free-write

Back to the Garden - Part 4: Mountain Lion Footprints on the Deck

This is the last in a four-part series of posts based on an interview I conducted with the poet Hazel White, about the twenty-year process of writing her book Vigilance Is No Orchard, forthcoming from Nightboat Books. Scroll down for Parts 1–3.

Eighteen Years of Defeat Is a Strange Space

[When we left off with Hazel's story in Part 3 below, she had revised her manuscript yet again and sent it—yet again—to Stephen Motika at Nightboat.] He wrote back after some time. He didn’t like the changes. But he didn’t out-and-out reject the work.

Six months went by. One day I pulled out the manuscript again. I cut a third of the quotes and embedded the remainder more carefully in the manuscript. I sent it back to Stephen and wrote something like, “I’m not certain that I’ve fixed anything. If you could let me know your decision by Sunday I’d appreciate it. If the answer is no, I completely understand.” I almost wanted a rejection. There were many times during the whole process when I wondered if I were mentally ill.  Eighteen years of defeat is a strange space.

Stephen wrote back and said he loved the rewrite. He had a lot of praise for it. But he also didn’t come right out and say he’d publish it.

I went to Brooklyn in the fall of 2016 and met him for breakfast. I was grateful that he had spent so much time on my manuscript and I was also nervous he might still be thinking it wasn’t done yet. I said hesitantly, Stephen, is it yes or no? He said, Yes. He said, Sorry, in my feedback I’ve been harsh on you. I said, That’s true. We laughed. He knows a lot about landscape architecture and admires Isabelle’s work, so he cared about this book. I’m of course very grateful now.

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Mountain Lion Footprints on the Deck

I’ve thought a lot about why this project took twenty years. I’ve come to understand that as an English person, I wasn’t writing about a Southern California landscape from the perspective of someone raised here. I had to take up habitation in a foreign aesthetic. It’s very hard to have lost one’s original place. It’s even harder to write about that. Yet I felt I might never encounter a more mysterious or necessary subject. So what choice did I have? I had to address that desperate resettling.

I also think I was jealous of Isabelle’s power as an exquisitely intuitive maker. I wanted to write as powerfully as she created gardens. The project became finish-able when I realized I would always fail to fully get the experience on the page; that instead, I needed to allow the failure to enter the work, become part of it.

A third challenge to completing the work was my guilt that I was making an experimental poetry book, not the gloriously successful coffee table book Isabelle and I had originally envisioned.

But about six years ago I realized Isabelle wasn’t holding a grudge. Around that time she arranged for me to stay in the guest house at the garden she had created for Lillian Lovelace. The Lovelace garden features a pool with boulders in it, set under oaks, with a teahouse at its edge. It’s that placement of the human-made lines and the wild lines I described earlier, that reduces me to a noodle. I stayed in the teahouse for three days and nights. I swam in the ocean and in mountain creeks. I slept with the door open and in the mornings there were mountain-lion footprints on the deck. I wrote several poems.

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Isabelle always knew I was more of a writer than I knew. She told me early on to stop calling myself a garden writer. She said I was an artist and a real thinker. By the time the book was finished, she had come to see me as being more true to myself as an artist than perhaps she’d been to her artist self during that time. So in the end, she’s glad it ended up how it did.

And so am I.

Back to the Garden - Part 3: "You're a Good Egg—Happy Easter"

This is the third in a four-part series of posts based on an interview I conducted with the poet Hazel White, about the twenty-year process of writing her book Vigilance Is No Orchard, forthcoming from Nightboat Books. Scroll down for Parts 1 and 2.

Put the Relationship on the Page

In 2005, at California College of the Arts, the main feedback on my attempts to write about Isabelle and the garden was that my text lacked any sense of our relationship. I showed ten pages to the poet Leslie Scalapino. She hated it and spent an hour telling me in detail what was wrong with it. I agreed.

I joined a writing group and everyone said, We think you should put your relationship with Isabelle on the page.

Years later, when I had 60 pages written, I worked with the poet Rusty Morrison privately for a few sessions. She had a lot of critique. The title had the word shelter in it, but she wasn’t buying that the book was really about shelter. She thought that that word, that concept, was a safe placeholder. She said something about how the image of the garden “owned me and disowned me.” She encouraged me to take more risks with the whole manuscript.

