Pat Schneider's Blog, page 3

Gifts from Pat Schneider

Please click on the links to download your gifts:

 

 

Broadside poster (11×17) of Pat’s inspirational poem for writers in two formats:

 

 

ALPHABET FOR A WRITER (150 dpi for computer viewing white type)

 

 

ALPHABET FOR A WRITER (300 dpi suitable for printing white type)

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ALPHABET FOR A WRITER (150 dpi for computer viewing black type)

 

 

ALPHABET FOR A WRITER (300 dpi suitable for printing black type)

 

 

 

3 WRITING PROMPTS TO INSPIRE YOUR PRACTICE

An invitation to ponder: “How the Light Gets In”

Dear friends and companions,

I am honored to have been asked to lead one component of an on-line retreat that promises to be rich with opportunities to go inward artistically and/or spiritually, guided by leaders of various paths toward pilgrimage and wholeness.

Here is how Elizabeth Foley, creator of The Art of Spiritual Living Online Retreat , explains it:

“Spirituality doesn’t have to just be something for Ashrams or vacations to Bali. We can make it part of our every day life.

 

The Art of Spiritual Living Online Retreat makes it easy for you to retreat from the comfort and convenience of your own home.

 

It’s completely free and you can do it on your own schedule after the kids have gone to bed or on the weekend when you finally have time to slow down.

 

This is for you if:

 

• You are an artist, writer, or musician that’s feeling blocked and you want to get your creative juices flowing again.

 

•You have always wanted to explore creativity, yoga, or meditation but haven’t really known where to start or thought you weren’t (insert whatever doubt or lack of qualification you’re concerned about here) enough to do it.

 

•You have been walking a spiritual path for sometime and you know community and support will help deepen your practice.

 

During the online retreat, join visionaries from around the world in exploring what spirituality means to them. 25+ guides will be sharing a variety of ways that you can experience your connection to Source and integrate that connection into your everyday life.

 

We’ll practice conscious movement from yoga to qi gong. We’ll experience guided meditations and visualizations. We’ll explore writing and art as spiritual practice. We’ll tap into our personal power.

 

Every experience is designed to be completely accessible to a beginner while still being engaging and nourishing to a seasoned spiritual seeker.”

My portion of the retreat will consider writing as a spiritual practice, based on my Oxford University Press book, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice. It is my hope that you will consider participating in this free online retreat, and pass the word to others who might be interested.

Click here to join us or to learn more about the retreat.

With best wishes,

Pat Schneider

P.S. The retreat began on Sunday July 23rd, but you don’t have to miss anything. By opting in participants will receive daily email with links to the day’s sessions and the schedule page where they can watch any of the sessions that have already aired. Sessions will air July 23rd – July 30th and be available for viewing until the full moon August 7th.

 

 

 

 

Lessons from The Little Red Hen

I am thinking these days about publishing, and my current mentor is “The Little Red Hen.” Listen up, girls and boys. You never get too old to have new understandings.  I’ll be 83 in a couple of weeks (how did this happen!!??), and so I know whereof I speak.  The Little Red Hen is teaching me something important.  For those of you too young to know her, she is the star of an old English or Russian folk tale, first published as a “Golden Book” on October 1, 1942, when I was eight years old.  I think she has always been important to me, but my clearest memories of her are of reading her story to my children. The Little Red Hen is quite elderly now.  No telling when she was born into folklore!  More about her later.

I have just finished a manuscript of a new book of poems – my sixth, all five before this one published in the small press that I founded, Amherst Writers & Artists Press.  I didn’t intend to found a press, but there was a young poet in one of my writing workshops who was writing amazing, brilliant poems, but very great trouble was going on in her life and I feared that she might kill herself.  I watched her sit in my rocking chair writing to the rhythm of her rocking, and I was frightened for her.  One evening when she was absent, I asked in the workshop if any of the participants knew where I could get money enough to publish a book of her poems, thinking maybe that would balance all the troubles she was facing, and help her want to live.  One of the women gave me enough money to do two chapbooks, and so we published chapbooks by two women, and voila! Amherst Writers & Artists Press was born. (And the rocking chair poet is alive and well!) Now, all these years later, we have published forty books, and have more waiting publication.  Five of those have been my own books.

