Day 9 & 10: Third and Steve Almond

Hey everybody! The two chapters that I am covering today (to get caught up from my lil vacation to southern Missouri) are called Third and Steve Almond.

Third, talks about how we gaze at something along with our writing. As Natalie Goldberg says, "There is you and there is writing. But you can't write about writing... You and writing must gaze out at a third thing."

She goes on to give an example about how this works in relationships with couples; you can't always be starring at each other face to face. There has to be something else that you are gazing at that draws you together, "Not face to face, but side to side." Ms. Goldberg points to a memoir called The Best Day and Worst Day by Donald Hall about his marriage to Jane Kenyon and all the things that they had together; poetry, ping pong, church, friends, friends children, traveling, gardening and the shared pleasure of the New England country side...

In Steve Almond, Goldberg writes how we don't start memoirs usually from the day that we are born right up to the present moment. We are usually telling about something in ourselves at a certain time, at a certain place, going through certain events. You don't write a book saying, "I'll tell you everything about myself and you will love it."

Goldberg states that you have to find the thing, the "rough elbow of our mind" that can be revealed.

Example? Steve Almond.

Steve Almond is a "serious author" with several short stories underneath his belt and two books out about his experiences, My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow and other stories. He has also written in several publications and teaches at Boston College on a creative writing course.

But it wasn't until he wrote about a passion in his life, in, Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America that people started to perk their ears up about him.

And what did he write about you may ask? Candy. He wrote about his relationship with candy and how it made him feel and the stories that he has to share that give a significant emotional attachment to candy. So much so, that when he left Poland to go back to America, his ex-lover left a few of his favorite chocolate bars to remind him of, "the taste of our doomed enterprise."

As Goldberg summerizes for us, "Candy illuminated his pain that he'd been trying to share all along."

What does this all come out too? That no matter what subject we write about, "anything a writer is drawn too and looks into deeply, reveals himself."

So without further ado...

Third

What is you third thing? Yes it can be your memories. Go, for ten minutes.

What is my third thing? What is the thing that I look out unto along with my writing? What is the thing that I gaze at?

It would have to be God.

How many times I have cried tears and He has come to consul my spirit, how many times I have filled page after page with words of love that I have for Him.

How many times has He come through for me, how He has directed my steps, watched my path, put me in good places where the boundaries of my life have fallen in pleasant places.

How man times has He come in the middle of the night how many times He has waited for me to be with Him.

How long has He waited to tell me who I am...

There are many things that I could look @, there are many things that could capture my heart and my eye.

There are many times I have gazed and pondered and noticed the beauty of seemingly mundane things: looking at the reflections of light on a white, bare wall, looking at the depth of blue on a Colorado sky, being so captured by stars in the night that I had to pull off the side of a highway just to gaze at these lights.

But what are these things without eyes to see? And what is beauty if not a purpose behind it... rather than a random creation of atom, thought and burning gas miles and miles away.

I am caught up in my creator's eye, and my gaze can find no greater form than the purpose behind the beauty that my, Father of lights, is.

Steve Almond

What do you think your passions are? Don't think. Make a list.

Now write for ten minutes, keep the hand going, what are your obsessions? Go.

Tell me this: what's the difference between passion and obsession? Would you rather have an obsession or a passion?

Passions:

• Travel,
• Writing,
• Drawing,
• Thinking,
• Eating,
• Drinking,
• Fellowshiping,
• Tasting,
• Seeing,
• Listening,
• Creating,
• Dreaming,
• Riding,
• Flying,
• Reading,
• Imagining,
• Daring,
• Dueling.

Obsessions:

Video Games; being lost in an imaginary place hour upon hour.

Hulu; mindless entertainment that causes one to kick back and do nothing... but also think and produce nothing.

Self-Identifying; the arduous process of continually trying to identify who you are countless: through what you do, through what other's say, through who you are around, through other methods, but, each one seeming to throw you farther off the scent of where you began.

People; always having to be around someone, although all well and good, but @ what cost of our privacy do we give up to be included and 'completed', supported and cared for by others around us.

Silence; when I'm upset, when I'm unsure, when I don't seem to know wheat the answer is or where it lies. Silence comes upon me, and the inner thoughts spin and spin and spin till all my head is filled with conversations and events that have not taken place, but in the confines of my mind.

There is a place for silence, but if what you are known for if your silence, your robbing the world of the gift that is your thoughts, words and voice.

Journeys; always wanting to be somewhere, always wanting to go somewhere.

Again, not all bad, but when a passion becomes an obsession, it comes out of balance and pulls you down rather then lifting you up, lifting not just you spirit, soul and body but the other that you take along with you.

I choose passion.

Well, that's it for today folks. Tomorrows topics? Nuts and Grade

See you guys there!

-Eric Alan

Note: New moleskin journal! Love the look and potential of an empty journal... it's just filled with so many promises :)