Supporting Writers & Readers on Giving Tuesday

It’s Giving Tuesday, a day to donate to good causes. Top of my list is supporting writers and readers. If this sounds self-serving, it’s because it is.

Democracy & Literacy

Democracy depends on a thoughtful, literate electorate. I’m deeply in favor of democracy, particularly one that protects freedom of speech.

Lately, political speech has become highly polarized, but life is so much more nuanced than being pro- or anti-. Most of our life choices are mitigated by extenuating circumstances, chance and doubt. Life’s complicated. Reading literature helps us untie – or at least better understand the complexity – of some of life’s knots.

Humans are a narrative species.

So on this national day of giving, consider donating to your local public library, to a literacy program in your community, and/or to a writing program that helps people write their own stories.

We tell stories to teach, to entertain and to memorialize what’s happened in our lives. Preserved, stories become history. Storytelling is civilation’s DNA.

Writing to the Light

For the fifth year in a row, I will be facilitating Writing to the Light writing circle to benefit my local library. This year, I will be offering it twice: by Zoom on December 31, and in person on January 2. Both will take place from 1-3 pm Eastern Standard Time.

Writers of all kinds and all levels of experience are invited to reflect on the light in their life in a supportive writing circle. We will write to illuminate our inner light, honor our inner voice, and tell whatever stories rise to be told. Prompts and guidance for automatic writing will be provided. Collectively, we will create a safe space for those who wish to read their new words.

Advance registration is required for each event. Register to receive the Zoom link for the December 31 remote circle, and to secure a seat for the January 2 circle, where numbers will be limited, masks required and indoor social distancing observed. Register at https://www.deborahleeluskin.com/contact/ Be sure to indicate which writing circle you plan to attend.

Deborah Lee Luskin

I’m an author, blogger, and educator with almost forty years’ experience teaching students from all walks of life, including inmates, healthcare workers, children, college students, adults and elders. I facilitate the Rosefire Writing Circle on Mondays (remotely) and Fridays (in person) throughout the year. Learn more at www.deborahleeluskin.com

The Rosefire Writing Circle Continues

One of the unintended consequences of the pandemic has been to welcome writers from far away to the Rosefire Writing Circle, a place for writers of all ages and abilities to write in community and with support.

I started the Rosefire Writing Circle because I know how lonely writing can be, and also how even the smallest amount of encouragement is as necessary as breath.

As a writer, I benefited from writing circles early in my career, most notably when I was a new mother and looked forward to every Tuesday evening, where I could write with others. This first circle of women, mostly older than me, was exemplary for being leaderless. Those who hosted the group lived in tidy, childfree homes. It was worth going just to experience such domestic order. But we also took turns providing prompts to which we wrote.

My words were so bottled up back then, that I scrawled thousand word essays in twenty-minute sprints, essays that I polished before submitting to the local paper, where they started appearing in print.

In 1995, I paid up front for a ten-week workshop that met weekly for three hours at a stretch. It’s where I wrote thousands of pages of what I then whittled down into a three-hundred page novel. I joined a similar group closer to home, where I started a different book, Into the Wilderness. Published in 2010, it’s now out of print, but the ebook is still available online.

At the beginning of this century, I spent more time driving, not writing – and not just driving my active kids. I traveled to libraries, hospitals and prisons to discuss literature and teach writing. One year, I put 30,000 miles on a car without leaving Vermont. I was doing this right up until March 12, 2020, when I gave my last public lecture before the pandemic shut such gatherings down. By then, I had a wonderful group of writers joining me at the Rosefire Writing Circle every Friday afternoon.

In 2016, I designed RWC to be more flexible than the workshops I’d attended: No upfront payment, no weekly commitment. It took some adjustments, but with the help of participants over the past five years, we’ve developed a writing circle where people come when they can and pay what they can afford.

Before the pandemic, we were meeting in-person on Friday afternoons. As a result of the pandemic, we moved the Rosefire Writing Circle online.

People grumbled, “It’s not the same.”

No, it’s not.

