wRite with me

You have always wanted to write and somehow not begun.  You have faithfully kept a journal for years and want to move out in your writing.  You are a writer who has found herself/himself blocked.  Consider working with me.  I teach long-distance - online and by phone.  Some of my students come to Flagstaff for two or three day intensives.
I invite you to explore your writing with me.  My Master's Degree is in counseling psychology which allows me to bring a deep approach to helping writers move into their work.  Your relationship with your writing echoes your relationship with your life. Please contact me at shebetsherlife@gmail.com for more information.  We base my fees on how you want to work.
Bio 2012, Mary Sojourner

I'm the author of two novels, Sisters of the Dream (1989) andGoing Through Ghosts; the short story collection, Delicate; essay collection,Bonelight: ruin and grace in the New Southwest; memoir, Solace: rituals of loss and desire and memoir/self-help guide, She Bets Her Life. She is an intermittent NPR commentator and the author of countless essays, columns and op eds for High Country News, Yoga Journal, Writers on the Range and dozens of other publications.  I teach writing - in private circles, one-on-one, at colleges and universities, writing conferences and book festivals.  I've learned both the limitations and possibilities of healing. Writing is the most powerful tool I've found for doing what is necessary to mend.

Psychology Today blog, She Bets Her Life: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/she-bets-her-life

Writing is as personal as desire – and often as fully uncontrollable.  Words have been my lifeline, road trip, volatile lover, relentless master - my instant transport out of where I did not want to be.  Most often when I write, I walk the edge of a blade (not unlike a lifeline) between intuition and discipline.  Without the first, the stories are dead on the page; without the second, my reader would be lured into lush and meaningless chaos.

I learned to write by reading.  My childhood was periodically terrifying.  There were two shelters:  books and the outdoors.  The library became my real home, the librarians my safe family.  I was the serious child who carried six books home when the library closed, and came back the next morning, every book read.  As long as there was a book to read, I could sleep peacefully. 

I never wanted to be anything but a writer – and the beloved of a hero in any of Andrew Lang’s collected fairy tales.  My mother gave me a book of Dorothy Parker’s poems when I was twelve.  A month later, I sent my first submission – a poem in the style of Dorothy Parker – to The New Yorker.  When the form rejection came, I tacked it on my bedroom wall.  It was proof.  I was a real writer.

Twenty years later, a woman friend gave me a journal.  In the intervening years I’d written little.  I’d pursued my second goal into not-beautiful chaos and raising three children as a divorced mom.   I put the journal aside. I was afraid I had nothing to write.  When the next hero turned out to be a toad, I opened it and wrote: I don’t know why I’m doing this.  An hour later I looked up from my writing.  It seemed my blood was ink, the pen an extension of my entire self.  I had begun my real work.  And, like Scheherezade, I had learned how to save my life.

Now, I write and teach writing – always on the edge of the blade.  There are at least four books stacked on the table next to my bed – Irish novels, short story collections, natural history, cop novels, David Malouf, Tana French, Louise Erdrich, James Lee Burke.  Each night I read.  Each night I learn more about my craft.  And I learn what I value in the writing of others: an image that turns my thinking sideways, characters I cannot bear to leave, dialogue that rings in my mind like a conversation overheard on a road trip, storylines that lure me on and on till it’s three a.m. and my eyes are blurred and I am forced to close the book.  Then I can sleep.    

The Window


             The window of my soul opens, 
                   and from the purity of the unseen world 
                         the book of The Divine comes to me directly…
                                        ---Rumi The Window of the Soul

             I lived for twenty-two years in a wallboard and scrap lumber cabin in Northern Arizona. Less than a mile from my back stoop there was a gated golf development. Over eighty per cent of the mansions stood empty year round. Their absentee owners did not look out their huge windows at the midnight sky. They did not sit on their back steps in a sweetly chill dawn to watch a sliver of moon drift to the western horizon. They did not walk out into a monsoon night to receive the double blessing of rain on their skin and lightning broken into diamond shards by dark pine boughs. I was lucky. I lived both in my tiny home and on its forty-nine square foot back deck.

             From as soon as possible in the Spring till as late as I could push it in Winter, the deck and stoop were my dining room, writing space, temple; bird, spider and elk viewing platform. And they were my celestial observatory. I did not own a telescope. I made do with 50-year-old binoculars. I had once been a city-dweller under skies never dark, my children and I once homeless. So, from the cabin’s deck, I blessed my neighbors fighting for Dark Skies, and was content with what revealed itself to my naked eyes.

