I started to get excited by maps in my first grade classroom when Mrs. Lett pulled down the world map in front of the blackboard and used her pointer to show us where we lived: Eganville, Ontario, Canada. Having seen the many possibilities of personal mapmaking since then, I created a memory map of my childhood backyard. I’m remembering maps sketched on serviettes and discovering ways to explore emotions by mapping them. And I’ve mapped my spiritual journey to Turkey, specifically Catal Hoyuk, an ancient site in central Anatolia, Turkey, which has one of world’s oldest authenticated map.

You Are Here

When my partner Sarah and I sold our house in Guelph, Ontario, she drew a map to show Avril, the new owner, where all the neighbours lived. At a gathering at our home, with the map in one hand, Sarah steered Avril to each neighbour to introduce them and show their position on the map of Kirkland Street. The map viewing began with “you are here.”

I wonder if Avril kept her hand drawn map or passed it on to the new owners when she sold the house at 38 Kirkland? Through the years I’ve seen many hand drawn maps on the corners of newspapers, on serviettes and on the backs of cigarette package flaps. Although I haven’t kept a collection I was intrigued to see that someone has.

Kris Harzinski began the Hand Drawn Map Association (HDMA), an archive of maps and other diagrams drawn by hand, when he found a collection of maps people had drawn for him over the years.  He says in the introduction to his book, From Here to There (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010): “The maps had become much more than useful directions from one place to another; they had become accidental records of a moment in time.”

Harzinski began to share his maps and to collect maps from others through his website.  The hand drawn maps record specific details peculiar or particular to a place. Many are maps of directions. Some are “found” maps while others are fictional such as the one Eleanor Davies created to explain a recurring dream to her friends. She calls her map “Newfoundlands” in which there’s no clear distinction between the land and the water. “In the dream she wanders along the coastline of an island, attempting to reach the beginning, only to find the island is constantly morphing and stretching into a never-ending expanse of land.”

Memory Map

One of the maps I drew some years ago in a women’s writing circle I was facilitating is what I call a memory map inspired by Hannah Hinchman’s book, A Life in Hand: Creating the Illuminated Journal (Gibbs-Smith 1991).  Hinchman calls her suggested exercise “memory walking” and I found the not-to-scale drawing to be a pleasant recollection of childhood memories. In fact, the exercise is designed as a happy remembering, not a traumatic one.

The details on the map are meant to be those “your child mind stored away.” Hinchman’s example is a winding line with small illustrations and words along it as she recalled what was significant to her as a child. You don’t need to know how to draw and nothing needs to be to scale.

Drawing my memory map took me back to a time when I became a poet – the solitude, the silence, the development of my imagination. I remembered the stories as I drew the map of my childhood backyard where I lived with my maternal grandparents.  The memories all ended up in poems and personal essays.

Beyond the vegetable garden and the pump,
The potato patch and the plum trees,
between the farmers’ wooden fences,
the fields of the valley sing their songs.

From “Ottawa Valley” by Mary Ann Moore included in Those Early Days, Hopeful (Leaf Press, 2010) and Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press, 2014).

If I were to tell you about my map, I would say:

The bench under the plum trees is where Grandma and Grandpa sit on warm summer evenings. If you walk across the strip of grass, you come to the gravel driveway that leads to the garage. Grandpa changes his car’s oil filter in there.  I play with the stones.

Behind the garage is a woodshed where I play house and behind that, a refuse dump of old tin cans. That’s where I saw a snake one day. At the very bottom of the property looking on to farmers’ fields is a swing.

The vegetable garden, tended by Grandpa, is behind the house. We shared some cucumber there as we sat on the grass and he cut slices off with his pocket knife.

The picnic table behind the house is where I play store with empty boxes and discarded tins. In the winter when a bit of snow mixes with the metal, a particular and strange scent emerges.

Hollyhocks grow up the side of the blue house and sunflowers border the potato patch.

The Third Dimension

            Titia Jetten, a Nanaimo artist, who, with her husband Robert Plante, has facilitated workshops called The Map, says: “The interesting thing is that a map is in fact a link between dimensions, because it shows a 3D situation in 2D. The reality around you is translated into a compressed form leaving out one dimension. Every map contains secrets, silent information, because the third dimension is hidden in the second. And when you are a good map reader, you are able to ‘read’ the reality pictured in lines and shapes and colours. Unfortunately people nowadays lose the talent to understand a map, ‘read’ the landscape and decipher the hidden information. They follow the voice in their car and lose every sense of place.”

