Karmen Kooyers
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memory exercises

11/9/2014

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Whenever I think of the power of childhood memories, I am reminded of the MFA graduate lecture of author Sarah Sullivan while we were classmates at Vermont College.  Sarah guided us in an exercise that asked us to remember a place where as a child we felt safe, a place where we felt “cradled in security.”  She helped us through a series of guided questions to remember that place and suggested that in some ways we're always longing to go back.  We began by drawing the place, sketching in details as best we could remember.  Once immersed emotionally and visually in our “safe place”, we were asked to gradually ponder these questions: “What do you see?  What do you hear?  What do you smell?  Are there people around you?  Is there an animal nearby?  What is above you? (a ceiling? tree branches? the sky?)  What is below you?  (water? grass? a floor?)  What do you remember?”

“Without our memories, what are we?” asks Leonard Pitts in a recent column.  “We are the equation after the blackboard has been wiped, the sandcastle after the wave—smeared images and shapeless shapes melting into the sand.”  (Chicago Tribune, p. 18, 10/30/14)  He's referring to recent visits with a favorite aunt who's now living through the lens of Alzheimer’s.  Yet she still remembers.  Maybe not what happened ten minutes ago, but what happened fifty years ago.  She remembers how to sing “The Way You Do the Things You Do” with the Temptations and how to hug her nephew, and what it feels like to go to the movies.  Leonard Pitts’ fond remembrances of his aunt echo the emotional resonance of the novel The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean, a story that shows how the mundane present existence of an Alzheimer’s patient can’t hold a candle to her powerfully moving memories of life decades earlier when she helped rescue art treasures during the Nazi invasion of her hometown in Leningrad.  Without our memories, what are we?

Maybe the old adage, write what you know, would be better phrased, write what you remember, write what you feel.  Sarah Sullivan’s memory exercises are powerful methods to get at what matters most in a story, what Sarah calls “the emotional truth, the stirrings of a writer’s heart, the wood smoke rising between the lines.”

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italy inspires

11/6/2014

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Back from a rejuvenating trip to Italy, I’ve been pondering some books I’ve read and thoughts that find connections over and over in the process of writing.  Be still in moments of grace.  Observe. Draw, dance, wonder.  Embrace love.  Hold my hand.  Ti amo.

“When I was very young, my mother took me for walks in Humboldt Park, along the edge of the Prairie River.  I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates, of an old boathouse, a circular band shell, an arched stone bridge.  The narrows of the river emptied into a wide lagoon and I saw upon its surface a singular miracle.  A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage.  Swan, my mother said… The word alone hardly attested to its magnificence nor conveyed the emotion it produced.  The sight of it generated an urge I had no words for, a desire to speak of the swan, to say something of its whiteness, the explosive nature of its movement, and the slow beating of its wings… I struggled to find words to describe my own sense of it.  Swan, I repeated, not entirely satisfied, and I felt a twinge, a curious yearning, imperceptible to passerby, my mother, the trees, or the clouds.”  Patti Smith, excerpts from Just Kids, p. 3

“Isn’t this what we’re really looking for?  A quiet corner of light, a warm chair to hold us, the chance to adventure deeply into someone else’s world and mind through the secrets they’ve committed to the page?...I pick up a book and something in me is hushed, as something else is brought to a new alertness.” Pico Iyer,The University of Portland Magazine, Summer 2014, p. 25
“I learned not to look away at the moment when I should be paying the most attention.  The closer I got to the heart of a scene, to the really difficult material to write, the emotionally challenging stuff or the exchange in which the conflict is made most explicit, the more I’d look for a way out of writing it.  This was out of fear, obviously, because you don’t want to run up against your limitations in craft, intelligence or heart.  It’s much easier to duck the really vital material, but it kills what you’re writing to do so, kills it instantly.”  Matthew Thomas, on writing his novel, We Are Not Ourselves, interview with John Williams, NY Times Book Review – Open Book, 9/7/14

“Soon, you’ll grasp that sentences originate and take their endless variety from within you, from your reading, your tactile memory for rhythms, your sense of the playfulness at the heart of the language, your perception of the world.”  Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing (p. 93).

 Take heart.  Take courage.  Take time.



 note: thanks to the slow mo guys for their inspiring slow-motion photography

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    Karmen Kooyers

    I am a children’s writer and youth librarian who’s passionate about literature, libraries, and art.

    The path before me unwinds in ways that surprise, delight, and befuddle.  I hope you’ll join me to see where it leads.


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