New blog

I've taken a break from writing this blog in order to focus on my new one at kickstartyourwriting.wordpress.com. The new blog includes lots of information for writers. See you there.

Poem: Remembering Harding Lake

My poem "Remembering Harding Lake" can be read on p. 64 of http://cirquejournal.com/.

Writing classes

New Writing Class Starts Jan. 20

More students than expected expressed an interest in taking the Kickstart Your Writing class, so an additional session is being offered:

Kickstart Your Writing (Beginning to Intermediate)
Jan. 20-March 24
Wednesdays, 6:30-9 p.m.
Northeast Portland location
10 weeks, $200.
Registration deadline: Jan. 18

And there's still room in this class:

Kickstart Your Writing II (Advanced)
Jan. 23-March 27
Saturdays, 6:30-9 p.m.
Northeast Portland location
10 weeks, $200.
Registration deadline: Jan. 18

To register or for more information: wordpics@aracnet.com, (503) 288-2469.

Read what students say about Kickstart Your Writing:

I love the class and your support. Thanks, Nancy! The class helped me establish goals and a regular writing schedule. It is also very helpful to hear the ups and downs of other writers, for support and for the relationship aspect. — Sarah Retzer

Thank you, Nancy. You are a great motivator and coach. I have learned a lot and hope to continue. (The class) gave me a better sense of how to proceed with the material I had (and) increased my confidence in my writing. — A. S.

This class has been really helped me make writing a priority and take myself seriously. I was surprised to see how much I responded to having the deadlines of reading in class. Thank you! — Lisa Serrano

The class helped me focus on establishing writing goals and meeting them. Nancy is a very knowledgeable teacher as well as a supportive coach. I learned so much from other students in the class — they are very talented writers. I valued the diversity in this class — different backgrounds, variety of written material and styles made the class interesting and challenging. — K. E.

Writing class

I'm offering a writing class: Kickstart Your Writing. 10 weeks. Mondays, 6:30-9 p.m. Jan. 18-March 22. $200. Northeast Portland, OR. www.nancywoods.org.

Taking part in reading on November 23, 2009

On Monday, Nov. 23 at 7 p.m., I'll be reading an excerpt from my short story "That Day on the River," which won honorable mention from the 2009 Oregon Writers Colony contest. The reading will take place at Looking Glass Bookstore, 7983 S.E. 13th Ave., Portland, Oregon.

That Day on the River

I just found out my short story "That Day on the River" won honorable mention in this year's Oregon Writers Colony contest. Contest winners will take part in a reading Nov. 23, 2009 at Looking Glass Bookstore, 7983 S.E. 13th Ave., in Portland, Oregon. Here's the story:

That Day on the River

The day Twerp fell in the river I remember wishing I hadn't yelled at her like that. I mean some of us are just born a pain in the you-know-what; and the rest of us are, well, easier to get along with. We were up the Badger River in central Alaska on a family fishing trip, which we did almost every weekend in the summer. By “we” I mean Mom, Dad, my sister Twerp, my brother Twig and me.

The Badger is a dangerous river, cold and swift, with invisible whirlpools, backwashes and sweepers (low-hanging branches just waiting to scrape some poor kid off a boat). It was a nice day in June, though, so it didn't seem like a day when anything bad could happen. I was about ten years old, which meant Twerp would have been seven.

The ride to the cabin took a couple of hours. Once we got there, Dad tied the boat to the water pump, and I started fooling around with it. It was fun to pump the handle hard until river water gushed out all over the place. The minute I started having some fun, though, Twerp started horning in.

"My turn!" she insisted, trying to pull my hands off the pump handle. "You have to take turns."

"No I don’t," I said. "There's plenty of stuff to do around here. Go find your own fun."

"It's not fair," Twerp said, stomping her feet. To listen to Twerp, she was always getting the short end of some stick. "I'll tell Mom," she said. Now, there was nothing that made me want to do my sister's bidding less than her threats to take things to upper management. I maintained a firm grip on the pump.

"Mom!" Twerp yelled toward the cabin. "Twyla isn't sharing! It's my turn to play with the pump."

"Back off," I hissed. "Stop copying my life."

"Stop it right now, you two," Mom called from the top of the bank where she stood with a dishtowel in her hand. "I don't want to hear another word. Not one. Not on such a fine day. Twyla, you share."

"Let me, let me," Twerp said, pulling at my arm.

I could hardly see her, what with the sun shining off her teeth because she couldn't keep her big mouth shut.

"Oh, take your damn turn," I said before walking away. I didn't even bother to look back. Instead, I wandered out onto the boat to watch Dad. He was working on the motor. Several minutes passed before he said, "Where's Twerp?"

