WRITING TOPIC — I FEEL MOST ALIVE WHEN

I Feel Most Alive, Droid Shots, St. Paul, Minnesota, August 2014, photo © 2014 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

I saw this blackboard outside of a church in St. Paul and thought it would make a good Writing Topic. Who wants to do a Writing Practice with me. Get out a fast pen, paper, or keyboard. I Feel Most Alive When…10 Minutes, Go!

-posted on red Ravine, Tuesday, August 5th, 2014

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WRITING TOPIC — APPLE

The Honeycrisp Apple, Archive 365, Droid Shots, The Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, Chaska, Minnesota, September 2012, photos © 2012-2013 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

Apples were a crisp, healthy snack when I was growing up. The apple varieties I was most familiar with then were Red Delicious and Granny Smiths. On a recent trip to the grocery store, I was introduced to two apples I had never tasted before: the KIKU and the Ambrosia. If you draw a thermometer and add a scale from sweet to tart, here’s where they fit in:  SWEET — KIKU, Fuji, Ambrosia, Gala, Jonagold, Cameo, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Honeycrisp, Kanzi, Braeburn, Pink Lady, Granny Smith — TART.

Apples are closely linked to place, and many of us are familiar with the Gala from New Zealand or the Fuji from Japan (both developed in the 1930s). In the history of the apple industry, the three varieties I favor are relatively new to the world. The Ambrosia originated in the 1990s in the Similkameen Valley of British Columbia, Canada where the Mother Tree still lives. Local favorite the Honeycrisp was developed by the University of Minnesota and introduced in 1991. The Honeycrisp is a cross between a Macoun and a Honeygold (the Honeygold itself a cross between the Golden Delicious and Haralson). The KIKU came about in 1990 when Luis Braun, the South Tyrolean apple expert, was traveling through Japan and discovered a branch in an orchard, which a few years later would become the sweet KIKU apple.

What’s your favorite apple?

Where does your mind go when I say apple? Is it your first bite of a lunchtime snack, a trip where you picked orchard apples with your family, or the smell of fresh apple pie right out of the oven (check out this great apple pie recipe from ybonesy: 1-2-3! Apple Pie Gluten-Free!). Are you reminded of a computer company? Or perhaps a certain snake and the precursor to the Seven Deadly Sins (another good Writing Topic). Do you believe the adage, An apple a day keeps the doctor away?

Let your mind wander to all the places where apples grow, and capture your impressions in a Writing Practice.

Apple, 15 minutes, Go!

The KIKU Apple, Archive 365, Droid Shots, Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 2013, photos © 2013 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

RESOURCES:

History of the Honeycrisp Apple – New Kid On The Block at Wood Orchard Market

History of the Ambrosia Apple – Ambrosia History at Ambrosia Organic

History of the KIKU Apple – Story – 20 Years at Kiku Apple

-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, March 3rd, 2013

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WRITING TOPIC – KINDS OF LOVE

  

Heart & Soul, Mabel Dodge Luhan House, on the hill behind the zendo, Taos, New Mexico, February 2007, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

My sister-in-law told me about a book she’d recently received as a gift, The Five Languages of Love by Gary Chapman. It’s about the ways individuals express love. And the ways they like to have love expressed to them. What makes you feel loved?

On a recent 62 degree November day, I was taking a walk by the Susquehanna River with my mother, and we started talking about the subject of love. The lively discussion led to many questions.

What if the way you are able to give love is not appreciated by your partner or spouse? What if your partner or spouse doesn’t know what makes him or her feel loved? What about friends? Isn’t it important that they know the things that make you feel appreciated?

According to Chapman, there are 5 primary languages of love:

1. Words of Affirmation
2. Quality Time
3. Receiving Gifts
4. Acts of Service
5. Physical Touch

               

Think about the things that make you feel loved. Are they acts of service. Thoughtfulness. Gratitude. Is quality time high on your list. How deep is the well. Half empty? Half full? To love we need to be able to both give and receive. How do you like to receive? How is learning to receive different than taking?

