Writing Life

For more information contact
Dr. Cris Crissman

To My Daughter in Bellingham, Washington

We Live in All Time

Like testing
the bath water with the elbow,
the milk on the wrist.

I have already lived through this hour –
still three more hours on its way to you.
It is good territory.
You are safe.

The years?
I have tested them too –
a little more risky but not
so hot as to burn.

Your 40th will not be mine again
and yet it will.

for I have been there
and am there now
with you.

We live it together.

Just so, you still young,
live these my late years with me.

Separated by almost 400 months,

Separated by a firm 180 minutes,

You and I – both of us –
We live in all times.

From Her Mother in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
September 21, 1997
Phyllis Koehnline

“We live in all times.” I close my eyes and see images of young girls, abandoning frivolity to take places standing proudly in front of women decades older. It is a symbolic gesture. A community ceremony. The women and the girls all brought to this place through their sisterhood as lovers of words. We celebrated that sisterhood, and I smile at the memory.

This ceremony took place at the North Carolina Women Writers' Conference which Phyllis, the poet, and I and several hundred other women of all ages attended on a clear September Saturday. I sat beside Phyllis, my new-found writer friend who would graciously agree to join me in my study of writers. I knew this ceremony was something that would go with me – something of lasting beauty I felt privileged to witness.

I could not know that Phyllis would find herself restless at 3:00 that next morning and inspired by the poets she met at this conference, feel compelled to rise and write this poem down before it might slip away. I could not know as she read it for me and the camera the next week that it would become the opening piece for this dissertation and the companion film.

It could be no more appropriate for to me it signifies that we are all of us intimately and integrally related through a web of complex relationships as well as the transcending narratives (Postman, 1996) of the spirit which we share as humans. And that beyond communication, writing, I believe, as reading (Jauss, 1982, p. 51) provides unique opportunities for actualization. Because writing offers us a way that we can not only inscribe or “fixate meaning” but create meaning which “can persist in a way its actuality cannot” (Geertz, 1983, p.30).

Through writing we are able to transcend space and time. And, if we are fortunate, we can experience written language as a way of capturing those transcending moments for nurturing the life of the mind. It is the self – the mind's own awareness of how its experience is organized (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993) that then takes motion and acts within the world. When we do – we are metaphorically and literally writing life.

One Writer's Journey

We live in all times.
Phyllis Koehnline

The physicist-philosopher Prigogine (1997) has noted that “time is our basic existential dimension” (p. 13). A discussion of time can lead to a myriad of questions relating to our notions of reality, free will and determinism, human freedom and democracy, creativity and responsibility. Since the role of metaphor is to help us use the known to understand and explain the unknown, it follows that there would develop a rich and varied system of metaphorical conceptual thinking about time. One of the richest is the metaphorical system of thinking about time as journeying. The journeying metaphor is a temporal and spatial one which arises from the joining of the ideas of time as a dimension and humans as physical beings taking up space. Historically and culturally there has also been a travel metaphor which deals with the concept of each of us as a container (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) with a constant flow of thought in and out as we experience the outside world on the other side of our skin and bring the sensory impressions inside.

Narrative or the story is often associated with the metaphor of journeying as we humans live our lives. Robert Coles has passed on this principle for living which William Carlos Williams had given to him:

Their story, yours, mine -- it's what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them (Coles, 1996, p. 30).

I have chosen to represent what I have learned through this study I have undertaken about writing life much as a retrospective story which moves along a time-space continuum while weaving in and out of my own introspective thinking. As such, this journey which I recount becomes, in Paul Jay's (1984) words, “less a retrospective story to be recounted than a literary activity enacted as the author composes his poem” (p. 33). This seems quite appropriate for this study called writing life.

This literary self-representation is then, as others undertaken by writers, an effort to “bridge the distance between past and present – between himself [the writer] and his [the writer's] own textual representation of himself [the writer]” (Jay, 1984, p. 32). Jay (1980) references the transformative and self-renewing potentialities of such writing, and I, of course, embrace these as someone who believes that we write life. But I am getting ahead of my story and should wait and let my composition speak for itself, because the “'the growth of a poet's mind' does comprise its story, but the growth is best seen unfolding in the process of the poem's composition” (Jay, 1984, p. 33).

