Thursday, October 02, 2008

A Way With Words - meditation & writing workshop

Last month's writing workshop was wonderful! We decided at the last minute to do it as a non-residential workshop and to hold it at the Whaletown Institute. We had a full house, and it was intensive, like a writers' boot camp. We focused on the foundations of story: what triggers a story, and how do we bring it to life on the page. We worked extensively with character, location, voice, point of view, and authorial stance--what John Gardiner calls "psychic distance," or the level of intimacy a writer maintains in relation to his or her characters.

It was so much fun, in fact, that I've decided to do more workshops, and so the next one will be in Vancouver, on October 17 - 18, in association with the Hollyhock Foundation. The title of the workshop is "A Way With Words" and this one will focus on meditation and writing, and the ways these two contemplative practices enhance one another.

Fiction, but also literature in general, trains us in empathy by requiring us to inhabit another's experience. To read literature successfully, we have be willing to enter our characters' minds and skin, to see with their eyes and to feel with their hearts. This is the prerequisite of the writer's work, too, and I'm particularly interested in exploring how traditional Buddhist meditation practices can support our experiences as writers and readers.

You can read more about the workshop in the What's New section of this site, or at the Hollyhock website. To register, please contact Hollyhock at 800-933-6339, or send an email to registration@hollyhock.ca.

Here's a pdf poster of the event:
WayWithWords.pdf

I hope you will come!

Whaletown Institute Writers' Workshop - Foundations of Story

posted at 10/02/2008 11:47:00 AM [::]

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Friday, July 25, 2008

Engaging Fictions: Writing stories of social change

I'm going to be teaching a fiction writing workshop in September, at Channel Rock, on Cortes Island. I know it's last minute, but I just decided to do it, and if it goes well, I'll repeat it next year. So check out the description at the Channel Rock website, or in the What's New section of this site, and drop me a line if you'd be interested in attending something like this, either now or in the future.

Labels: Channel Rock, fiction writing, workshop

posted at 7/25/2008 11:52:00 AM [::]

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Everyday Zen

Just a follow up note on new EVERYDAYZEN website: we launched the site in April, and since then we've added about 100 of Norman's talks and lectures, so please feel free to stop by and check it out. Here are two of my favorites, about language and poetry:

Language (audio)
Language and Dharma (text)

Norman is a poet, as well as a Zen teacher, and so language is something he returns to again and again. As a writer, too, I'm fascinated with language, thinking about it, thinking in it, trying to see it for what it is, sometimes joyfully, sometimes miserably, failing, always. Language is my living.

EVERYDAYZEN is the virtual home of Zen teacher Norman Fischer, and the Everyday Zen foundation and sangha. In addition to the 500+ dharma talks available for download, there's also a Study Guide and a schedule for events and retreats that Norman leads.

posted at 7/25/2008 10:42:00 AM [::]

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

The Art of Losing

I just figured out that I can upload files to this weblog, so here's a link to the PDF of an article called "The Art of Losing: On Writing, Dying, and Mom," that I wrote for Shambhala Sun magazine last month. It's based on a talk I gave at a benefit for the Zen Hospice Project, and some of the bits of it are from this weblog. I really like the way Shambhala Sun did the layout, with such nice photographs of my mom. I don't know if it will look as nice in the PDF version, but you can always buy a back issue of the magazine, too, if you really want to see how cute my mom was.


ArtOfLosing.pdf

posted at 4/29/2008 02:38:00 PM [::]

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Why Bother?

I wanted to make sure to link to the article, "Why Bother?" by Michael Pollan in last week's New York Times. The title says it all, and it's required reading if you're feeling a little overwhelmed by the state of the planet.

I'm a big fan of Pollan's work. His 1998 article, "Playing God in the Garden" was one of the things that inspired me to write about genetically engineered potatoes in "All Over Creation." I ended up incorporating a description of the article in the novel, where one of the characters, Elliot Rhodes, a PR flack for a biotech company, comes across it, much to his dismay. In 2002, when the manuscript was finished, I felt I had to contact Pollan to let him know that I'd appropriated his factual article into my fictional novel. He was extremely gracious and told me that he had been reading "My Year of Meats" when he was writing his article "Power Steer," about a steer he purchased in order to learn about how modern, industrial steak is produced in America. That made me very happy.

posted at 4/29/2008 02:06:00 PM [::]

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

rapprochement...and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault

How to re-enter this world of my weblog? So much has happened, so much to talk about, and how do I account for my absence?