If you’re having a hard time answering, Chapman provides some clues, questions to ask yourself to help determine your primary language:

 1) What does your partner or spouse do or fail to do that hurts you most deeply. The opposite is probably your love language.

 

2) What have you most often requested of your partner, spouse, or friends? That thing is the thing that will probably make you feel most loved.

3) In what way do you regularly express love to your partner, spouse, or friends? That method may also make you feel loved.

After answering the 3 questions above, pick up your pen and do three, 15-minute writing practices:

I feel loved when…

What hurts me the most is…

I know my friends care about me when…

  

    

The journey is discovery. Where would we be without love?

-posted on red Ravine, Tuesday, November 20th 2007

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WRITING TOPIC – HAUNTED

The Haunting, All Hallow’s Eve By The Fire, one year ago, Minneapolis, Minnesota, October 31st, 2006, photo © 2006-2009 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

Maybe it’s the time of year — Halloween and Day of the Dead nearly upon us. Nights grow longer. Frost kills the plants, and another season is put to rest.

Or maybe it’s our era, so many things to haunt us. We seem to be troubled, melancholy. Is the world crying, or is it just me?

I believe in ghosts, and not just the kind that might spook one cold, dark morning. (Who just caused the book to fall in the room next to me?)

It doesn’t take much to be haunted. Something someone told you that you can’t shake. Or something you saw. Experiences can haunt, and the specter of disease can haunt, and memories — my, how they haunt!

Is it bad to be haunted? Or is the ghost only as menacing as we allow it to be? (Remember Casper, anyone?)

In the October 1, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, Philip Roth said this about the inspiration of ghosts and haunting for his novel Exit Ghost:

‘Haunted by the past’ is a commonplace phrase because it’s a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, ‘haunted’, the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become. I agree with the Chekhov character who, when, in a crisis, he is reminded that ‘this, too, shall pass’, responds, ‘Nothing passes’.

What do you think of when you think of haunting and ghosts? Are you frightened? Or do you regularly revisit your old ghosts?

Write about ghosts and haunting. You can write about the ways you are haunted figuratively, or write about your real experiences with the supernatural. The topic is rich. Write more than once.

At the top of your page, write these words: I am haunted by … and then for three or so minutes list all the things that haunt you. Just like in Writing Practice, don’t stop to think about your list. Just click off each item.

When you’re finished, pick one of the “ghosts” on your list and write about it for ten minutes. Pick another and write for ten more. If you’d like, send us one of those writing practices to post on red Ravine. We’ll publish as many as we can.

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WRITING TOPIC – GREENING

April showers, winter melting. Earth Day pops up this weekend. There is green the color and there is green the movement.

Think about green. Take a walk, look at blooming trees and daffodil stalks. Look around your house and see how green you live. Do you have good recycling habits? Do you eat green eggs and ham?

Green is money and envy, the grass on the other side of the fence. Airsickness. Riding your bike to work, driving a Prius. Lettuce and unripened tomatoes.

Think green but don’t think too hard. Just write. Green.  Greening.

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Tu Mu on Li Ho, 15 years after his death

Li Ho (791-817) was a T’ang poet who, according to Five T’ang Poets, Translated by David Young, “….has a reputation as a gaunt and ghostly enigma, summoned on his deathbed by a heavenly messenger riding a red dragon. A common phrase for him is Kuei-ts’ai: demon talented. And his literary influences can be found among many subsequent writers.

One of them, Tu Mu, a 9th Century poet, was asked some 15 years after Li Ho’s death to write a preface to his collected poems. He tells us that he fudged and evaded the assignment, out of a sense of inadequacy. When he settled down to it, though, his enthusiasm took over….”

______________________________

Here is Tu Mu’s preface. Steal a line and run. Let your mind go wild.

Clouds and mist, mingling softly, cannot describe his manner; endless stretches of water cannot describe his feelings; the green of spring cannot describe his warmth; the clarity of autumn cannot describe his style; a mast in the wind, a horse in battle cannot describe his courage; earthenware coffins and engraved tripods cannot describe his antiquity; flowers in season and beautiful women cannot describe his intensity; fallen kingdoms and ruined palaces, withered grasses and gravemounds, cannot describe his resentment and sorrow; whales yawning, turtles dancing, oxghosts and snake spirits cannot describe his unreality, wildness, extravagance, and illusion.

