June Maffin Interview re Soulistry

 Dear Readers and Writers:
June Maffin, author of Soulistry, has given me an interview.  I think you'll find her ideas stimulating!  cheers, Laura Hoopes

LH. You’ve written Soulistry - Artistry of the Soul: Creative Ways to Nurture Your Spirituality recently.  Can you tell us what Soulistry means and something about the book?

JM: *Soulistry* is a neologism and shorthand for artistry-of-the-soul (SOUL and artISTRY).  The Soulistry book contains over eighty inspiring quotations from ordinary and extraordinary human beings of all ages around the world , living in different cultures, along with accompanying Soul-Questions.  Its intent is to encourage readers to recognize and celebrate their inner wisdom, embrace life in new ways, connect/re-connect with the intangible soul-essence of life and deepen their awareness of the presence of the holy around them, regardless of any connection they may/may not have with any form of religion. 

LH: What features of your life led you to write this book?

JM: Words have always fascinated me.  As a young child who stuttered, verbal expression was uncomfortable and difficult, so writing became my way of expression.  I had two books published before Soulistry and was working on two more (a children’s book; a book about euthanasia) when a life-changing diagnosis of mercury poisoning was determined.  Within 48 hours of that diagnosis, my muscles (legs, arms, voice) began to atrophy, leaving me unable to walk more than a few steps or speak above a whisper.  The reading function of my brain ground to a halt and while I could recognize letters of the alphabet, I couldn’t put the letters together to read words for almost a year.

A lifelong love of quotations helped focus my attention on putting sounds with letters.  With a lot of work, I taught myself to read once again using quotations from a variety of sources.  As I read the quotations, questions (Soul-Questions) emerged. I spent time reflecting on my responses and found myself experiencing a gentle spiritual growth.  In a “be still” moment of quiet reflection one morning, the idea for a book began.  Slowly, quotations were selected, Soul-Questions were written and the process of seeking copyright permission for the quotations began. With each step, I experienced my brain regenerating its cells.  Nothing scientific … just an abiding awareness that it was happening. 

It seemed that the more Soul-Questions I wrote for the quotations, the more frequently I incorporated ‘play’ in my life (embellishing wooden framed mirrors, creating marbled art cards, etc.), the more my left-brain activity was increasing.  My soul was being nourished in new ways as the connection between creativity and spirituality was nurtured.

LH  You live in such a beautiful place, Vancouver Island. Have you always lived there?  Has it influenced your spiritual development?  

JM: I’ve lived on the west coast for over forty years and on Vancouver Island for the last twelve years.  Here, I experience an abiding sense of peace that deepens as I pass farmlands, look towards the snow-covered mountains, gently walk along wooded paths surrounded by trees that reach to the sky, and feel the pebbles under my bare feet at the water’s edge. Here, I connect with nature in its simplicity, beauty and grace.  Here, I am aware of myself as human ‘being’ rather than human ‘doing.‘   Here, a life of simplicity, (focusing on ‘kairos’ rather than ‘chronos’) emerges.  And here, a growing holy connectedness to the world, Holy Other, others, myself, is nourished. 

LH:  What or who influenced you to develop your ideas of how spirituality can grow from dealing with our wounds, both physical and emotional?

JM:  Life’s experiences and a deep belief that each day presents choices (as to how I respond or react to those choices) continue to be my teachers.  Life’s wounds have been deep, but over time, spiritual growth has come as I learn and re-learn what it is to be human, to make mistakes, to forgive, to heal.

LH:  When one nurtures spirituality, what changes should be expected in one’s life?

JM:  When my spirituality is nurtured and nourished, the more I am in tune with others, myself, and the world and the more I become aware of beauty, gratitude and joy within myself. 

The more I focus on my breathing (inhaling peace, wholeness, healing; exhaling tension, anger, hurt, negative feelings), the more I become peace-filled and forgiving.  The more I experience time as ‘kairos’ rather than ‘chronos,’ the less “time-pressure” I feel.  The more I play, the more playful I become.  The more I look for beauty, the more beauty I see around and within me.  The more joy I express, the more joy I experience.  The more ways I seek to be creative, the more creative I become.  The more I anticipate a day to be filled with blessing, the more blessings unfold for me. The more I give, the more I receive.

