process – Susan J Tweit

Writing: Postpartum Shift

Posted on February 22, 2015 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

If you’ve ever finished a big project of whatever sort, one that took months or years, and required a kind of intensity and focus that left you feeling hulled out at the end of each day, you know something of what I’m feeling after sending my new memoir, the story I call Bless the Birds off to my agent last Monday.

The first “spring” bud on the cyclamen plant on my windowsill, finally beginning to open, its petals unfurling like my postpartum creativity….

The feeling is something like postpartum blues, that sense of emptiness when the work (or baby) that absorbed you from within begins its journey outward into the larger world. It’s still yours, but no longer exclusively and no longer inside you.

Bless the Birds isn’t out of my life or my hands entirely. I still need to do some fine weaving, adding ordinary details and working threads of themes all the way through the larger manuscript. Nothing major, but important for the finished story nonetheless.

And after my agent reads and approves of the manuscript, then comes selling it to a publisher. Somewhere down the months, I’ll be working with that editorial team; the manuscript and I have a journey and more changes ahead.

Already my relationship to the work has changed. I can feel the inner shift; the story is no longer contained inside me, absorbing my attention in small and large ways over the course of the day.

I’m still thinking about it, just not every moment. And now I’m thinking about other writing too, specifically the feature article I promised to Rocky Mountain Gardening by (gulp!) March 1st, and beyond that, a bigger project. For the first time since I began work on Bless the Birds, I’m thinking seriously about the next book.

Part of my front-yard meadow (plus a drive-wheel from an old steam-powered pump Richard collected for a sculpture) drifting over with snow this afternoon.

Part of my front-yard meadow (plus a drive-wheel from an old steam-powered pump Richard intended to use in a sculpture) drifting over with snow this afternoon.

Which is why on this snowy evening, I’m on the couch getting ready to pick up Robin Wall Kimmerer’s wise new book, Braiding Sweetgrass, first on my to-read list as that next book takes shape in my mind.

And I’m listening to Lyle Lovett’s “Natural Forces” CD, hoping that some Texas two-step will warm things up here in unusually frozen south central Colorado.

The world outside is white with wind-driven snow and a temperature of nine degrees F, down from the day’s pitiful “high” of 13 degrees. Yesterday afternoon, it was 52 degrees and sunny, and I was outside in a sweater, installing solar-powered landscape lighting.

I think I have climate change whiplash.

And yes, climate change is one of the themes in that next book, which may be called MEADOW, What I Learned About Healing Ourselves and the Earth From the Industrial Property No One Else Loved. It’s the book about plants I’ve been thinking about writing for most of my career. (No pressure there!)

Blessings to you all, and thanks for walking with me on this journey we call life….

A very much younger me, thinking about plants and the communities they weave as a field biologist in northwest Wyoming.

#amwriting update: Finishing with Love

Posted on February 15, 2015 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

#amwriting: Yesterday at about four o’clock, I read the last sentence of what I think is the final draft of my memoir-in-progress, Bless the Birds. Okay, final except for the subtitle, and that I’m still tinkering with.

The pile of pages that is Bless the Birds….

“Done” is a relative term in writing. When I say, “I’m done with it,” I mean that I think I’ve taken this version as far as I can. It’s not just that it’s worn me out, which it has; it’s that I can’t see anything else that needs work.

Right now. In two months, I might see it differently. In two years, I certainly would. Any good story is as organic and of-the-moment as its creator. Our understanding of writing and what we have to say changes over time (if it doesn’t, we likely have nothing new to say).

How do I know I’m done? It’s an intuition when I read through the manuscript, a sense that I’ve said all I have to say about this particular narrative.

Could I be missing something? Absolutely. If so, I can’t hear it right now. Of course, I’ve thought I was done before. It feels different this time, exactly how, I can’t explain.

I’m letting the manuscript sit until tomorrow. Then I’ll send it off to my agent with fingers and toes crossed.

Sometime in the next month or so, I’ll hear what she thinks. If she deems it ready to shop around to publishers, I’ll have prep work to do, including coming up with a kick-ass bio and a list of my books and recent publications. Which won’t be as impressive as it might be because of the time away to journey with Richard’s brain cancer, but that’s life.

