Morning Pages, and Teaching Writing

Wiley and I have been doing "Morning Pages." I believe it was Julia Cameron who popularized this idea: first thing in the morning, you sit and write for a few minutes. It doesn't have to be good, or coherent, or anything. No rules, other than keep writing. Just butt on seat, pen/pencil on paper. It's a great way to clear out the cobwebs in your head and get your mind in gear to be creative.

So much of what we write in our lives is filtered through expectation and self-consciousness. Is it good? Can I say this? Is it interesting? Then there's the voice of the critic: "you're no good," "why are you wasting time doing this," "who are you to think you're a writer." No wonder the biggest challenge in writing is to have "a voice."

We spend most of our adult lives trying to find out who we are. Many, perhaps most of us, fail. Maybe even a greater number just don't try.

I think morning pages are a great tool for kids, and a great beginning to more "formal" writing. Hopefully they haven't learned yet that "writing" is just jumping through another hoop to please someone else. Frankly, mechanics, grammar, structure, this can all be learned fairly easily, *if* you have something to say. If you are merely doing an exercise, an assignment--why does it matter then, where the period is, whether a sentence is too long? If you have a voice, something pure and special that is truly yours, then nothing will stop you, and your words, and your life, will resonate, like a strike on a clear bell.

And, I suppose, this is why I home school.

In any case, this is what a morning page might look like (and I am typing in one of Wiley's, because it's riotously entertaining and much better than mine):

"I like potatoes. they taste good baked and in hash. baked Potatoes need butter, sour cream, herbs, cheese, and bacon bits. thereis a tick on my dog. I bet he can't feel anything. I hate having to sit here writing my morning page. Iwish I was in Florida sliding down a water slide at typhoon Lagoon in disney land my mom says I have to make spaces between words. Small intestines look like snakes when protrayed in a book. Our barn hypnotizes me when I look at it. I must remember not to overuse exclamation points!!!!!! We have a huge pop-up 3D human body on our wall. he comes with liver, intestines, bones,nerves, heart, etc, etc, etc. isn't it weird I have used the word "intestines" three times? I made breakfast this morning. darn. my yolk was too thick. I have an air condishiner and it works. Yay! I snuck six (maybe five) cookbooks into our library bag. this includes the norwegiean, mexican, hungarian, east african, and italian cookbooks."

Questions of the Day

From Wiley (9): "What's a tongue fetishist?" (Thank you, Bloom County).

From Kiran (4): "Mommy, can we hunt a deer and cut its skin off and then stretch it sometime?"

From Mira (6): "Can't anyone ever wipe the seat?"

Creation, and Following Your Instincts

We've been reading Pearl Buck's "The Story Bible" as part of our studies. I'd never read the Adam and Eve story before, and it's bugging me. I think it's the whole "the world was just perfect until Eve had to go screw it up" thing.

I've been working on a short story called "Geeta and the Horrible Sausage Factory." Or had been working on it, about two years ago. It never went anywhere. Last night--ZAP. I think I'm going to make it into a creation story.

Now, the part about following your instincts. I'm finding it hard to figure out where in this story there will be even a little link of sausage, never mind a sausage factory. Or a *horrible* sausage factory. This should be a a huge signal flag. But I really, really want to call it that. Which way to go?

Two Different Ways to Write About Bananas

I've been having my son do a "morning page" in his writing book each day. The idea is that you put the pencil to the paper, and keep writing until the end of the page. No rules, no standards, just write. The idea, I explain to him, is it's kind of like taking a morning dump, literally. You've just gotta get the *stuff* out of your head, and once you do that, some of the better stuff has more of a chance to get out. Besides, it's good practice to do a little bit of writing every day, not to mention without any pressure for it to be "good."

Amusingly, I've discovered this is a *great* way to "teach" poetry. Wiley has written several "poems," with excessive, but very creative, use of white space in order to take up the whole page with the minimum amount of effort.

On another page, he's listed the ten avatars of Vishnu. That took up half a page.

Today, I got off my duff and told him I'd do my own while he did his. Turns out we both wrote about how there were seven bananas on the counter, at about the same moment--a wonderful moment of communion. It was interesting to note that we both said the same thing, but the slightly different words made it sound different:

"We have seven bananas on the counter. I like bananas!"

"There are a lot of bananas on the counter. Seven bananas."

Hands-on-Math

We've been doing math with the "four friends"--from right to left Max Multiply, Minnie Minus, Patty Plus (she's had a sex-change since we did these with my oldest, and she's having a very bad hair day), and King Dominic Divide.

Mira and I worked with Miquon workbooks last year, and it was pretty obvious that none of it was having any resonance. I think all the operations were so abstract, and she couldn't really keep track of what all those signs were. And, frankly, when I tried to get into the mindset of a child (which isn't too hard first thing in the morning), it was hard for me to get it either. What *is* subraction. If you "take away," don't you have more?

So we brought these guys back out. The shiny glass stars were a hit. Suddenly the nature of the processes and their interrelationships were obvious. Even my four-year old gets multiplication and division now, after say, an hour of playing with these guys!

More writing

Managed to get done two columns and a short story, "The Places She Missed," done this weekend, hiding in my little room.

You'd think I was in here buggering the dog or something, with the looks I get whenever anyone comes in. And the door isn't even shut.

I sent the story into Writers' Digest. We'll see. Maybe I should be buggering the dog instead.

Rhyming skills:a great way to start the morning

We were at our chore board this morning, and I was rather brainlessly singing "Friday, Friday, time to..." and stopped because I really had no plan for the rest of the phrase. Kiran immediately chimed in , in perfect tune, with "...die day."

Hard to know where to go from that.

They must serve great beverages on planet Wiley

So I'm in here working on my next column for the paper, and Wiley comes in with a "special Rosh Hashanah beverage." We're studying the Torah for the next few months, and I'd gotten a book out on Jewish cooking (apparently that isn't an oxymoron, and I've eaten enough dessicated chicken in my life to have earned the right to make that remark). This is along with "Cooking the Hungarian Way," "Cooking the East African Way," "Cooking the Mexican Way," Cooking the Italian Way," and "Cooking the Norwegian Way," which were all smuggled into my library bag and checked out without my knowing.

The beverage is "Cinnamon Almond Milk," and damn, it's good. He apparently modified the recipe, wrote it out with an illustration, and rated it 5 stars upon my approval.

If anything, he'll have a successful future as a barrista.