The Oldest Map

I wonder if the people of the ancient village of Catal Hoyuk in central Anatolia (Turkey) were experiencing a mixture of joy and grief as they depicted everyday rituals and drew a map on a wall in one of their dwellings.

What may be the oldest authenticated map in the world is dated to approximately 6000 BCE and was painted on a wall at Catal Hoyuk. The streets and houses of the Neolithic town are shown in rows lying beneath the profile of the mountain of Hazan Dag.  A volcano is part of the wall painting.  It was found in 1963 and is now in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, Turkey.

In 1998, I was part of a pilgrimage to Turkey called “In the Footsteps of the Goddess.” One of the most significant sites on the tour was Catal Hoyuk. Present day homes in the vicinity are similar to the houses of the ancient site: square with animals roaming around on the flat roofs.

The villagers
of Catal Hoyuk
linked their red ochre handprints
with honeycombs,
painted the palms of others
with seeds
or an egg.

On the eve
of the wedding
in the village of Basmakci,
the women sing,
place a dot of red ochre
on their palms,
the hand of Fatima.

From “Hands” by Mary Ann Moore included in You Are Here (Leaf Press, 2012) and Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press, 2014).

Before our tour group went to Catal Hoyuk, we spent the night in private homes in the village of Basmakci where the members of our all-women tour attended a henna party, kina gecesi, where a bride-to-be had her hands hennaed in a special ritual before her wedding the next day.

We also had our hands hennaed so that the next day when we placed our palms on the earth at Catal Hoyuk we were linking our stories, all that we had learned in our modern world, with those hand prints of the people who lived peacefully 8000 years ago. The handprints in red ochre were placed on the walls long before Islam so the hands are as if to say we are here. I have found the symbol of the hand to be an important one to many cultures of the world and a significant connection to one another for thousands of years.

I can’t help but think of the hand prints in dwellings, and on woven rugs for example, as maps of an ancient people. I can look at my own hand and see the past and future there. According to Palmistry or Chiromancy, the “proper” name of divination with the hand, hands tell a tale. There’s a life line, a head line, a heart line and a fate line.  All the lines on our dominant hand show us where we’ve been and where we may be headed.  A map of lines on our hands that also tell the tale of what our occupation may be whether ink-stained or with gritty nails from garden soil or callused hands from holding instruments.

You Are Here

In one of  the women’s writing circles I began to offer in my Toronto living room, we drew our hands noting on them what we wanted to drawn into our lives.  I couldn’t help but think then and now of children placing their hands in finger paint and then on a large pieces of paper to create wrinkled artifacts of red hands in a determined row proclaiming: You are here.

“Schedules as little maps of the possible” Sage Cohen said in her book The Productive Writer (Writer’s Digest Books, 2010). With that description schedules have taken on a whole new meaning.  I create a list for the day, a sort of map, and look through the window to a fine web of fine grey branches against a November sky. I am reminded of the broken veins on my shins like embroidery – or would a crocheted doily be more apt? I think of the words and write them down as a poem about veins, like branches, on my left leg.

If I could look this close
see the shin etchings
before the surgeon has me
lift my pant leg
to declare calligraphy in blue,
I would see the branches
crocheted across the sky,
the November veil,
trace the tiny crab trail,
through the sand ­­­­–
a map, shimmering:
you are here.

 From “You Are Here” by Mary Ann Moore, is included in You Are Here (Leaf Press, 2012) and Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press, 2014).

 The Place You Already Are

 I find poetry to be a kind of map as well especially since reading an interview with Jane Hirshfield in an interview in Tricycle magazine (Spring 2006). She said: “Poems are maps to the place where you already are.”

Sarah and I have been discovering a new place that reminds me of living in the country with my grandparents. I’m in a different province now and I’m feeling the expansiveness of the property on which we now live in Nanaimo, B.C. We’re very much “here” learning the names of the trees and the wildflowers, the birds and the butterflies. We’re part of a community with the deer, the rabbits and a bear.

