These are Adele Mendelson’s reasons for writing. You might say, well, that’s true for a
poet who writes personal stuff. It doesn’t apply to prose writers.

But the same thing does happen in stories, I believe, though it’s probably not so easy to
recognize. It happens through the action and through a change in a character. For the writer, the
personal insight may be a few steps removed. Why, for instance, did Flannery O’Conner have
the grandmother murdered after her epiphany in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”? Did something
come up for O’Conner about her family? We could ask a similar question of James Joyce, about
commitment and illusion, in his story “The Dead.”

Adele goes on, “This is a unique kind of communication. Best friends, lovers, even
spouses don’t receive this pure flow. You may speak to your husband about your work, your life,
relationship issues.

“But you don’t tell him, ‘In the earliest blue, I am gone. I’m not the me you know, I’m
far away in a space that only I can fly to. I return, put on my apron, kiss you good-bye. But one
day I may stay away. It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s because I am more – boundless, unknown,
hungry, free – ’”

How can you tell somebody words like those? Adele says you might not even know the
words until you write them. And you don’t say these things because other people “operate on a
different level.” She might have said that the poet operates on a more authentic level. In writing
and rewriting and thinking again, you reach for your exact, intimate meaning. “The poem is a
bridge from my mind to yours.”

This is close to what Allen Ginsberg says. “Poetry is not an expression of the party line.
It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world
public, that’s what the poet does.”

The power we experience in writing may be beyond anything. One grain of authenticity
may be worth all the self-doubt, all the naked feeling, all the struggle with demons. It weighs
more than a mountain of effort and pain. It’s life-changing and enduring. It stymies any system
of cost analysis.

One grain of authenticity. Go figure.

“Try this, I really enjoyed it.”

I’d read a few pages and then stack it on the floor.

“That’s it? You read a dozen pages and you’re done?”

Yes, I’d tell her, that writer seemed to have an intriguing plot going but it didn’t hold me for long. Or I’d enjoy the dialogue for a few pages, but I wanted more. Or the characters were likeable at first but eventually I couldn’t relate. The pile of books at my side of the bed got large.

I was more involved with writing from the workshops than with published work. That didn’t seem right, so I surveyed book stores and asked other writers who read a lot. Of course there was, and is now, a wide variety of adroit, competent writing out there. My partner had shown me a broad sample. Still I was more interested in the workshops’ efforts.

“What about this one, should I hand it to you?” My partner had finished another well-loved novel. “Or just throw it on the pile?”

I couldn’t broadcast my prejudice, though, since I need to look appreciative for people interested in workshops. I learned to say something intelligent about current writers, especially those with cache, at the time Alice Monroe and Tobias Woolf. Or, if the questioner leaned toward classics, I’d mention Tillie Olsen or J.D. Salinger or Flannery O’Conner or Charles Bukowski.

What’s going on? I remembered something an alert reader had observed in the 1970s. He said enduring work has “muscle in the ectoplasm.” Maybe that’s the angle, for my first models were Alden Van Buskirk, early John Wieners and Michael McClure, when I was protege to the Beats during 1962-1967 in New York. Add Sappho, Simonides, Rumi, Shakespeare, Keats, Elliot, Virginia Woolf, and Marge Piercy, and there’s plenty of muscle. That muscle comes from deep personal commitment.

But this doesn’t explain why workshop writing appeals so much. Do our writers all happen to be great, just undiscovered? Does my personal esthetic seep into the air and into their heads, and we have a class full of Shakespeares? Are we part of Dorothea Brande’s university of the unconscious, and the writers somehow teach themselves?

Not a chance. Truth be told, I have no idea how it happens, and no idea how to introduce muscle. I think the only answer can be that our strategy, with its focus on the creative unconscious, directs us little by little to a barrier we can’t easily cross. We follow the restlessness in our psyches, or the itch in our bodies, and we come to a place where personal issues weave into the characters and into the plot. And, to continue, we have to develop a lot of strength. We have to solve problems.