For now, I’m done. And that feels deeply satisfying.

It's apt, I think, that I'm finishing as the moon wanes.

Finishing as the moon wanes seems apt timing.

To give you a taste, here’s how the story begins:

On my desk where my eyes stray to it whenever I look up from my computer sits a square of foil wrapper that once held a bite-sized chunk of dark chocolate. The creases have been carefully smoothed so it lays precisely flat. The outside is red and printed with the logo of a chocolate maker. The inside contains just three words: “Love every moment.”

Perhaps a chocolate wrapper with a saying that could be trite seems like a foolish thing to keep on the desk of a working writer. As with so many of the things we carry through our lives though, this piece of printed aluminum foil means much more to me than just a used candy wrapper. The hands that smoothed out its creases were long-fingered and strong, with a sculptor’s love of stone, steel and wood….

And here’s the very end:

Richard and I didn’t love every moment, because we weren’t perfect. We did do our best to embrace the journey life gave us. And to live with love, which I think is the greatest gift we humans have to offer this battered world. Love asks us to lead with our hearts, to accept flaws and hardships as openly as joys and triumphs, and to be true to ourselves as we navigate the cycles of our seasons. Love is like the blessed wine that continually refills our glass: the more we give, the more there is to receive. Without an abiding love for this existence, ourselves and each other, we merely survive. With love, we and all others thrive.

When my time comes, what remains of Richard and I me will go into the earth together, companions still in this journey through the circles of life on this glorious blue planet. Home.

A blue granite basin Richard carved for our old house, now in the bathroom in my new one.

#amwriting: Finding More In the Story

Posted on February 1, 2015 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

#amwriting, as the Twitter tag labels the act of creating story from a blank page. Yesterday, nearly eleven weeks after I began this deep revision of my memoir, Bless the Birds, I wrote an entirely new ending for the book. One that fittingly circles around to the place where the story begins.

Which is not the beginning of the story as I originally imagined it, before the aha! moment that sent me into re-envisioning, a transformative journey that took the narrative (and me) to places I hadn’t known we needed to or even could go.

New moon near the beginning of this revision

That re-envisioning grew out of comments by both my agent and my memoir-buddy, writer and teacher Page Lambert, as well as something I “saw” as I was reading and evaluating memoirs for a national award. All coalesced into a new understanding of what this memoir is truly about and told me I would be taking another, more intense look at a story I thought I had already finished.

It wasn’t simple. “Revision,” literally seeing anew, implies shifting one’s perspective. Re-evaluating, looking beyond, before, below and around, what you thought you saw. Shaking up the pieces like a kaleidoscope and watching to see what pattern appears as they fall into place.

It’s hard to let go of an existing narrative, to see it anew. As I listened to the story with the inner ear of my intuition, I “heard” places that hinted at more, at truths I needed to pull out into the light, examine and decide how to show and tell.

I’ve said that writing memoir is like peeling off your skin with a dull knife. Diving back into this particular story to look at how Richard, my late husband and I became the people who could walk our final journey together with grace and love was at least as intense as the living it was.

Once I got going though, I wrote every day. I wrote when I was sick, I wrote when I was exhausted. I wrote through the weeks, the phases of the moon, ignoring other writing I needed to do, leaving email to accumulate, even forgetting appointments and deadlines. I couldn’t not write. The story compelled me in and on.

Half moon near the middle of the revision

Why do it at all? Why go through this grueling re-writing of a story that was already perfectly good?

Because “good” isn’t enough. I want this story to reach as far as it can, sing as loud as it can, touch as many hearts as it can. I want it to change how we see life and death, and love. How we understand our place in the dance of existence on this shimmering blue planet.

Maybe I’m asking for too much. But I know this: If I don’t try, I won’t ever find out whether this story has more to give. And after these eleven weeks, I can tell you that I found more in a “perfectly good” story than I knew was there, and at the same time, discovered more in myself than I had seen. That’s powerful.

Another writing friend, the best-selling mystery author Susan Witting Albert reminded of something I had said about that “why” in an earlier book. I dug out the passage she quoted and was surprised. (I wrote that?)