Well, maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe we just go in and out—of our projects, our journals, our intentions and our resolves. What matters is just that we return, eventually, to today, when I'm excited about a story I read, and I want to share it.

It's about the Sval­bard Glob­al Seed Vault. Today was the official opening of the vault, which is was dug 393 feet inside a sandstone mountain, under the permafrost, on a remote Norwegian island called Spitspergen in the Arctic, about 1,120 km from the North Pole.

Today, during the official opening, the vault was unlocked, and the first box of seeds was placed inside by the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, and Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize laureate and environmentalist, Wangari Maathai. The box contained varieties of rice seeds from 104 countries.

Nicknamed "The Doomsday Vault," the Svalbard Seed Vault "is designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections from around the globe. Many of these collections from developing countries are in developing countries. If seeds are lost, e.g. as a result of natural disasters, war or simply a lack of resources, the seed collections may be reestablished using seeds from Svalbard."

You can see the video of the opening ceremonies, as well as a really great video about the World Cowpea Collection, at the Svalbard Seed Vault website.

posted at 2/26/2008 08:27:00 PM [::]

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Monday, November 05, 2007

War and Remembrance

Here's something for friends in Vancouver. I'm going to be doing a reading with Shaena Lambert, at the Joy Kogawa House this Saturday, November 10, at 3:00 - 5:00. Hmm, I see that the graphics of this poster aren't reproducing very well, so here's the info you'll need:


A reading in support of TLC’s writers-in-residence program at Historic Joy Kogawa House

Location: 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver

Date: Saturday, November 10, 3 to 5 p.m.

Cost: Admission by donation.
Space is limited. To ensure a seat, please RSVP to (604) 733-2313.

Ruth Ozeki, the Vancouver Public Library’s One Book, One Vancouver author for 2007 for her novel My Year of Meats, will read her contribution to the new collaborative novel, Click, published by Scholastic to support Amnesty International. Ruth’s story describes the experiences of a Japanese boy living in Tokyo during the American occupation following the Second World War.

Vancouver writer Shaena Lambert will read from her novel, Radiance, which tells the story of a Hiroshima survivor whom a group of antinuclear activists sponsor for plastic surgery in New York in the 1950s. The story pits the ideals of peace at home against the realities of the war experience in Japan.

Special guest appearance by Canadian author and poet, Joy Kogawa.


And one more thing...I just figured out that the comments people so kindly send me must be moderated, before they are published on the weblog. When I logged on just now, I discovered there were 17 of them waiting for me, dating back to March. None seemed particularly immoderate, but I clicked the appropriate buttons, and I hope they're up and available now. I want to apologize to all of you who sent them and to thank you for being patient. It was lovely to read them, and I promise I'll try to do better in the future. It's not that I'm inept, exactly, just kind of deeply uninterested in this technology....

posted at 11/05/2007 12:14:00 PM [::]

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Monday, September 17, 2007

Click

It's been a pleasant, though somewhat unconvincing summer—not quite hot or long enough to persuade me that it's time for fall, but then I don't seem to get much say in this matter. Time just passes, whether I like it or not...or perhaps it's me who's doing the passing, and time just is. Being. Hmm. These are wintery thoughts, indeed.

Here's a link to a nice article in Publishers Weekly about a new book that I had a small part in, called "Click." It will be published in October this year, by Arthur Levine's imprint at Scholastic. It's a collaborative novel, written by ten authors, of whom I am one, and it's a benefit project for Amnesty International.

The idea was that one author would kick things off by writing a chapter, and then that chapter would be passed it along to the next author on the list, and from there the chapters would accrue and the book would grow. We were told we could take as our inspiration any aspect of the chapter or chapters we received in our turn—a character, or an event, or a location, or a word or object—and that we should feel free to follow the story in any direction it took us, forward or backward, up or down, in time or through space.