As I was putting last touches on my new manuscript, The Weight of Love, getting it ready to send off to a large publisher in New York City, I realized that I have never done this before.  I’ve sent poems to journals and magazines, I’ve even entered a few contests, but I’ve never, ever, sent a book manuscript to anyone.  Why? I asked myself.  Instantly I knew the answer:  all my life, since I wrote my first poems at age ten, what I have wanted to be was a poet.  I didn’t dream of being a teacher, or an editor, or a writer of books to help others write.  I wanted to be a poet. I endured (and still do!) the inevitable fifteen or more rejections for every acceptance by journals and magazines, but I was afraid that the poet in me would not survive the rejection of a whole book of my poems. So I never tried.

Now I have finished a new book, poems that I believe are the best I’ve ever written, and in waddles The Little Red Hen.  She doesn’t look a day older than when I first met her seventy some years ago.  Same perky tail feathers, same bright eye.  She finds a grain of wheat and goes asking other animals in the barnyard who will help her plant the seed, grow the harvest, grind the flour to make a cake, bake it, frost it and decorate it.  The answer to each question, by each animal, is “Not I.”  And each time, The Little Red Hen says, “I will, then.”  Finally the cake is done.  It is beautiful.  It is a masterpiece.  And she asks who would like to help her eat it.  They all volunteer their help.  And she says, “I will.” And she does.

I have sent off my book.  I have done my homework.  I have been rejected and accepted by journals, I have published five books of my own poems, and now I am a mentee of The Little Red Hen.  I am asking, “Who will publish my book?”  If they all say “No,”  I will say, “I will do it, then.”  And I will.

The moral of the story is obvious.  For all the things we mourn about publishing these days (the loss of local bookstores, “fake news” of the death of books, etc., etc.) there are a few good things.  Self-publishing is no longer considered bad taste.  We can do this; it is good for us to have our work honored by our friends and neighbors, good for us to do it ourselves.  It is good for us and for others when small groups of writers form their own presses and publish one another’s work.  The old system that claimed being a writer depended upon publication by an established press – is dead.  Publication is available; by shopping around, one can individually have book excellently, beautifully published  — only a few copies, or a great number, at very modest cost.  Send your manuscript off and ask, but don’t stop there.  When you get tired of the answer, “Not I,” perk up your feathers, put the gleam back in your eye, and say, “I will do it then.”

Form for Ordered Books dedication:

 

[contact-form-7]

ALPHABET FOR A WRITER

A – at last.

B – be still.

C – care for your spirit

D – dream

E – eat, with deep pleasure

F – feel

G – go without knowing your destination

H – have, in abundance

I – instinct, rather than rules

J – – just this one day

K – kindness toward your own mind and body

L – let wild creatures, wild places, teach you

M – meander

N – name yourself she (or he) who is a writer

O – open to a blank page

P – put one word on the page

Q – quickly add another word and another without looking back

R – relinquish all judgment

S – stop//sleep//solitude

stop when you are tired and do not scold yourself
sleep extravagantly; sleep toward the writing
solitude – claim the sort you love. It is essential

T – trust your own voice and your own process

U – very gently return to your page

W – wait  if you feel stopped,  rest, then ask your unconscious for an image

X – X out anything that displeases you, but don’t erase in a first draft

Y – Yes is a beautiful  word.  Say it to yourself

Z – when your pattern doesn’t work, abandon it.  Go back to A.

 

Pat Schneider

Response to the Women’s March, January 2017

Pat with daughter Bethany and granddaughter Sarah

Dear travelers with me,

some months ago I wrote this letter to a friend, and today she sent it back to me, thanking me for it. Day before yesterday was the Women’s March  – so now I tinker with my letter, update it, and offer it to you.  My own tradition is Christian – those of you who have read my books know my struggle with my tradition – here that struggle with its problems and its strengths are clearly visible:

A lot of years ago, as my daughter, Laurel, who is a theologian and author of some amazing books of theology, (Beyond Monotheism; Awake to the Moment) was washing dishes and I was drying, she said, “Oh, Mom, by the way — some young feminists are saying the gospel of John may have been written by a woman.”

I laid down the towel and without a word went into the front room, closed the door, sat down on the couch and sobbed those deep, racking sobs that come up very seldom and usually from a place within us of which we are not fully aware.  It would take too many paragraphs to adequately tell what the gospel of John meant to me.  Let it suffice to say that almost, if not all, of the tender stories of Jesus and women are in it, and I spent two years once teaching from it, one verse at a time, researching what history I could related to that verse in preparation for the next Sunday morning class.