We have better attendance. On Zoom, we have no weather cancellations for snow or ice, and we’re all eager to break the isolation of pandemic living to come together and write. And thanks to videoconferencing, people from away are able to join us from different locations and time zones.

The Friday group, all vaccinated, is currently meeting in person again. Encouraged by one participant’s published memoir, some others have started book-length projects. Others just come and write. The virtual group continues to meet on-line most Monday afternoons. And there’s room for any writer of any ability who wants to try writing to a prompt in a supportive group.

Learn more about Writing Circles. If this sounds like something you’d like to try, you are welcome to join us. To learn how, contact me.

Whether you come write with us or not, I wish you may find the exact words to convey your precise meaning and thrive in good health.

Deborah.

Deborah Lee Luskin is currently writing a book about learning to hunt deer.

I Hope You Are Writing

I hope this post finds you as well as can be under the present circumstances of pandemic, political and social unrest, and economic challenges. And despite all this, I hope you are writing.

Vermont Almanac

I have been so engrossed in learning to hunt whitetail deer and drafting the story, Learning to Hunt, that I’ve not written much else, not here, and not on my blog. But my essay November appears in the inaugural edition of Vermont Almanac, a lovely anthology about all things Vermont that’s just been published, and I wanted to let you know.

Published by For the Land Publishing, the Almanac is organized by month and is filled with stories, information, illustrations and photography about life in Vermont, where we are connected to the land by weather, agriculture, forests, the rural economy, and each other. Vermont Almanac is especially about the people of this land: the farmers, loggers, conservationists, homesteaders, scientists, hunters, poets and writers “who are preserving and pioneering a rural way of life” according to a land ethic that “combines economic vitality with environmental stewardship and the values of rural life.”

For those of you writing placed-based stories, this is an essential resource, showing some of the different ways writers can find inspiration in a place, its people, and the synergy between them. I hope you will check it out.

And keep writing.

Deborah Lee Luskin lives, writes and hunts in southern Vermont. She blogs at Living in Place, and leads the Rosefire Writing Circles and the Rosefire Revision Circle for writers who want community and support. Learn more.

Goodbye and Farewell

GOODBYE

Dear Readers: This is my last post for Live to Write – Write to Live.

It has been deeply gratifying to post my thoughts about the business and craft of writing here every other week for almost eight years. I have enjoyed sharing my knowledge, my successes and my challenges with you. And I’ve loved the “Likes” and comments you have given me in reply.

I’ve come to recognize many of your avatars, enjoyed stimulating correspondence with others of you, and consider a few of you my on-line friends. I will miss you, but it’s time for me to consolidate.

CONSOLIDATION

The impasse I came to with Vermont Public Radio has shaken me in curious and unlooked for ways. Most notably, I am honoring a need to consolidate my thoughts and energies to telling the two stories I’ve been working on in fits and starts these past years. I recognize the need to make telling them my priority, and to do that, I have to give up the shorter, easier, extremely gratifying work of writing for you.

TURNING INWARD

Between the death of my father, the end of my term as Chair of the Brattleboro Community Justice Center, and my break with VPR, I sense in myself a great moving inward, as if I’m finally ready to sit still and listen to the voice rising from deep inside.

LIVING IN PLACE

I will continue to post an essay every Wednesday on my personal blog, Living in Place. I invite you to join me there, where I write about our human condition by telling stories. Humans are a narrative species. We thrive on stories.

For reasons I don’t begin to understand, I seem to have been chosen to tell them. I hope you will honor me by subscribing to Living in Place. I look forward to seeing your avatars there, and to engaging in thoughtful exchanges of ideas and opinions.

FARE WELL, WRITE WELL

I wish you all the courage to tell your own stories. May you always find the exact word you need to say what you mean and thereby engage in that intimate relationship between writer and reader.

Fare well,

Deborah.

Deborah Lee Luskin is a writer, speaker and educator who blogs weekly at Living in Place.

 

When Does Editing Become Censorship?

WHEN DOES EDITING BECOME CENSORSHIP?