I haven’t any idea how to teach this. In the workshops, we listen to the journey and support the writer. There’s nothing to do but say, writer, you put yourself there, now it’s your fight. Good luck.

“Yeah, Honey, just throw that book directly in the pile. It doesn’t need me to turn pages.”

I want to feel the tug-of-war as the author grapples with a serious problem. Work out, author! Like writers in the workshops.

I give this talk every workshop. It opens another dimension of the Crazy Child exercise, where we tell the Editor and the Writer to take a walk, and let the Crazy Child write whatever it wants. In the tropics those voices could head for the beach, try bird-watching, or go climb a tree with the howler monkeys.

In Costa Rica, magic entered the room the moment I finished my spiel. A white moth, an inch-and-a-half wide, fluttered over the heads of the dozen people in our workshop. A gecko came suddenly out of hiding and scurried along next to the ceiling, in position to pounce. The hapless insect flew close to the gecko, and a second gecko appeared, twin to the first, a gray lizard-shaped animal about five inches long, moving adroitly high on the wall. For an instant the moth was poised midway between the geckos, who faced it from either side. We expected to witness the moth’s demise.

Instead the moth fluttered into open space. Flitting this way and that, out of reach of gecko jaws, it seemed oblivious, happy-go-lucky, and why not? It flew in comparative safety. The moth demonstrated the huge size of the creative unconscious: It lives in three dimensions and the geckos, in effect, are confined to two, the surfaces of the walls.

Casual magic is commonplace. How often does the phone ring, when a line is read that mentions the phone? Or a siren goes off, when there’s sirens in someone’s story? Costa Rica gave us a perfect representation of the Editor and the Writer in bad moods, or eager for action, or just hungry for lunch. And the Crazy Child escaped.

In Costa Rica the portal to the creative source is wide. When we did workshops in Scotland and Italy, wonderful as they were, the very things we love about Europe limited access. The portal felt crowded with cathedrals, museums, castles, and hundreds of years of tradition. But Costa Rica is Central America, it’s the new world and not much nibbles around the edges of any portal. A wide open sky with very little history we’re aware of, with sunsets you can walk into, hosts of exotic and colorful birds, a tribe of monkeys in the trees, a green flash almost every night as the sun sets, and a warm ocean that lets us swim freely and soaks away our doubts. It’s all as vast and as intriguing as the creative unconscious itself.

The geckos might have commented, with their crisp calls, “clack-clack-clack” a half second apart, on what we were saying at the workshop. They did call from their hiding places, but I didn’t notice any sort of fit. Afterwards I walked to my room, and the howler monkeys were talking. “Uhhgg-uh-uhmnhg-mnh” they called out in the trees, an extremely loud, dinosaurial sound like nothing else. You don’t have to go through a portal to hear these guys.

Do they speak for my creative unconscious? The calling continued into the night. If I could translate that “Uhhgg-uh-uhmnhg-mnh” I’d put it in a poem.

Assessing what’s of value may be chancy, since we filter out so many impulses in our writing lives, and advanced writers filter out more. They’ve learned what works for them and what doesn’t. But when we’re on a developmental spurt, or when we’re beginning, it’s useful to have no filters.

“It feels like vomit. Just vomit!” one beginning writer stated, and then added, “That’s when I know I’m doing well! There’s vomit all over the page.”

This is extreme, and the slightest tinge should remind us that writing may be neither mild nor safe. Violent and soul-wrenching forces lurk beneath our words. The image speaks both to how much we have invested in our day-to-day personality and to how much that personality may differ from our authentic self. We could be committing a huge amount of energy to maintain a fiction.

It took forty years or so for me to work through self-images and allow the Chalcedony poems to emerge. My journey is not a smooth one, more like a wiggly trail, being a hipster, an intellectual, a political radical, a lay psychologist, an ordinary male – I don’t remember what all, on the way to the raw honesty and full passion of Chalcedony’s voice.

