Kortney Garrison

“I want to consider what William Stafford’s daily writing pages contained and how they worked for him–
how something like his approach might work for any of us who choose to give such daily writing practice a try.”

He would write something like a poem…or notes toward a poem…or just an exploratory set of lines that never became a poem.

He had taken a few steps up the ladder from silence in the general direction of song.

This can begin a process for distilling from ordinary experience the extraordinary report of literature. Nothing stupendous may occur…but if you do not bring yourself to this point, nothing stupendous will happen for sure….

and you are likely to spend the balance of your day in reaction to the imperatives of the outer world–worn down, buffeted, diminished, martyred.

–Kim Stafford
Four Elements of a Daily Writing Page in William Stafford’s Practice

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I live in William Stafford country. His words and work permeate this place. And it is a goodly inheritance.

His collection on writing called Crossing Unmarked Snow came out while I was in school, so it became our unofficial textbook. Come January, I think it might be my first re-read of the new decade.

Often when I’m writing I hear his advice over my shoulder: if you get stuck, lower your standards and keep going. I think sometimes when people encounter that axiom, they focus on being stuck or lowering their standards. But I think our attention should be to keep going.

That’s where the magic starts.

In the daily return. The simple companionship of attention and a notebook. A way to discover what we didn’t know.

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In Reggio Emilia classrooms, teachers often leave out provocations for their students–a neat collection of supplies or books, a pile of leaves, a lump of clay. Just enough to catch the attention of an interested child. Just enough to inspire them to use these new materials in the work they were already doing.

So each night I set my own provocation. A pile of books and a black pen. The french press filled with grounds, the kettle filled with water. A candle and matches at the ready. A room strung with twinkle lights. Pictures of geese everywhere!

In her excellent journaling class, Lori Pickert says we need to remind ourselves of the work we want to be doing.

Create an environment that nurtures you toward success. Make sure it reminds you of your plans and your intentions.
 
The whole world is trying to distract you away from your meaningful work. It is constantly bombarding you with messages about what it cares about: your clothes, your electronics, your weight, your dinner plans, your entertainment choices.
 
Create an environment that helps you focus. Advertise to yourself. Create visual reminders that call you back to your highest priorities. Make sure your space is constantly bombarding you with messages about what you care about: your family, your work, your values, your priorities, your goals.
 
Use your space to promote your most authentic life.

–Creating a Supportive Environment

The allure of screens, the bog of inattention, the 10,000 other things that demand our time–these and more can keep us from touching our work every day. From stoking that fire and gathering around its warmth. From staying with the work.

What steps can you take to creative a supportive environment?

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In The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft, Kim Stafford writes about sharing Theodore Roethke’s notebooks and fragments with his students. I don’t know much about Roethke’s work, but I am always interested in writers’ notebooks. In fact this whole series is an extended look at my writing practices and notebooks.

The library had a copy of Straw for the Fire. Excellent title–we’re off to a good start. The collection is edited by David Wagoner. Here are the first two sentences of his introduction:

At the time of his death in August 1963, Theodore Roethke left behind 277 notebooks–most of them spiral notebooks–full of a miscellany of

• fragments of poetry,
• aphorisms,
• jokes,
• memos,
• journal entries,
• random phrases,
• bits of dialogue,
• literary and philosophical commentary,
• rough drafts of whole poems,
• quotations, etc.

…and 8,306 loose sheets (as a rule these represented a second stage in his method of composition: a movement from notebook to clipboard as he began to track a poem into its final multiple versions,

…after which he would move on to typed drafts, revising heavily.)

Let’s just pause for a moment and honor that very large number of notebooks and pages! And the wonderful miscellany that his notebooks contained. I fill notebooks fairly fast. But it would take me 69 years to approach Roethke’s stacks!

What really caught my attention though was the beginning stages of revision that were described–from notebook, to loose leaf on a clipboard, to typed drafts.

Oddly enough, this is exactly the process I follow. I even have a clipboard. I write what Holly Wren Spaulding calls zero drafts in composition books. Then every season I read through the notebooks and mark pages that I want to pull out. Then I copy these by hand onto yellow loose leaf pages.

Why yellow pages? In the basement I found a ream of yellow paper that had been rescued when a nearby school burned down. Straw for the fire, indeed!

My personal process, that developed haphazardly and accidentally, suddenly had a level of legitimacy.

How is revision a part of your process?

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