LH: Do you lead workshops or give talks about the subject of your book?

JM: SOULISTRY has been a blessing in so many ways in my life.  It’s become an umbrella for a variety of workshops, retreats, and conference speeches on a variety of topics (e.g. Creative Spirituality Writing; Spirituality of Play; Awakening the Creative Spirit; The Soulistry Story). I am humbled by the invitations to lead retreats, facilitate workshops and speak at conferences on a variety of subjects.  So, in response to this question, yes, I do.  And I love doing them.  :-)

LH: Can you share something about what you mean by “spirituality of play”?

JM: When I play … when I enjoy the fullness of life with its curiosities, frivolities and insensibilities … when I don’t take myself too seriously … when I laugh and delight in life, I allow my spirit to breathe and re-create - spiritual growth results. 

Believing that laughter and play are holy and healing has been a blessing in many difficult times in my life and a spirituality of play has helped me live with absurdity, pain, paradox, sleepless nights, mystery, frustration.  And because a spirituality of play has opened doors (of intuition, vulnerability, child-like joy, healing, spontaneity, flexibility and hope) in my life, it’s not surprising that a spirituality of play finds a home in SOULISTRY - and a home in me.   :-)

LH: Is it particularly hard or easy to write about spirituality? 

JM: Pierre Teillard de Chardin helped me understand that I am not a physical person having a spiritual experience, but rather I am a spiritual person having a physical experience.  To that end, I believe that every thought I think, every thing I experience, every person I meet, and every act I do is a connection with my spirituality.  Writing about spirituality seems to be an extension of who I am and while it can take a lot of time (chronos), it has always been experienced as a time of blessing (kairos) for me.  So ... all things considered, setting aside the time factor, the writing part has been easy.

LH:  What writing habits or helps have you found in your writing practice?

JM: If I’m writing for publication, I tend to get an idea about where I want to go and then let the thoughts/words/sentences flow freely without editing. I leave the writing for a few days and then return to hone it.  I’m not a disciplined writer (e.g. I don’t have specific times or location) when I write.  Rather, I’m a writer who writes responsively and spontaneously to a situation, conversation, thought, image.  I don’t find writing to be ‘work.’  Writing for me is gift, oftentimes healing and always a humbling privilege - not only to write, but to have people who appreciate the words that come forth let me know that the writing "speaks" to them.  Joy comes to me as words become transformed into sentences and paragraphs and in discovering that those words/sentences/paragraphs have made a difference in the lives of *Soulistry* readers, retreatants and workshop participants.

LH: Can you refer us to your blogs or websites for more information?

JM: The primary resource about SOULISTRY would be its website (www.soulistry.com) and Facebook page (www.facebook.com/soulistry).  My personal FB page is www.facebook.com/junemaffin  I’m a book reviewer (www.bookpleasures.com/websitepublisher/authors/394/June-Maffin)  and while I’m on LinkedIn, Google Plus and Twitter, I haven’t become familiar enough with them to use them very much - yet - but I’m working on it. :-)   And of course, there’s always a Google search.  :-)

LH:  Any other thoughts you’d like to share with the readers of West Coast Writers?

JM: Thank you for this invitation to share with your readers, Laura.  I’ve appreciated the opportunity to share something of my love of the written word, my passion for SOULISTRY and the delight I experience in the privilege of encouraging people who are intrigued by the connection between creativity and spirituality.  

Life is full, and I feel blessed in many ways, and connecting with you and other West Coast Writers has been yet one more blessing in my life.  So, thank you for this opportunity.

I wish you much continued success with this wonderful blog, and I look forward to reading about other West Coast writers here and someday, meeting you in person. 

SOULISTRY ... the book, retreats & workshops

... connecting spirituality and creativity in new ways

www.facebook.com/junemaffin   
www.facebook.com/soulistry

www.facebook.com/cyberscribes

www.soulistry.com  

www.bookpleasures.com/websitepublisher/authors/394/June-Maffin 

Interruption of the Rivulet of Small Stones for Long Sentences

Hello friends of reading and writing,

I'll be back with more small stones tomorrow.  Steve Silberman wrote on Twitter about an interview with author, Pico Iyer,  in praise of long sentences.  