The question, “Why so vulnerable?” doesn’t have a single answer. When it’s asked, though, the territory displays its ubiquity and its difficulties. Integrating our authentic self, which probably includes some of what psychologists call “the excluded self,” can release as much pain as it is possible for any human being to feel.

That’s only the beginning. In Western culture, with its emphasis on linearity, human myths have been submerged, though of course they’re operating as strongly as ever – in the strata beneath our awareness. They evolved over thousands of years and express the stories we’re born to fulfill or born to contest. As we write, they send chunks of energy through our bodies and onto the page.

This could expose us to the total sum of historical pain, to as much human pain as exists. How to deal with it is an individual problem, and changing the twelve-step maxim “one day at a time” to “one breath at a time” is helpful to me. If we accept some of our vulnerability as valuable, or link it to a mythological source, we continue our development. The beginning writer did just that, acknowledging the feeling and recognizing that it means she’s doing well.

David Whyte asks if vulnerability and humility are close first cousins. He suggests, “There is a lovely root to the word humiliation – from the Latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returning to the ground of our being.”

Is my journey painful? Yes, I go through a lot, humiliation and shame, as well as fear, and panic, along with a trembly astonishment when a glimpse comes through of the reward. The beauty we earn and inherit, when we finally start to become who we are.

Looking at the question from a positive angle, Don Miguel Ruiz comments in The Four Agreements: “Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive – the risk to be alive and express what we really are. Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans.”

(With help from Carrie Mercy, Lonner Holden, and Kalaena Pertofsky)

Just that quickly this elegant, confident-looking woman backs off, the moment I announce that we’l be reading our writing aloud. The raw, corrosive fear in her voice surprises me.

“You don’t have to,” I reassure her, “but we’l twist your arm just a little.”

New writers are often shy, but, since this lady mentioned she’s an actress in classical theater, I assumed she’d be at ease on the very small stage of our writing workshop.

“Do you do Shakespeare?”

“Yes,” she says and pulls her jaw back in a frown, as if she’s not happy where I’m going.

Some of Shakespeare’s women run through my mind. Feisty, smart, principled, and at the same time expressing a range of emotion quite fluidly. Like Juliet, who’s beside herself with desire and frustration. And Lady MacBeth, what about her? How strange she must feel, haunted by one drop of blood.

“Have you played Lady MacBeth?”

“Yes.”

“Now there’s a frightened woman, aware of her family’s murderous intrigue. ‘Out, damned spot! Out, I say.’ She’s frantic with anxiety.”

I slow down, looking her in the eye, and set up my punch line. “Correct?”

“Yes.”

The punch line: “Do you think reading your work aloud could be worse than playing Lady MacBeth?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

I build the strongest platform I can, and she destroys it with one syllable. Now I’m at a loss.

“Why?”

“Lady MacBeth is someone else.”

She waves her hand in the air as if shooing a fly, then sighs and pats her breast.

“What I’d read would be me.”

And she’s right, of course. That is the rub: your very essence, your heart and soul, are likely to be revealed. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve been on stage, perfecting the art of being someone else. It’s just not easy to maintain any safe or serene or confident or grand image of yourself. And your writing will somehow broadcast the truth, the very truth no one has seen before: who you really are. Your frailty, your stupidity, your funkiness, your fuzziness, your general unworthiness, how poorly you write – and oh, how touchy, how very vulnerable you are to any word that could be construed as criticism.

Does this sound troublesome? It’s the short list.

One writer, as she prepared her novel for an editor, dreamed she was in the wings of a theater. While waiting for her cue, she wrapped the curtains around herself and suddenly she realized she had no clothes on. How could she go on stage without a costume? She was stark naked. She woke up, sweating, from the nightmare.

Bob Dylan’s line, “A poem is a naked person,” applies as well to any creative writing. The good news is, in workshop, you don’t have to take your clothes off. The bad news is, it can feel worse than if you did.

(With help from Linda Cohen, Kalaena Pertofsky, and Lynn Sugayan.)