I shrugged my shoulders. What did I care, right, as long as she wasn't in my hair? But then I noticed the silence and realized something wasn't right. Twerp was never quiet. Never. Dad must have had the same idea I did. We looked at each other, then turned and looked back toward shore. There, by the water pump, all we could see were white bubbles in the water.

Dad pushed me out of the way and took what seemed like impossibly big leaps back to where Twerp had been. He stepped right on the duffel bags and tackle boxes and fishing poles, something that at any other time he would have yelled at us kids for doing.

What he pulled out of the water didn't look like anything living. It was all loose. The only things that looked familiar were Twerp's yellow boots.

I remember looking at them and then up at Mom. She must have come out to call us for lunch or something, but when she saw Twerp and Dad, her mouth fell open and stayed that way. Dad was holding Twerp upside down and pounding on her back. And that moment, for the first time in my life I realized what life would be like without her, how it would leave this big hole that we would have to walk around for the rest of our lives. And I realized how quiet everything would be. Too quiet.

Just then, Twig walked around the corner of the cabin carrying an ax. When he saw what was happening, he dropped the ax. It landed on the dirt and raised a cloud of brown smoke. Dad put his finger in Twerp's mouth and yelled, "Breathe, you little shit kicker. Breathe!" She must have heard him, because just then Twerp started to cough and choke, which made us laugh, which made her angry. Twerp hates to be laughed at.

That night, inside the cabin, after the sun had gone down and we’d finished eating dinner, we continued to sit around the table as Dad lit the Coleman lantern that hung overhead. The shiny table threw back the yellow light as, for the first time, Dad told the story we would come to call “The Day Twerp Almost Drowned.”
"Someone must have been watching," Dad whispered as he lit the first of the two bootie-shaped mantles. "Otherwise, how do you explain my turning around just then to check on Twerp?"

And we all nodded, knowing something mysterious had happened. We'd almost lost Twerp but she'd been saved. I couldn't take my eyes off her. Her braids were all washed now and freshly combed and she was wearing her flannel pajamas so clean and soft. She was enjoying all the attention, of course. Almost made you think she'd done the whole thing on purpose. Ever since the accident, she'd refused to leave Mom's lap, where she sat with a big smile on her face.
###

Pen in Hand

Blind spots

One day several months ago, a writer friend and I were taking a walk. He was telling me about how his father hadn’t loved him and how that relationship was holding him back, stopping him from writing.

Well, write about that, I thought. Write about being rejected. That’s your story, your wound. It might not be the only thing you could write about, but maybe you need to write about that so you can write about other things.

But I didn’t tell him what I was thinking. Why? Because, in my experience, when it comes to our own stories, self-discovery is vital. It’s just not the same thing when someone tells us what they think we might need to write about. In addition, as my friend and I were walking along, I could actually sense his writer’s block. It felt heavy and solid, like it had a lot of history behind it and wasn’t going to move.

The whole incident made me sad, because, when it came to writing, my friend was just as talented as a lot of writers I know. But sometimes our stories are so close to us, so embedded into our bodies and psyches, that we can’t see them. That’s why they’re called blind spots, I guess.

Joseph O'Neill

I drew the above sketch while watching a TV show in which Charlie Rose interviewed novelist Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland: A Novel. The story is about two cricket players (which is why you can see the words "play cricket" on O'Neill's forehead). When asked about his writing process, O'Neill said that, unlike some writers who compare writing to chipping away at a piece of marble to reveal a human figure, he makes random chips at the stone to see what happens.

Office supplies

The only things I like more than Pilot G-2 07 pens (Ah, the comfort of the rubber grip, the easy release of the black ink) are blank, 3-inch-by-5-inch index cards (Just the right size for cupping in the hand while jotting down a writing idea) and file folders (Buff color only, please, letter size).

Other people may prefer hanging out in coffee houses, dress shops or taverns, but I spend my off hours in office-supply stores, those big- and small-box outlets crammed floor-to-ceiling with all things clerical and writerly.

Heading down an aisle inside Office World or Paper Emporium, I breathe in the scent of 10-inch-by-13-inch mailing envelopes with their reinforced eyelets and long-life clasps. Then it’s on to the next row, where I fondle packages of red-edged address labels, Super Sticky florescent-green Post-it® notes and laminated maps of the world.

Extra-strong storage boxes that support up to 350 pounds beckon me on, followed by the perforated notepads, disappearing-glue sticks and bags of size 16 rubber bands. Who could bypass the pencil pillows, desk pads and leather-bound journals, the high-back chairs with lumbar support or ignore the briefcases (leather and plastic, with and without wheels), computers and printers, calculators and shredders, scissors and letter openers?

Eventually, I stumble out the door, feeling uplifted, as if life mattered somehow.

