The Silken Tent
      My Letter to the World
      October 2000
      October 23, 2000
      Monday


      One of the things I talked about in my JournalCon presentation was the ways in which keeping this site has affected my writing. On the positive side, it has increased my production a thousand fold. I write more now, and better, more shaped stuff, a result of the awareness of an audience. John Scalzi has likened the writing center in the brain to a muscle, and this kind of daily writing for an audience as exercise that promotes a healthy tone. I know that this effect has taken place in me, giving me at least one muscle that's in top shape.

      On the other hand, I said in Pittsburgh, this work has diminished the uncensored free writing that is still the province of my private journal, a catch-all writer's notebook that is part diary, part idea bank, part confessional. I am so conscious now of shaping syntax and word choice and I work so much at the computer that production in my paper journal has fallen off. This means that small, random ideas are often lost, and trails of thought that did not prove immediately productive end at stone walls instead of a closed door that can later be opened.

      For my paper journal I use top-bound spiral notebooks, college ruled. In the fall of 1992, on my Labor Day retreat before the opening of school, I visited my college and bought several notebooks with a sky blue cover and "Millersville University" in bold white letters down the side. There are 80 sheets in each, which gives me 150 pages (sides) for writing and five sheets left over for notes and an index (which I am haphazard about compiling)..

      By summer I had filled two of them, and although it was really some profound life changes that had spurred me to write, I attributed my diligence to the notebooks. In the fall of 1993 I again visited the college store and stood in line with the freshmen who were acquiring textbooks and supplies. I bought two dozen or so, all that I could carry. ("How many classes are you taking?" the clerk asked me.)

      I still have about half of them left. I'm coming to the end of the one I'm in now, which I began on the Feast of Stephen (December 26) last year.  I have enough left for about a page a day until the next Feast of Stephen, when I'll start a new one, no matter what. Only 150 pages of free writing in a whole year -- that's not enough, I've decided. I've resolved to do more.

      I looked through the one I'm in now, trying to see if the gaps, the dry periods where I didn't write in it, follow a pattern, and trying to find places where I've written about my novel, to photocopy for a dedicated binder that has just that stuff. And I found something, written back in September, that I thought worth posting here, as an example of a "brain dump." (The names of the people are changed, for their privacy.) So here you are, another glimpse into the writer's process:
       

      September 11, 2000
      Monday

       
       
       
      ...Finding again the world,
      That is the point.
               --Howard Nemerov      		 I believe in living on grateful terms
      with the earth, ...
              --Maxine Kumin

      Look up: hackamore; tedded; skirl

      "... the long lazy unrefined fields/of heaven." -- M.K.

      longing for Wyoming, the West, Fury and Flicka --- "she had some horses" (Joy Harjo)

      On the morning of March 20, 1997, eleventh grader Marcy Heverling stayed home from school. She reported at 11:38 and was issued a yellow pass to admit her to class. In all likelihood, Marcy does not remember this, one morning of cramps or flu or just a need to sleep in out of all the mornings of her high school days. Even I do not actually remember this, recalling it now only because the yellow slip of paper has fallen out of the slim volume of poetry I've chosen to read this morning.

      I've been carrying that volume around with me for a week, unaware of that slip of paper tucked inside, yet this girl's image floated up to me last week. I couldn't remember her name, only her face and that she was Brenda Webster's daughter, Brenda who sat in my classroom twenty-five years ago, who would go on to become a nurse, a wife, a mother, and who would then die in a car accident, broadsided by someone running a redlight in the middle of the afternoon, leaving behind this girl, then about twelve, a son, and a grieving husband.

      And I touch the yellow pass and remember the motherless girl, the modern poetry unit I taught that spring, carrying my own volumes into school, how the kids waded through them, marked their selections with slips of paper that waved out of the books like feathers -- when I arranged my books this spring I pulled most of them out but one or two remain and this one falls out of Maxine Kumin's Looking for Luck this morning where it has marked p. 37, a meditation on raising lambs to be slaughtered for your table.

      A blessing on you, Marcy, wherever you are today. She's lovely, Brenda, as were you. You'd be proud.

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      Margaret DeAngelis.

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