Little Fictions & Ragged Memoirs is weekly subscription writing.  Most of the writing is what I like to call “ragged memoirs:”  experiential pieces that dive deeper than I do in the blog posts.  Occasionally I write short fictions that are also based in my own experience.  The writing is physical, cinematic and experiential.   Here is an example:

Body Stories

The book of the body
The the scroll of the body
The etching of the body
The earth of the body
The sky of the body
The language of the body
The singing of the body
The sheaves of the body
The stalks of the body
The branches of the body
The vines of the body
The fields of the body
The cave of the body
The lessons of the body
The memories of the body

I look at my body and I wonder:  what has been lost and what needs to be lost?  What remains to be found? What can be recovered?  What am I learning in this exact moment from the body? I think it is to feel myself in the interstitial spaces – the places where life and sensation accumulate in invisible lines – like subtle, moving geologic strata beneath the crust of what we can see.  The earth of the body.

I want to feel what is being laid down even now as I write.  

I have art etched onto my body.  A collection of tattoos.  Cuttings of the flesh.  Etchings on skin.  I am an illustrated woman.  The images on my back are horses and magnolias.  Winding trunks and branches of pink blossoms and green leaves weaving around the dark, turbulent bodies of Chinese horses.  A wild mare flying down my left arm.  A stallion like Nelson on my left shoulder blade.  A second black spirit horse flying up the right side.  A small faint pony peering over the left shoulder.  Magnolias spilling over my right shoulder onto my chest.

The last tattoo was so excruciating that I felt the artist was cutting into my shoulder blade with a knife.  I wept as he finished the last scrolling Tibetan clouds.  The wide needles used for that work were worse than any of the small thin ones.  It felt as if I were being flayed.

 The horses are under my skin.  They were even before I put them there indelibly.  A woman of a certain age asking to be marked, to have her horses imprinted on her flesh.  Eternal horses.  And yet when I am consumed by flames, so will they be.  None of us will stay past our time.  I feel they have my back, that they hold a mythic story, a fairy tale, a cabalistic history that is playing out whether I am looking or not.  

When I see my hands in the mirror I am startled, momentarily horrified.  How did my mother’s veined and wiry hands come to be attached to the ends of my arms?  When I am dancing and using my hands, I know that I have earned all of those strange mappings.  They are brilliant, dancing their complicated mudra, their secret, febrile language.  The dances have always been stored in the hands, and then move like the feral tides of the bay of Fundy: pouring in thick waves up and through the channels of my body.

Now I dream of calligraphic birds flying up my right calf and thigh.  I collect the images:  birds of color, splayed wings, tumbling, spiraling.  I can feel them there even though they are not.  At the same time, I feel that I am finished.  I may not need to be marked again.  But there are other ways in which I am not finished.  Other ways in which I know that I am just beginning.   I am not talking about tattoos.  

I am talking about wisdom.  I am talking about joy.  I am talking about discovery and delight and appreciation.  Those are the things that it has taken me six decades to stumble upon, to uncover, to unearth, to carve open. These things – joy, appreciation, delight – are not just destinations, but the places toward which we are continually moving.  Not driving with our high beams shining down a known road, but dreaming ourselves forward using celestial navigation, an emotional sextant.  Charting a course to ravishment.  My friend, the playwright and actress Laurie Carlos, stood with me on a beach on Martha’s Vineyard, and said, “I do not think I can take in so much beauty.”  Her face was rapturous, looking out at the waving sea. I did not understand at the time that I had to give myself permission to be swallowed whole by the moment.    

The wonder of the body
The softening of the body
The dreaming of the body
The opening of the body
The kindness of the body
The sweetness of the body
The love of the body  

You can receive Little Fictions & Ragged Memoirs as a monthly subscription for $9.  You are free to unsubscribe at any time.  If you are already subscribed you do not need to do anything.

Even if you subscribe in the middle of a story, you will receive that piece from the beginning.

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I took this photograph after the recent light snow.  When I looked at it, I felt a bit queasy – the orientation to gravity, light and the lines of the tree were disconcerting.  I felt myself falling. Falling from what, I wondered?