When we meander this newly found place, we take careful
steps around randomly placed daffodils, notice tiny white
flowers we haven’t found a name for yet. Josef has made
birdhouses, assembled cocoons for Mason bees. We know
we’ll find our way back to the work we once did.

From “Mending” by Mary Ann Moore included in Mending (house of appleton, 2023)

Mapping Your Spiritual Journey

I’ve written about my pilgrimage to Turkey in Writing to Map Your Spiritual Journey and included the memory map I referred to above in a chapter entitled “Memory Walk”. It’s a digital workbook in full-colour, available from the International Association for Journal Writing (iajw.org). Here’s the link for more information and purchasing. Please note prices are in U.S. funds.

A Curious Happiness in Small Things (Raven Chapbooks, 2020) – such a perfect title for a book of poetry, especially this book of praise poems by David Haggart.

The poem from which the book takes its title is about the narrator’s ride in the back of a pick-up driven by a woman “near eighty” down the hill on Mt Maxwell Road. Mount Maxwell is on Salt Spring Island, B.C. where David has lived since 2000.

Happiness in small things appears in other poems in the collection too such as “The Truce” about a boy and his Nanny which ends:

I have learned to be grateful
for the least bit of light.

“Moments in Time” describes some natural wonders such as “a polar bear out on the sea ice,” “caribou heading north,” and “a couple of deer delicately picking / their way through a meadow” and ends with:

And last night —
the first adult conversation you have ever had
with your seventeen-year-old granddaughter
how all of this matters
how it all belongs.

There is little punctuation in David’s poems beyond the odd em dash (in place of a comma) and periods at the ends of stanzas. And that works well! One line leads to another, one poems leads to another. As Robert Hilles wrote in his cover endorsement: “Like all great poetry books, you can’t read just one of these poems. You will be drawn in by the compassion and wisdom and after every poem you will want to pause and reflect.”

David’s “wonderful” daughter, Rebecca Hendry, wrote the beautiful preface to the book. She writes: “In this book you will find love songs to his family, to the glory of nature, and to the fierce beauty of the North. You will find fragments of the incredible and the mundane, the mighty and the fragile, and the healing and the trauma that make up our experience as humans.”

Never mind accolades from people we don’t know, it’s the people closest to us who read and appreciate our poems that matters the most.

In his poem “Giants,” David pays tribute to various poets including Bly, Cohen, Atwood, MacEwen, Oliver, Carver and Patrick Lane “who always breaks my heart.”

David Haggart was born in 1949 in Brockville, Ontario. He studied journalism in Toronto and worked all over Canada “from cutting pulp in Nova Scotia to working in the bush in the Arctic, spending a fair amount of time in the Barren Lands – savouring the emptiness there.”

He moved to the Fraser Valley, B.C. in 1983 working construction and silviculture there. In 1988, David successfully “quelled” his lengthy battle with alcoholism only to discover he had “serious mental health issues.”

In the mid nineties, David began to write and attended a Patrick Lane poetry workshop in Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. As poet and mentor Patrick advised, David learned to write “by writing.”

David makes note of that advice in his poem “Lane” written after Patrick died in 2019. In the poem, David says following the workshop, he sent “a handful of new poems” and “a copy of a chapbook / I had just published” to Patrick. David writes:

In the letter
I said my only wish
was to write
three beautiful lines
before I died.

He wrote back
lauding the chapbook
with the faint praise it deserved
telling me I had already written the lines
and quoted them back to me —
I have never received a greater gift.

I can appreciate David’s feeling of having received a great gift from his poetry mentor, master poet and teacher Patrick Lane. As the poem was published in recent years and the praise goes back twenty-five years, such a gift has been long lived.

At a gathering on Salt Spring Island recently at the home of Diana Hayes, a poet, photographer and David’s publisher, David read his poem “The Weekend.” It mentions Patrick Lane, also a mentor of mine, and other poets the poem’s narrator will read. The first lines of the first four stanzas are inviting writing prompts I think:

There are things I cannot do . . .
I would give one year of my life . . .
I would like to sing like . .
I would like to find . . .

There are ordinary tasks described (returning books to the library) with a poet’s reflection. The final lines are:

on Monday I will visit a dying man in the hospital
and then go to see my shrink as usual
and read him this poem.