Nothing like those moments with Laurel has happened since.

Until the night recently when our friend, Emily Savin sat between Peter and me on the couch in the living room and played from YouTube for us the twenty-third Psalm by Bobby McFerrin.  To hear this gentle, sweet coming to the words “mother and daughter” simply broke open some place in myself I didn’t even know existed.  Again, I was reduced to sobs.  Only later, only in the days and the events that have wracked our nation and our world, have I come to understand the feelings that those two events brought to my awareness.

This morning I read in the New York Times a careful and caring response to the Women’s March on Washington last Saturday – but I do not agree with it. It said, in essence, that marching makes us feel good but doesn’t change  a thing.

Wrong.  It does change something.

I am full of hope, my sisters and brothers.  I believe that Donald Trump has ripped open and made visible, as no one before him has, the ugly truth about the forever place women have lived in — less than, second to, touched where we don’t want to be touched, told as I was told in graduate school that I could not get the degree I wanted “because unfortunately you are a woman” and I didn’t even feel any anger —just soggy disappointment because that was the way the world was.

“Mother” and “daughter,” Bobby McFerrin sings. And I remember Jesus kneeling beside the woman about to be stoned, writing in the sand with his finger.

Let us write, my sisters.  Let us speak and write and sing the truth of our lives, and let us have hope because so many good men marched with their women, so many good men are seeing for the first time, understanding for the first time, how it might feel as it felt when I was twelve years old, riding by myself on a Greyhound bus on an inside seat, when all at once a finger began moving up and down my leg.   It was 1946.  I never until now told anyone about that moment.  Why should I?  That’s just the way the world was for women. But it doesn’t have to be that way forever.

The Women’s March does change something.  It has changed something in this one old woman’s heart and mind.  I will write.  I will write to my senators and representatives as I never have before. And I will continue to write the truth of my own life.  Poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”

Here is Bobby McFerrin, singing a deep truth of our lives:

A Year’s End Gift

 

In this season of great fear and danger, when wars and rumors of wars clash against our consciousness, it seems to me that we must do two things: commit ourselves to action toward peace and justice in every way possible to us, – and find in the small things, the tender things, the quiet things, meaning and patience and hope.

 

I do hold the hope and the belief that we are not alone in this universe. Although it is beyond my understanding or ability to name, I do experience what the ancient Hebrew poet expressed: Underneath are the everlasting arms.

 

 

 

 

 

I offer this new poem as a year’s end gift:

 

 

AROUND US

Snow fall

and all

the seeds

the birds feed on

covered.

Tiny, earnest

air full flakes

cover the hand

that spreads

more seeds.

Mercy and woe

world sized

abounds.

Around us

always the fall

and the hand

offering more.

Pat Schneider

 

 

 

 

 

This may be the best statement I have ever drafted of the work we do in Amherst Writers & Artists

Pat with members of the Original AWA Chicopee Workshop

I was asked to write the introduction to a book of writings by 50 homeless and recently homeless women writing together at Mary’s Place in Seattle, WA. They use the method described in my book, Writing Alone & With Others, Oxford University Press.

This may be the best statement I have ever drafted of the work we do in Amherst Writers & Artists, and why we do it. The essay is here adapted for Anchor Magazine. Please click the link to read it online.

This may be the best statement I have every drafted of the work we do in Amherst Writers & Artists

Pat with members of the Original AWA Chicopee Workshop

I was asked to write the introduction to a book of writings by 50 homeless and recently homeless women writing together at Mary’s Place in Seattle, WA. They use the method described in my book, Writing Alone & With Others, Oxford University Press.

This may be the best statement I have ever drafted of the work we do in Amherst Writers & Artists, and why we do it. The essay is here adapted for Anchor Magazine. Please click the link to read it online.

Brilliant painter Fanny Rush and Anchor Magazine

I’m delighted that my poem “The Patience of Ordinary Things” has just been published in Anchor Magazine accompanied by Fanny Rush’s stunning painting. (Please click on the link above or the painting below to see it).

Window – Summer Morning – Dorset by Fanny Rush
Oil on Canvas, 67cm x 67cm

I’m in love with Fanny and her work. You can see more at www.fannyrush.com.