The Zingara Project

Tag: #CreativeWriting

  • Blackbird by Yvette R. Murray

    (on Nina Simone’s “Blackbird”)

    A dot sprouted in the universe
    She wanted, she wanted, wanted flight
    Doubt filled her hollow bones with sand
    and night kept her black wings from rising.

    How could there ever be enough tears
    for an orphaned bird still at the nest?
    How could fear ever make her sun rise
    or drip moonlight rest into her soul?

    No place wanted a black bird like this.
    Nowhere a hometown she can call near.
    A little sorrow can hold a soul back
    and force the brightest of lights to roam.

    Nina Simone: February 21, 1933 to April 21, 2003

    —

    Yvette R. Murray received her B.A. in English from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  She has been published in Fall Lines, The Petigru Review, Catfish Stew, Genesis Science Fiction magazines and online.  Presently, she is working on her first collection of poetry and a children’s book series.

  • Landing in Snow-Covered Landscape by Anneliese Schneider

    I take the comfort from
    the seasons’ soft edges

    That this is not time.

    The ice that holds your
    footprint slides upwards
    into my bones

    We must step—
    Carefully. Slower, now.

    I have been thinking
    that all snow is
           some form
                of falling

    Soon it will be time
    to forget the old fear,

    slipping off
    the wrong side
    of that darkened line.

    —

    Anneliese Schneider is currently an undergraduate student, living in Virginia and pursuing a personal interest in poetry and literature.

  • Sound the Trumpet by Edith Friedman

    All hail the trash-talking bball players, high-voiced sixth graders,
    out on the courts this early summer evening
    I curve my bike through San Pablo Park.
    The city took the big oaks last year, but the fields are lush and broad
    and the sunset sky is full of treasure.
    Here at the border of have and have not
    there’s a shooting about three times a year.

    Four months since the last one took a grandfather to the ICU.
    We’re nervous, but we can’t live inside.
    At noon today the park was full for Eid al Fitr, prayers in the open
    a woman in a burqa walked down my block with her package of food
    then a family on bikes, dad and two little girls
    long handlebar streamers and flowered helmets.
    Flowing garments, people laughing,
    full plates on laps, smell of grilled meats.

    Tonight softball players race across the June grass.
    The scofflaw dog owners, out in force
    cluster deep in right field
    as the bright lights come on.
    Back home, praise the boy who unloaded the dishwasher unbidden
    now he’s lacing up basketball shoes
    bigger than dinner plates.

    The gleaming crescent moon clutches her drab mother
    but you always go back to the park.
    I say, don’t come home too late.

    —

    Edith Friedman is sheltering in California with her partner and two stunned and bored sons. Her work has appeared in Sisyphus Literary Magazine. She studies Writing at California College of the Arts.

     

  • Four More Weeks of “Creative Writing Extravaganza” at Bliss!

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    As Seen in Natural Awakenings Magazine!

    Creative Writing Extravaganza
    Tuesdays, August 16 – October 4, 2016, 7:00 to 8:30 PM
    Bliss Spiritual Co-op
    1163 Pleasant Oaks Drive, off Chuck Dawley Blvd
    Mount Pleasant, SC

    No registration required! Attend all eight weeks or drop in when you can!

    Join us as we explore how the raw material of our life experiences informs our artistic expression and how we can develop them into poems, stories, flash memoir, and more! Each class will focus on a specific sample or style of writing from which students will generate their own work by responding to prompts, engaging in invention activities, and emulating the sample writing itself. Time will also be set aside during each class for students to read aloud from any new work they wish to share (always optional). All levels are welcome.

    We will explore:

    • Imagination in prose and poetry
    • The music of the sentence
    • Forms of poetry (and why they matter)
    • Elements of narrative
    • The Lyric Essay
    • Flash fiction
    • Fun with metaphor, simile, and personification
    • Flash creative non-fiction
    • The role of the writer’s journal
    • How drawing helps writing
    • Deepening writing through awareness and meditation
    • Deepening awareness and meditation though writing
    • Establishing a regular writing practice
    • Working through fear of failure
    • Working through fear of success
    • The joy of revision
    • Revising life stories for empowerment
    • Deepening self-awareness and healing through writing
    • Deepening craft through self-awareness

    Bring your journal, favorite writing instrument, and inner child!

  • Write Despite Distraction

    Even writers with a room of their own have to deal with distractions. Family members, loved ones, and friends all quickly figure out how to encroach on whatever protected time or space a writer manages to carve out for herself. Fight fire with fire by desensitizing yourself to distractions. Set an alarm clock or kitchen timer to go off in increments of varying length, ten minutes for the fist session, fifteen or twenty for the second, five for the third, or whatever combination suites your needs. Try this exercise for a period of sixty full minutes if possible. Each time the alarm sounds, take just enough time to reset it, then get right back to writing.

