The Labyrinth as Metaphor for the Writing Life

The other night, I walked a labyrinth lit only by candles. If you want my thoughts on this experience as spiritual metaphor, go here (if you want to read the Miami Herald story, go here). But as I was writing that post, I thought of how much the labyrinth also works as a metaphor for the writing life.

A labyrinth is not a maze. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth has one way in and one way back out. All you need to do is follow the path.

Do you look at your creative life as a maze or as a labyrinth?

In some ways, the idea of a labyrinth doesn't work as a metaphor, if we think about it in terms of publication and acclaim. The lust for publication and acclaim is more like a maze. We might follow the path ahead of us and find ourselves coming to dead ends, in a maze, with manuscripts that we can't publish, canvases that no one wants to show or buy, work that interests no one.

Some artists are led astray by the expectations of the world. They try to produce work with an eye to the market, and even then, they find themselves stymied.

On Friday, I walked a labyrinth lit only by candles, outside, several hours after sunset. It was dark, dark, dark. I understood the basic shape of the labyrinth, but still, I couldn't anticipate the twists and turns. I could only follow the flickering light, put one foot in front of another, and trust that the path would take me where I was supposed to go.

Lately, my writer's life feels like that experience of following a candlelit path. When I was younger, I had it all mapped out. I'd get this degree, that teaching job, produce that kind of work, get this publication by that age, that publication by the next age, boom, boom, boom. Then I'd die and graduate students would study my work, and they'd discover I fit into the canon this way and was ahead of my time in that way.

Now that I am older, I look back over my creative life, and I'm amazed at the twists it has taken, the directions it has gone, in ways that my younger self couldn't have anticipated and couldn't have planned for.

In 1983, when I went off to college, it didn't seem impossible that one could support oneself by one's creative efforts. Now, as the traditional publishing industry seems in danger of complete collapse, one would be crazy not to make a back up plan.

Of course, that's only important if we ignore all the other ways that our work can make it into the world. The Internet offers us many options, as does powerful computing, that an artist in 1983 wouldn't have had.

But perhaps we lose our way when we focus on what happens to the work once we've created it. Perhaps we should focus on the creation more than we do.

As I walked the labyrinth at night, I peered off into the distance, trying to remember the shape. I'd almost trip, and I'd remind myself to focus on the task at hand. As long as I focused on the candles and the path before me, I was OK. It was that incessant grasping for information that wasn't available that made me anxious.

Often, when I'm writing a poem, I'm not even done with the poem before I start trying to figure out how I'm going to revise it, how it will fit with my larger body of work, which journal might be interested, which manuscript I can integrate it into most easily.

Why can't I just be present with my poem, delight in it as it emerges?

It's a pressing question for many of us in many aspects of our lives. If we just lived in the present moment, we'd be much happier. Ah, if only I could live as Zen Kristin all the time.

Writing about this reminds me of a poem, "Golden Retrievals," by Mark Doty. I love the idea of the dog's idea of time, that the dog lives in the current moment in a way that humans cannot.

The labyrinth, too, reminds us to live in the present. The experience of walking it reminds us that we'll get to where we need to go, if we just walk step by step. It's a great metaphor for our creative lives, and for life in general.

The Mayhem Poets

On Thursday night, I went to see the Mayhem Poets at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. What a treat! And because I went with a group from my school, we got a reduced rate. When I was young, in grad school, I always assumed that I'd teach English in a small, liberal arts college, where we'd have fascinating people and groups coming to visit. If we can't have that, going places to see fascinating people and groups is the next best thing (and it's a treat to live in a location where fascinating people and groups come through).

The Mayhem Poets consists of three poets (young, male, hip hop vibe) with an additional guy playing the flute while also creating a percussive beat with his body (foot stamps, mouth noises, that kind of thing). They created amazing rhymes, amazing sounds, amazing theatre.

It's the kind of night that made me think, I'm not challenging myself enough. I don't memorize my poems. I don't write them with an eye to performing them. My poems are fairly short--if I performed them, they'd take all of about 30 seconds.

My rational mind says, "Wait a minute. I'm working in a different area of poetry. And there's space in the world for both of us. We don't all have to be performance poets who go to slam competitions."

And I have a regular job. I have family commitments. I can't travel the country, sleeping on sofas, slamming my way through the poetry circuit.

And frankly, I wouldn't want to. When my chapbook first came out, I set up some poetry readings and some workshops, while continuing to teach. Only a few of my readings required travel. And yet, after that spring of poetry promotion, I found myself exhausted. I can't imagine keeping the schedule that the Mayhem Poets do.

I'm immensely grateful for people like them who can do it. It's a missionary calling, of sorts. They go out and generate enthusiasm for poetry. People who like one kind of poetry are more likely to fall in love with other kinds of poetry. The important thing is to ignite that passion. Thanks to people like the Mayhem Poets, who set the auditorium on fire.