I loved the poem when I heard David read it and love it even more now. As David’s daughter Rebecca says in the preface: “He can hold his sadness close to him, cradle it, turn it over, and look for whys, and yet can be overcome by joy while having a simple meal at a restaurant with his grandchildren where, for a few moments, the light eclipses the darkness.”

A beloved daughter, a respected mentor, a “gifted” psychiatrist have all helped encourage David Haggart’s poems. And as he says in the Acknowledgments: “Thank you also to my publisher, Diana Hayes, without whom there literally would be no book.” Diana Hayes is the publisher of Raven Chapbooks. I thank Diana too for making David’s poems available for many others to read. (David Haggart’s photo is by Diana Hayes.)

Raven Chapbooks is an independent press located on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, founded by Diana Hayes. This family venture first began in the late 1990s as Rainbow Publishers. The press has now turned its focus to poetry chapbooks featuring emerging and established British Columbia poets. A Curious Happiness in Small Things by David Haggart was the first chapbook published by Raven Chapbooks in 2020. To order a copy ($18.), here’s a link to the contact page for Raven Chapbooks: https://www.ravenchapbooks.ca/contact/

Nourish Yourself
Honour Your Voice
Write Your Stories.

Summer, a time of year with little or no structure . . . a free-floating time of musing, pondering and shifting. It’s also a perfect chance to take a “time out” to connect to oneself while being in the nurturing company of other writers.

This summer I am offering some unique ONE-AT-A-TIME POP-UP circles to keep you connected to a sustainable writing practice and a nourishing writing community. And this is an opportunity to see what a Writing Life circle is like before signing up for a four-week or six week circle.

Some writing circles are in person and one is on Zoom so you can enjoy the circle from wherever you are.

Fee: $60 for each 2-1/2 hour session (includes refreshments)
except for the Zoom circle which is $50
There are angel funds available so please let me know if a lower fee would be helpful.

Location: My home in Nanaimo (about 15 minutes from downtown)
The July 13^th writing circle wherever you live, on Zoom.

Please Do: Check your calendar to see what dates you’re available. Let me know so I can save you a space. E: creativity@maryannmoore.ca

Confirm your space sending an e-transfer to creativity@maryannmoore.ca.  If mailing a cheque, my mailing address is: Mary Ann Moore, 76 Colwell Road, Nanaimo, B.C. V9X 1E6

Maximum: 6 writers
Minimum: 3 writers

All that we are is story. From the moment
we are born to the time we continue on
our spirit journey, we are involved in the
creation of the story of our time here. It is
what we arrive with. It is all we leave behind.

Richard Wagamese

July 2023

Create a retreat for yourself for a morning in July whether on Zoom or in person in Nanaimo.

A Cabinet of Curiosities
Thursday, July 13, 2023, 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Pacific Time on Zoom

The term “a cabinet of curiosities” goes back to Renaissance Europe, and probably earlier, when people had “wonder rooms” full of knick-knacks and collections of oddities from nature for study, inspiration and contemplation. We still collect curiosities on our walks, our travels and because we cherish objects we’ve kept since childhood. Each object has a story and each evokes or invokes a memory in us. Readings from poets and prose writers will inspire our writing about our own cabinets of curiosities. Lorna Crozier’s The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things will be one of our inspirations.

A Cabinet of Curiosities
Thursday, July 20, 2023, 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in person

The term “a cabinet of curiosities” goes back to Renaissance Europe, and probably earlier, when people had “wonder rooms” full of knick-knacks and collections of oddities from nature for study, inspiration and contemplation. We still collect curiosities on our walks, our travels and because we cherish objects we’ve kept since childhood. Each object has a story and each evokes or invokes a memory in us. Readings from poets and prose writers will inspire our writing about our own cabinets of curiosities. Lorna Crozier’s The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things will be one of our inspirations.

I have come to believe that we are given
certain stories to write: that regardless of
genre or length, these stories seek us out.

Betsy Warland, “Twenty Pages and a Razor Blade”

August 2023

Create a retreat for yourself for a morning or two in August at a country setting in Nanaimo.

Maps of the Possible
Wednesday, August 2, 2023, 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in person

“Writing makes a map,” writer Christina Baldwin said in her book Life’s Companion. “There is something about a journey that begs to have its passage marked.” That can be done in a journal as well as in various forms that include poetry, personal essays, short prose and genre-defying approaches you create yourself. You have something to say that only you can say; stories that seek you out.  We’ll have a look at the various possibilities when it comes to your own writing from life.