Stories nurture our connection to place and each other. They show us where we’ve been and where we can go. They remind us of how to be human, how to live alongside the other lives that animate this planet. … No one story can give us the whole picture. We need every voice to speak its version of truth from the silence. We need every story to guide our lives.
–Susan J. Tweit, Walking Nature Home

Stories matter. Not just mine. Yours too. Every story.

Almost-full moon rising this evening

Kent Haruf, award-winning novelist, all-around good human being

RIP Kent Haruf–Novelist, Neighbor, Friend

Posted on November 30, 2014 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

Kent Haruf, 1943-2014

Kent Haruf, award-winning novelist, beloved teacher and all-around wonderful human being died this morning, three months shy of his 72nd birthday. He had just finished copyedits for a new novel, Our Souls at Night, scheduled for release next year.

Kent’s novels reach to the heart of what it means to be human, the stories told in prose so spare and quiet the phrases linger in the soul after being read. Washington Post writer Mike Rosenwald calls the fictional town of Holt, on Colorado’s windswept eastern plains, the setting for Kent’s trilogy of Plainsong, Eventide and Benediction, “his version of [Faulkner’s] Yoknapatawpha County. It was as real to him as the world he lived in — maybe more real.”

Plainsong, the first book in the Holt trilogy

Kent’s bone-deep knowledge of the sweep of the plains and the lives spun out in their isolated expanses comes from growing up there among people like his characters. He writes their lives with compassion, understanding our capacity for grace even, or perhaps especially, in the hardest of times. Their lives sing hymns of grace.

My friend John Calderazzo, writer and faculty at Colorado State University, remembers hearing Kent read a memoir passage from West of Last Chance detailing with loving humor the spread of food at 1950s-era church potluck that featured quite a few varieties of Jello.

After the reading, John writes, “I told him that the facts, the intense focus, and the precision of the details of time and place reminded me of James Agee’s A Death in the Family (my idea of one of the greatest memoirs ever written). He got this very slow deep smile, and he said that Agee had been his model all along and that no one had ever “caught him” at it. … That was a lovely moment, and that is how I will remember him separate from his wonderful work.”

Eventide, the second novel in the Holt trilogy

In my small town of Salida (population 5,500 people) in rural Southern Colorado, Kent Haruf was simply Kent, a regular at the coffeehouse, a patron of the library, an attendee of concerts and plays, a hospice volunteer, part of the Buddhist sangha, a neighbor, a friend.

He was modest, unassuming, funny, and wise. When he asked, “How are you?” he listened to the answer. Because he wanted to know. He cared.

After the love of my life, Richard Cabe, came home to hospice care for terminal brain cancer in fall of 2011, Kent and his wife Cathy stopped by one morning. Kent sat down next to Richard’s wheelchair, I poured him a cup of coffee, and they plunged into a discussion of the meaning of the Buddhist concept of metta, lovingkindness, in daily life.

An hour later, Richard was tiring and Kent got up to leave. After he put on his jacket, Kent kissed my cheek and whispered, “Thank you for letting me come. It’s an honor.” He came back regularly, and always thanked me for “letting him” visit.

Benediction, published in 2013 and shortlisted for the international Folio Prize

Last Saturday, I walked to Cathy and Kent’s with a bag of scones warm from the oven. “Come in! Come in!” said Cathy. “Go on through. Kent wants to see you.”

Kent greeted me with a welcoming smile, showed me a copy of the cover design he had just gotten for Our Souls at Night, and asked me what I was working on. I told him about my aha! realization about my memoir-in-progress, Bless the Birds:

“I finally understood that it’s not about our journey with brain cancer. It’s about the choices we made that shaped us into people who could live that journey and face his death with love.”

Kent beamed and took my hand. “Yes! That is exactly why people will want to read it. You’ve got it now.”

I felt like I had just won the National Book Award.

My heart hurts tonight. But as I go back to revising Bless the Birds tomorrow, I will keep Kent’s joyous smile in mind. He was right: I do have it now (finally).