In recent weeks, I have felt my orientation shifting as I move into some new work.  It started with my morning 750, which I now write in Scrivener.  I began writing, and a piece of fiction (a short story perhaps?) emerged.  I felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland, falling falling falling into the well of this piece.  As if I was taking dictation.   I loved the story and wondered where it was going.  I still don’t know. I have no plan.

When I was in the third grade, my family lived in London.  Part of what we did in school was to write stories.  My teacher, Miss Sherman, loved my writing and encouraged me.  I felt a sense of pride and excitement.  But when we moved back to South St. Paul, my teachers were not interested in writing.  They like penmanship and numbers.  I put the writing away, could not hold the thread of it.  It went underground with the rest of me.

Later, my writing became stodgy and correct.  Dead.  Nothing kills the writing spirit like grant proposals.  And so now, starting right here, every day, I am recovering my writing self.  Recovering myself.

I have had an offering called The Journal (and the deep end) for some time.  I knew that this new writing didn’t fit that old description.  So I changed it to Little Fictions and Ragged Memoirs.  I like this title – the openness and possibility that it holds.

It is a subscription, which means that it is one of the ways that I support myself as a writer.  It also helps give me the resources to make dances.  You see, I don’t write grants anymore.

It has come to my attention however, that many find it hard to pay for a subscription at $20 a month.  I hear you.  I am lowering the cost of the subscription to $13 a month.  I like the number.  It feels lucky. (If you are already signed up, your subscription price will lower.)

If you sign up now, I will send you the first two episodes of the story that I am writing now so you will be up to date.  As always, you can unsubscribe at any time.  If you would like to try it, you can sign up here.

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Little Fictions & Ragged Memoirs is the new incarnation of The Journal (and the Deep End).

I am shifting my focus to writing unfolding stories that develop over several weeks or even months.  I have found that I like delivering work to The Journal that is more fully developed.  Some of the stories are fiction and others are short memoirs. The writing is physical, cinematic and experiential.  Think of Alice in Wonderland, Woman in the Dunes with some magic realism and surrealism salted in.

You can receive Little Fictions & Ragged Memoirs as a monthly subscription for $20.  You are free to unsubscribe at any time.  If you are already subscribed you do not need to do anything.

Even if you subscribe in the middle of a story, you will receive that piece from the beginning.

If you would like to give it a go, you can sign up here.

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Guinevere and Jules are waiting for us to finish tea and make their breakfast.  They are moderately patient.  They are confident that breakfast will arrive.

I am waiting for inspiration.  I am impatient.  I am not confident that inspiration will come. For the past couple days I have been feeling a lull, like a surfer out on a flat sea, no wave in sight.

But I am keeping in mind something that Stephen Nachmanovitch said:  Attempts to conquer inertia are by definition, futile.  Start instead from the inertia as a focal point, develop it into a meditation, an exaggerated stillness.  Let heat and momentum arise as a natural reverberation from the stillness.

I know that in dance, stillness is the canvas on which the movement appears.  With my writing have lost some sense of stillness being the place to begin.  I am filling the moment with too much effort, too many gestures, too little breath.  There is also this:

To the mind that is still
the whole universe surrenders.
                                       Buddha

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Pam White and our friend Suzanne were talking about pentimento, the practice of over-painting – basically the artist changing his/her mind.  Pam had some examples of her own pentimento on her Google+ page.

That got me to reflecting on the past two days, when i have been directing and making new movement for Xmalia. The process of choreographing, standing back, and then going in and layering in different or denser or richer movement is painterly in a similar way.  Sometimes the hint of a first rendering is there, other times I obliterate it completely, but even so, some trace remains.

Maybe I just like the feeling of the word.  It reminds me of another favorite word, palimpsest, the difference being that in that case the layers of a manuscript or scroll or painting were scraped or washed away, say with milk and oat bran.

I think what I really like is the idea of underlayers – of something earlier either concealed or revealed by what has been put down later.

When I went from being an actor to being a dancer, the actor was still there, shining through in the dances.  Now that I am writing, the dancer is still there, because the words are gestural – like movement to me – they have a physical resonance that I can feel.