I recently had to answer this question when Vermont Public Radio prohibited me from using the word “grandfather” to name my childhood abuser.

They insisted on alternatives, like “male relative.”

I refused.

For ten days we went back and forth, trying to find a way through this editorial impasse until finally, I withdrew my script and wrote the story of what had become the all-too-familiar narrative of being blamed, shamed and silenced for speaking out about sexual abuse.

But I wasn’t silenced: I wrote the story about VPR’s attempt to censor me, published here.

DRAWING AN ETHICAL LINE IN THE SAND

I was torn between my desire to broadcast my story and my need to be accurate. In the past, I’ve mostly accepted editorial suggestions that I thought were less than perfect but not worth taking to the mat. This time, I balked for the following reasons:

1. Precision of Language: There was no reason to be vague when the English language already provides a perfectly good, accurate, and specific word to name my abuser: He was my grandfather.
2. To use one of VPR’s suggested substitutes, like “beloved male relative” or “someone close” would be to cast aspersions on many innocent people, including all my truly beloved and respectful male relatives and friends;
3. VPR’s claim that to name “my grandfather” crossed the line of “journalistic integrity” is specious:
   1. My grandfather died in 1972; the dead cannot sue for defamation of character;
   2. This is a commentary, not a news report;
   3. My contract clearly states that I’m responsible for the veracity of my content, not the radio station.

A MATTER OF TRUST

Worse than the arguments outlined above was the station’s complete lack of trust in me, despite their repeated protestations of “complete trust in your integrity.” Ironically, the script I’d submitted was about why women stay silent about sexual abuse for fear of being disbelieved. I was disbelieved.

Worst: VPR worked harder to protect the reputation of my long-dead abuser than to help get this story out in the world. They didn’t succeed in silencing me, as I found a different outlet for the story, but they have done their audience a disservice by remaining silent about what happens to ordinary women who are willing to speak out about what we’re discovering to be a common occurrence.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post, among other mainstream news outlets, continues to publish the voices of well-known women willing to talk about their abuse. Are only celebrities allowed to speak? Let’s not kid ourselves: sexual abuse occurs across all ages, genders, races, religions, socio-economic groups; it is truly inclusive.

ENDING THE SILENCE

At first, I was hesitant to insist on accurate language for fear that I’d never be allowed on the radio again. But during the ten days of arguing by email, I knew that speaking the dirty truth was more important than sanitizing my words, even if it meant losing what has been a wonderful gig. I’ve already found other outlets for publication.

And most important: I’m doing my part to end the silence that allows the ubiquitous abuse of girls and women at work, at school and at home to continue.

I hope you will read both He Was My Grandfather and Ordinary, Daily, Demeaning Abuse.

Thank you.

Deborah Lee Luskin lives and writes in southern Vermont. She blogs weekly at Living in Place.

 

Just Read!

• Carry a magazine with you at all times.
• Keep a book in your car.
• Tuck a paperback into your messenger bag.
• Load a library onto your Kindle – and fire it up instead of checking your phone!

Too much screen time!

I’m not the only one checking my cell phone like a nervous tic.

I’m trying this technique myself, because I find myself checking my phone like a nervous tic, and if I see a new email or a new headline, I fall into the black hole of cyberspace. Poof! My time to read evaporates, and it’s time for bed.

Instead of reading print on a page in a chair by the fire before retiring, I pollute myself with screen time. Even if there’s no new message from a friend or no new headline to upset me, the light itself is known to disrupt sleep. In my case, I’m also cranky for having squandered the time I’d planned to read, and for not reading.

Advice to writers: “Just read!”

As writers, we’re told, “Just read!” as a way to learn craft, study style, examine structure, and gather facts. Reading other people’s stories helps us tell our own, whether our stories are invented, factual, remembered, retold, or some combination thereof.

Technology changes, but our human need for stories does not.

Humans are a narrative species. We used to tell stories around a fire; then we heard them in the marketplace and in the cathedrals. Eventually, we learned to write and read. Drama, film and TV tell stories through acting. These days, stories are lost in email and stunted in social media. Our time to read at length grows short.