Thank you, Kent, for that blessing. And thank you Cathy, and both of your families, for sharing Kent. The quiet grace of his voice lives on.

Salida’s eventide as I began this blog post….

The sunset tonight--a moment of beauty free just for the noticing that reminded me of why I write.

#amwriting: After Aha!, Revision

Posted on November 23, 2014 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. —Buddhist saying

The sunset tonight–a moment of quiet beauty that reminded me why I write: to witness to this life, and the community of this blessed planet.

#amwriting (Take Seven or is it Eight?): I’m back to work revising Bless the Birds. Again. And I have no one to blame but me.

When I emailed my agent last Monday to hear her take on my brand-new mission/vision statement, and to find out whether she would lose patience with me if I made one more pass through the manuscript with that new understanding of why I write in mind, she responded immediately,

“This is exactly the right approach… Take the time to expand the vision and the appeal [of the memoir].”

“I don’t think I’m talking about a huge revision,” I replied. “I should have it back to you in a couple of weeks.”

Bless the Birds, a pile of pages on my desk….

As I wrote those words, I had a funny feeling that perhaps I shouldn’t be so sure. Still, I could already “hear” some of the changes I needed to make, so I plunged back into revising.

Monday I worked through Chapters One and Two, and that felt good.

Sitting on the couch that night, I began to score one of the handful of memoirs I’m reading as part of judging for a national memoir award. I thought the book was really well-written and insightful but…

It took me while to articulate what didn’t feel right. The author had a real gift for language, the characters were vivid and realistic, and the story itself was compelling, except… there were sections I found myself skimming because they contained detail that didn’t interest me.

It seemed to me that those sections didn’t illuminate the story, or move it forward; the details got in its way. They overwhelmed the reflections that make memoir more than just the story of the author’s life.

That’s when I had my Aha! moment about Bless the Birds.

The story isn’t just about Richard’s and my journey with his brain cancer; it’s about our relationship, the choices that we made through the decades that formed us into people who could live that journey with love, even when—no, especially when we knew he would die.

Molly, Richard and me at our apartment in Boulder, Colorado, in about 1989

Those choices and that story of growing a relationship that could thrive through the most terrible and beautiful journey we humans take—accompanying a loved one to their death—are the universal theme in this memoir, the visionary part.

What’s limiting Bless the Birds, making it likely to be pigeonholed as “just” a medical/health memoir isn’t the writing, it’s my concept of what the story is about. I need to write out of the box I wrote the story into.

Which means cutting some of the medical/health journey, the detail that could overwhelm the reflection that is the true heart of the story. And adding history that explains how Richard and I came to be who we are and to live the way we did.

So now I’m back to sculpting narrative, to the everyday work of chopping wood and hauling water.

Me, Molly, and Richard on the front porch of the duplex with Perdida, 1997

I’m listening to my memories, looking at photos and reading journals to find moments from our nearly 29 years together that illustrate how we nurtured our initial love-at-first-sight into a relationship that allowed us to live as well as humanly possible through Richard’s journey with brain cancer. And to part with love.

It’s hard work, but It feels right. It will take longer than I confidently predicted and that’s okay. The story is growing stronger and deeper, reaching toward universal.

As the late Bill Kloefkorn, State Poet of Nebraska said about poetry, memoir is “words on a page, nibbling at something vast.”

In this new revision of Bless the Birds, I’m aiming for more than a nibble.

A bronze temple bell I hung near the wreath on Creek House where I hear the wind in the bell's deep voice.

The bronze temple bell hanging on the front wall of Creek House that gives voice to the wind.

Yellow pear tomatoes, round red stupice, and oblong Pompeii romas, all from plants I grew with my own hands, thanks to Renee's Garden Seeds.

Local Food & Author Platform

Posted on November 16, 2014 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

Yellow pear tomatoes, round red Stupice, and oblong Pompeii romas, all from plants I grew with my own hands, thanks to Renee’s Garden Seeds.

It’s 21 degrees F outside and the mercury is falling fast, stars are pricking the evening sky, and I’m snug on my couch, sipping local whiskey, nibbling bite-sized tomatoes from my summer garden, and thinking about my author platform.

