Tag Archive | relationships

The Artist’s Way Reflections – Week Five: Recovering a Sense of Possibility

whitepumpkin This was another volatile week for me. I think it’s just a volatile time. I had a hard time sticking to things like Morning Pages, after thinking I’d turned a corner on that.

The damn pages just aren’t letting me ignore feelings that I’d much rather ignore and it’s annoying.

In this chapter, she talks about wanting to be left alone, and I’m definitely feel that to some degree, and also in these quarantine times, the need for human connection feels paramount, especially as someone who’s living the quarantine life alone.

It feels somehow that this is out of balance for me, like I’d like to work in more connections in some ways and less in others and I’d like to think and write on that to re-center as it applies to in-person, virtual, phone time and social media.

Week Five: Recovering a Sense of Possibility

Limits

One thing that really spoke to me in this section was the bit about how we’re miserly with ourselves because we’re afraid of overspending any spiritual abundance. For me, it manifests as a fear of jinxing things, a fear of getting my hopes up, a fear of what horrible thing will happen if too many good things happen.

Does anyone else feel this way?

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The Artist’s Way Reflections – The Basic Tools: Morning Pages

Aug6

MPs In The Artist’s Way, aka AW, a book I’m blogging about weekly, one of the first thing that the author, Julia Cameron, introduces is the practice of Morning Pages. As far as I know, this is also true for subsequent spin-offs and sequels. Morning Pages are the cornerstone of all her work on discovering, recovering, and reconnecting with creativity.

So, that raises (not begs) the question of what are they and why are they so important. Morning Pages are simple at face value. When you wake up, you’re supposed to write three pages of long-hand writing, about anything you damn well please. The keys are that they’re supposed to be in the morning, they’re supposed to be long-hand and they’re supposed to be private–even you yourself aren’t supposed to look at them for awhile.

The morning part of it is to clear your head, dump out all your little thoughts and worries and random tidbits floating in your head that otherwise could nag at you for the rest of the day. And morning because maybe when we’re still groggy, there’s less self-censorship. That’s part of the privacy aspect, that they’re never to be shown to anyone because once they are, the other person’s judgements come in, and so do your own.

To that point, though this is probably a story for another day, I did once have a boyfriend who told me, drunk off his ass when we were in a fight, that he’d read mine and then made fun of me for things I’d written. Fun freakin’ times.

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folklore – First Listen Impressions

Jul24

taylor litho

Like so, so many people, I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night because of the release of TS8 – folklore. There is already so much I want to say after only one listen, and I want to put it down in writing before subsequent listens change things, as subsequent listens always do.

There are going to be a lot of posts on this site about this album. I’ve been wanting to post about Taylor for years, and that urge bubbled up strongly during the reputation era in 2017 (and I’m just going to put it out there, even though I know it’s Swiftie blasphemy and Taylor herself would disagree, I love reputation more than 1989, by a lot, and that’s not anything against 1989 just love for reputation).

I hadn’t thought about blogging in a long time but that album made me want to write blog posts about every song on the album, about my Taylor Swift origin story (that’s still on the docket to be posted eventually), about the infamous phone call drama (I think the only day since corona started that I forgot, for just a little bit, that we were in the middle of a global pandemic, was when the full phone call was released on Twitter), about some of her other albums and songs and lyrics, and so on.

But I never did.

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Miss You, Love

Apr18

Our talk turns to crushes. “I just miss that feeling, you know?” I say. “Like when you’re just so alive that even when it hurts you’re just glad you can feel. I miss the excitement.”

Jillian says, “My friend Emily calls it the ketchup phase.”

“Catching up with what?” I ask, uncertain.

“Well, because it’s like, when you first fall for someone, they’re all you think about. No matter what the subject, it reminds you of them. Someone could say, ‘pass the ketchup,’ and your first thought is, oh wow, my guy likes ketchup too.”