This journey to understand the relationship of the writer and the writing began with my first humble attempts at introspective poetry around age seven (“My days have come, my days have gone, my days are leaving me . . . “ – even then obsessed with time) and I am sure will not end until I scribble my last few notes on the last page of my last journal. This dissertation represents merely a break in the journey – a time to pause and reflect on the trails that led me here. I will write more about the origins of my questions about writing in Chapter One, but I think Cassirer's (1944) recounting of Socrates's comments about extraneous matters represents well my motivation to choose such a topic to study. It seems that Phaedrus asked Socrates to interpret the myth of Boreas who supposedly carried off Orithyia. Socrates essentially replied that he had more important things to do:

But I have no leisure at all for such pastimes, and the reason, my dear friend, is that as yet I cannot, as the Delphic precept has it, know myself. So it seems absurd to me that, as long as I am in ignorance of myself, I should concern myself about extraneous matters. Therefore I let all such things be as they may, and think not of them, but of myself – whether I be, indeed, a creature more complex and monstruous than Typhon, or whether perchance I be a gentler and simpler animal, whose nature contains a divine and noble essence.” (Phaedrus, 229D ff., as cited in Cassirer, 1944, pp. 1-2).

And, of course, the opportunity to come better to know myself is a large part of my passion for this work. I cannot think of a better topic than one that can potentially help me to know myself and at the same time offer, hopefully, something of value to others. I think I have found that in writing life.

I have enlisted ten other writers to join me in this exploration of how we might be engaged in writing life. They have each shared stories of how they believe writing has played an important role in their life. You will meet these writers through what they write as well as what I write about them. They have graciously shared bits and pieces of their work that is important to them or they feel representative in some way (Appendix).

I am attempting to describe what I see to be relevant from the writing life histories that they have shared with me. I am not trying to reconstruct what they said or what I think they meant. The best way to define how I make use of their stories is that they are travelers, too, who have kindly paused on their own journeys long enough to catch me up on the progress of their writing and what it has come to mean to them. And it seems they often point ahead to some distant place that I have not yet traveled. It is not like a “See Rock City” scenic trail, rather it seems I am turning over more than a few stones to see if any writer, those I have met and talked with or those who I have read, before me has already uncovered any gem-like theories of writing, the self, and agency. I know that what I write is the only the visible part of what I have experienced and am in the process of learning from all of these writers, both my writers whom I have interviewed and read and the writers I have only read, my everyday experiences, and the dynamic interplay of all of these with my imagination.

Coles (1997) describes the import of the researcher or writer in this way:

. . . the role of the scholar's personal life is evident – his or her attitudes with respect to the attitudes of others under scrutiny, and his or her imaginative life as it gets expressed in the embrace of concepts, of generalizations, of hypotheses, which are collections of words meant to offer or convey an idea, a suggestive or organizing principle, a manner of looking at things, a gesture of interpretation, of coherence (Coles, 1997, p. 23).

I refer to these writers whom I have interviewed collectively as my writers throughout this text, partly out of warmth and appreciation for the role they have played in bringing this study to life, and in acknowledgment, that, ultimately, this is my story that I am reporting. I am the someone for this work who Coles describes when he writes that “an opinion of someone whose mind has taken in all that information, that documentation, and then given it the shape of sentences, of words used, with all their suggestive possibilities” (Coles, 1997, p. 21).

My goals in this work has been much as Rosenblatt described her own: “to immerse myself in a rich source of insights, not merely to accumulate a body of codified data” (p. x). The work that results is a synthesis of my interviews, observations, readings, discussions, and reflections. I perfectly understand now Freire's (1996) comment that “I live intensely the impossible relationship of the false dichotomy between writing and reading” (p. 1). Nancy Spivey's (1997) description is not nearly as poetic but echoes this holistic experience of reading and writing which she calls “discourse synthesis” (p. 136).

I have often felt the high that comes from the process of flowing in and out of reading and writing until it seems one continuous process. I read what others have written; I am prompted to write; I reread my writing and I work to improve upon it and/or I am off again in search of more nourishment. I often find myself wondering if the writers I read have read have read each other. The exciting potential is what I call the constructivist's dream – that from my unique experiences, vicarious and actual, from experiencing through print or film, on screen and off, that I might actually come up with something that no one has thought of before. I not only understand but live Belenky's (1986) principle of the constructivist learner who has experienced “the opening of the mind and the heart to embrace the world” (p. 141).