What is “author platform,” and what does it have to do with local food?

Platform is what a writer brings to selling a book in addition to her writing. It’s your expertise in your subject (which mostly applies to non-fiction), your following on social media and your blog; plus your contacts, personality, previously published work, and your message. It is also who you are and how you live.

These days, great writing isn’t enough. Writing is a business, and the truth is, we’re selling a bit of ourselves along with our books.

Hence platform, which is basically the foundation a publisher uses to help sell your books.

Local drinks: Tenderfoot Whiskey, from two blocks away, in a hand-blown glass from Gallery 150, two store-fronts from Woods.

Local drinks: Tenderfoot Whiskey, from two blocks away, in a hand-blown glass from Gallery 150, in the same block.

Okay, but why am I sitting on the couch on Sunday evening sipping local whiskey (thank you PT Woods!), snacking on tomatoes harvested a month ago before a hard frost (I took in 15.35 pounds of tomatoes from three plants), and thinking about author platform?

The whiskey is because it’s a cold night; the tomatoes are because their touch of sweetness reminds me of summer on my deck where they grew. (I rarely drink–with me, a little goes a long way–but I do love to sip a finger of good, neat whiskey now and again to clear my thoughts.)

The platform thinking is because I sent Bless the Birds, my memoir-in-progress, to my agent three weeks ago; she read it promptly and loved it. (“Beautifully written, clear in its direction, very strong in description…. Congratulations, you have written the book this story was meant to be.”)

Bless the Birds, a pile of pages on my desk….

She also said that the market for “health memoirs” is soft, not a good thing in the midst of the confusion that is publishing these days.

So I’ve been thinking about platform in the sense of what my message is, with this new memoir as well as my twelve previous books and all of my other writing. I’ve always resisted the idea of distilling my mission into a few words.

(I really hate being pigeon-holed. Put me in a box and I’ll have broken out in no time flat. That could be claustrophobia, which I confess to, or it could be sheer cussed stubbornness, which I have to own as well.)

It occurs to me though that articulating my mission would help, not just in selling this new memoir, in seeing whether the story articulates that mission clearly enough to be so visionary that it breaks out of that “health memoir” box.

The storyline that drives the narrative in Bless the Birds is the two-plus years Richard and I spent figuring out how to live well with his brain cancer. That’s health and memoir.

But is it “just” a health memoir? There’s the question. If I’ve done my job well, it’s more than that. Not that cancer, living mindfully and death aren’t universal themes. But….

Which brings me to back platform and local food.

Dinner was local too: Moroccan meatball soup from Ploughboy Local Market, featuring Colorado-grown ingredients. (And a recipe inspired by my neighbors.)

Dinner tonight: Moroccan meatball soup from Ploughboy Local Market, featuring Colorado-grown ingredients. (And a recipe from my neighbors.)

I eat local food to support my community (dollars spent close to home have a greater “multiplier effect” than dollars that go to some distant corporate headquarters and return diminished by the many hands they’ve passed through). And because local food is more likely to be grown with care for the community of the land as well.

Nurturing my local community—including that of the land that nourishes all of us—is part of living my mission and platform. Which I now see as this:

Reconnecting humans to nature to restore us to our best selves and fullest lives—healthy in body, mind and spirit—and also to nurture this Earth, the home of our hearts.

Now to make sure I’ve articulated that message in the story. That’s the visionary part.

The sunset tonight when I started writing this blog post reminded me of the way we often begin a piece, tentatively, scribbling.

#amwriting… every day

Posted on October 6, 2014 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

The sunset tonight when I started writing this blog post–a scribbled beginning.

As any social-media-literate type knows better than I do, #amwriting is a Twitter identifier used to proclaim when you’re engaged in the crazy-making, compelling and most-often solitary pursuit of laying down words in a creative way (usually on a long project).

I think I’ve used the hashtag maybe twice over the past several years, even though I #amwriting every morning, starting at about six am when I get up. I grab my laptop and go back to bed, prop my back up against several pillows and write for an hour.

I don’t tweet that I #amwriting then because it’s my journal work, and the point of doing it so early is that no one knows I’m up, so I can write without interruption.