Here is a bit of his thinking, "What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances — the "gaps," as Annie Dillard calls them — that don't show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker. "

I think he speaks for a lot of writers, who hope their words resonate in long term memory, instead of passing through on a one-second flight to nowhere.  He goes on to quote some favorite long sentences, none from my own favorite exponent of the art, W.G. Sebald, but one from Annie Dillard that I plan to quote at the end of this posting.

Why not use long sentences?  People do claim they are left breathless, but they should just breathe at the commas!  I do.  Or they say the sentence is unclear.  As Iyer points out, Proust can take us through space and through character changes, all within the same sentence.  There is no rule that a sentence must be self-consistent, thank goodness.  I like to use a long sentence sometimes when my characters are going somewhere in a car, or walking down the hall.  They aren't busy, so I can let the sentence pile up tiny insights they've accumulated and prepare for a change of heart or an outburst of feeling.

It's important to make the sentences clear, though.  If you tend to lose the verb tense or mix up the modifiers, then use adjectival phrases to accumulate thoughts, or you'll make us think you believe that time travels both ways and that trees can think, or some such mishmash.  But consider having fun with long sentences that take us deeper into meaning or confusion, wherever you need us to go.

Here is the promised quotation from Dillard, about a winged maple seed.

"I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world's rondure where they must, but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit which bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down."

Doesn't that sentence take you to a place vis-a-vis maple seeds that you've never been before?  Try long sentences in your own writing!
cheers,
Laura

Small Stone #1 from Laura

Warm air is rising outside my front door, with a grassy smell,  and I see one red and one yellow rose blooming, raised high on the tops of spindly stalks like the statue of liberty's torch.

Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction

This past semester, I had a lovely class from poet/novelist Marilyn Chin.  It's the first class in my MFA program from a woman, and she reveled in being a woman!  I really enjoyed the massive reading list, which she told us was partly for our future reference.  It's fine with me that we couldn't really define what's a prose poem, what's a flash fiction.  We even found out that certain pieces are celebrated and have won awards in both categories.

I was more interested in the poetry half, since it was so different from the kind of writing we practice in the fiction workshops.  Intense images, sensory to the max, steeped in layers of meaning, and highly condensed prose with every word carrying a double dip of meaning, those concepts go with prose poems to me. I think of one centering about an image of a small basket of dead bees, covered over with a thin layer of red rose petals.  Or, a bag of dried human ears, dumped out on the dining room table.  Or a full moon noosed on a black cord, hanging over a house. But not all prose poems have an indelible image, an appeal to senses, power-packed verbiage where every word must have resulted from intense debate in the author's mind.  Some capture a scene with minimal poetic devices, with spare prose with simple beauty or starkness.  I might call them flash fiction, but perhaps there is not enough story line to make them count as stories.  The dividing line is assuredly murky and indistinct.  Our collections of each genre only made it less obvious that the two are distinct, while enticing us to write our way into the mystery.

Sports Comparison per Carlin

Hi readers and writers,
One reason to have children is that they take you into areas of life you might never notice but for them.  In my case, baseball.  I was a Dodgers fan, but not a well-versed, ask-me-anything type.  But my son is a walking sports almanac and now my daughter, the former opera diva, has decided she wants to manage a baseball team some day.  Suddenly the names of those few women in baseball management have become quite familiar to me.  My daughter's boyfriend recently told me about something so entertaining I need to share it with you here.  George Carlin did a great comedy routine comparing baseball and football, largely in terms of their language (see, it IS related to writing after all!).  If you tend to write fast without thinking through the implications of the words you've chosen, this routine will make you resolve to think more about the messages people receive subliminally from your words.  Here is the link.  You may need to copy and paste the URL into your browser.  Enjoy!  http://www.baseball-almanac.com/humor7.shtml
cheers,
Laura

What's beauty got to do with it?

