LUCY BURDETTE: Do you ever wonder how we find and curate the posts that appear miraculously every day on this blog? Sometimes people ask us to appear, other times we just make stuff up, and sometimes we invite guests who we think will be interesting. A while back when one of our friends, Amanda, posted about a writing group she led with a pal, I asked her to write a post. I hope you find it as interesting as I did, and I know you'll welcome Amanda!
AMANDA LE ROUGETEL: Once a month, I pack an overnight bag and head across town to my
friend Deborah’s for a writing retreat. We do more than ‘just’ write — we talk,
we eat, and we critique each other’s work. We usually stay up too late, but the
morning is rich with good coffee, and more time for writing and talking.
We are both in times of transition in our lives: Deborah is
heading towards the third anniversary of her husband’s death and reinventing
herself as a lone woman after a loving marriage of 40+ years. I am moving
towards retirement sometime in the next five years and wanting to be a capital
W writer by the time I get there. For me, this means actually writing (rather
than just talking about writing!) and having people read that writing. Whether
it’s on a published page or online doesn’t matter to me, but I want my writing
to find readers.
Deborah and I trust each other, so our critiques pull no punches:
We question word choice, push for greater clarity of thought, and suggest that
beginnings, mid-points or endings might be stronger by considering X or Y. Deborah has
been focusing on creative memoir, while I’ve been writing creative non-fiction
on my blog Five
Years a Writer.
After several months of coffee and conversation, we realized that
our process was producing not only better writing but also increased clarity
about our evolving identities. It seemed that, in paying attention to our
writing, we were becoming sharper critics of our lives and more confident
agents of personal change.
One day, we decided that we wanted to share our practice with a
public audience. So we developed a 4-part workshop titled Writing as a Tool
for Transformation, which we offered last fall through the community
classroom at our local independent bookstore.
By happenstance, the sixteen participants were all women. By
design, they were each facing a self-identified transition of some kind:
widowhood, retirement, ending of a relationship, the struggle for identity
within motherhood, to name a few. Each was ready to use writing as a way to
gain clarity for themselves. In each session, the participants wrote to our
prompts, then re-wrote, shifting the form, perspective, audience and, in the
final class, even the medium — using images from magazines to encapsulate their
new understanding of themselves relative to the transition they were working
with.
And clarity came. One woman said she was able, for the first
time, to articulate her feelings about the transition she was working with.
Don’t you think that that is exactly the power of
words? Whether we write them or we read them, if we engage actively with the
meaning they create for us, they open doorways through which our imagination
can flow to shape new thoughts and understandings.
For me, active reading of fiction or non-fiction can spark
insights into myself, because I live vicariously through the characters and
story unfolding on the page, and I contemplate how I might acquit myself in
similar circumstances. Would I be as fearless as V. I. Warshawski? As
open-hearted as Clare Fergusson? As committed to family as Gemma James? I
I’ve sorted out many a thorny issue in my life by writing it
out. And I’ve come to untold better understandings of myself by engaging with
the lives of characters invented by an author. Reading is a pleasure, and when
that pleasure produces insight, then it’s not only rewarding but potentially
life-changing.
What about you, dear Reds and JRW readers? Do you ever write
your way to clarity and insight about a challenge in your life? Do characters
in a book lead you to better understanding of yourself?
Amanda
Le Rougetel is a lifelong reader and a non-fiction-writer-in-progress. She was
introduced to the mystery genre through Mrs. Pollifax, Kinsey Millhone and V.
I. Warshawski and is happy that the Reds writers have expanded her reach much
more broadly into the field. That she finds herself posting to the Jungle Red
Writers blog today as a guest is an enormous thrill and unexpected honor. She
posts to her own blog Five Years a Writer less regularly than she would like, but is working to
improve her writing routine. She earns her living as a college communication instructor in the heart of the Canadian prairies in
Winnipeg, Manitoba.
