Fitz's Journal

It Is Easy To Fall off a Horse

I wrote this for my classes who complained that I wasn't writing for "the sake of writing," which I constantly implore them to do themselves.

                                                                                   

I enjoy sitting on my porch and writing, but it certainly has not been the kind of spring that encourages being outside. I also enjoyed browsing through your blogs last night and reading about your experience writing your drama and sitcom episodes. Any writing that makes us think, and any writing that makes us re-examine what we've written is good writing--in my book anyway!

With an extended writing assignment like this it is easy to neglect our journals (the blogs). I am neglectful myself! I sit here and watch the rain drip from the roof and think only of what I need to get done, not what is being done for me. The world is offering itself to me to examine creation in all of its majesty and wonder and I worry about the plumbing I just finished in my new bathroom. Every drop of rain is screaming "watch me fall," and I think about Industrialization in 1890; the buds on my maple trees are about to burst in an ecstacy of rebirth, and I plan dinner in my head.

My kids, who are dutifully doing their homework, will think it strange if I ask them to go for a walk with me through the rain, but that is what I (we?) need to do. We live near the town forest and there is a culvert that goes under the access road down by the town wells (behind the no trespassing signs, of course). I will challenge them to stick races. "One-two-three: drop your sticks." and then we'll race to the other side of the road to see whose stick caught the flooding current first. We'll create bullseyes on scraggly oaks and pepper the wily bark with stones and crude spears.

Wet, muddy, and cold the door will open for us, and the fire will be warmer than it is now.

And maybe there will be one more thing to write about.

Wednesday Night Ramble

This is probably one of the last nights I can sit out on the porch and type my blogs.  This blog, sadly, has been neglected since school began.  I keep two other blogs going for my classes--8th grade English and 7th grade history.  By the time I am finished with them and through with grading and reading, I lose the energy to write more. And it is energy that writing needs.  Energy and time. On a typical night, I finish my schoolwork and pick up my guitar and practice--something in twenty five years of playing professionally that I have never really embraced.  Several months along and it is starting to pay dividends.  I feel like I have met a new friend--the fretboard.

I love Wednesday nights.  Denis gets up early and makes a huge batch of meatballs, and then anyone who wants can come over for dinner.  On any given Wednesday there might be anywhere from five to twenty people who show up for a good meal and a good time.  It is something we started some years ago when we realized that we could not get out ourselves, so why not have people over.  Now, it is a huge part of our lives and the lives of the kids--and  regular get together with good friends. The ancient Greeks called it "xenia," which translates roughly as "hospitality."  Whatever it is, it is good--and so is the food.

On the subject of xenia, I am looking out at the new old truck that Kevin Walker gave me: a 1994 Dodge diesel pickup truck with well over a quarter of a million miles on it. After a couple of weeks of patching with bondo, replacing a few parts with the help of "Wax," my old time mechanic friend, I have a way cool truck that has already made a few trips to the Carlisle dump--a bastion of the Carlisle culture I once lived in.  Kevin calls it "the circle of giving." It is, at heart, an attempt to create community and friendship. More than an attempt, it works. The back bumper has a sign that reads, "Atheists are Beyond Belief." I'm surprised by how many people who know me comment on that statement.  I simply smile and say, "Well, it's true." I am not an atheist. I should have another sign tht reads, "Click on my bumper to read more." At some point, I will probably sand and prime the body and give it a terrible paint job.  What will people think then?

My time on the porch is governed by the battery life on my computer;  it's down to 14 minutes--and a car is pulling in; people are arriving--and so this ramble closes.  Nothing lost; a little bit ventured. 

It's baby Lyle and Jen.  Tommy is banging on the window in his joy. Another joy is made.

Xenia is real.

The New Year

This blog seems like a friend that has moved far away.  School, sports and the other responsibilities seem to have stolen the time I once used to write.  One of the realities of being a teacher is that there really is never enough time to do what you want to do as well as you can. Even now, I feel like I should be preparing for tomorrow's back to school night; not dithering in my blog for no obvious reason, except to write for the sake of my own writing.

In my sane moments, I convince myself that this is the year that I re-engage with songwriting and poetry in a daily and sustained way. But where is that hour--or two hours--or even twenty minutes? In a few minutes I need to leave to sing at the Inn.  I have not sung on a Sunday night since June. I'm looking forward to a night of quiet ballads, seeing Patty again, and trying to make something of these Sunday nights. 

I coached Charlie's soccer game today and was disgusted with myself for wanting to win a seven year old's game simply because the other coaches were obnoxious, running up and down the sidelines as if the kids would dissolve without their incessant clammering. Of course, we lost.  The kids didn't care.  Neither should I. We live in the "no age is too young" era.  From my perch, I wish we'd just play pickup games until we're ten years old, then hand them off to the barbarians on the sidelines. Even then, we need perspective.  I watched a father wrap his arms around his inconsolable daughter whose team just lost a game.  I laughed with Denise because I could just hear her saying to one of our own kids, "Don't you dare cry about losing a game!" I fear my years as a curmudgeon are approaching.

Denise just walked in with three pizzas.  A good way to end the weekend--or start the week.  The same can be said of a night's worth of songs. Ninety percent of life is just showing up.

Vivid Writing

Imagine you are cooking dinner and your stove catches on fire.  No problem, because you bought a new fire extinguisher the other day, and it's hanging on the wall right next to the stove. You grab the extinguisher and quickly read the instruction label. It reads: “My fascination with fire extinguishers began when I was a young child--early in 1963 as I recall...”  I doubt you will think to yourself, “Wow, this will be really interesting to read!”  You might rather that the instructions read: “Point extinguisher at the fire, pull the metal pin, and squeeze the black handle.” Knowing your audience and the reason you are writing goes a long way towards defining the style, tone, and content of your writing.