         Here are notes from that time: I walk out of the cabin. That is an act of alchemy. I have believed for years that the huge-windowed mansions are built in an effort to recapture for the owner the sense of Bigness they experienced on their first moment in the western wildness---with the guarantee of none of the risk that goes with walking in wilderness. I walk out not into wilderness but onto a deck twenty feet away from a telephone. I sit not on an exposed basalt ledge, but in an old pine rocking chair. The only animals that prowl around me are five thoroughly domestic cats. And, I sit under the same hugeness that arches over mountaintops, and cups in a glittering bowl deserts echoing with pure silence.              Sometimes I turn on my headlamp and make notes; most of the time I simply watch. I put what I see into my holy middle. Later I sleep with what I contain and wake to my fingers aching with words: Parchment moon. Ribbon of molten quartz. New moon black over black trees. I ached with more than words the morning when I sat in the rocker and stretched my arms out to shreds of hope. “I join you in this work,” I whispered. “We will contain what must go on.” I had trance-walked out to the deck with my son’s phone call howling in my mind: “Mom, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. It’s not a movie. It really happened.” I had put down the phone and known there was only one place I needed to be for the next---I didn’t know how long. I sat in the cool September light. I saw how morning gleamed in the strands of the spider web that stretched from lupine to lupine. I considered that I had sat with just that light and shimmer twenty-four hours earlier and I wondered if I would occupy that radiance in a new morning to come. I could not find an answer. I whispered again, “We will contain what must go on.” Only a little less than six years later, I took myself out to the back stoop to watch the elegant progress of a full eclipse of the moon. There was a faint pink-gold disc above the ragged pines. I wrote apricot in my notes and returned to my bed. Hours later I jolted awake. The moon hung further to the west, the exact color of the translucent membrane I had once seen stretched over the rib-cage of a dead fawn. I wrote without my headlamp, raised my head and, in that instant a fat meteor arced slowly from west to east. On many of the nights that flowed between September 11, 2001 and August 28, 2007, I walked out to the back deck, to the base of the two-trunked pine that is my southern altar, to the heart of the little meadow that lay between my Pine Dell neighbors and me. I watched Orion hunt Lepur, the star-giant doomed to never catch the glittering rabbit crouched at his feet. I named the Pleiades to my self, knowing a few of the seven sisters would become women in my newest novel. I stepped down to the wet grass that sparkled in the light of a monsoon full moon. I lay down, watched the stars from a bed of stars - and I remembered so many years ago tucking my children into their blankets in the back of our car. We were not camping. We had nowhere else to go. I turned my head and saw the soft glow of the candle in my bedroom window. I thought of my children’s homes and knew they were held safe in them. I turned my gaze back to the sky and considered our great good luck in the double shelter of roof and sky. Later I sat in the rocker a while before I went into my warm bed. I imagined that a spider lived in the low corner of a huge window in a huge empty mansion. Because the heavy curtains were never opened, the spider lived her life unbothered by any humans, even the person who came every two months to clean a house in which no-one made a mess. The spider rested at the edge of her web. She knew that there were insects that would find their way to her. She waited for them---and every night she watched as the moon moved through its immutable cycle of shadow and silver.

Planxty

Hopping on One Foot

...planxty (an ancient Celtic music form) is not suitable for either singing or dancing, due to its erratic sequencing...the conclusion of a phrase is so framed as to produce the idea of a beginning; and again, the beginning or middle of a phrase so constructed as to seem for a moment the notes of a passage about to close.
---Tom Cowan
Fire in the Head

My new student is on fire, willing to face that she doesn’t know everything. She’s the keeper of a remarkable story. The only glitch is that her favorite slogan is “Get ‘er Done!’ Aside from the hee haw, let’s git that snow cannon up on the mountain and fire some frozen pee at the slopes nature of the phrase, the one work ethic a novel will resist is “Get ‘er done!” It’s a lot more like “’Er gets the writer done!”
The writer doesn’t dance in lockstep. We dance to a choreography that makes us as we go. Here is how it works. When it works:
Ravens dance on the snow in front of my little apartment. It’s not a vision. It’s not a surprise. This morning I scattered corn chips to the four directions: North for the Old Ones, East for Light and Burning, South for a little girl, humming to herself, playing hop-scotch alone every day through a long, hot, wet summer; West for She Who Rules, the Dark shining Lady of Take and Give-Away, the implacable Mistress of Time.
Corn chips on snow in an apartment complex. Cats asleep in the living room. No speed limit. No white line. No danger. No trucks looming around the curve.
“Too easy,” my friend, the planxty, would say. “Never move road-kill off the road. It takes away all the fun.”
Ducking and dodging, running the knife edge, off balance, in. Either way, we’re gonna die. Either way, this may be the last day we have, the last moment, the last breath. The way the ravens see it, so what. This could be the last corn chip and that would be the real tragedy.
One of my students writes about wild turkey. She says they have no vacations. We humans only believe we do. From the edge of the blade, there are no holidays. We step out, and out, and, past a certain point on that shining, we look back.
To a time we could close our eyes and pull our history and fear around us and imagine that, for an instant, we were safe. And, safe moment by safe moment, we died. I am one of you. I look back.
Look back.
Remember when you were safe. You knew the dance. The music was easy. One, two three, one, two three. Moving hand in hand in a straight line. Patterns droning. The first step leads to this one, this one to the next, the middle, the closing, the end. Pause. Breathe. Change partners perhaps. And begin again. One, two, three, one, two, three, in endless circles, moving out, around, coming back, again and again, to the same place. No drums. No back beat. No voice, no harp rising like a clear wild scream. When the ravens hear this same old same old notmusic, they fly away.
Somewhere up north, they know, there’s a two-lane highway so far out the cops forget it. Kids in Cannibal Corpse t-shirts are eating french fries and drinking sweet wine. They have their hands on each others’ thighs and J.R. is driving. There is no sun. Orion rises in the east. Somebody screams. Laughs. J.R. throws his empty out the truck window, grabs Leeanne’s french fries and gives them to the wind. Your raven heart jumps in your gleaming breast like a drum. Starlight glitters off shattered glass. You hop. You scream. You call the others in and, YOU EAT.
Lugh, before battle, hops on one foot and screams. His arms stretch out from east to west. Blue-black feathers. Bright eye. His shining. Hopping on one foot to a tune that has no pattern. Only endings held in beginnings and beginning rising from the end. Screaming. Out of balance and in.
The only safety is the edge. Heading east to the unknown west. Till we meet again.