Plein Air

At about this same time last year, I took part in a Plein Air event during which writers and painters wrote and painted outdoors in the Columbia River Gorge. It took place on a beautiful day with the sun shining brightly overhead, but I was carrying with me a certain feeling of sadness, a result of something that happened the night before.

I’d gone out for dinner with a friend, a member of a writing group I’d belonged to for many years. After we ate and talked, Beverly was walking me to my car when she told me she thought our writing group might be ending, that the whole thing had run its course. I didn’t say so at the time, but I felt sad, to think what Beverly said might be true. In typical fashion, I dealt with it by making a joke, about how I would send an e-mail to the members with a subject line that read, “Writing Group Dies Slow, Agonizing Death.”

It was true. Signs of the group breaking up had been showing up for months, if not years. Still, for some reason, I didn’t want to give up on the group. In addition to the fact that I just liked hanging out with writers, many of the group members had become my best friends. So that’s what I was thinking about during Plein Air – about loss and endings and giving up; but although I was feeling sad, at the same time, I was aware of the bright sun overhead. And I wrote this poem:

Fallen Fruit

Narrow shouldered and
Bottom heavy
The ripened pears
Fell like copper buddhas
Onto the welcoming earth

Where they
Kept each other company
After having given up on summer
Allowing gravity to do its work

Offering comfort
For lonely souls
Passing by
Revealing secrets
Hidden in the shadows of branches
Reflecting the strength
Of the sun overhead

Free copies

One morning not long ago, I unlocked and opened my post-office box to find three thick, glossy copies of Oregon Home magazine stuffed inside, along with a copy of Oregon Home's Get Guide, and a kind note from the editor. The day before, I received two copies of Oregon Humanities, with a colorful cartoon on the front.

As I wrestled the magazines out of the small box, I gave thanks for one of the benefits of being a freelance writer — free copies of magazines.

Small-town news

Other people may be addicted to sugar or sex. Me, I’m addicted to small-town newspapers, the more picayune the better. Whenever I visit a tiny town, the first thing I do is find a newspaper stand, where I plunk down two or three quarters for a copy of the local gazette, to find out what’s going on, what the residents are talking about.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in the small town of Fairbanks, Alaska — where I cut my journalism teeth on the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, with its articles about moose sightings and curling bonspiels and its regular “Sourdough Jack Sez” column — that I have a soft spot for what other people might dismiss as insignificant rags.

Whatever the reason, I still enjoy reading everything from the Skamania County Pioneer to the Goldendale Sentinel, with their fuzzy photos showing someone handing someone else an oversized check and their features on everything from rooster-crowing contests and spelling bees to county fairs and students making the dean’s list.

Maybe it’s the relatively low percentage of crime stories combined with the unpretentious prose that makes the papers so appealing. Maybe it’s their neighborly, we’re-all-in-this-together tone combined with the outspoken letters to the editor and weekly recordings of births and deaths. Now what could be more significant than that?

Making fun of myself

Last night, I took part in a reading at Blackbird Wineshop (blackbirdwine.com) in Portland, Oregon. The audience clapped in all the right places, perhaps because I had more than one plant in the crowd, including two members of my writing group and their spouses, a former writing student and my painting teacher and her husband.

Only a humor writer, I suppose, would understand what fun it is to be laughed at, something a more well-adjusted person might try to avoid. I read two pieces: “Hooked on Antifreeze,” about my tendency to return, again and again, to my hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska; and “New York Agent,” about my inability to schmooze.

E. B. White fan

E.B. White's house. Photo by Nancy Woods

“It’s another E.B. White fan!” Mary Gallant called out to her husband.

The fan she was referring to was me. I’d shown up, unannounced, at White’s 19th-century Maine farmhouse with its barn and boathouse to see for myself where one of my favorite writers had penned everything from Charlotte’s Web and newsbreaks for The New Yorker to essays for Harper’s Magazine.

I’d arrived at White’s place in a rental car. White had died several years before; his home (where he lived for many years with his wife Katharine, who also had died), was now owned by Mary Gallant and her husband Robert.

It was all part of an East Coast trip I made that included stops at the homes of several other writers and artists, including the homes of Louisa May Alcott, Andrew Wyeth, N.C. Wyeth, L. M. Montgomery, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (well, in Thoreau’s case, I visited a replica of his cabin at Walden Pond).

But, for me, seeing White’s house and attached barn (where it was easy to imagine Charlotte the spider and Wilbur the pig hanging out) was the highlight of my trip.

After pulling my car into the driveway, I got out and walked up to the front door. Dark-green lilac bushes grew on either side. There was no doorbell, so I knocked and then stepped back.

“Hello!” someone shouted.

“Hello!” I shouted back, following the voice around to the side of the house just as Mary Gallant, an auburn-haired woman, stepped out.