    If it is difficult at first to shift your focus from alarm to page, and it probably will, try taking a few deep breaths and center yourself mentally by repeating the following incantation before returning to your writing: inhale and say,  “I am…” exhale and say “writing right now.”

    Remember, learning to regain your writing focus after a distraction is the goal of this exercise. It will likely feel uncomfortable and difficult at first, but will become easier with practice.Completing this exercise will give your brain a point of reference – a successful experience of dealing with distractions – that it can recall when more pressing distractions arise. It’s not possible to eliminate all distractions from life, but it is possible to learn to write despite them.

    Good luck, and happy writing.

  • Write While Standing

    Among writers who are known to enjoy writing while standing are Vladimir Nobokov, Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway. This week, take a stand and dedicate at least one of your writing sessions to writing standing up and discover the many benefits, including: freedom of movement and therefore freedom of thought, better posture and therefore less back pain, passive exercise (you burn more calories when standing than you do when sitting), and a general change of pace that may result in clearer writing and fresh ideas.

    Not sure what to write on while taking this new approach to working? Try a clipboard, your kitchen counters (clean and dried), the top of a waist-high bookshelf, a piece of plywood resting atop a few bar stools, or one of those tall tables at the library.  If you like the results, you can build or purchase something permanent, like a drafting table, later.

    Remember, the best way to get your writing done is to write – so don’t over think it, just write right now!

  • Writing Exercise: Do it in Bed

    DSCN3581Numbered among authors known to enjoy writing in bed are Edith Wharton, Winston Churchill, Colette, and Mark Twain. Certainly there a others, well-known and novice alike, who also find the benefits of writing in bed worthwhile. And why not? Writing in bed, especially first thing in the morning (before fully rising to begin the day) is an excellent way to tap into the interstice state of mind that exists between dreaming and waking states. Writing while reclined, more than any other position, also reduces the effect of gravity, thus encouraging the mind to wander. Worried your muscle memory will put you to sleep the minute you hit the mattress? Try writing while reclined on the living room sofa or your favorite recliner. If you wind up dozing between lines, all the better. You may find your writing takes an unusual, even refreshing, turn.

    This week, try writing in a reclined position, at least once, and embrace the nonchalance this exercise will bring to your prose or poetry.

  • Informal Notes on The Japanese Renku

    A Renku is an endless poem consisting of alternating three- and two-line stanzas. The fist stanza consists of three lines while the second contains two lines. This pattern repeats indefinitely, or until a specified and predetermined date and time of its conclusion. Each stanza is written by a different poet and attempts to change the focus, utilize mixed images, borrow syntax or otherwise thwart expectations set up by the previous stanza.

    The Japanese tradition of Renku suggests that the beginning stanzas include compliments about and generally acknowledge the graciousness of the host.

    Ways to shift focus and link stanzas in surprising ways:

    1) kotobazuke (link through words): Observe rhymes, existing repetition, puns, familiar phrases, grammar or syntax and carry them through. For example, if the first line of one stanza is something like “The man in the hat,” you may want to consider using the same syntax but with a very different subject, like “The car in the street.” Alternately, free associate with words and images. For example, if the previous stanza has a word like “goggles,” it makes me think of “google,” which makes think of searching, so I may write about searching. If the previous stanza uses a word like “sleep” it makes me think of a rhyme, like “sheep”, so maybe I will include something about sheep (sheep searching, searching sheep, shepherds searching for sheep…)

    2) monokuze (shift through things/use contrast): Ask a question to which there is no answer, deepen the observation or present an opposite or contrasting mood. If it’s dark, lighten it. If it’s active, present a still setting, if it is quiet, add some noise.

    3) ioizuke,  a.k.a./ “scent” (shift mood or feeling): Like syncopation, add an unexpected element to the mood. Use a metaphor or change the setting.

    4) Finally, do not explain connections: resist the temptation to explain the image you have presented.

    For a pre-Renku exercise, students work  with the Haiku three line concept, but discard the 3-5-3 syllabic restrictions (as Japanese doesn’t adapt to that English language parameter very well).

    Here are a few exercises:

    Focus: Look at an image, then deepen your focus; don’t worry about making connections.

    Image: Sheep in a field.

    Response: First Stanza

    Sheep in a field
    Men on horseback
    Un-hitch the barbed wire

    Second Stanza:

    Focus: Contrast the mood that has been established; present its opposite

    Prompt: Small boat in calm harbor

    Response:

    Small boat in the calm harbor
    breeze echoes the sound
    of raised voices

    Third

    Focus: Ask a question/add a person

    Prompt: The cat returns after eleven nights

    Response:

    The cat returns after eleven nights
    Where are you?