I had thought it was almost done, so I was a bit shocked. And scared about taking those risks. I went to England. After a few months I gathered up the courage to read through all of Rusty’s written comments. Her observations felt completely right. But what she was suggesting—writing about what wasn’t sheltering me, of being lost over and over again in that image—seemed impossible. I realized that right from the beginning I’d clung to the topic of shelter because it was something I felt confident about and comfortable with. Rusty said, Take it out.

I needed to let everything go and write the messiness, make myself more lost!

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I produced another version. I put everything I had into it. I met with Rusty again and this time she seemed to think I’d succeeded, or done well enough.

So I sent it out to poetry competitions. It was a finalist for both the Fence Books Ottoline Prize, chosen by Brenda Hillman, and the National Poetry Series. It seemed only a matter of time, I prayed, before it would be picked up by a publisher. I hoped I was done.

You’re a Good Egg—Happy Easter

Feeling more confident than I had in years, I sent the manuscript to Nightboat Books. The publisher, Stephen Motika, read it and said, I’m interested in your relationship with Isabelle and I don’t see it on the page.

I honestly didn’t think I could do anything more about it. I came to a grinding halt.

One day several months into my despair, I felt a different kind of energy—a little cocky, a little devil-may-care. I walked to the filing cabinet and took out a file overflowing with correspondence from Isabelle to me. Birthday cards, holiday cards, notes I had saved. With a kind of weird, wild boldness I thought, I’ll give them this relationship. Flipping through the file I started writing things like, “You’re a Good Egg—Happy Easter.”

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I should mention that during these years I’d become a close friend of Isabelle’s, in spite of the fact that I’d failed to publish a book about her and the garden I was so obsessed with. She’d gotten married—in that same garden. I’d attended the wedding, even helped her dress for the ceremony. In my maniacal writing fit, I included details about how I helped her that day with her corset and shoes. I produced about eight pages of quotes and inserted them into the manuscript.

I sent it off to Stephen. I was just waiting for him to reject it.

Next Installment: Mountain Lion Footprints on the Deck

 

 

Back to the Garden - Part 2: "A Pretty Big Failure"

This is the second in a four-part series of posts based on an interview I conducted with the poet Hazel White, about the twenty-year process of writing her book Vigilance Is No Orchard, forthcoming from Nightboat Books. Scroll down for Part 1.

A Pretty Big Failure

Isabelle had a show at the UC Santa Barbara Art Museum. I wrote a catalog essay for it. A publisher of some note came to the show, became wildly interested in her work, and wanted to publish a series of books on her. Later, I had a verbal contract with the publisher to write one of the books, but due to an economic downturn in publishing, the project fell through.

Hazel with Isabelle Greene

Hazel with Isabelle Greene

Exhibit catalog for Isabelle's show at the UC Santa Barbara Art Museum

Exhibit catalog for Isabelle's show at the UC Santa Barbara Art Museum

At another point, my partner agreed I could take a year off from earning income to write a book about Isabelle. At the end of the year, with nothing much written and feeling miserable, I got brave and contacted the top agent for landscape books in New York—office on 5th Avenue, the works. She was interested but thought Isabelle wasn’t sufficiently well known to warrant an entire book just about her. The agent wanted me to write a book about Isabelle and another landscape architect. I turned her down; it didn’t feel possible to compromise. I’m sure she was very surprised.

Then I decided that in order to write the book I needed to attend a Master of Fine Arts writing program. I got into the MFA program at California College of the Arts. At the end of the first semester, a professor told me that she didn’t think I could write the book about Isabelle’s garden for probably five years. I went home and cried.

By the second semester, my writing had broken down completely. I could no longer write a linear sentence. Friends were telling me I should drop the book idea. It was looking like a pretty big failure. I suppose the breakdown in sentences was related to my emotional state. Something had to break.

At that point I took a course called “Hybrid Forms” taught by the poet Kathleen Fraser. Being a good girl and following her directions, I produced these short condensed pieces in response to her exercise prompts. She called them poems. I was terrified—I didn’t want them to be called poems. I couldn’t face my inability to write sentences anymore. I made a valiant attempt to get the hell out of this huge discomfort and transfer to the Visual and Critical Studies program, but wasn’t able to.

I had grown up in a working-class family. I’d argued my way to college based on the expectation that I’d make money. So writing poetry felt like a crisis. Yet I could no longer write anything else.