Dear friends of reading and writing,

I just read an article on a man who studies birds in an interdisciplinary way, in the Yale Alumni Magazine (The bird-filled world of Richard Prum by Cathy Shufro).  I'm sure I'll be thinking about this article for a long time.  Near the end of the article, Shufro describes how Prum changed the way people think about bird coloration.  Biologists have explained the bright colors we enjoy as evidence of fitness, so they are supposed to help a female choose a mate with good genes since he's so fit.  Kind of like advertisers think about great arm muscles and abs for human males, it seems to me.  But Prum could not really buy the theory, and harked back to the ideas of Ronald A. Fisher that females choose those bright males just because they are attractive.  People resisted his ideas until he realized it's about beauty and moved into the philosophy of aesthetics.  Feather art, like human art, he theorizes, is a form of communication via beauty and it co-evolves with its evaluation. As females enjoy red throats, they get brighter and bigger.  As humans enjoy irony in art, it gets ever more ironical.  He has no trouble connecting flowers, birds, and consciously made art in the category of Art, since he defines it as this communication with co-evolution by evaluators.  Who evaluates flowers, you ask?  Bees, birds, all the pollinators.  But what they receive is the joy of beauty.  So I think this is a message for writers too.  Writers need to write for themselves, but in the end, their work will rise or fall based on how well it communicates and how the readers respond.
Photo credits (Wikipedia Commons): Cardinal by a Fish and Wildlife Service Employee, Peach-faced lovebird by Stephen W. Dengler, 2005, via Gnu.

Welcome to the Season of Reflection

As the Northeast lies dormant under a Nor'easter storm bringing snow before Hallowe'en, I've started thinking about the quiet season that is beginning, more harshly for some than for others.  It's about to be colder.  The leaves are about to take the wind and pile up in drifts.  The pumpkins are ripe and the butternut squash are full of flavor, but it's hard to find a tomato with that summery taste.  I have started to accumulate books to read over the winter break, and I have some ideas that I want to write about as I extend the bits and pieces of my new novel.  Now that I live in SoCal, it's hard to remember how fierce the wind was in fall in North Carolina, how bitter the cold felt on my neck and how icy the air that I breathed into my lungs on early fall mornings walking to school, how long it took to get ready to go out of the house, with boots, sweater and coat, mittens, scarf, and hat to find and assemble.  I enjoy sipping camomile tea with vanilla and sending my mind back to reflect on those days, so I can use some of that sensory detail in my writing.  And I love having long periods to read and write, instead of snatched, almost stolen bits of time.  So welcome to the time of reflection, or to the anticipation of it.  Fall is here.

Misplaced Earthquake and Typical Hurricane

The East Coast friends and relatives have our sympathy as nature turns vicious there, first delivering an earthquake in Virginia, which propagated in the harder rock so that it was felt much farther away than it would have been out here.  Then we have Irene, the hurricane that has New York planning to shut down the subways on Saturday perhaps.  And Amtrack and the airlines are canceling travel right and left.  So it's a good time to settle down with a good book and a hurricane lamp to enjoy a nature-induced break from modern life.  That's what these natural disasters impose on us.  The outdoors we ignore most of the time suddenly appears, renders us house-bound or nearly so, but wakes us up to the power and majesty of nature.
Quite a few of my friends attribute all this to global warming but I recall hurricane Hazel's destruction when I was in junior high school, walking home as limbs crashed all around me, half pushed and half pulled by wind gusts that could not keep a constant direction.  I arrived home wet through but exhilarated.  My mom, though, was appalled and thought the school should have kept us there until the winds died down.  No doubt I could have been killed by a falling limb; some of the ones I saw fall were over a foot thick.  But I am glad I didn't miss the immersion in nature's reality.   I hope that wherever you are, you can manage to contact nature regularly and don't have to wait for disasters to make it happen.

Joys of Historical Research: The Battle of Hayes Pond

Hi writer friends,

I am beginning to write a novel about North Carolina.  Incidents that I half remember from when I lived there keep coming up in the back of my mind.  Then I have to see what the public record shows about these half-memories.  This week, I recalled that while I was in high school, the Indians of the coastal region of NC surrounded a Ku Klux Klan rally and won the fight with them hands down.

