New Writing Prompt: How to write a letter to your teenage self! Try starting out with second-person to make it intimate (I recorded a video here on YouTube about the second person if you need a refresher). A good jumping off place is "You think that..." or "When you try...." Really imagine yourself - get out a photograph. One of those hideous school photos or a yearbook. Doesn't it look like a different world? What would your teenage self be the most shocked by? Is it something personal that has happened to you? Have you overcome something you never thought you would be capable of? Can you … [Read more...]
Writing Prompt: What are Your Life Gifts?
There are certain things that are woven into the fabric of your life that become part of who you are, but because they seem so inevitable it is hard to think of them as a gift. One of my friends experienced a rift in her life - when she was a child her mother decided to leave her husband in the US - and she took her daughter and resettled in Portugal. Leaving San Diego, California behind as an 8 year old, and starting her life again in Lisbon with her mother was a strange process. Not knowing the language or customs, not having any friends or people to go to for comfort radically changed … [Read more...]
Writing Prompt: Writing Your Recipe for Resistance
Sometimes it feels like the world is bent on telling you who you "must" be. As a prompt, write your own recipe for resistance. What do you suggest for shaking it up? Today is a day to look for cracks to move through. Change form. Pick a new exit. Try a new greeting, and a new way of saying goodbye. If it feels like a yes, say yes. If it feels like a no, then no way. Stop coming up with a reason. Today you don't have to explain yourself. Move towards people who you can sit in silence with. Share things you have made with people, but don't ask for feedback. Feel free to change your mind, … [Read more...]
Embracing the Crazy Wisdom in Your Writing Practice
Overnight the buds popped on the trees and the jacarandas are exploding with brilliant lavender blooms. Spring fever is here and - oh - there's a fat robin red-breast...welcome to working with a Spring fever. The phrase that keeps coming to mind for me is "Crazy Wisdom" (coined by the founder of Shambhala Buddhism, Chögyam Trungpa) which refers, according to Steven Goodman, "to someone who seems to be intoxicated with an un-bounded, luminous, loving energy." It aligns with the concept of the sacred fool, or as personified by the famous picture of Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue - the … [Read more...]
Maintaining Your Practice: Your Life is a Writing Prompt
The last few months have been difficult for me as I try to help my family through a devastating illness. I have been in three different hospitals in two states and it reminds me of another sage whose life was cut short, John Lennon. Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. So how do you maintain a writing practice during chaos, illness, overwork, stress and change? One way is to treat your life as a writing prompt. At the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota I took copious notes. Between appointments with my family I wrote down exchanges between couples sitting … [Read more...]
The Art of Witness
"The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history." - Robert Rauschenberg Every day I am amazed by how much life has changed in the last twenty years. In pre-cell phone camera days (Remember those? I do!) we had to debate stories and decide without visual evidence to believe one side or another. We judged based on reputation and societal expectations. We took the side of the teacher over the student, the adult over the child, the police officer over the suspected robber. But with cameras, the power structure has flipped, and all of the previously unknown abuses of power are now … [Read more...]
Writing Small: A Craft Exercise
I just finished a very short and contemplative memoir, Ongoingness: The End of Diary by Sarah Manguso. Easily read in one sitting, it is about the author contemplating 25 years of her diaries/ journals. For Manguso, when she holds the mirror up to her writing, she feels a need to record as a hedge against forgetting. There is a subtle and shifting line between the diary as a sketch vs. the diary as a neurotic attempt to "hold on" to moments. It reminds me a bit of Yoko Ono's book of poems/ art, Grapefruit (196os) which contains her conceptual/ Fluxus thought pieces- whether she is writing … [Read more...]
Artistic Origins: Map of Influences
Scrolling through a friend's Facebook, I saw she had uploaded a simple pen and paper "Map of Influences." I was intrigued, so I put it on my list of things I would like to try. Mine, when said and done is not as intellectually inclined. For me the streets of cities I have lived in, clouds, and anxiety are as much of an influence (perhaps even more so...) than Don Delillo, Joan Didion, Pina Bausch, Miss Piggy and Gordon Matta Clark. So to start, where does one start? For me, a curlique. In inward/outward spiral is what the pen and I decided on as the beginning. Then some … [Read more...]
Stunt Writing: L.A. Gun Club
(Copyright 2013, Erin Jourdan The art work above was created from the targets.) Stunt Writing: The L.A. Gun Club by Erin Jourdan “Like a country club for ghetto people, only a lot smaller and instead of grass, there's just a shit load of guns!!” –Yelp Review My hands sweat even going to the LA Gun Club Website. I have decided to go to five places that I feel that I don’t belong and the shooting range is one of them. The pictures on the website are plain. A white room, the only décor is metal baskets of gun stuff. I cannot tell the gun stuff apart—it is just … [Read more...]
New Writing Prompt: Defining and Defending
This writing prompt is adapted from How to Train a Wild Elephant by Jan Chozen Bays. Before I go to bed I often like to read a mindfulness exercise, as something to focus on for the next day. It helps set the stage for a more thoughtful and focused day, and is part of trying to approach life with a sense of practice and presence. In this particular chapter, Jan Chozen Bays writes, "Become aware of how you define yourself and defend yourself and your personal territory. For example do you see yourself as a Liberal or a Conservative? An East Coast person or West Coast person? How do you … [Read more...]