I write extensively to describe the ten writers who joined me in my study, but in preview, let me say that each is a reflexive writer defined in the literature by Jay (1980) and Lucy (1993) as writers who might be said to “turn an inner eye” on themselves as they write. To use a time and space metaphor, such writers find a place outside themselves to look back. Torgovnick (1990) calls such writers “writerly” writers because they share something of themselves in the writing. Such writing is not necessarily autobiographical but still personal:

Even if it offers no facts from the writer's life, or offers just a hint of them here and there, it makes the reader know some things about the writer – a fundamental condition, it seems to me, of any real act of communication (p. 27).

Such writerly writing is advocated by Torgovnick (1990, 1994) and Tompkins (1993) for literary and cultural criticism. Lucy (1993) describes reflexive writing as making an impact across a range of disciplines as those voices representing cultures outside the mainstream are now able to be heard. These examples represent what seems to be a search then for new forms of written discourse (Jay, 1980).

Foucault (1975) in his well-known article, “What Is An Author,” acknowledges the changing concept of author over time:

. . . always only the projection onto the texts, in more or less psychological terms, of the traits, connections, continuities, and exclusions one establishes. All these operations vary according to the epoch and the type of discourse (p. 606).

That our thoughts of the author and forms of literature would evolve is not surprising as we consider how linked they are to our changing concept of self (Jay, 1980).

In Chapter Two which is devoted to setting up the contexts and relations of my study, I also explore this changing concept of self as seen through a ecological lens which places the individual within the context of the larger whole. The word, system comes from the Greek synhistanai which means “to place together” (Capra, 1996, p. 27). It is only through seeing ourselves “coming together in one place” in contexts and relationships with both living organisms and social systems that we can understand the larger whole of reality (Capra, 1996, p. 27). This systems thinking is supported by a new science paradigm which I think shows how far we have come towards understanding the interrelatedness of our world and how far we might go in becoming more responsible for creatively changing ourselves and our world.

I will also show how the new science metaphor is reflected in the evolving methodology of qualitative inquiry through my story. Capra describes the new science paradigm's methodology in this way:

The new paradigm implies that epistemology – understanding of the process of knowing – has to be included explicitly in the description of the natural phenomena (Capra,1996, p. 30).

I begin to describe my process of knowing in this chapter as I explain the life history method that I have used in my inquiry and my own introspective methods.

Chapter Two, A Writing Journey, is devoted to a careful weaving of the contexts and relations of literacy study including who they are, how they came to join in this inquiry, and a brief writing life history for each. I explain something of the methodology and the philosophy behind the life history method and why its constructivist, collaborative, democratic underpinnings make it a natural match for this inquiry into the value writers give to writing and its place in their development. I also beld through symbols and the role of culture in such development.

Chapter Three, Writing -- It's You, I begin an indepth look at what my ten writers and I, along with the numerous others I have read, might contribute to the development of a theoretical framework of how writing can contribute to our evolving selves and world. My focus in this chapter is on how these writers describe their use of writin in their lives and the thinking process I engage in to understand how writing may be more than a tool or technology (Foucault, 1972), or a habit according to Dewey and Bentley (Ratner & Altman, 1964) and Sheldrake (1991). Writing for my writers becomes an important aspect of the self.

I include many stories along my writer's journey so that Langer's qualification for representing “a thinker's conclusion” might be met:

. . . to be presented with a thinker's conclusions, not really seeing the path whereby he reached them, or knowing the first suggestion – the insight or na�ve perception – which opened that path, is unsatisfactory to anyone whose philosophical interest is more than skin deep– (Langer in Cassirer, 1944, p. vii).

I also in this chapter explain the process I engage in which leads to my synthesis and interpretation of the stories of my writers and my reading and reflections during the course of this study.

True to Natalie Goldberg's (1986) maxim when you sit down to write, expect to be surprised, Chapter Four, Writing as Mythmaking, holds some surprises. On the way to interpreting how my writers speak of their passion for writing and how the process permeates their lives, I was inspired by George Noblit's interest in the writing of ethnography as mythmaking. A myth represents the essence of a story's message or moreal -- its transcending value.

In Chapter Four I write of a theory of how writing can serve as a process for change when out of the experience of changing oneself, the writer grows to feel that he or she can act constructively to change the outside world. I find support for this thesis in the work of Michael Cole's (1997) research in cultural psychology. Weaving again the strand from the humanities, I consider Cassirer's (1944) work on language, myth, and culture is a milestone along my path as I assert the connections that I have made about writing as ritual and mythmaking. Writing, I believe, can create through ritual and mythmaking, a reflective space where possibilities are endless.