When I told her I was an E.B. White fan, she smiled and said “Come on,” before leading me to the water side of the property and pointing out where I could stand to get a good shot of Allen Cove.

“You have to see the barn” she said next, explaining that that's where White kept his chicks. The interior of the building was high, wide and clean and conveyed a sense of safety. As Gallant showed me the corner where she potted her plants, her husband walked in.

“It’s another E.B. White fan!” she told him, before turning back to me and saying, “When people say, ‘I don’t know how you put up with it (visiting fans),’ I tell them, ‘Well, I don’t know if I could if I were living in Stephen King’s house, but I figure E.B. White was fairly benevolent.’”

I think E.B. White would be pleased to know that a woman with a sense of humor is living in his house.

The Gift

I just finished reading (well, okay, skimming) The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde.

Originally published in 1979, the scholarly book left me with these takeaway thoughts:

Most artists need to somehow "make some peace with the market."

"...the artist who wishes neither to lose his gift nor to starve his belly reserves a protected gift-sphere in which the work is created, but once the work is made he allows himself some contact with the market."

Being an artist "is most often a way of getting by, not a way of getting rich."

"No matter how the artist chooses, or is forced, to resolve the problem of livelihood, he is likely to be poor."

Do I feel better yet?

Readings, wine tasting

July 1. 7–9 p.m. Co-hosted by Oregon Literary Review. This month’s readers and performers are Barbara Blossom Ashmun, Samantha Waltz, Karen Flagstad and Nancy Woods. Free. Blackbird Wineshop, 3519 N.E. 44th Ave., Portland, OR (just north of Northeast Fremont Street). www.blackbirdwine.com. (503) 282-1887

Kickstart Your Writing: A Writing/Coaching Workshop

I'm offering the following class, beginning on Sept. 28, 2009:

Kickstart Your Writing: A Writing/Coaching Workshop

September 28 – December 7, 2009
10 weeks/No class November 23
Mondays, 7-9 p.m.
Northeast Portland, Oregon location
$200

Part writing workshop, part coaching session, Kickstart Your Writing was designed to help beginning to intermediate writers improve their writing skills while they take positive steps toward completing specific writing projects. During the 10-week session, students will receive:
· Individual help in setting their own meaningful, measurable, long- and short-term writing goals
· Positive, helpful feedback on their writing
· Frequent check-ins and ongoing editorial and emotional support

By the end of the workshop, students will have:
· Increased how much, how well and how often they write
· Achieved a feeling of accomplishment from having reached their writing goals

About the Instructor:

Nancy Woods (M.A., Journalism, University of Oregon) is a freelance reporter, editor, humor writer, essayist and writing coach whose articles and essays have been read on Oregon Public Radio and published in The Oregonian, The Portland Tribune, katu.com, Northwest Palate, Nostalgia, Oregon Home, Oregon Humanities, Oregon Quarterly, Portland Physician Scribe, Portrait of Portland, Raven Chronicles, GreenPrints, shortmemoir.com, UU World and Zephyr.

For more information or to be put on a mailing list: (503) 288-2469; wordpics@aracnet.com; www.nancywoods.org.

Keeping score

“People say all kinds of things online,” my editor warned me, “especially when they can be anonymous.”

He’d called to tell me my article on couponing would be posted the next day and to give me a heads up about the fact that people might post critical comments.

The idea that anyone would spend one second of their time commenting on the value of something I wrote definitely got my attention. First thing the next morning, I went online to check the article which, it turned out, already had received five comments. The readers had rated the article, too.

About the topic of couponing, Missy wrote, “I love it! …I think I’ll change my ways and save even more!” before giving the article a +3.

Mmmhmm wasn’t so convinced, saying, “…coupons are never really for more than $1 off of the usual things you don’t need. Never on carrots and tomatoes...” Rating: +2.

To Middleroader, however (who gave the article a +5), the article was “Just more concrete evidence and fallout from 8 years of out-of-control Bush/Cheney/GOP economics that favored the rich time and time again until the system imploded.”

Hello?

During the day, I found myself strangely attracted to the comments (which varied from thoughtful to silly) and ratings. I returned again and again to the posted article, lured back to see if anyone else had said anything. It felt a bit strange. A traditional print journalist, I was used to turning an article in and never hearing another word. But Missy, Mmmhmm, Middleroader and 18 others had taken what would have been a static story and turned it into a living, breathing thing.

My article wasn’t the only one being read and rated that day.

“Portland jobless rate spikes to over 11 percent” earned 19 posts, with a highest rating of +7.

But it was “Search on for man and monkey in biting case,” about a pet monkey that bit a six-year-old child in a park, that captured top honors, with a total of 53 posts and a highest rating of +8.

The ABCs of Writing