We live on a coastal hill with a view west
onto a bay, a mountain, a rust-gold bridge,
and the sea beyond them.

Robert Hass, “To Be Accompanied
by Flute and Zither”

Desire Lines & A Memory Map
Tuesday, August 15, 2023, 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in person

From an imagined walk in a once familiar place, a memory map, we’ll move on to where you live now and then consider “desire lines,” which are the paths you create for yourself, straying from the one carved out for you. Desire is at the heart of creativity the late John O’Donohue said. “When we engage creatively . . . we enter into a kind of genesis foyer, where something that not yet is might begin to edge its way from silence into word, from the invisible into form.” (To Bless the Space Between Us)

What Happens in a Writing Life Circle

In the Writing Life Circle we write from our lives and create writing lives. We write for the love of it. I offer inspiring readings, poems and prompts as doorways to our own stories and “your own way of looking at things.” Much of our inspiration and creative stimulation comes from one another as well as from the work of other writers. There’s no critiquing and no previous writing experience is necessary. Responses to one another’s writing is meant to encourage and support.

While some of the writing may be considered “journaling,” it has value as acknowledging an event or an emotion and may offer some fresh insight. Lines from those journaling entries may make their way into future pieces of fiction, a personal essay or a poem. An important aspect of the circle is to claim the fullness of your own life, to write your story for yourself first before you consider the aspect of crafting it to share elsewhere.

We follow guidelines in the circle so as to create a safe container. I also offer a flower essence each week as Nature’s support for our safe container, the process of uncovering and the integration of what has been discovered.

Please be in touch with any questions you may have.

April is National Poetry Month in Canada. with the theme of Joy this year.

We’re all definitely in need of and ready for joy.  Nanaimo, happily, is a poetry city. We have a poet laureate, Kamal Pamar, and there are always poetry events taking place at the libraries; accompanied by a symphony orchestra in a theatre; in cafes; at salons; and often on the street. And hopefully in classrooms too.

Last Fall, two women in the Writing Life women’s writing circle I lead, and I, decided we would put some poems together and create chapbooks to launch in April 2023. We kept to a proposed timeline and hired Sarah Clark to design them for us. Sarah is a graphic designer and my partner. As she was designing three books she thought she ought to have her own imprint which she named house of appleton. You can read about her new venture named for her maternal grandfather Franklin Fletcher Appleton here.

You can also order copies of the chapbooks at the link above.

I called my book Mending after one of the poems included in it. I wrote the poem last April at a poetry retreat with Lorna Crozier in Honeymoon Bay, on Lake Cowichan, Vancouver Island, B.C. The theme for our poem was “love” and I felt full of love and gratitude for my partner Sarah, and the new home we found ourselves in. (We moved to our current home on February 29, 2022.)

There are all sorts of definitions for the word “mending” while the poems in Mending, my book,  are about emotional mending such as a refection on “My Mother’s Hands” and about having a hysterectomy in “A Ceremony in the Forest.” I actually refer to a hysterectomy in both of those poems!

“My Mothers Asks Me Questions form the Afterlife” contains questions from my mother with my answers having to do with a goddess pilgrimage I was part of on the Greek island of Crete.  “Forsaken Things” is about things given away and “Small Victories” is about facilitating a circle at a drop-in for the mental health community in Nanaimo, B.C. where I live.

“Whenever I’m disappointed” is about my daughter and special times we spent together in the past and there are some poems that refer to the COVID-19 pandemic such as “I wonder what we will talk about” which continues:

when we get together in person again,
having not done much except hang a new feeder
for the hummingbirds, so busy at the buffet 

. . . 

MJ Burrows, Marlene Dean and I began the celebrations of our new chapbooks with a salon at Sarah’s and my home which we call The Literary Hummingbird Ranch. Women from the Writing Life circle attended and MJ, Marlene and I were happy to share our poems with women we had spent time writing with and with whom we have shared encouragement and support.

The photo above was taken by Sarah Clark. I’m in the back and Marlene Dean and MJ Burrows are in the front. We’re all holding our new chapbooks. Marlene’s is Because Things Are and MJ’s is Sea-Washed Stones.