Hazel as a child (Hazel's on the right)

Hazel as a child (Hazel's on the right)

Hazel as a teen, on a farm in the southwest of England, where she grew up

Hazel as a teen, on a farm in the southwest of England, where she grew up

A couple years after receiving my MFA, I wrote my first poetry book, Peril as Architectural Enrichment, in the space of about four months. It was published by Kelsey Street Press in 2011. It dealt with landscape architecture—but wasn’t about Isabelle and her garden. I felt guilty. I had accrued 70 hours of interviews with Isabelle yet I had been unable to produce anything out of all that material.

Next Installment: You're a Good Egg—Happy Easter

 

Back to the Garden - Part 1: "Aesthetic Shock"

This is the first in a four-part series of posts based on an interview I conducted with the poet Hazel White, about the twenty-year process of writing her book Vigilance Is No Orchard, forthcoming from Nightboat Books. It’s a story of intense commitment to carrying out a creative vision no matter how challenging the process.

Aesthetic Shock

I started out as a freelance writer, writing primarily about landscape architecture and gardening. I have loved poetry since childhood, but I always had this thought running through my head: “Poetry is the hardest thing in the world; I’m going nowhere near it.”

One day twenty years ago, I turned a page in a magazine and saw a photograph of an amazing garden. It was an aesthetic shock. I felt physically jolted. I knew instantaneously that I would do whatever was required to stand in that garden.

I had long believed that our most essential experience of place or space is about shelter and view. Now I think the maker of the garden, landscape architect Isabelle Greene, had triggered my almost paranormal experience through an exquisite manipulation of those two elements. The garden sits in a tight canyon; a series of freeform terraces step down the hill.

I thought that if I could just stand in that garden, I would understand it.

The Valentine Garden, designed by landscape architect Isabelle Greene

The Valentine Garden, designed by landscape architect Isabelle Greene

Within 24 hours I’d called Isabelle Greene at her Santa Barbara office. Too shy to say, “I’ve had an aesthetic shock,” I presented myself as a garden writer and explained that I was writing books for Chronicle Books on garden design and used that as an excuse to ask if I could come see her work.

She asked why I was writing gardening books. I said I wanted to teach ordinary gardeners what professional landscape architects know about space. I’d taken a lot of landscape architecture classes at UC Berkeley Extension and had read a lot about  the philosophy of space. She said she didn’t think this was something that could be taught. And she wasn’t compelled enough by my story to meet me or let me see the famous garden she had made for Carol Valentine, in Montecito.

Years later, when I told her the truth, she said, My god, if you’d just said so, I would have gotten you into that garden immediately. So I had shot myself in the foot by not being honest.

Access to the Garden

Each year for the next four years, while I was writing other books in the Chronicle garden design series, I called her assistant and asked if I could come down and see some gardens and maybe meet with Isabelle. I was always told, “She’s busy, but you’re welcome to come see some of her work.”

In Year Four, I called the assistant as usual. This time I suggested that if Isabelle had a favorite restaurant, I’d be happy to take her to dinner. That approach broke through! I went down there and we met for dinner. Within five minutes we were talking about line and form and whose work we loved. It was immediately obvious that we were both crazy about landscape.

Hazel White

Hazel White

She explained to me that the inspiration for the Valentine garden—her most famous creation—came from aerial views of the California landscape. She was particularly interested in the straight lines of fields and how they get interrupted by a creek or a river or foothills. She was interested in that meeting of a strong, human-made line against a natural line. The garden photograph I’d seen had the most extraordinary resonance with aerial photos of landscapes. But in the view in the photograph, you’re actually only looking down thirty feet. Isabelle had manipulated the scale such that the viewer sees terraces that are large in themselves, but are a miniaturization of the much larger landscape you’d see from a plane.

She finally arranged for me to see the garden.

All those years, I had been confident that once I was standing there I would know the particular power of that garden. I thought back then that I could pretty much understand and write about any landscape architecture using a set of concepts I’d become familiar with. I had been quite successful doing so, getting my work published in the London Telegraph Sunday magazine and so on.

Standing in the garden, I felt a strange alertness, a fizziness in my nervous system—yet I couldn’t figure out what was producing the effect. It would be a long time before I was capable of writing anything sufficient about this garden.