Sunday, January 7th, 2007

-related to post, Among Ruins – Li Ho (791-817)

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WRITING TOPIC – TAOS

Taos is on my mind. One from our group will be there soon for a week of silence. The three of us convened in Taos for a week in July of 2004, genesis for our relationship today as writers.

From my notebook during that July retreat I’ve selected six phrases. Some were topics we used and others came out in my writing. Pick one of the phrases. Don’t write on it right away. Hold it in your belly for two or three days. Then write. No word limit, but base your post on a practice of at least fifteen minutes.

Here are the phrases:

• The last time I was in Taos
• What’s good in my life
• It was Fiesta weekend
• Let it come to you
• Sirens interrupting the caws of ravens
• Pickles

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WRITING TOPIC – BOOKENDS, BALANCES, AND HARD RAIN

Below are 2 poems by Nikki Giovanni and Tony Hoagland, and the lyrics from Paul Simon’s Bookends. Inspired by one of these pieces or a line from one of the poems, write a blog post of poetry or prose not more than 250-300 words.

Bookends

Time it was, and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence, a time of confidences
Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you

-Paul Simon

Balances

in life
one is always
balancing like we juggle our mothers
against our fathers

or one teacher
against another
(only to balance our grade average)

3 grains of salt
to one ounce truth

our sweet black essence
or the funky honkies down the street

and lately i’ve begun wondering
if you’re trying to tell me something

we used to talk all night
and do things alone together and i’ve begun

(as a reaction to a feeling)
to balance
the pleasure of loneliness
against the pain
of loving you

–Nikki Giovanni

Hard Rain

After I heard It’s a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood there’s nothing
we can’t pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can’t turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.

You can’t keep beating yourself up, Billy
I heard the therapist say on television
                                                         to the teenage murderer,
About all those people you killed—
You just have to be the best person you can be,

one day at a time—

and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.

Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
                                   are covered with blood-
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
                                                       Signed, America.

I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,

but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth—

whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.

Poem: “Hard Rain” by Tony Hoagland from Hard Rain: A Chapbook. © Hollyridge Press. Reprinted with permission. 

Thursday, November 16^th, 2006

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WRITING TOPIC – OBJECT

Pick up your pens. It is time to lay down the assignment for the week, for the blog.

I did not think about this much, it came to me in meditation Saturday and I thought I had another week to think, and besides we are not supposed to be thinking when we meditate, just watching the thoughts, so I put aside the pen and paper and now on this victorious Wednesday morning I have forgotten all the grandness, recall only the most basic.

What I want to propose is that this week we all hold something. Hold something for ten minutes, or it could be fifteen and you could get by on five or seven, but for the sake of uniformity, let’s say ten. I do not mean something like an idea, a belief. I do not mean holding someone in our thoughts. I mean literally taking the five fingers of your right or left hand, picking up an object and holding it.

Let your fingers clutch, let your palm get sweaty, caress the front and the back of the object. You can move the object up and down your arm, if you want, rub it along your chest, squeeze it in your armpit. Do not taste it, do not smell it, and if you put it near your ear, for our ears are very sensuous, try not to listen. Only feel what it has to say.

The object can be something ordinary, like a toothbrush, or exotic, like a tube of toothpaste.  This morning it feels like everything is exotic, doesn’t it? Hold the piece. Then write about it.

As an exercise, I’d suggest that you put the piece behind you while you write, that you do not look at it. Write from the feeling, from the sensation that was picked up by your finger cells.

The object should not be living, breathing, but it can be of nature, does not have to be – pardon the expression – manmade. Your choosing is your own, you can pick up something off your desktop, or you take time to think about what you want to hold. It doesn’t matter.

If this seems lame and too lucy goosey it doesn’t matter. Just hold something, and hold on to it when you write.  Ten minutes holding, then go.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

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