Then I compose a haiku to go with that day’s photo as my daily awareness and gratitude practice. I post the pair on Facebook and Twitter, but I never use the hashtag then either because it’s “just” haiku (which, if you’ve never tried it, is quite challenging), not a longer creative piece.

Pretty soon, the sunset got down to business with some strong themes….

After which I get ready for the rest of my day, which usually means writing. But not always the creative work implied in the hashtag #amwriting.

For most of the last two-and-a-half years though, #amwriting has filled my days. I’ve been working on one of most grueling projects of my writing life, my new memoir, which I call Bless the Birds.

I haven’t tweeted about the time I’ve spent on BtB because once I am (writing), I get absorbed. And because it’s taking me this side of forever to get the story right, and who cares that I’m working on version six of the same bloody memoir I have been working on since early 2012.

But yes, I #amwriting. In the last five months I’ve gone through two major revisions of the story, working steadily from nine o’clock to three o’clock (or later) every weekday, and squeezing the work I get paid for into the evenings and weekends.

(It’s true, pretty much all I do is work, most of which is writing. Plus gardening and restoration landscaping.)

Right now, this memoir, the work I #amwriting, is what grips me. And I just. want. to. get. it. done. Or at least done enough that it’s off my desk for a while.

Working on it is like peeling my skin off with a dull knife—digging deeper and deeper until the essence of me and the story are exposed.

And then bumped up the drama…

As I’ve said before, to write memoir well, you have to not only relive the period you’re writing about, you have to immerse yourself so fully that you know viscerally what about your story matters to anyone else, including those readers who will never experience what you have.

You have to answer the “why care” question so compellingly that even if your readers would never want to read about what you know, they cannot put the story down. It grabs them by the throat and growls, it enchants them with a siren’s song, it sets them to laughing so hard they read with their legs crossed; it leaves them understanding what they did not know they needed to know before they began reading.

Answering that “why care” question is what I’ve been doing in these last two revisions. So yeah, I #amwriting. And rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.

If all goes well, Bless the Birds will head off to my agent late this week. After which, for the first time in years, I won’t be writing every day. But not for long. Because #amwriting is a natural state of being for me.

At the end, the moon rose.

Writing out of my comfort zone

Posted on June 8, 2014 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

My last book, a memoir

I think of myself as a reflective writer, someone who is at her best in the overlap between personal essay and memoir. I am not a journalist, as I learned decades ago during an internship at High Country News. My temperament leans more toward listening and sympathizing than asking hard-nosed questions.

I usually eschew political subjects because I detest our current mode of “discourse.” It so rarely involves thoughtful articulation, reflection or careful listening.

Richard Cabe sitting outside the VA Hospital in Denver with Molly, after being treated for catastropic brain-swelling.

Richard Cabe sitting outside the VA Hospital in Denver with Molly, after being treated for life-threatening brain-swelling.

When the scandal broke about the secret wait lists at the Veteran’s Administration hospital in Phoenix, I read the first few articles. I happen to have quite a bit of experience with VA healthcare because of the guy in the photo above. After reading, I went back to work revising my new memoir.

Not my issue, I said firmly to myself.

As the reporting took on a more sensational tone and the comments grew more vitriolic, I became more uncomfortable.

I recognize that the bureaucracy administering the VA healthcare system needs fixing.

Richard in the surgical ICU at the VA the day after brain surgery number three.

But the VA I know from Richard’s two-plus-year journey with brain cancer is not the bureaucracy; it’s the dozens of skilled, compassionate, and dedicated care-givers who worked with my love through four brain surgeries, one emergency brain-drain procedure, six hospitalizations, a course of radiation and adjuvant chemo, and two courses of chemo by itself, one requiring monthly half-day infusions, and finally, palliative care.

In all the appointments, procedures, hospitalizations, consults and other interactions, the people at the VA were invariably respectful and knowledgeable. They listened, asked questions, and checked to see how we were at each step along the way. In short, they cared.