Next installment: "A Pretty Big Failure"

 

This Thing I Found: Teens Teach Us How to See Freshly

Recently I returned to an earlier incarnation, teaching a couple poetry classes at the high school in New York Mills, a town in upstate Minnesota where I've just completed a writing residency. I taught poetry pretty intensively for a number of years but that was a while ago. I loved re-entering “the classroom.” (As if it’s the same classroom, wherever one is—and that’s true, in a certain way—and not, in others. But I digress.).

Kasey Wacker, the teacher, had informed me that her 11th graders had all written poems, but not many, and not in quite a while. I chose a lesson built around an excerpt from Wallace Stevens’ poem “Someone Puts a Pineapple Together.”

Like his “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” each line in this poem asks the reader to look at a pineapple in an entirely new way.  The second stanza, for example, reads:

4. The sea is sprouting upward out of rocks.

5. The symbol of feasts and of oblivion . . .

6. White sky, pink sun, trees on a distant peak.

As I held a pineapple aloft, we discussed Stevens’ strategies for waking up our powers of perception. Not only does Stevens give us a new image in each numbered line; he also changes up the syntax (a whole sentence followed by two fragments), the use of punctuation, the music of the language, the scale (from a rock to a mountain), and the type of figurative language employed (metaphoric in lines 4 and 6; symbolism in line 5). The vocabulary too is full of surprises, like the word “sprouting” where you’d expect “spouting”—so you get the spouting action of water but also the sense that the water is alive, growing up out of the rocks.

And that’s just one stanza!

I then gave the students each their own fruit or vegetable and asked them to employ some of Stevens’ strategies to write their own poems. With remarkably little experience in the genre, they dove right in.

My coachy takeaway? Find some teenagers to hang around with. They are coming into their full power as interesting individuals with big brains. Yet their curiosity and permeability can remind us older humans to break out of our ruts and responsibilities, give ourselves fully to life, receiving life’s goodies in return.

Kasey sent me all 40 poems afterward. Part of me wants to publish all 40. Instead, I'll tantalize you with a smattering of the great work Kasey's students did (see below). Even in this sample there's a range of forms and tones—enjoy!

What (brussels sprout)

Round like a watermelon, yet small.

The fresh smell, a Sunday morning in May.

Each layer barely over the next.

 

Like the veins in a heart.

They go towards the center.

The whole is nothing without the center.

The center is irrelevant without the whole.

 

Each layer a limb, each piece a muscle.

With more power in than out, the body develops.

One day it stops, and the Sunday morning turns to Monday.  —Jake

 

This Thing I Found (brussels sprout)

Green and round,

this thing I found.

With veiny leaves,

and no fleas.              —Maddie

 

The Things You Can See  (small yellow pepper)

1.  The bulb hung alone on the tree.

2.  The tiny pot held the most beautiful upside down flower.

3.  Would they ever pull the sword out of the stone?

4.  Can you hear that bell . . .

5.  Look! That bird has no legs.

6.  The mushroom was covered in bumps.                        —Kaitlyn Dykhoff

 

A Cherry Pulled Apart (ground cherry)

1.   The dark green rivers within

2.   The tail of the taut mouse slips away

3.   An egg inside a frail shell

 

4.   Wrinkling away as new arrives within

5.   The brightness within the dark

6.   Veins of the animal show through battered skin

 

7.    A hut of darkness with life within

8.   The old man hardened with kindness in his soul

 

 

Poem (reaper pepper)

The wrinkled red reaper is as hot as the summer

days    gives you chills like the winter nights.

Red as blood, vivid as a memory, exotic as a bird.

Its thin hide reveals the tasty beauty inside.

 

At Peace (potato)

The bird, plump and bald

perches; bathing in the light,

in a deep slumber.

 

The Hand (ginger)

1   From the swallows of the tomb

2   came the hand

3   crawling creepily, steadily

4   it emerged

5   into the dawn, the light

6   it wrinkled, decaying

7   twisted, crisped, squirming

8   dying in the rays

9   from the bitter son

10 so back to the swallows

11 it retreated

12 sobbing, anguished, lifeless

13 gone

Dream On - Part 2: Dream Recall

We dream multiple dreams, every night. No matter how entrenched our habit of not remembering dreams, our dream life is willing, even eager, to make itself known to us, provided we prepare for it—and approach it with an attitude of invitation and respect. This is a matter, not of hocus pocus, but of lessons learned from many experiments with what does and doesn’t work. Here are some tips for encouraging dream recall:

