Are You a Reader? Then You Might Be a Writer Too.

I was 18 and 400 miles away from home living on my own in Vermont when I finally found a way to reach back across the page.

From Little Women to Whitman, a short skip over to Ginsberg and the Beats, and then all poetry, my relationship to writing has always been about having a felt experience as a reader.

When I read a writer who makes me feel, who breaks the silence of the page, I feel that I too have a responsibility to reach back across the page and grip another reader.

I walked to the independent book store in town, called The Tempest. I had two books in my hand and $21 in my pocket. It was a Monday or maybe Tuesday and I wouldn’t be paid until Friday. I had food, so I reasoned, I could make it to the end of the week. I had to have both books: Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and The Selected Poetry & Prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley. While I was captivated by both for different reasons, in that moment I had no idea how they would sustain me. I only knew that when I read the Shelley something happened inside me and I felt giddy. When I read the Goldberg book, my hand began to twitch to write.

I bought the books and ended up with about $3 left. I walked straight across the street to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, ordered a Mocha Raspberry, and sat down to writing practice. I still remember the quality of sunlight coming in through the front window. How I was hot as I looked out at the snow. I did exactly what Natalie Goldberg told me to do. I believed every word she wrote and still do. It was an awakening for me and I can’t believe my incredible luck for just stumbling across this diamond. I had no idea it was a classic. I didn’t know it mattered, but suddenly doing writing practice the way Goldberg instructed was a way for everything to matter.

I kept filling notebook after spiral notebook, leaving them behind or taking them with me as I moved around. It was the practice of writing, the process of writing that was the thing. I wrote through Stage IV cancer, births, deaths, marriage, three English degrees, and more. Essentially my writing practice has never left me, though I have most certainly left it for years at a time.

After graduating from Rutgers with my MFA in poetry, I stopped writing. It wasn’t just that I didn’t have the structure, it was something bigger, scarier. I found that I knew how to craft a poem, but it felt like artifice. I could make a poem, but they weren’t coming from a real place anymore and I felt like a fraud.

Whenever I get really lost, I return to this book, Writing Down the Bones. It is a kind of coming home. If I get stuck, I just begin simply again with a cheap, spiral notebook. I still use all of Goldberg’s ideas, but especially the timed free write. It works for me. I return to my favorite books and take the time to read and discover new writers. I capture the clock ticking behind me, the grain on the table I’m writing on, the bitter taste of hot green tea gone cold, the details of my life, just as they are. They are enough. I write with my whole body, my arm, my heart, with my feet on the ground. I keep coming back for that felt experience, that alchemical transfer that happens between writer and reader. Then I work on pieces from my notebooks to share that experience with others because I believe we owe each other the world.

For more on Goldberg’s other books, read this interview:

https://www.elephantjournal.com/2013/12/practice-is-life-a-conversation-with-natalie-goldberg/

~Chris Vogt Hennessy

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