I love to read; I have to plan time to do it.

As a writer, I’m a glutton for words, most of which I get from print on a page. So I’m starting a new campaign to increase my reading time. I’m going to keep prose on hand wherever I go, so when I have a moment of “downtime,” I can “Just Read!” instead of reflexively checking my phone.

How do you make time to read?

Deborah Lee Luskin reads and writes in southern Vermont, where Into the Wilderness, her critically acclaimed story of love in middle age, is set.

Write Now!

Due to complications of my husband’s broken jaw, I have to Write Now!

This afternoon’s writing time was unexpectedly pushed aside to pick up liquid Ibuprofen, a pill crusher, a WaterPik, and energy drinks for my husband, who’s had his broken jaw wired together this morning and will be on a liquid diet for weeks. I rushed home to cook dinner for friends arriving from Great Britain momentarily, and I haven’t written Tuesday’s post yet.

Write now!

I remember days when writing time would be supplanted by a childcare-giver’s day off, a sick child, a grandmother’s broken ankle, chicken pox, strep throat and a child’s broken ankle. Emergencies happen, yet one can still write in the waiting room, in the car, in the sick room, while the kids are playing dress up or make believe or watching a movie.

Write now!

You can write anywhere, write now!

Then there are the planned trips to the shop for car maintenance. I’ve come to love those waiting rooms. With earplugs to drown out the TV, I use the hour to write.

I’m driving on the Interstate, headed to or from a gig at a library and the words for a commentary start bubbling up. I pull over, pick up my pen and notebook.

Write now!

The dishes are piled in the sink, the clean laundry needs to be folded, the trash needs to go out. Take care of the trash. Everything else can wait.

Write now!

I’m told my mother-in-law sold her washer and dryer, subscribed to The New Yorker, and read it in the laundromat every week. Have to do laundry? Write now!

The emails are incoming thick and fast. Turn off email – write now!

If social media is no longer a tool but a distraction, turn off your internet connection – write now!

Whatever you’re doing, write now!

Even though I prefer to write in my studio, life happens. I write here, there, and everywhere, at all hours of the day or night. I always have paper and pen with me. I’m always ready – write now!

 

 

September: The End is Where We Start From

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.   ~T.S. Eliot

September’s first task was to clean my desk.

September: Summer ends, and we begin the push to the end of the year. Summer ends and work resumes in earnest.

September: the first thing I did was clean my desk.

The very act of sorting books, papers and projects has helped me choose what to place front and center of my attention and which to shelve for the time being. This simple act has given me focus, structure and deadlines.

September is full of promise and hope. So are a clean desk and the deadline of a year’s end just over the horizon. I’m feeling hopeful and focused to be back at my desk after a summer of grief.

This September: I’m adjusting to the memory of loving parents who are not longer alive. I’m peering through the murky fog of mourning and see hope and promise in the slow death of the garden as it gives up its bounty. I hear the crickets singing summer’s end and know the silence of winter is coming. I welcome the gradually shortening days as the earth tilts away from the extended daylight that makes summer so luxurious. And I welcome the shift that allows me to sit at my desk with focus and energy to blog, to teach, and to advance a novel that’s starting to sing in me.

September is like taking a breath: I inhale cool air of intention and exhale the warm air of summer’s ease.

September is a time to focus and write.

What does September mean to you?

Deborah Lee Luskin lives in southern Vermont and blogs at Living in Place. She is a freelance educator, a radio commentator, and an avid hiker. Learn more at www.deborahleeluskin.com.

 

 

Attention to Details

 

Attention to detail matters.

“What’s wrong with a drawer full of jar lids?” I asked Roz Chast during the Q & A following her recent author talk before a capacity crowd.

I’d hesitated to ask the question because it was so unlike the questions about process and inspiration readers usually ask authors. But I’d loved her graphic memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? – except for the one frame about the jar lids, which bothered me both personally and professionally.

You can read my personal reasons at Living In Place; the professional reason are about craft, and are what this post is about.

DETAILS

Chast’s graphic memoir about caring for her elderly parents.