  • Place a journal and pen by your bedside. Choose a pen that doesn’t have a tendency to leak; simple, smooth-writing ballpoint pens work well.
  • Alternatively, you might wish to speak your dreams into a small recorder, and transcribe them later. However, for the writers in the house, I recommend writing, because even the way you record your dreams as you emerge from them can be, or evolve into, a form of creative drafting.
  • Before you go to sleep each night, make the wish that you’ll remember your dreams.
  • Make a plan for how you’ll record your dreams upon waking. For example, you might say to yourself, “I plan to take three minutes before getting out of bed to jot the strongest images I remember, and another five minutes to flesh them out while eating breakfast.” Or you might say, “I plan to jot my dreams when I wake during the night. Just knowing I’ve fulfilled my commitment of remembering and recording my dreams will help me go back to sleep easily and restfully.”
  • Upon waking, during the night or in the morning, before moving or speaking, gently inquire internally whether there are any dream images coming to you. Even the slightest sensation or fragment is worth attending to. If at all possible, jot down whatever comes the moment you recall it. Don’t judge yourself for not remembering more. Gradually, over time, your recall will improve.
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At first you may feel that you are the single human failure who is incapable of remembering a dream. Despite careful preparation and invocation, morning after morning you draw a complete blank. Don’t despair. If you persevere, it’s almost certain that you’ll begin to remember your dreams. Remind yourself to invite, not demand. The subconscious is like a small child or an easily frightened animal—it simply will not come out to play unless and until it feels it is being treated gently and respectfully. Impatience makes it run for cover. Respect and curiosity for this mysterious, fragile yet powerful creature will eventually draw it into the light.

As you continue to practice, the act of recording will bring more details to your awareness. In my next post I’ll provide more support for recording your dreams.

Enjoying the Ride of Serendipity

When I first heard of Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way, I disdained it. Self-help books were for losers and wannabes. At the time I had just received my MFA in Creative Writing. Suddenly adrift without the structure provided by grad school, I suffered serious writer’s block—but I did so, nobly, in silence. Then a gifted poet I was coaching told me he found the book useful. And a PhD candidate at MIT’s Media Lab said the book was helping him write his dissertation.

Guess I needed permission! I started working with the book. One day I mentioned to a fellow poet what I was up to. “Sarah, do you have ‘writer’s block’?” he asked, the air quotes weighted with derision. Clearly it was wrong to be blocked, or say so, or seek a remedy. I had an ugly afternoon, contending with a cranky inner critic reawakened from its temporary slumber. But next day I went back to The Artist’s Way. Not long after, I completed my first full-length book.

Truth is, I’m still critical. Not of The Artist’s Way but of the cottage industry it spawned. Several weaker spinoffs followed—a depressingly common practice in the self-help world. (That said, if the spinoffs have helped you, I celebrate that.)

But I value the first book’s core ideas and sometimes use them, or modifications thereof, with clients. The two most touted concepts are the Artist’s Date and Morning Pages. The first is a weekly solo date—arranging flowers in a vase, say, or strolling in a park, or visiting a gallery—that “fills the well” of creativity. The second is a daily free-write to override the inner critic and develop creative flow. But there’s a third that I treasure too: attending to serendipity.

Per Merriam-Webster, serendipity derives from a Persian fairy tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip” (love that!) and means “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for; also: an instance of this.” The Artist’s Way periodically enjoins readers to reflect on serendipitous events.

It’s weird: The more one pays attention, the more such instances seem to crop up, and the more significant they become. You start out hesitantly noting that when you rolled over in your sleep and accidentally thwacked your beloved, he happened to be having a nightmare he was grateful to be woken from. Pretty soon, you’re spotting God at the 7-11—where you never go but you got an inexplicable urge for a Slurpee. Even—or especially?—if you’re an atheist, bumping into God is pretty cool.

This serendipity exercise points to something mysterious and good about life. Call it God, call it spirituality, explain it scientifically like the Media Lab guy probably would. Regardless, attention to wonder creates more wonder. Noticing the way beauty arrives unbidden lifts the burden—temporarily, at least—of believing we’ve got to make everything happen. I think of it as life’s gentle reminder that we’re not the drivers we think we are. Sit back and chill for a moment, life is saying. Be a passenger. Enjoy the ride.