anyway.

People who publish their work also have given up publication as their reason for being. They've learned to live their lives in the world, not shackled to their desks. They've made writing one of their pleasures, independent of whether it ever sees the inside of a library. They've divided their creativity from the misery of locating agents and editors. They can play the hardball of publishing, where a rock flies past their noses at ninety miles per hour every time they raise their heads. Writing for them is a daily practice, however the world responds to their work.

Writing is a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer continues to develop, even as she markets the work of the writer she was last year. Patience, stubbornness, determination, if not the keys, are some of the keys to our finding joy in the work.