The Big Read List

I couldn't resist playing with this list. And I couldn't resist commenting.

Here are the rules (I first found this list in the form of this game here; I first saw the list some time ago, before I was blogging).

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you intend to read.

3) Reprint this list and leave a comment

And here's what I'm doing too, because I'm interested--I'm listing the books I had as required reading in high school, college, or grad school. I'm a bit startled at how many of these books I would likely not have read, if I hadn't been in school. There are only a few on the list which I read in the last 10 years. Hmm.

And interesting to see how few of these books I plan to read. It would be fun to create alternate lists. Some other day--I've already spent lots of time on this list



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

I read this in high school, when I increased my reading, for fear of being unprepared for college

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

I read about 50 pages--not my thing

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

I first attempted this when I was 12, and couldn't get very far. But I loved it in high school, in college, in grad school, when I taught it. I love the main character. I love her commitment to herself.

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

I feel like I've read this.

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

I read this in high school and undergraduate school. I recently reread it--it holds up well.

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

I loved this in college and grad school; when I taught it in 2001 and 2002, I found myself losing patience with all the characters.

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

read in high school and grad school--if I reread it now, would it seem that these things we've feared have come true? Big Brother is watching--all sorts of big brothers.

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

The first book that made me cry--I read this on a family trip west. I wept through the Rockies as Beth died.

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

I don't remember all the works. But as I look at my anthology from undergraduate school, I see notes that I made in the margins of all the plays. Did I read them all or just take notes as my professor pontificated?

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

The only Tolkien I've ever been able to read.

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

I read this in grad school, and required my students to read it in a Victorian Lit class. It's a slog, but after the first 100 pages, I couldn't put it down (only about a quarter of the class I taught agreed with me).

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

I read this as a teenager, expecting a dirty book because it had been banned--but I found it tame, compared to the bodice ripper romances I was reading.

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

required in college and high school.

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

I've only completed it once (attempted at least twice before I finally finished it--it showed up on a lot of grad school syllabi). I recognize the brilliance of this novel, but my goodness, it's long and involved.

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

Ah, the Russians--the huge gaping hole in my education. I must read them some day. But first on my list would be Anna Karenina.

25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

I read this in high school. My whole class came to English class unprepared, with the book unread. My English teacher told us to start reading, because we'd have a test the next day. I read the whole book in one day.

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahme

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis

Why repeat this book, when it's included in #33?

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

I read half this book and wasn't impressed.

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

Such a perfect book. I may reread this soon. The Sunday School pageant chapter is perfect for this time of year.

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

I read this book periodically--ever since its publication, it's always seemed pressingly important, as a tale of what can go wrong, if we're not vigilant. Atwood said that she didn't put anything in the book that wasn't happening somewhere in the world, and unfortunately, she can still say that.

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

I read half this book before losing patience.

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

Ah, the books we read during our Sci Fi geeky phase

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

I read this one after seeing the 1995 movie; I think it's her best (although Northanger Abbey is great fun, if you've been reading Gothic novels and you're in the mood for a satire of them).

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

Not as bleak as her memoir, Lucky

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

required reading in high school. We all complained bitterly, except for a punk rock guy, who claimed it was the best book he'd ever read. And he had read a lot of books.

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

required in grad school. My favorite Dickens (except, maybe for Hard Times)

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

I read part of this book, but it's no Frankenstein, which is curiously absent from this list.

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

I've read this several times since my grad school class, but not since I finished my M.A. thesis, which focused on Joyce.

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

required for grad school--blhhh

80 Possession - AS Byatt

I read this during the summer when I was fairly strict with my reading--I was studying for PhD Comprehensive exams, and I had told myself that I could only read the books that would fill in the gaps in my knowledge. But I allowed myself this one for a treat. I'm in awe of what Byatt was able to do. When my own Vic Lit students were reading it on their own, and raving about it, I envied them their experience of reading it for the first time.

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

I will always love Alice Walker's essays best, but this book led me to those essays, so I'll always be grateful.

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I've read some of these tales--could I have read them all?

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

I read this in grad school and again, as I've taught it--it's short, so Survey of Brit Lit students might read it--and it seems to sum up much of the 20th century, even though it was written early in the century--and the 19th.

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

I read this while desperately homesick at summer camp. My mom had slipped it in my suitcase. I was only away for a week, but it seemed like the longest week of my 8 year old life. This book helped me through.

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

I read this book in high school (but it wasn't required)--it's the first book that sensitized me to animal rights issues.

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Why does this one get a separate entry? It's included in the complete works! I hate this play--so much dithering about, and so little action. I suspect it's because I have had so many Hamlets in my life.