And sometimes I have scraped things away – old text, old selves.  More about that in The Journal this week.

I am interested in how you are feeling your layers.  Over-painting or scraping away with milk and oat bran?

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Photo:  Jeffrey Anderson, from Flight, with Dillon Paul and Sanne

A horse appeared to me.  It was a horse I had known from some long ago time. Who knows what that long ago was, but the horse was very present, and I could smell the horse, and the horse was very familiar.  It seemed to be someone I know from long ago, and so I felt I knew the horse well.  I was very happy to see it, so happy that tears ran down my cheeks.  Joy Harjo

This week in The Journal I am writing about callings.  I am interested in the difference between a calling and a yearning, between lust and desire.  I have some stories about my own callings, and how they shape what is here now.  I got to thinking about this a number of yeas ago when I read Gregg Levoy’s Callings:  Finding and Following an Authentic Life. 

My post yesterday about the herd also reminded me that callings are usually embodied.  That is what Joy Harjo is talking about.  And a few of you mentioned that not everyone is that clear about how to communicate in an embodied way. 

Actually, that is a major theme of my online class beginning next week:  Breaking into Blossom.  The subtitle of the class is “moving into an improvisational life,” and so much of that, in my experience, is about being fully present in an embodied way – deep listening with the body.  My intention is that by learning to live more intentionally and improvisationally, and be more consciously embodied, you will find new and delicious ways of experiencing/approaching work and play.  

I hope you will join us.  You can register here.

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I saw this cabbage in Whole Foods.  It was so beautiful that I bought it specifically to photograph.  It was also sweetly delicious.  Since I got my new camera, I have been obsessed with image-making.  I am like a kid in a candy shop of color, light and shape.  Seeing me in my pajamas on the road is becoming a common sight for morning commuters.  Oh well.

I am also a new blogger.  I LOVE that.  I feel as if I am awakening from a long hibernation, and stretching out in the sun like a cat.  Writing has become luscious, unpredictable, my morning improvisation.

It has also pushed me to re-calibrate, to look at my goals.  Life goals, work goals.  To articulate them for myself and for those who are helping me figure out how to attract more people to the site.  More readers, more conversation, more connection, more community.  Practical law of attraction work.  Yesterday I heard Abraham say that if your action is driven by need or worry or lack, it is counterproductive.  That the best way to attract what you want is to get happy.  Simple as that, really.  It is a vibrational universe and we have to be vibrating at the highest, happiest frequency to attract what we are wanting.

I am pretty happy these days.  Actually joyful.  That has not always been something I could say.   I am writing about that this week in The Journal. What it is to be A Dangerous Woman.

Today though, I am writing to you, and that makes me very, very happy.

What is making you happy?

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When we first adopted our daughters we lived on Martha’s Island.  It was a wonderful, safe, sea-bound nest. One thing the girls quickly learned was that whenever we went somewhere that required traveling on a ferry or a plane, we were heading “off island.”

Even after we moved back to the mainland, they would still talk about going off island.  It was a funny, quirky remnant of island time.

One thing we found when we moved to the mainland is that there were many, many roads. Not just North Road, South Road and Middle Road.  (There are others, but you do travel the same paths a lot.)   I spent the first couple years, meandering.  Particularly after my Mom died, I would leave the stable and just drive – the Hudson River region is endlessly beautiful – I got deeply lost and I loved it.  It was a way of working out my geography – the new landscape of where we physically lived and where I was in the world without my parents.

For me, off island has come to mean other things.  I feel that my work is taking me off island. That I am headed out to open water, sometimes without any sense of purposeful navigation.  Perilous, adrift.  Mostly though, going off island feel pretty exhilarating.

My writing, which has been focused for the past few years on writing a book, is starting to morph and  shift, and I find I am bringing more of myself “on the mainland.”  Meaning I am writing in a public forum, and am hungry for a different kinds of connection.  When I started planning the blog, my friend, Jon Katz, said “Do it.”  And I am doing it.  Every day.

What is taking you off island?

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