Many well-meaning teachers and schools have done a pretty good job of killing the joy of writing by neglecting the natural origin and evolution of writing.  You write a paper, hand it in, get a grade, and, more than likely, it is then buried in a sheave of other papers in the recesses of your backpack.  These written works are handed in to a machine and spit back at us with a reptilian calculus and detachment.  But words are meant to be heard and read, not damned with little praise or created in a vacuum.

Writing is a conversation from the head and heart to an actual person or persons.  This your audience. As much as I love my dog, I seldom send her postcards from my travels.  Moreover, most of us don't carry on a conversation when no one is with us. (Although, I was standing beside a guy in the coffee shop the other day who was jabbering away to himself.  Later I discovered he was talking on his cell-phone, which I thought was a hearing aid on the fritz.) My wife is a beautiful writer (and a beautiful person, too!). She is also untainted by living with a writing teacher.  “I write,” she says, “just like I talk.” This way of thinking is not a bad way to approach writing--plus, when writing, you get to rewind your conversation if you say something stupid. 

The written word is always an extension of the spoken word delivered to a specific audience: The written word is simply a new way to remember: Novelists have taken over where the storytellers left off; newspapers and magazines have supplanted the town crier bellowing from the village square, while essayists now give lasting form and testament to the speeches and harangues that for centuries rallied the troops and urged countrymen to join a cause or crusade.  Our personal reflections and journals capture our quiet meditations and make palpable the fleeting memories of our lives. Temper the steel of your imagination; hone, and craft the voice you already have, and your words will ring clear and true through the ages yet to come. Your voice is as real as the acorn sprouting in the waiting earth, and, as the saying goes, “No less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here.”

Why Writing Prompts?

Heading to a show yesterday I listened to some professional newscasters deride the prevalence and audience of the bloggers who undermine their attempts to present the news in a fair and balanced way. They made a lot of good points, especially when it came to verifying and being held accountable for the sources of the material being presented as "fact" out in the blogs of the internet world. They also lamented--in an arrogant way--the amount of "bad writing" posted quickly to blogs without any thought to what constitutes "good writing." My visceral response to this observation is simply that, like a good folk song, good writing survives; bad writing does not survive--at least for long. This has been true since the first stories were told. The choice for those of us who blog is simple: Are we willing to do what it takes to become a better writer?

Week One

We are off to a great start this summer.  Thank you for all the writing so far!  There are already over 200 separate posts among the four communities--and close to five hundred comments.  Some folks just finished school and are getting around to opening that Crafted Word e-mail with the log on information.  If you ever run nto log on problems contact me immediately and we can fix the problem.  If you have any friends you thik might be interested in joining your community, please let me know, and I will send them some information.

My First Ramble To the Writing Communities

I hear the early morning traffic on 117, the occasional rat a tat of jack brakes on trucks and the impatient horns of those late for work.  It is the streaming aorta of commerce and duty that so defines our lives.  Even now, as I drink my morning coffee, I have to resist the temptation to check my e-mail; I have to remind myself that this is the first morning of my summer vacation, and that this is the beginning I've been waiting for, and, like in any new venture, (or adventure) how you start often determines how you finish. I want to start this summer as a writer, and end the summer as a better and more disciplined writer.

Midnight Rain, Blogs and Ruminations

The gentle rain is now a waterfall pouring off the roof of my front porch. My inner clock is telling me it is after midnight and I need to sleep, but my outer self is immersed in words and the warmth of a crazy fall night in New England. Three hours of reading blogs. Most of the time amazed and excited by what I've read, and only occasionally disappointed (mainly by what I have not read). It's good to see you guys writing and giving your heart and soul to the process. I know that a lot of you must have gone way over the homework limit, but ,in a real and palpable way, this is more than homework; this is preparation for life itself. In the same way you probably practice your pitching and juggling and basketball outside of your required practices, so we often lose ourselves in the challenge of trying to get our writing to do and say what we want it to. I just want you to know I appreciate what you do.

The entries ran the course from the mundane to the profound and from the silly to the solemn--but most all of them were great efforts put forth with a sense of purpose. All of them, too, could be better. When I was your shop teacher very few of you were satisfied with a pile of boards loosely banged together; you came to shop eager to put on another coat of varnish or to putty up your screw holes, or to put one last finishing touch before you "brought it home." A good question to ask ourselves as writers is, "Is this ready to bring home?" Ask yourself this question as you prepare to hit "save" on your final two writing pieces this week. Don't be afraid to pick up that big essay book I gave you and measure your work against the great writers of the last few hundred years. If you don't aspire to greatness in everything you do, then you will one day rue the melancholy of mediocrity. You need to be able to walk away like Jack Nicholson in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and say, "At least I tried, damn it; at least I tried."

Thanks for trying (and for succeeding!)

Friday Morning Thoughts

I just read through all of your blogs and posted comments. You guys should do the same! There are some great entries, and there are some that feel like, well, you didn't feel like writing. The way you approach writing is the way it is going to feel to your reader. If you don't give a darn, that feeling comes thorugh in your writing. Think of each entry as a way to tell us a good short story. Reading a list of your days events is not always that interesting--in fact, it's seldom interesting! But, if you throw in some witty or insightful remarks as you write, then it will be interesting. If you put it together so that a theme or plot comes through, it is even better.

So my plea to you is to simply care about what you are writng and to "try" and give your writing some heart and soul. Sooner or later you will reach a point in life where you are not wriitng for a teacher; you will be writing for an audience, and, unless you're the boss of bosses, they won't have to read what you write. EVERY "boss" that I talk to laments the poor writing abilities of his or her employees. Here is a chance to become better. Seize this opportunity. I am not a better writing teacher than anybody else, but I am passionate about the need to learn to write well.