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

More Thinking about Strange Symbols and Nativity Scenes

I thought I'd write more about nativity scenes and strange symbols.

I've had nativity scenes on the brain, since they start to appear right now, and they often inspire controversy: do we allow them in civic spaces? Do we include the baby Jesus before Christmas? Do we allow children to be creative with them?

Through the years, I've heard of unusual additions to home nativity scenes, and I decided to combine all the possibilities I could think of into one poem, which I included in yesterday's post.

My current nativity scene has lost some key figures through the years. We've managed to keep track of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, probably because they're glued into the stable. We're down to one shepherd and a camel--no wise men to go with the camel, no angels in sight. That's probably a poem right there!

We do have a plastic, purple monkey that our friend John put in the nativity scene years ago. It's a tiny, flat monkey with a scooped hand that came from a game where you try to pick up other plastic monkeys to make a chain. I know that some people might see it as disrespectful (and they shouldn't read the poem from yesterday's post!), but now, most of my decorations have some memory of beloved friends and families attached to them, and I like decorating and remembering.

Plus, I think that if the Gospels teach us anything, it's that God will be found in the most unlikely places and attract all sorts of attention. People will follow who you would never expect to find in the company of God. That purple, plastic monkey can be a symbol of the tax collectors/prostitutes/social outcasts that Jesus invited to dinner.

The Strip Bar has been Transformed into a Starbucks!

One of the things that I love about a long car trip is that ideas often bubble up. Of course, I often don't write them down, but I like to think they'll come back to me. I also like seeing different landscapes to the ones that I usually see on a daily basis. And of course, when travelling a road that I've spent some time on, it's interesting to see what's changed.

I've been driving up and down I 95 for much of my adult life. Some time in the mid 90's (I think), an enterprising soul began to open strip bars. The billboards would begin about 50 miles before the exit, enticing people to come in search of good food and pretty women. I loved the sections of highway where the stripper billboards competed with the South of the Border billboards--and I was always glad I didn't have children in the car who would ask interesting questions.

Last week, as I travelled north, I noticed that one of those strip bars has been changed into a Starbucks. My first impulse was to cheer. I've always wondered why Starbucks doesn't build some of their gazillion stores close to Interstate exits.

Then I wondered if there was some symbol lurking in the landscape--something useful for a poem. I tried, and so did my spouse, but all we could do was to create potential country songs. Lots of wordplay with latte and the like. I could also see a punkish country song, something the Violent Femmes might have sung in the 1980's. But no poems, as of yet.

If you're in need of a poetic symbol, or a writing prompt, feel free to use this one!

A Poem to Get You in the Christmas Decorating Mode

As we've been decorating the house for Christmas, I've been thinking about how many poems this season has inspired. Here's a poem from my chapbook, to get you in the decorating mood, be it an irreverent mood or a more solemn occasion.

Nativity Scene


Through the years, the stable attracted
the odds and ends of our childhood toys:
a plastic soldier, his rifle chewed and mangled,
migrated from the war zone;
a horse, which once helped herd
plastic animals, now riderless and alone;
a Magic 8 ball with murky
water, the answers to our questions, obscured;
a nutcracker dressed in festive finery, but missing
its lower jaw, its mission in life undone;
lonely Barbie, hair shorn from too many experiments,
now loveless and forlorn;
a matchbox car, once prized, now missing
a wheel and limping along;
a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle doll with other refugees
from popular shows of past years;
a gingerbread boy gamepiece, knowing he belongs elsewhere,
neglecting his duties in Candyland, so compelling
is the baby in the manger.

Getting Back to the Blog

For the past week, I've been away from the computer. We don't have a reliable lap top, and even if we did, we were away in the NC mountains, and finding a WiFi spot would have been a hassle. Besides, I traveled almost a thousand miles to be with my family, not to stare at a computer screen. It's astonishing to realize how much of my life now revolves around that computer screen, both in my free time and my work.

Still, I've been enjoying my new experiments in cyberspace--2 blogs created and a website, all in the month of November--no wonder my brain feels like it may explode. It felt strange to drop out of all that activity for a week.

And now I return to pick up these threads. I used to write novels (but always, I fell apart in the revision and submission to publishers phase). Occasionally, I'd be away from my writing desk, and return to that novel. Trying to pick up the threads of my blog feels like that process--except that my blog is about part of my real life, or so I think. Have I become a character? A character in a work that I'm creating?

How post-modern is all of this? Or did writers and other artists always feel this way? When writing fiction, I was always amused at how many bits and pieces found their way in to my creative work. And blogging is similar--I'm always thinking about my blog, what should go in, what should stay out. I'm always on the lookout for good blog topics.

Still to be determined--will this blogging detract from my other creative efforts?