I thought about how hard the VA-bashing must be for all who gave the man I love such outstanding care. These people–the real VA–don’t deserve to be vilified. They deserve our thanks for caring for 8 million veterans in hundreds of hospitals and clinics nationwide on a budget that is too small for the job.

Richard the week before brain surgery number four, six months before he died.

So last Monday, I wrote a commentary about the issue. I read the first version out loud, blew my nose and mopped my eyes, rewrote, blew my nose again, read aloud through tears again, cut out another hundred words, and finally ended up with about 550 words of what I hoped was concise, clear, and thoughtful essay.

Then my doubts returned: Do I really want to wade into this ugliness?

I went outside and watered the pots of flowers and edibles on my front deck. I looked at the peaks rising over town, the view Richard admired every day, even when admiring it meant I had to power up his hospital bed to raise his head and rotate the bed to face the sliding glass door.

I really do. I came inside and wrote a careful email to Barb Ellis, the editor I had worked with when I was a Colorado Voices columnist at the Denver Post. I read the email, edited it, attached the file with the commentary and hit “send.”

Then I worried about what I’d gotten myself into.

On Tuesday afternoon, Barb wrote back to say she loved the commentary and would try to find a place for it.

Wednesday she emailed with a couple of questions. I clarified one fact and added a sentence to another place.

“Do you have a photo of Richard we could use with the commentary if we have space?” she asked later. I picked one of my favorites and emailed it.

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

Richard Cabe, 1950-2011, with one of his beloved “ambassadors of the earth.”

This morning over breakfast when I opened the Sunday Denver Post, there was my commentary on the front page of the Opinion section, with Richard’s face smiling out at me. I read my own words through tears.

Thank you, Barb Ellis. And thanks to all those who have responded with appreciation. You remind me that compassion and thoughtfulness matter.

I’ll write out of my comfort zone more often.

Bless the Birds update

Posted on March 2, 2014 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

Whoever said writing is 90 percent revising had it right.

That’s where I am with Bless the Birds. Revising. Oddly, I don’t mind it. It’s not easy, but I find each pass through the story satisfying. As I dig deeper and refine, I learn more too.

My revising pen is one of Richard’s, appropriate for a memoir about our final journey together.

Why am I revising? Because the story needs to grow more reflective and more universally meaningful.

The agent I’m working with read my draft and had thoughtful and positive comments. She admires the love story, the respect it shows between Richard and I, the science, and the connection with nature that was such a renewing force for us as we walked with his brain cancer.

What it’s missing, she said, is harder to articulate. I’m paraphrasing, but it’s basically the why-we-should-care-about-this-particular story.

Richard and Susan in the Tularosa Basin of Southern New Mexico, around 1992.

Yeah, it’s full of love and respect, and tender treatment of an “incurably unsolvable” crisis that ended a life. Yeah, it’s beautifully written and evocative.

But what I learned along the way needs strengthening. That’s what memoir is all about: a reflection on a life story and what can be learned from it–not just for me, but for every reader.

So I’m going back and strengthening that reflective voice. As my agent said, “With memoir, we play with time.” Meaning we can talk about what we’ve learned as the story unfolds, even though we may not have recognized the learnings until later.

We turn the mirror on our experience in a way that readers can see how it applies to their lives too. For instance, we come right out and say,

Seeing my love in the hospital was deeply unnerving, disturbing balances I built my life on. In close relationships, we make unconscious adjustments to accommodate each others’ strengths and weaknesses. As a friend put it, “We are each others’ other half.” Part of Richard’s half, although I had never thought of it this way before, was protecting me, allowing me to think of myself as strong and independent. I had been once. I thought of myself that way still.

But was I?

At the very least, I was out of practice handling everything myself. Richard and I had things divided up so well that we didn’t even think about who did what. He was always there to take over what he did best–think incisively, understand the details, lift heavy things, shepherd us when I was tired, design and build, carry the half I couldn’t. Our “we” worked smoothly because there were two of us to deal with everything. Could I manage on my own? Sitting beside his bed, I wasn’t sure. And I didn’t particularly want to find out.

Oh, and I need to revise without making the memoir longer. Which means I’ve got to find and cut words, sentences and paragraphs that don’t make the story strong.

