And More Play April 27, 2016
Posted by Isobel Freer in Writing.Tags: Bio Notes, Writer's Groups
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[Editor’s note. When I was still a member of 10 Days Before (which is where my Café Blue originated), the leaders posted a series of questions for each of us to answer and post at the website as our profiles (10 Days Before is a successful and popular Meet-Up group in Atlanta for writers).
When I left the group, I copied my profile notes, and thought they might serve to further introduce me here, too, and add a bit of fun for a mid-week post.
I have edited for later life changes/progresses/regressions…]
Introduction
City girl since ’79. Writing since third grade. If I were a cat, I’d be in my sixth life. Simply because of endings. And I’d have long silver hair with tips of black shivered through like a dark mist—and gold eyes. But I am not a cat. I’m ajar.
We have all types of writers in our group! What kind of writing do you do? (Poems, Fiction, Non-fiction, Articles, Blogs, etc.)
Literary trajectory: poetry, fiction (novels & shorts), essay, blogs, memoir, private journal, & voluminous correspondence.
Some days it’s tough to stick with it… what motivates you to keep writing?
Fiction, poetry, lined paper, a pen, Beautiful Language, the click-clack of cadenced syllable, fire-words, sounds in a city night, image, shattered promise, truth, small 
irreverences, danced frenzies, sight, misunderstandings, curiosity, interior brick walls, glumness, half-closed eyes, a blazer made of grey wool, faith in God, two oceans, a mountain, winged horses, a clown in a brown suit, monks chanting the hours, the literary Canon, despair, a closet in a small room, whispers, seven days in October, requiems, questions, the darkness outside my window, a fragrance made of white flowers, a woman with white-blue eyes & auburn hair, after, one footbridge across a bayou, hope, a house that has a name, long vowels, joy, charm, moments stripped of all but essence, sweetness, colour, empty winter chapels at seven a.m., blue & white porcelain, an antique clock, jasmine tea, a blue wine glass etched with small flowers, the us of me+you, predawn coffee, indoor gardens, two secrets not told, a small teddy bear, January, & one black dress.
Have you ever been published before, or are you just getting started in the writing world?
Work published in a high school journal (1970), a college journal (1975) and an anthology (1976)…already veering toward the Dark Years. Began writing again, summer, 1999 and sending work out again, May, 2000. Currently have work submitted and am preparing several caches of poetry for projected January 2012 2016 submissions. First blog, 2007 with first post Saturday, October 27, 2007. Subsequently created seven eight blogs. One completed novel still in edit mode, four chapbooks still in edit mode, one completed ‘short’ short story that has been/will soon be again in circulation, plus several incomplete novels, a few sometimes-circulated essay/memoirs and other works-in-progress. Began keeping a journal the third time in 1985 and have continued to present. I write under three four different names for better handling of the sometimes surprising & always disparate clamour of voices within me…
To help us keep our group informative and useful, please tell us what do you hope to gain from joining our group?
Escaping the empty room, where words become projectiles that ricochet back and impale.
©2011 Valerie Isobel Freer. Personal papers. Images ©2007 Isobel Freer. Personal logo(s).
The Empty Room April 16, 2016
Posted by Isobel Freer in Writing.Tags: Bio Notes, Voice, Writer's Block, Writing Instruction
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Last year, I took Writing Fiction 2015, a University of Iowa’s International Writing Program MOOC. While I have had much opportunity to guide and/or proffer teaching and analysis to writers along the way (and hope to have accomplished same in this coursework, even though I did not sign up to mentor), I thought perhaps being in the company of other writers would jar me from the empty room.
I did not take the course to learn how to write, and in fact, at one point experienced a place where I had to ‘block out’ what was being said because it would have invaded places I keep sacred (and must) as a writer. That, however, will perhaps be the subject of a future post, and is peculiar to each writer: that a place does exist wherein beginning writers should study writing is a given.
When I was very young, I studied writing. Too, whenever I have the opportunity, I hand on what I know and/or have learned about writing: I have taught writing, though not in what could be counted as ‘formal’ situations. One, however, did involve a group of writers, and a setting I oversaw, and teaching was very much the focus of what I gave.
At the point in my writing, however, that I thought the MOOC might be a good thing, ’empty room’ had become the motif to explain what kept knocking me out of the saddle, and leaving me powerless to reorient, and begin again.
One must allow that falling off a horse can do very real danger, hence its beauty (though clichéd) as a metaphor.
No one would quibble with a bit of hospital stay, there!
I took the course, however, in that hope of escaping the empty room, and finding my way back to voice again. A very real sterility exists in the 9 to 5 world, and the more that world becomes our daily roost, the harder it is to find our voice again. It is not just an empty room, devoid of people with whom one might converse about the important things, but it is void of people to whom one might aim one’s work.
Some sense there is of an imagined someone with whom one converses, when writing. Yes, all writers ultimately write for themselves—if the empty room has removed even you, however, how very empty it is!
I do not experience, as I say frequently, writer’s block. I experience identity block, and that is a different matter entirely. (And yes. It is quite possible that, were I to sit before my computer every day, I would experience a very real block, here and there.
I do not regard the pacing one sometimes faces, however, in the course of writing, as a block. And, truth to be told, I rarely pace. The words are not silent, and I have worked ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for months on end, still producing words.)