It was a good idea to have a “dress rehearsal” before heading to the library in Nanaimo. We launched our books at the North Nanaimo branch of the Vancouver Island Regional Library on Monday, April 3^rd which was a great kick-off to poetry month. The space at the North Nanaimo branch is an inviting one with lots of light, plenty of seating, and three microphones.  Thank you to Darby Love, Adult Services Librarian, for all her help.

We three poets read our poems in sets of three on a theme, each of us taking a turn, weaving our poems and our voices.

The picture of me above was taken by my poet friend Diana Hayes from Salt Spring Island, B.C.

If you happen to live in Victoria, we three poets will be reading at Planet Earth Poetry which takes place at Russell Books, 747 Fort Street at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, April 21^st. The open mic is first and we will follow around 8 p.m. So you have a chance to read a poem of your own and to mingle with other poets.

The reading will also be on Zoom and recorded. If you get in touch by emailing me at creativity@maryannmoore.ca, I can send you the Zoom link when I have it or the link to the recording later which will be on the Planet Earth Poetry You Tube channel.

Enjoy National Poetry Month!

The title of Julia Cameron’s new book, Write for Life: Creative Tools for Every Writer (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2022) resonates with me as I lead women’s writing circles called Writing Life; we write from life and create writing lives for ourselves. And I’ve written a book I consider a writing companion and guide called Writing Home: A Whole Life Practice. I see writing as a (whole) life practice and as Julia Cameron does, I consider writing a spiritual practice.

Julia Cameron’s Write for Life is called “A 6-Week Artist’s Way Program” as it relates to Julia’s The Artist’s Way published in 1992. I so appreciated that book and have read several of her books since in the Artist’s Way series as well as other books she has published on the theme of creativity.

I still have my original copy of The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Perigee Books, 1992) and enjoyed seeing what I had written in pencil all those years ago in answer to the questions posed. I had marked in pen the portion at the end of the book entitled “The Sacred Circle.”

Julia wrote: “Drawing a Sacred Circle creates a sphere of safety and a center of attraction for our good. By filling this form faithfully, we draw to us the best. We draw the people we need. We attract the gifts we could best employ.”

I didn’t begin women’s writing circles in 1992 but I did gather with other writers regularly to write and share our work. I attended writing workshops when I could including a two-week retreat in North Vancouver called West Word IX. It was a women’s  writing retreat, the last one in the series as it turned out, and I was in the fiction group led by Lee Maracle. I value solitude and I very much need to gather with others writers to write together and to share our work.

The two main tools of The Artist’s Way are Morning Pages and Artist Dates. Julia refers to both in Write for Life with an emphasis on Morning Pages. “Walking for Creative Health” is also added to this new book as well as to her books since The Artist’s Way. “Twice a week, or more often if you’d like to, take yourself on a solo phone-free, dog-free, friend-free, twenty-minute walk,” Julia suggests. You could walk out with a question and return with an answer.

Artist Dates are taking exploratory adventures on your own to have fun. Julia suggests once a week, two hours at a time, to give yourself some renewed energy and inspiration.

Since Julia began the practice of Morning Pages for herself, she has published more than forty books. It’s a practice of three pages of longhand writing on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven inch paper done each morning. The pages are “strictly stream of consciousness” Julia points out. You keep your hand moving and write down anything that comes to you.

The first page and a half is pretty easy and the second page and a half a bit more difficult as you keep writing. Those pages contain “pay dirt” Julia says.

Something added to Writing for Life is The Daily Quota. At the end of each chapter in the six-week Write for Life program, Julia asks if you’ve reached your “doable daily quota for your writing project.” She suggests two pages for prose and three pages a day for screenplays. She doesn’t mention poetry but I have sometimes taken on the challenge of writing a poem a day, particularly during April, Poetry Month, using a line of another poet’s poem to get me started.

If you want to complete a particular writing project, Julia says: “The key to productivity is regularity.”

In her first chapter, “Priming the Pump,” Julia refers to having supportive and safe companions she calls “believing mirrors.” As for a room of one’s own as Virginia Woolf proclaimed as a woman writer’s need, Julia suggests Morning Pages as a safe place to vent.