Holding hands even at the end….

Not an easy task. But very, very satisfying as the story gains depth and authenticity. As the main characters become more real, more vulnerable and complex, more fully human.

That authenticity, that finding the inner truths is what makes writing matter. Because it makes readers care.

****

Casper, Wyoming, workshop with Lauren Springer Ogden (and me!)

For the next six weeks because I’m going to be on the road a lot, teaching wildscaping workshops for the Habitat Hero project. If you’re in Colorado or Wyoming, check my calendar and sign up to learn how your garden can nurture songbirds and pollinators, and help us restore earth one landscape at a time.

wind clangs rusty tin/ winter seeps into abandoned house/ dust dances

Writing Practice: Why I Haiku

Posted on January 26, 2014 | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment

wind clangs rusty tin/ winter sneaks into abandoned house/ dust dances

Every morning, I write a haiku and post it on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest too, along with a companion photo.

I’m no poet. I’m a long-form creative nonfiction writer–as attested by twelve books and hundreds of newspaper columns and magazine articles.

So why haiku?

It started the year Richard and I commuted to his folks’ house in Arkansas once a month to help with his Dad’s hospice care. A thousand mile-drive each way across the Southern Plains through landscapes of such wide horizons that it seems like there’s nothing happening.

Unless you pay close attention.

ivory explosion
prairie blazingstar opens
afternoon departs

Which is the point of haiku. To witness the now, to distill the moment.

Too, when you’re driving for miles and hours, haiku are short enough to write and revise in memory without forgetting the words. Yes, of course, I could have recorded my thoughts with my smartphone, but….

I really don’t love the sound of my voice that much. If I can’t remember my thoughts, they’re probably not worth saving.

So I started writing haiku in my head. And once I thought they were not horrible, I began writing them down.

teenage crows/ hurl caws at winter-blue sky–/ stomachs grumbling

Why write haiku every day? First, the practice. Practice in slowing the rush of life enough to notice something haiku-worthy. And practice in picking just exactly the right words to capture that something.

Second, Twitter. Really.

A publisher pressed me to develop a “platform” on Facebook and Twitter as part of growing my audience.

I was skeptical. Thinking in sound-bites is not something I particularly appreciate. What could I say in 140 characters that would be useful?

Finally it hit me: haiku.

A form of three-line poetry that originated in Japan centuries ago as a kind of introduction or epigraph to a longer piece, haiku’s syllable limit makes it ideal for Tweeting and posting on Facebook.

(This book by Penny Harter, an extraordinary poet who just happens to be my friend, and her late husband, Bill Higginson, is an excellent guide to haiku.)

earth’s shoulder turns/ revealing round cheddar moon / trees exhale

Haiku are actually much more complex than the ultra-short form indicates. These simple guidelines convey the spirit of the form:

The whole poem runs seventeen or fewer syllables, and is usually broken into a short/long/short format, meaning a short first line, longer second line, and a short third line.

Line breaks aren’t forced: If the poem needs to be 2/8/5 or 4/6/3, that’s fine. The breaks serve as punctuation or natural pauses in the “thought” of the haiku.

Haiku focuses on a moment; grows from nature, references the time of year and often the place (perhaps only with one word); eschews metaphor, and includes a “turn” or surprise. That may seem like too much to fit into so few syllables, but with practice, a haiku can say a lot.

waves of spring wind—/ whoosh, hiss, rattle, crash, bang!/ iris blooms unfazed

Posting a daily haiku is not just idle digital chatter. It uses the virtual world of social networking to encourage awareness of the very real earth where we live, emphasizing the fleeting nature of any given moment.

It’s like sending out an electronic locator beacon broadcasting a signal of awareness: This is where I am, this is what I feel, this is what is happening now at this particular moment in time, here on Earth.

It’s a way to use the digital universe of Twitter and Facebook to foster appreciation and understanding of the living Earth that is our home, our refuge, our place of nourishment and renewal.

It’s a way to see life through new eyes. And a way to write even when you don’t “have time.”

Try it. Haiku is very much worth practicing. Every day.

Venus pierces/ deep blue evening sky/ steeples point in awe