I sigh. “Yes, that’s what I miss, the ketchup phase. I hope I’m not too old or numb.”

~~~

A tiny little conversational snippet from Moonchild. It took place almost fifteen (!!!) years ago, this talk, but the funny thing is that I feel a little bit of that at the current moment, too. And wow, the topic of passion, in so many different forms, keeps coming up in the manuscript. It may be more of an underlying theme in Moonchild than I realized.

Check out other Samples, Published and Early Work!

~EJ

Did She Really Just Say That?!

Apr2

So, I love Anne Lamott. It’s been awhile since I read it, but Bird by Bird was one of my favorite writing advice books. I’ve taken several writing classes with two wonderful women – Janet Thomas and Susan Reese – and both have read her “shitty first drafts” excerpt to encourage the class to write. I find her funny and wise and kind-hearted. There is a section of Bird by Bird that I can open to naturally, even taking the book off the shelf after years without touching it. I’ll excerpt it here:

       “Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the light on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.”
      “Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.
     “If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act–truth is always subversive.”

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Writing as Time Travel – Blue Alchemy 1

Sep7

Writing about your own past is surreal. You’re reliving it. You’re at Fox Cabin at blind camp with the blue vinyl couches in the living room and the orange, white and yellow checked curtains in the bedrooms. You’re eight years old, unable to sleep because you’re terrified of your parents because Mom was getting hysterical again today and maybe this time she’ll really lose it or Dad’s smoldering rage will erupt, so you’re reading Nancy Drew by the night of your night light. You’re riding King County Metro after being rejected from both blood plasma donation for cash (your temperature was too low) and staying at the Green Tortoise Hostel for work-trade, knowing you only have three days until you and your roommates get evicted. You stare out the window watching as the bus passes through the hilly streets of downtown Seattle, thinking dark thoughts like maybe homelessness would suit you because you’ve always felt like an orphan anyway. You’re skulking by a payphone outside 7-11 in the outskirts of Seattle while your roommate is across the parking lot buying pot. You’re swimming in Puget Sound, not long after sunset, and the water is so cold that you’ve never felt more alive, and it suddenly, truly, deeply feels like all you’ve been through was somehow worth it to be here now, in the water, your limbs feeling heavier as you get closer to shore, and you’re unable to stop looking back at the cerulean dusk and the fading pink on the western horizon.

You’re all of these places but you’re also sitting on your bed writing in your little room with your books and notebooks stacked in milk crates, your window slightly open to let in the sounds of the Orcas ocean and the slow creak of cedar trees swaying in the wind, trying not to think about the boy who lives down the hall from you or the girl in his room. Or you’re writing in the fluffy brown chair in your apartment, wondering if you should get rid of it because your ex-boyfriend left it when he went to jail and do you really need any more reminders of him? But on the other hand it really fits the color scheme of your room and is really comfortable to write in.

In the story you are writing it might be fall while in reality when you are writing it, it’s summer solstice. And yet, the more you write, the more you swear that the light coming in through your windows is so distinctly autumnnal. You can almost smell the foliage.

There is something haunting about being in more than one experience at once. It’s like how it felt when I first came home from college after months of being away. Walking into the living room with its dark blue patterned furniture and light blue pleated blinds felt almost like an out-of-body experience. Everything was always slightly off from what I remembered, like all the colors or the feelings I associated with them had all made the slightest of wavelength shifts on the electromagnetic spectrum, just a few angstroms, nothing you could quite articulate or measure but sense nonetheless. Writing memoir is like that, I’m in two places in time, two times at once, memory and present tense, and they are so distinct and yet so muddled that it’s hard to tell which one I’m living in more.

~~~

For more samples, look here.

This is an excerpt from my most recent piece of writing, a personal essay called “Blue Alchemy,” about writing memoir, and the slipperiness of writing and memory.

~Emilia J

Josie – Sunshower Chapter One

Aug24

“Josie, I’m sorry,” he said for the thousandth time. “Things just aren’t working out.”

My heart was being broken and I was reading a book. While he rattled off all the reasons why we couldn’t be together, I sat there with one ear on the phone, and my eyes on the pages of a book I had found in the basement of my house.

It was actually more like a diary than a novel. It was written by Janet Andrioli, who had apparently lived in my house almost two hundred years before I was born, way back near the turn of the 21st century. I was reading about her teenage years. Things were so different back then. Humanity had not traveled past the moon. Computers had required laborious typing to function; that seems so mediocre compared to the ones we have today, where you can give them voice commands. And people couldn’t interact with their televisions; I couldn’t live like that!

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"All in the Cold Midwinter and at the Midnight Hour"

Jan4

Or, what I did over my winter vacation.

I’ve actually been dying to blog about this but wanted to get some other things out of the way first. Like revamping it and updating it, for instance.

A few years ago, I wrote this post about my favorite winter memory, the second winter I spent living in the dispensary, a perfect cabin at Camp Orkila and how blissful that winter was, reveling in my connectedness to the natural world. I sometimes feel there aren’t words for how satisfying in a soul way living there was to me. And it wasn’t just the proximity to the ocean, the way I heard the owls and the creaking of cedar trees at night, or the thick woods I could walk through or even the months I lived there while having very little work, or all the great books I read, or the great company I had in my friend Tracy, or the walks by the coast.

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Coming Out of the Closet about College

Sep19

I am nervous making this post, might as well get that out of the way from the very beginning.

As I’ve talked about in previous blogs, I’m planning on returning to school next fall to finish my undergrad degree. I’m looking at some WA state schools, and also, as described in I Can’t Seem to Stop Stretching, widening my circles of where I’m looking. I’m not sure I want to stay in WA. I am sure it would be easier, especially financially, and that if I go somewhere else, everything will depend on financial aid. Still, that hasn’t stopped me from looking. I dream big, always. And I’m determined as shit, so if I want to make something happen that’s more of a stretch, I’ll find a way. Of that, I have no doubt.

On a different note, up until April, I was living with this guy. He doesn’t want to be written about (and almost definitely hasn’t seen my blog), and I want to respect that, but also be able to give bare bones background stuff when necessary, so I’m going to call him…Adrian (lol it doesn’t fit him at all but I have my reasons). You can pretty much assume that any names I use in this blog for people in my real life (aside from other writers who I want to link you to and such) are changed.

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