Julia has “writing stations” in her Sante Fe home so she writes in different forms in different locations. She makes notes on the couch in her exercise room for instance and writes prose in her library.

I was a fan of Julia Cameron right from the start, all those years ago, as she sees writing as a spiritual path. She says: “. . . as I retired from my ego’s need to be a brilliant author, my writing became more clear. No longer aimed at being impressive and brilliant, it aimed instead to be forthright.” Julia came to believe “that honesty and authenticity could capture my reader’s faith.”

She still has a reader in mind but not for those Morning Pages which Julia says “is like sending a telegram to the universe . . . Although we may not call it that, we have sent a prayer.”

In Week One, “Priming the Pump,” Julia deals with what could be stumbling blocks for writers: perfectionism, the inner critic, procrastination, and the “dailiness” of writing.  There are “tasks” at the end of the weekly chapters and related to perfectionism is a series of lines for you to complete. They all begin with: “If I didn’t have to do it perfectly, I’d . . . “

There are also suggestions for dealing with your inner critic and “blasting through blocks.”

In the short essays in the book’s chapters, Julia usually describes the weather in Sante Fe and/or her state of mine. In “First Thoughts” included in Week Two “Begin Where You Are,” she describes the full moon with thick clouds obscuring it and the fact her dog Lily is restless. Although this is part of Julia’s essay, it could be something you could write in your Morning Pages. She does say: “My Morning Pages track the weather.”

I think beginning the day with writing what’s going on for you leads well into whatever writing project you’re working on. It could be that those feelings make their way into your piece of fiction, poetry or prose and it has all started with you. And as Julia says, with Morning Pages “we jot down our ideas. We do not strive to ‘think them up.’ “

I’m all for celebrating your achievements which is the subject of Week Six of Write for Life. You may want to take an all-day Artist Date as you may have a first draft of your writing project or are approaching that stage. If you dare to show your work to anyone at this stage, you can ask them to focus on the draft’s strength’s. That’s Julia’s suggestion and it’s a good one: “Tell me what works, and why.” As she says: “It is my experience that focusing on strengths amplifies those strengths. Focusing on weaknesses amplifies those weaknesses – not what you want to do.”

As I mentioned, there are questions and prompts among the “tasks” at the end of each week. For instance in Week Three, “Trust Your Process,” Julia suggests numbering one to ten and writing “What I’d really like to write about is . . . “  You could choose one topic from your list and write about it.

Under the heading of “Writing to Metabolize Life,” Julia suggest listing five emotionally charged topics or moments from your life and writing about one of them for five minutes.

While there are prompts such as the ones noted above, Write for Life isn’t going to give you ideas for keeping your memoir moving forward for instance.  You’re going to have to rely on your Morning Pages for that or other guides that ask specific questions. Write for Life is a companion for the process of writing and honours one’s daily practice of writing for yourself with a view to writing something that you can later share with others.

If you haven’t read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, I’d recommend starting there – or returning there. It’s the sort of book that you can read and follow over and over again.

And while I’m at it, I’ll let you know of my own writing guides.

The first two are presented in a digital format, available from the International Association for Journal Writing (IAJW). (Please note IAJW prices are in U.S. funds.)

Writing as a Spiritual Practice: Your Own Tea House Practice
Have a look for a description and to order here.

Writing to Map Your Spiritual Journey
Have a look for a description and to order, here.

The following is a 344-page book in soft cover:

Writing Life: A Whole Life Practice
You can have a look and purchase here. The price of $75 Canadian includes postage in Canada and a free copy of my poetry book: Fishing for Mermaids.

I have written in a journal, on my own, for many years and I’ve written in community in various settings with others for a long time too. One setting in which I haven’t written with others is in a jail. We do have a jail in Nanaimo, B.C. where I live but the fear of being behind several locked doors prevents me from suggesting writing circles to the Nanaimo Correctional Centre.

Tina Welling has been going to the Teton County Jail in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she lives, since 2011 specifically to offer journaling workshops. She has written about her experiences including the insight she gained in her beautifully written book: Tuesdays in Jail: What I Learned Teaching Journaling to Inmates (New World Library, 2022).

I pictured one room with a circle of chairs but that’s not how it was always set up for Tina’s Tuesday journaling workshops with the inmates. If in one room, there was an armed guard present and often two rooms were used that were adjoined by a metal grate. Tina also met inmates confined to maximum security, one on one, in a grated locked down room with no chance of physical contact. In that case, it was the only chance they got to talk to someone during the week.

