It got me to thinking, where do I write? Is it anything like the book- and computer-strewn enclaves of these sci-fi wizards of the word?

Well… no.

It’s a timely moment to ask the question. I’m fresh off a (nearly) two year stint of support from A Room of Her Own Foundation. It was a blessed period that gave me the time and wherewithal to complete WRECKER, the novel I’ve been loving and laboring over since ARROYO first came out in 2001. Part of that wherewithal was, yes! A room of my own. Complete with bookshelves and file cabinets, and furnished with the infamous kelly green couch that’s been bearing the backsides of our family members since 1991 and of others since the thirties.

It was great to have my own room. It was a luxury that came to feel like a necessity. It was a place for me to store the notebooks and stack the piles that organize my thoughts, and it was a place for my computer to reside, a place to go when it was time to turn my scrawls into an electronic commitment to for-keeps.

But did I write there?

Sometimes I did. Lying on the couch, sitting at the desk, looking out the window.

But now that we’re in the process of moving (I call it a process because of the serious construction commitment that moving always seems to entail for us), and we’re living in two tiny rooms as I make slow headway on rendering the rest of the house habitable, I find that my old habits die hard. I write on the wing. It’s not so bad.

Here’s a partial list of some of the places I write:

- in the cab of my truck. Better if I’ve pulled over, but I’ve been known to scrawl thoughts while in transit. Something about driving – especially in these wide-open spaces of the west – opens the faucet for me.

- In the armchair. Legs akimbo.

- Out in the yard, where I can be profitably distracted by such wonders as mating dragonflies and the changing colors of the leaves on the neighbor’s pear tree.

- In bed. That’s my little secret. Writing drops me into a state of suspended animation alarmingly close to sleep, and sometimes a nap is the best way to dream my way into the next scene.

Yes, it’s on the books to build a tiny writing pod, a place to sit at my computer and store my papers and even lie down on a cot and catch a few z’s while waiting for the words to catch up with the characters. And I”ll be better organized and more efficient for it.

But I’ll bet you anything that having that space won’t stop me from writing in the less orthodox places I’ve found. Maybe it’s just that it takes some of the pressure off to write away from my desk. Maybe it’s just that I’m unwilling to give a place – my own room, my own desk – so much power that, in its absence, I’m unable to write.

How about you? Do you have a special place to write? Certain conditions that make it possible? What’s the view from your window?

Send me your responses and I’ll post the longer ones on a special page. You can email me at summerwood@thewhereofit.com.

Happy writing, wherever you are.

This is what spring looks like in my neck of the woods.  A snowstorm’s coming on, but in the meantime

1. ravens execute crazy aerial maneuvers in tandem.  mating, fighting, having fun?
2. robins crowd the juniper bushes
3. redwing blackbirds cause a ruckus by the creek
4. muddy road, muddy path, muddy dog paws, muddy house
5. wind blows hard enough to make your eyes water
6. hermits emerge, blinking, and get hit with social invitations
7. prairie dogs emerge, blinking, and get hit by truck traffic
8. wind-induced despondency.  warmth-induced hilarity.  repeat rapidly
9. ferocious need to change out of your studded snow tires.  now!
10. what’s that color?  GREEN?

Come back tomorrow for a guest post written by Maida Tilchen, author of the newly published novel LAND BEYOND MAPS.

SPRING BARN (Photo by Roger Blake)

What lies out the back door?  And … what about when you get in through the back door?

I stumbled across this photo by Roger Blake (rblakephotos@windstream.net), who generously agreed to let me share it with you.

I’m ready for spring.  How ’bout you?

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A few notes:  first, the SEEDBANK is up.  Click on the page tab to find a rotating collection of ideas/images/writing exercises to spur your imagination and spark new directions in your writing practice.