It's kind of a puzzling idea, but somehow it works. Here's a description of the book from the Scholastic website:

posted at 9/17/2007 02:46:00 PM [::]

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Wednesday, May 30, 2007

One Book, One Vancouver

Earlier this month I was delighted to learn that the Vancouver Public Library had selected “My Year of Meats” as the 2007 choice for One Book One Vancouver, a municipal reading program described as “a book club for the entire city.” It’s the oldest program of its kind in Canada, and it’s been great. I’ve been going down to Vancouver every couple of weeks to do events of various kinds, but the highlights have been the visits to the branch libraries, where I’ve had a chance to meet with smaller groups of readers and talk about the novel and the issues that it raises. This month, we'll be screening film, “Halving the Bones,” on Tuesday, June 11, and the program culminates at the Word on the Street festival in September.

I was especially moved when I heard about the selection because I wrote “My Year of Meats” while living in Vancouver in 1996-7, and I did most of the research for that book at the Vancouver Public Library. I remember how excited I was when I first visited the Central Library. I was really hard up for money that year, and I felt like I’d just won the lottery. The grand new building had just opened, and it was so airy and bright, with lots of crannies to curl up in, and carrels with electrical outlets, and even a food court with good coffee right outside. I would bike across the Georgia Viaduct from East Vancouver, where I was living at the time, grab a coffee, and then hit the stacks, searching for books on the meat, food and pharmaceutical industries, on synthetic hormones and antibiotic resistance, on the media and television and cultural theory, on roadside attractions in America. Other times I’d just wander, following some inchoate and undeniable pull toward Cannibalism, say, or Paleogeography, or Parapsychology.

Browsing the stacks is one of the true pleasures of a library. You walk slowly along with your head cocked, neck bent at a 90 degree angle and eyes perpendicular to the floor, skimming the shelves and letting the words drift from the spines into your subconscious where (you hope) they will spark new ideas and associations you’d never have thought of if you’d known what you were looking for. Occasionally, (frequently), you’ll reach out and pull a book off from the shelf and flip quickly through it, maybe adding it to the pile that’s growing in your arms. You’ll take it home. Maybe you’ll read it, or maybe just having it on your desk, largely unread, for three weeks will be enough to inspire. So much of fiction writing depends on the random factor, the fortuitous juxtaposition of mood and word and place that gives rise to the quirk of a character or the twist of a plot, so writers are browsers, culling for luck. You increase your odds by browsing, and true browsability can only be achieved in a real library, with real stacks, filled with real books on shelves. The digital world is infinitely rich in ideas and information, and keywords, metatag clouds and search engines greatly enhance its browsability, but nothing compares to the physical act of lurking in the stacks.

When I finished the draft of “My Year of Meats,” I took out books on How to Get Your Novel Published. I learned How To Write An Effective Query Letter, and How To Format A Manuscript For Submission, and How To Get an Agent. And I did these things. “My Year of Meats” owes its existence largely to what I learned at the public library.

So, this is why I am so happy that this particular book was chosen, but there’s another reason, too, which is that libraries are miracles of public munificence in an age of privatized corporate greed. Think about it. Imagine if there were no libraries, anywhere. The concept does not exist. And a politician comes up with this idea and goes to the legislature with a proposal. “I propose we take millions, no, billions of taxpayer dollars, and hire the most famous architects in the world to design and construct monumental landmark buildings in all of the big cities, and the small cities, too, and, hell, even the littlest towns, and when the buildings are built, we’ll fill ‘em up with books of all different kinds, which represent the entirety of human knowledge and experience, and then we’ll pass out these cards, see, and everyone, even people who don’t have any money or property, can come into the library and find the books they want to read, and take ‘em home and read ‘em! For free! Won’t that be great!?”

Uh huh. Right.

So we’re really lucky to have libraries, and we should use them all the time, and I'm happy to be the poster child for the library to which I am so deeply and gladly indebted.


Libraries will get you though times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.

posted at 5/30/2007 07:11:00 PM [::]

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As will be gathered
from these notes of mine,
I am the sort of person
who approves
of what others abhor
and detests
the things they like.

—Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book
circa 1000 AD

Clearly,
if Sei Shonagon had had access
to the Internet,
she would have had a weblog
instead of a Pillowbook.

—Ruth Ozeki, Weblog
circa 2000 AD

 

 

It starts with the earth. How can it not? Imagine the planet like a split peach, whose pit forms the core, whose flesh its mantle, and whose fuzzy skin its crust - no, that doesn't do justice to the crust, which is, after all, where all of life takes place.

—Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation

"A feast for mind and heart."
—Kirkus Review

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