For people judged for their outward actions in the world, Tina gave the inmates a chance to examine their inner lives. As she said in an interview with her publisher: “Writing with pencil and paper engages the body, the mind, the emotions. Putting language to thoughts and feelings brings them from the unconscious where they can work us to our awareness where we can work with them.”

One of her own wise quotes is: “What we bring into the light, we can work with. What remains in the dark, works us.”

Tina spoke to the inmates on various topics including the abandoning of oneself and mentions a man called Isaac in her interview. “We discussed how easy it was to confuse generosity with giving ourselves over to others.”

In her book, Tina writes that she realized it was imperative for her personal growth that she spent time in solitude. That meant she would sometimes respond to social invitations occasionally by answering: “ ‘I have another commitment.’ And that meant a commitment to myself.”

The inmates were given small notebooks and small yellow pencils such as are used by golfers. Writing prompts designed and given by Tina were meant to help the inmates name their feelings and face them. If there can be an advantage to incarceration, as Tina says: “When all alone in a jail cell, a person can discover who they are when not defined by friends for work or reputation.”

While there was some discussion in the workshops about upcoming court dates for instance, the workshop focused on the emotional pain felt by the inmates. For many, violence was experienced in their early home life long before the inmates became the perpetrators of violence themselves.

The surprise that emerged over the years for Tina was that she and the inmates had a lot of characteristics in common. “It’s just that they had been arrested and I had not.” In the workshops they discussed “self-esteem, anger, forgiveness, compassion for ourselves and each other, personal power, co-dependency, and so much more.” Tina says she “went into the jail workshops and came out changed, every time.”

After several years of seeing inmates at weekly journaling workshops, Tina was seeing her “own issues, my own stopping places, or as Jungians call it, my shadow” reflected back to her. She asked an inmate called Gerald that she met alone with: “Would you say you abandon yourself in any way?”

A tear-filled session followed and when Tina was in bed that night she thought of the ways she had abandoned herself. “Not maintaining my boundaries, overriding my emotions, saying yes when I meant no.” She thought to herself the same words Gerald had said out loud: “Damn, journaling class is rough.”

Tina refers to several inmates she worked with and she describes her own “belly of the whale” period. During that time, she began “a lifetime spiritual practice;” she wrote “seriously;” and she “became a lover of the natural world.” These three are the “pillars” of her life now. When Tina began the journaling workshops, she didn’t really know herself she says, just like many of the inmates who attended them.

On Tuesday evenings, through six locked doors in the jail, Tina Welling took her stack of index cards. Each card had a quote that could offer some-in-the-moment wisdom. She wanted to tell the inmates: “Your real life lies beneath your life situation.” She didn’t use the word “soul” but felt it was the soul of each inmate that she spoke to, “that core spiritual self.” The workshops took place in a situation, Tina feels, that the Sufi poet Rumi described: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing / there is a field, I’ll meet you there.”

Author Photo by Ryan Dorgan

Tina shares so much of her own wisdom and each chapter is a pleasure to read. She names the inmates who attended the journaling workshops and shares her own feelings and insight. Over seven years, Tina figures she saved thousands of dollars by not going to a therapist and rather working towards personal understanding in the journaling workshops.

In 2020, the jail was closed to the public due to the pandemic. Tina created a workbook of fifteen lessons each of which poses five questions. Some of Tina’s favourite quotes are included. I particularly like this one by Hafiz: “I wish I could show you / when you are lonely or in darkness / the astonishing light / of your own being.” The workbook is included in Tuesdays in Jail.

Tina also wrote a book entitled Writing Wild: Forming a Creative Partnership with Nature (New World Library, 2014) which I also highly recommend.

I want to say bless you Tina Welling for your work in the world and sharing your insights through your writing and the witnessing of uplifting sessions every Tuesday in jail.

If you’re curious about further approaches to journaling, I suggest checking out the International Association for Journaling Writing (IAJW). I’m on the Journal Council of the IAJW with a couple of my writing resources available for sale. A membership offers many perks including discounts on writing tools and courses. And there are many free resources too. Here’s a link if you’d like to check it out here.