Chast’s frame about the drawer full of jar lids struck me as off, not just because I have a drawer full of jar lids, but because Chast didn’t give me enough information about what made this bizarre.

All the other frames in the section – photographs rather than drawings – of the “stuff” she was left to clean out of the apartment in which her parents had lived for forty-eight years made sense: the photos show piles of magazines and papers, dozens of handbags and several defunct electric razors. It’s clear that the things we save – sometimes deliberately for reasons of potential usefulness or sentiment and sometimes from sheer neglect – take on a meaning of their own to she who has to sift through it. I know; I’ve just emptied my dad’s desk of pens that had run out of ink.

As a reader, I simply wanted more information about why Chast chose this particular detail, because it wasn’t clear to me the way it was clear why she chose to photograph her mother’s two-dozen nearly indistinguishable old handbags and electric razors that clearly no longer worked. So I asked.

“Rusty jar tops?” she said, her voice rising as she wrinkled her nose in disgust.

I got it.

And I got more.

Chast went on to tell a story about a man who’d saved the screw tops of toothpaste tubes. He’d always planned to use them as lampshades for his granddaughter’s dollhouse.

This is a detail I’ll never forget because Chast did more than simply answer my question: she told me another story. In the process, she illustrated the kind of details that help a reader get what the writer is trying to convey. She amplified the characterization of the narrator of her memoir’s persona with her intonation and nose wrinkle, “They’re rusty!” And she created an idiosyncratic grandfather who saw the potential for miniature lampshades in every toothpaste tube cap.

THE TAKE AWAY

A single vivid detail can make the difference between the mundane and the memorable. If you make your details accurate and vivid, you will help your reader will see objects and attitudes the way you want them to. That’s authority.

Deborah Lee Luskin

Deborah Lee Luskin blogs weekly at Living in Place.

 

 

How To Write An Obit

My Dad. 7/23/1925 – 7/19/2018

Even if you don’t think of yourself as a writer and never plan to write for publication, chances are you will someday have to write an obituary for someone you’ve loved and lost.

Mom, circa 1940.

I know this, because last week I wrote an obit for my dad. Six years earlier, I wrote one for my mom.

While I included the usual details of where they each were born, what they did for their livings, and where and when they died, their lives were a great deal richer than a collection of biographical facts.

Collect the Facts

Since it’s entirely possibly that you’ll be a blubbery mess when the time comes, you’ll want to collect all the facts about your subject before you start writing. Professional obit writers keep files on famous people for when the time comes. You might want to start a file now on those for whom you expect to write an obituary. You also might want to create a document with such details about yourself and file it along with your Advance Care Plan, your Last Will and Testament, the key to your Safe Deposit Box, and a list of your passwords, to make it easier for your survivors to tie up lose ends.

Consider Your Audience

Next, just as in writing anything else, you must consider your audience. The obit you write for the local paper may emphasize someone’s community service, whereas the one you send to a professional organization’s publication will narrate the arc of the person’s career. Make it easy on yourself: write a master obit with a paragraph for each section. This makes it easy to cut and paste shorter versions to the different places where an obit is likely to appear.

Make it Meaningful

Then consider what made this person’s life worth living. For most of us, our obituary will appear in the local paper one day and line the litter box the next, but readers will always remember a story. Tell stories about this  person’s one wild and precious life.

Links to Worksheets

Here’s a link to three examples, each for the same fictional person. I wrote these examples for a workshop I taught on obituary writing. The first is just the bare minimum: Who died, where, when and how (optional). The second is Standard Vanilla, with the usual details and not a whole lot more. The third gives you more detail and more flavor of the person who didn’t just die, but who lived – and how.

And here’s a link to a worksheet to help you gather the facts you’ll want to have on hand.

Having the Last Word

How do you want to be remembered? Try writing your own obituary – one draft if you died today and another if you live to be one hundred. Then figure out how to make the second one come true.

Blessings to you all, ~Deborah.

Family Photo, circa 1962

Family Photo, August 2005

Family Photo, June 2018