Writers who write in addition to working a forty hour week, however, deal with more than just an empty room, if they dwell in a day world that is 9 to 5 business. I recently devolved to calling it the deadness. But all the images grope at explaining the same thing. It is that deadness—that emptiness—that loss of life and voice and thrust that cripples me now, too much of the time, and that is what I hoped to resolve, in the University of Iowa’s MOOC.
And yes, for a few weeks after, I gained my prize.
And then. Knocked out of the saddle again…
[Editor’s note. I studied under Berry Morgan, at what was then Northeast Louisiana University, either my freshman or sophomore year of college. It was an upper level class, and required pre-approval by Ms. Morgan. NLU was on the semester schedule.
In 1978, I studied under Dr. Bin Ramke, who was the 1977 Yale Series of Younger Poets. I took a poetry and a fiction seminar under Dr. Ramke at what was then Columbus College. The college was on the quarter schedule.
I highly regard, however, another course as well—it was a basic composition course, for which I still have the textbook. (I took this course at NLU as well.) While it taught expository writing (I remember the professor well, but not her name), much of a sense of ‘order’ to writing came from it—it helped train the details within me, and show me where they could be found, and which details should be found.
The textbook for that latter course is Writing Prose, by Thomas S. Kane and Leonard J. Peters, Third Edition, published by Oxford University Press, 1969. Highly recommend for writers of any level, whether it is still in print or not. (Amazon and ABE Books are my go-to places for out of print books, although I do use others, if I can’t find what I want.)
I distinguish now between the places where I actively learn (and am self-taught), 
as opposed to being taught by others. Poetry is a form I could study and be taught by others, as it involves specific forms that I do not know.
Screenwriting, likewise. In fiction, however, as noted above, I zealously guard the sacred place where I cannot be taught. Where I must sift, and observe, and analyse, and learn on my own.
This is a theme to which I will return frequently…]
Of Sealing Wax, Ad Specs and Other Things April 10, 2016
Posted by Isobel Freer in Writing.Tags: Bio Notes, Blogging, Writing Instruction
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Commentary Optional is a bookend blog to another blog, Sleeping at Noon. That latter blog was intended as a creative non-fiction site pulled from my journals.
I thought perhaps in Commentary Optional to have a place where I might comment (or not) to concerns raised in Sleeping at Noon, and proffer the later view of an older observer.
That particular idea never got off the ground.
When I needed a spot to create URLs for images needed for my online portfolios, I thought to create a new blog that would house them, and remembered this blog, which had been sitting in the dark corners of the Internet, unneeded and unknown.
Imagine my surprise when it became visible (and I mean by that, not hidden still in the dark corners), right from the get-go, and observed. WordPress has a built-in marketing system that other sites I have blogged under do not, and how they handle getting the word out about your blogs is quite a nice plus. Several years back, in fact, I had other blogs on WordPress, one of which was developing a small following.
The advertising that WordPress inserted into my blogs, however, angered me: I returned my blogs to another host. I left the two bookends at WordPress, largely untended and unread (and because of that, unmarred by any loss in their status as ad-free sites).
I have blogged under three or four noms de plume. Isobel’s primary blog (I am accustomed to thinking of the different characters my creative imp plays in the third person) is an art blog at Tumblr. We Must Live as though the City Had Eyes began as a literary blog, and gradually morphed into art. 
Because Commentary Optional has been noticed, however, and has followers, I am considering continuing with it, and posting notes on writing (and perhaps art).
As an unpublished writer, who completely falls off the train (and I will devote a future post to that very topic) whenever my words are returned to me, I remain leery of posting work at any of my blogs that is from my ‘to be published’ cache.
For whatever else can be said about possibilities with blogs—and the continuing process of American letters (and the separate inroads being made into the press and art worlds) to adapt to this new world of self-published work—the older process of ‘not self-published’ goes through an approval system that vets product in a way we usually are less willing to vet ourselves.
(And yes, I know. Many got their start in becoming Velveteen Rabbit Real through what was called a vanity press; others established their own printing houses, and got past the gate in that way. Too, blogging continues to gain in ratings, as it matures, in the worlds that are so set on having a vetting process in place: after all, it is not going to go away. Most literary journals that allow work that has been ‘blogged,’ however, do so because self-published still lacks the credibility that serious literary work requires.
And those that do respect blogging as a form of publication (which it indeed is) will not re-publish blogged work. So if your road to success in writing is literary, be sure that diverging into blogging won’t interfere with the process.
And yes, I know that literary journals at large now have websites, and post work from recent issues therein—and that some literary journals are completely online now. This is not the same as the self-publishing of blogging, however.)
In the world of blogging, ‘success’ can well be said to be determined by readership. As a woman who blogged with smaller caches of readership, however, I can affirm that readership (or lack thereof) will not always be a proving point of worth.
The final ‘proof point’ for all of us is what survives past our brief hour—and as we know, the later view changes, frequently, our ideas about the inherent worth (or genius) of a work: a Casablanca paradigm will always be the reminder that what seems mere Grade B reveals its excellence after its hour is past.
I don’t know how much time I will have to try blogging again, but I know that most of what I intend to proffer here is already written anyway, and will merely (as if mereness were all that were required!) involve pulling from my files and/or correspondence.
My ambivalence toward blogging does remain, but who knows where this venture might take my other blogs…
Or that work I still regard as ‘serious,’ and real…
That ambivalence, however, does not interfere with my gratitude to those other writers who are reading here. A most heartfelt thank you to all who have liked and/or are following this blog.
[Typos corrected 12 April 2016.]
commentary optional 