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<\/a>I\u2019m a bit Type A for a poet\u2014or for what people perceive as one. I like to know when and where I\u2019m going with my writing, and why. This is no apology. Without specific goals, I wouldn\u2019t have written a thing since becoming a parent twelve years ago. I make the time and space to write, even perching atop an ottoman in the corner of a stairway to scratch out drafts in the early, nauseated hours of my pregnancies.<\/p>\nMy projects are clearly defined. Explore Paul the Apostle with fifty poems. Grapple with the book of Revelation from Patmos to the Great White Throne. Write at least one poem week, unless it\u2019s Christmas or something, until the project is \u201cdone.\u201d Then revise with intense, almost physical focus, as if scrubbing a yellow ring from the bathtub.\u00a0Inspiration?\u00a0<\/em>Who has time to wait around for that when the elementary school is requiring five start-of-the-year events?<\/p>\n However, when I flew to\u00a0Image\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0Glen Workshop earlier this month, opting to spend most of the week on retreat, I had no such plan. I knew it was time to start a new collection of poems focusing on the violin, one of my lifelong loves. But I had no idea how to approach it, how to even\u00a0figure out\u00a0<\/em>how to approach it, or how long any of these undefined tasks would take. I just knew I was about to spend a week in Santa Fe with artists, writers, mountains, chocolate, and wine. At least a couple of those are daily necessities.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat do I do?\u201d I had written my writer-editor friend Cameron a week before. \u201cHow do I even begin something like this?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cStart building a world for yourself,\u201d he said. \u201cA world to write from. Collect links, songs, pictures and artifacts, and keep them in a box or digital file. Enjoy the process of discovery, and you will find your way there.\u201d<\/p>\n It should come as no surprise that the violin, or the traditional Celtic\/American fiddle music I\u2019m most interested in, is a vast songscape, as fluid and choppy as the Atlantic over which the Scottish settlers sailed in passage to their new world. And I found myself flipping overboard before even lifting anchor.<\/p>\n I had to start swimming. After reading a bit of\u00a0Wayfaring Stranger,<\/em>\u00a0a book by Fiona Ritchie and Douglas Orr that explores the migration of music from Scotland to Ulster to Appalachia, I stretched out on my dorm bed and listened to several fiddle renditions of \u201cShady Grove\u201d as the scent of pinyon whispered through the blinds. Before long, I couldn\u2019t get the song out of my head. I took out my electric fiddle and headphones and played the song myself in a number of octaves and keys.<\/p>\n The next day, I watched hours of fiddle players on YouTube. I obsessed over Mark O\u2019Connor\u2019s \u201cMidnight on the Water,\u201d Cape Breton fiddlers Natalie MacMaster and Donnell Leahy performing on TED, and the Nordic Fiddlers Bloc\u2019s \u201cMountain Bird.\u201d I\u2019m not Irish, Scottish, Canadian, or Norwegian, have no claim to any of these people or histories, and have come to the fiddle relatively recently after a life of just-okay classical playing. Yet I couldn\u2019t escape these tunes.<\/p>\n In the middle of my simultaneous excitement and bafflement, a fellow Glen attendee, Tom, approached me in the coffee shop one afternoon. \u201cWhat are you working on these days?\u201d he asked. \u201cAnd how can I help you?\u201d<\/p>\n The Glen community is really that kind of place.<\/p>\n We settled down at a table in front of Tom\u2019s laptop, and I started to play the Nordic Fiddlers Bloc tune. After several seconds, he paused it. \u201cWhat are you feeling right now?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n I hadn\u2019t really thought about expressing how or why music makes me feel the way I do. I knew the Scandinavian hardanger fiddle had a way of working into my bones, the sympathetic strings beneath the four main ones ringing in words that cannot be spoken.<\/p>\n \u201cThe music brings you to the immediate thin place, doesn\u2019t it?\u201d Tom asked. \u201cThe song\u2019s an air? Think about that word.\u201d Then he started to talk about the progressive revelation of the secret things of God.<\/p>\n I felt like I couldn\u2019t move. And I felt like I wanted to dance. (I don\u2019t dance.)<\/p>\n Later that day, I started writing questions:<\/p>\n Why do I like the music I like? I started sharing these questions with friends. Then people proceeded to offer ideas, recommending books and podcasts like Martha Graham\u2019s\u00a0Blood Memory<\/em>, and the most recent episode of\u00a0On Being<\/em>. Their support kept me suspended in that dangerously beautiful thin place.<\/p>\n The next day, I sat (almost) silently with four other writers in a Santa Fe coffee shop without Wi-Fi. Forced away from online research, I started jotting down lines.<\/p>\n the faces of fiddlers closing their eyes<\/em><\/p>\n hair a fermata<\/em><\/p>\n shady love, my little grove<\/em><\/p>\n the chop and flick of the wrist<\/em><\/p>\n The lines seemed to take me nowhere but insisted upon being written.<\/p>\n One afternoon, I played fiddle along with my friend Laura on the Irish whistle. Gold honey locust leaves floated around us, the desert\u2019s coins for our busking. During worship services, I refrained from singing and held my palms to the music. Some nights, I read Rilke and couldn\u2019t bear more than two or three lines of his words rippling through me like vibrating strings.<\/p>\n That week, I got nothing done and everything done. I left with several pages of graphs, names, and illegible lines and dozens of bookmarked songs. Most of all, I continue to hold a feeling I still can\u2019t describe anymore than I can how I felt the first time I pulled a bow across a string in fourth grade, rosin dusting my shoulders.<\/p>\n In his opening address at the Glen, Greg Wolfe said, \u201cart should be the act of discovery, not the expression of what is already known.\u201d So as I give my hands to writing, hands that Luci Shaw anointed with oil that last night of the Glen, I will let the questions come. I will continue to go about my unplanned plan, the plaintive notes of a wayfaring stranger passing her song to the next.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>How and why do I identify with music from different cultural heritages?
\n<\/em>Why do I play the way I do?
\n<\/em>How do lessons, personality, age, and region affect how I play and think about music?
\n<\/em>How, exactly, is the violin like the human voice?<\/em><\/p>\n