And, second — some of you may have noticed that the schedule of posts has been altered somewhat from the original plan. Which is to say that, right now, there is no real schedule.  I hope to settle in to two posts a week with an occasional third from a guest writer, leaving the “seeds” to their own page. I’ll let you know as soon as I nail down something regular, but for now, check back frequently, or add www.thewhereofit.com to your RSS feeder. (If you have Gmail, it’s easy. Click on the Reader tab and sign up, follow their instructions, and in a minute or two you’ll be following all your favorite blogs with no effort.  There are others besides the one Google offers, but that’s the one I use.)

I learned how to do this from Yen Cheong, who writes the Book Publicity Blog.  If you’re a writer with a book out there – or aim to become so – you might want to check out this post.

Me?  I try to stay away from the question — although occasionally I’m forced to take it on.

I’ve learned never to answer when it’s phrased (mostly by myself) in the form:  why the hell would you want to do something that…

Every once in a while someone comes along to remind us in a personal way of the value of art.  Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory, gave an address to freshman music students there as they embarked on their careers.  I’ll copy it below for anybody who needs a shot in the arm, a personal account of why to create art.  He’s talking about music, but it pretty much goes for any form.  And — in what I think of as an unusual twist for music — he describes how place, and circumstance (story, really), go into creating a particularly moving composition. Thanks to Sharon Kenny for passing it along.

Why do you write?

Welcome address to freshman at Boston Conservatory, given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory.

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school—she said, “you’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heartwrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?”
Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”

I’m also easily and genuinely amused by the odd and original in architecture.  A friend sent a link to this website of photos of astonishing buildings.  They’re almost all public buildings (very few homes), but they’re wildly creative and sometimes hilarious.  (Check out the Kansas City Public Library!)

Glancing at these photos got me to thinking about buildings and houses, interior and exterior space, and how they function in writing.  Which got me to thinking about particular houses I’ve lived in and how they’ve influenced me.  Which got me to thinking…

Okay, for those of you who like a new challenge, try this:  return in your mind to a house you lived in or were familiar with some years ago, and write your way through it.  Try to do it in one fell swoop, traveling through all of its parts and documenting how they interacted.  Then focus on one particular part (a room? a window? a closet? a stairwell?) and write a scene set there.

If you’d like, email me your piece (summerwood@thewhereofit.com) and I’ll post it on a Readers Respond page.

Hmmm.  I’m remembering a laundry chute in my neighbor’s house when I was a kid…

What stories do you have to tell about sleeping outside?  Under the stars, over a steam grate, in the back of your truck, on the beach?

Made up or remembered, email them to me at summerwood@thewhereofit.com and I’ll post them on a “readers respond” page.

Brendan Gill wrote about architecture:  “Even the most sympathetic feats of restoration carry the taint of an embalmment.”  I’d argue that restoring damaged places – even if the restoration limits itself to the page – carries that same risk.  “Nature writing” is far too often just an elegy for what’s been lost.

But the place is still there.  Isn’t it?

There’s one thing I’m really sorry I missed the chance to do while in Chicago, and that’s ride the El.

I’m a huge fan of city-wide public transport in general, and of subways in particular.  I like them for their efficiency and their convenience, but I like them most because they cram a bunch of very different people together in a tight little space. 

It’s instant story.  Eavesdrop in a crowded subway car for twenty minutes and you’ve got writing ideas to last for the week.

Anybody have any good lines to share from listening in?

In this case, the “rising creek” was a snowstorm that dropped several inches of the white stuff on the mountain pass that stands between where I live and where the train leaves from.  So I did an about-face and booked a one-way flight to Chicago out of Albuquerque this afternoon.  AWP or bust!

But as much as this idea that God and the weather are the ultimate arbiters (going by different names — fate? chance? karma? — and under various disguises, of course) — is acknowledged pretty much every place, so is the constant struggle against it.  

Rich ground for story.  Human folly, or something.

William Least Heat-Moon wrote a spectacular book, called PrairyErth, about the place.  “The last remaining grand expanse of tallgrass prairie in America.” I wonder if it still is so.

Makes me think about the “geographical center” of my own world.

And you?