Hello. We interrupt our regularly scheduled program series,The Wilderness Beyond, for something completely different. Two kinds of rain fell here lately, and this is my overflow report. It has to do with writing and with something called the Tao. You may of heard of these things. Here’s my bit today.
Winter With The Writers
The first rain that came watered my writing life: the annual literary festival at Rollins College called “Winter With the Writers.”
For the month of February each year, accomplished authors arrive on campus, hold master classes with dedicated writing students (and let us voyeurs sit in on them), then engage the community when they read from their work on Thursday nights. WOW.
The line-up this year is an especially nourishing shower because it included the debut of Forty Martyrs, a series of linked stories by my friend and mentor, Philip F. Deaver. He is the author of the Flannery O’Connor Award-winning story collection, Silent Retreats. From a full house in Bush Auditorium last week Phil received a well deserved standing ovation. You can buy Forty Martyrs from Orlando’s own Burrow Press.
We have one more week of WWW, but it has already made a difference for me. Writing advice shared at master classes include these notes (Please, these are not quotes, they are my paraphrased notes):
- Then, when I finish writing the story, I must make it readable. ~ Antonio Skarmeta, Chilean novelist, playwright, referring to the long editing process.
- Sprinkle faraway outdoor noises into a scene in your story to give it a 3-D feeling. ~ Brian Turner, poet, memoirist
- In the writing of poetry there are three parts: what the poem wants/has to say, what the poet is learning of that during the writing process and ideally finds out, and then there’s the reader’s response. ~ Chase Twichell, poet
The Tao of Psychology
Another needed rain shower came from finishing a book (for the umpteenth time) about synchronicity by Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. It’s a slim little thing but powerful—The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity of the Self.
If you don’t know, synchronicity is when something out of the ordinary happens that carries personal significance for you. You know, like when you’re thinking of a close friend and the next minute she calls you. Or you sit down beside a stranger at a meeting and that person becomes critical to improving your book. Both of these things have happened to me.
How about you? What has synchronicity done for you lately? Better yet, what has synchronicity done for you that enabled you to be a part of another’s synchronistic moment? Play it forward …
That’s it for today.
Thanks for reading!
Don Glenn
Thanks