I remember that the Klan was unpopular, even though there was a lot of racism in my whites-only high school, and that people passed around gossip about the Klan's defeat with great glee, even people I knew had racist attitudes towards black people.  The fact that the Klan behaved like terrorists, hitting at night, keeping their identities secret, and trying to win by intimidation, probably accounts for why my fellow students rejoiced in their loss of the battle.  I hoped to find out more about this event, and turned to the internet to find some sources I could order.  Most sources seemed to be newspaper and magazine articles, at least as cited in the Wikipedia article.  Now I'm really tempted to use this incident in my novel!

Have you ever included real historical incidents in your fiction?  How do people react to that?

The mystery of voice

For one of my classes last semester, a class in British Literature (modernism), the professor let me do a creative writing paper rather than a research paper.  After he read my draft, he said, "Wow.  The first three pages are very poetic.  You really got into the landscape of the area where you grew up.  But then, it's like you feel off a cliff.  It's not in the same voice at all."  I knew exactly what he meant.  I almost never have "flow" when I'm writing, but those three pages jumped from my brain to the page almost effortlessly, with joy and purpose, with writerly thoughts, with a sense I knew what I was doing.  But then, I didn't know how to go on.  I had a setting and a main character, but although I wrote about 27 more pages around the setting and character to turn in for my professor, working on and off for a period of weeks, I never found that voice again.  I hope very much that I can, in some quiet moments in natural settings this summer, reread the three pages, meditate, and reconnect that cord to the source of the voice.  I don't know if it will be possible, but with every fiber of my being, I want to make it work.  I only hope wanting it that much won't get it the way.

On Writing What You Know, or Not

One of those powerful dicta that newbie writers receive many times is, "Write what you know."  It certainly worked for Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Hardy to sink body and soul into the places that ran in their bone marrow, to use the accents and verbiage of their homebodies, to ignore the rest of the universe.  Each of them sought the commonality of humanity in the specifics of their own villages and towns, farms and roads, libraries, ramshackle cars or carriages, and tired feet.  But is that the only way you can write anything worthwhile?  What about Blind?  Who has experienced what it would be like for everyone to become blind at a stroke?  Yet it's a profound novel, well worth reading, with great insights into human behavior and emotions.  I've thought a lot about this advice, and I think it can inhibit creativity. Its virtue is that you are likely to know the important details of places you've lived and loved.  But it can prevent you from applying those details to new places and ideas.  And here's the real rub.  You can tell yourself you know a place and its people, but the insides of their heads could be much different than you imagine.  So unless you talk about the world according to your own thoughts, there is no real way to write only what you know.  And if you talk with any philosophers, even your own thoughts will have fading reality.  So, I'd say this.  Keep in mind rooting what you write in the physicality of the universe you're describing.  But let your imagination go free in placing your writing in Stonehenge, on Mars, or in a time and place of your richest desires.  And enjoy yourself in that world.

David Hockney Views a Lane

As I've started observing, collecting, and savoring details from my daily life to use in my writing, I have become more and more interested to read what others say about how they relate to their environments. David Hockney, the British artist, lived in Hollywood from 1978-2005 and I've enjoyed much of his art reacting to that experience. But then he returned to Yorkshire. In an article in the New York Times, Carol Kino records how he described the scene to her as they approached a group of trees along a narrow country lane. "As we drew close to the trees, he fretted over the sun’s position. “The lighting is made for going the other way,” he complained. Then he slowed down so we had time to appreciate each tree individually, and began issuing orders about how to look.

“Watch!” he called out. “The ash tree now comes in — look at the shape of it! And now then on the right, another tree. There’s a point where each one stands on its own. There. Now. It’s surrounded by sky. Now the next one, and it stands on its own. You see?” It was as though he were giving director’s notes. " He told Kino he had seen this area many times and wanted to make a painting of it, but could not yet get it to work since he had to synthesize many perspectives into one. He said he hadn't yet figured out how to do it, but he would.

It's a new idea to me to take in an experience repeatedly and consider how to synthesize it. I like this concept a lot, and I'm thinking over how I'll use it in my writing. I haven't yet figured out how to do it, but I will.