The most inspiring words I’ve heard in the past several years are from a speech Ursula LeGuin delivered toward the end of her life. She said:
“I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. … The name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.”
These words liberate and grant permission, and I need them. They remind me to lift my head and widen my scope of reference. They remind me, in my writing, to follow my muse—my pleasure—and to pay no mind to those who tell me what I am supposed to create or write or do with my life. Other times they remind me, in my writing, to follow my grief. To get down into the tidal muck of life’s disappointments to remind others they are not alone in their own disappointments.
LeGuin calls out poets in this speech as she makes a point about writing for freedom and not for profit or market satisfaction. If you’ve ever looked at poets’ earnings, you will know why. Poets are free spirits and truth tellers who write to get at the root of a matter, to better understand—through the discipline of writing—reality in the broadest sense, as well as how one feels about it. They never write for profit.
For some time, I have felt particularly quiet (and I start out quite taciturn). I think it has to do with the vociferousness of our environment. Not just the noisiness of social media, but the fact that everyone and their dog has so much to say. It seems that every week a thousand new podcasts are launched and though I love podcasts and listen to a handful, I marvel at how much talk we swim in.
My quiet writer soul turns more and more to poetry. I feel most free and honest and alive when I write poetry. I do occasionally publish poems in journals and I have a poetry collection forthcoming this spring from Fernwood Press. But I long to also share poems with you, here; so on occasion, I will do that. I hope you enjoy.
Here is a poem that will appear in my upcoming collection. This poem is about a beach cottage I moved to during a pivotal, painful, promising turn in my life, in the early 00’s. The place had a little necessary magic.
oceanside
outside my window
waves’ grandmotherly hum
daughter asleep,
house steeped in milky quietness
holy casa del mar
as my monk friend said.
rising from bed, I smooth
the quilts, lift blinds
a magician flicking
his long silk scarf.
oh light cresting the hills!
oh hint of sun on the sea!
bleached breakers,
elysian white.
once from my window
I swear I saw the word
“welcome” spelled out
in foam on the beach—
the swift message
returned to the sea. And I,
back to second-guessing,
back to who-knows-where.
birds fly into our tree
then ascend, mere
quivers of light
to come back again.
Wren, winner of a 2022 Independent Publishers Award Bronze Medal
Winner of the 2022 Independent Publisher Awards Bronze Medal for Regional Fiction; Finalist for the 2022 National Indie Excellence Awards. (2021) Paperback publication of Wren , a novel. “Insightful novel tackles questions of parenthood, marriage, and friendship with finesse and empathy … with striking descriptions of Oregon topography.” —Kirkus Reviews (2018) Audiobook publication of Wren.
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