Finally, I have followed Cole's (1997) mantra for the researcher: to “ground analysis [or synthesis] in everyday life events and findings in everyday life as useful to people” (p. 349). Chapter Six is devoted to implications for how we can go about creating the conditions through which we can ensure that individuals have the opportunities to learn to use writing as a process for improving their social futures.

The Path of Literacy

I learn by going where I have to go.
Roethke

It is from the my telling of our story that I hope that my own commitment to educational and social change will be evident. I appreciate the way Schaafsma describes the significance of including his own story – that his “story embodies theory” (Schaamsfa, 1993). I at the same time am hyper-aware of the problems wrought by the researcher's “self-indulgence” (Smith, 1997) or the artist's “outsized artistic signature of its maker”(Cameron, 1992) and will attempt to walk that narrow path of balance between self-indulgence and self-reflexiness.

There is a signature I which I could add to those of “my writers.” I think the world mourns for Charles Kuralt and the stories he never got to tell. Kuralt was a wonderful storyteller who once, in an interview with Larry King, credited the “front porch storytelling tradition” as the origin of North Carolina prolific and acclaimed writers. Kuralt's legacy, I think, is his celebration of the “everyday.” And he delighted in sharing the wisdom that he borrowed from those “everyday” philosophers who he met “on the road.” This seems a good place to stop and say that though I have chosen “to live the questions” that deal with writing, I know that the questions are much bigger. I would not have this work be seen as an idealization of writing and literacy in some romantic notion that I have found the “answers” to life's probing questions and they lie in books. I was not born of “bookish people” and actually feel an outsider to the world of intellectualism. And, perhaps, if I recognize any agenda that I have, it includes democratizing this world so that it is not the realm of the privileged – because I have come to believe there is value there and not because I believe in its superiority. I appreciate Olson's (1994) warning that we risk being unintentionally arrogant and self-serving when we place literacy on the pedestal of cultural idealism and snub those of cultures which are not as literate. Those that still, perhaps, preserve their values and life lessons through orality, through storytelling – whether these cultures are found in non-Western, third world countries or rural Southern roadside communities. I do believe in the transformative powers of literacy but I also believe as Kuralt, who Doris Betts (1997) eulogized as someone “who found meaning everywhere.” Literacy, I believe, is a route of access.

Making the Road by Traveling

There are roads which are not easy to travel alone.
Bunkyo-Ku Otowa, 1974

I have had a critical friend, or reflective partner, I prefer, to make this journey with me. My good friend, Bill, has not only been the cameraman who preserved my writers' images but his eyes have been another lens through which I might glimpse my journey from another perspective. And his has been a perspective that has complemented mine for we have stood at different places on what became searing issues of creativity and artistic drive. His skepticism created a healthy tension that helped to keep me aware of my own biases. He is the eleventh writer in this journey's story. And he drove the Land Rover that managed to take us places I thought we could never get to.

I have endeavored to write in a simple, first-person, reflexive way – definitely low cal with not a lot of cream sauces or rich desserts. I have carefully packed in a few “chocolate kisses” here and there – to borrow Mariana Torgovnick's metaphor for the ethnic treats she included for Italians when critiquing The Godfather – in this case, the treats being quotes or stories about writers which I think other people who write will appreciate. Such as this one: E. B. White, author of what has been called the all-time favorite children's book, Charlotte's Web, when asked if he had to modify his writing so children would understand him said simply no, because he didn't know a lot of big words anyway (Paris Review, 1957). I still do not know a lot of big words, though I have a stack I can pull out now and then after working on this study, but I am more interested in finding the best word to use communicate to, what will, hopefully, be a broad audience.

Finally, I would like to thank you, the twelfth writer, for joining me as I recount my writer's journey. As Louise Rosenblatt writes: “The dynamics of the literary experiences include first the dialogue of the reader with the text as he creates the world of the work” (Rosenblatt, 1978, p. 69). My only regret is that I will probably not have a chance to dialogue with you as you pause along your journey to create this “world of the work.” But I would love to hear from you if you ever get a chance. I will just be down the road a-piece.

Dr. Cris Crissman Homepage
copyright 1998-99 Cris Crissman
Technical problems contact sysop@writinglife.org
10/28/03 06:09 PM