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I tend to get a bit over-involved in writing.  No, I don’t forget to eat, but I do spend a vast amount of time in my writing mind-frame and I neglect other things.

This week again my step son got me to lend a hand with some construction work, since that’s his business.  Truly:  try Nickportnoybuilders.com if you doubt my veracity. Obviously I was the unskilled laborer, and I was running up and down ladders with windows on my back for part of the day.  The rest of the day I wasn’t running at all. A stately, measured pace seemed more suitable.

Several things struck me about all this.  The first was how much energy people half my age have!  The second was how kindly I was treated, and how much I enjoyed being the neophyte - since that’s what I was. No one expected me to know anything much, but that didn’t make me any less of a person.  The third and fiinal thing was that I saw just how darn hard so many people work, in very hot weather, and still do a splendid, meticulous job.  It reminded me of that whole other aspect of work.

I’m hoping I’ll get a regular gig as a fill-in laborer.  It’s much better than a work out in the gym - since gyms bore me silly.  I’ve shed 15 ponds this summer already. Look out for my latest book: ‘The Weight Loss Miracle - get a job in construction”.

Today I walked past one of my neighborhood characters - an older lady who pushes a shopping cart in which she has placed her dachshund, on that small flip down seat usually used for toddlers.  The cart has been fitted out for this dear old dog, going white about the muzzle, with cushions and blankets and padding.  The dog itself wears a woollen hat knitted in rasta colors, a tartan coat, and a red blanket.  It looks colorful and very cozy, even in the heat.  The dog doesn’t move much, although I check each time to see if it’s alive. This is the way she takes her dog for a walk.

I don’t know much else about this lady and her dog.  I’m reluctant to ask.

Today it struck me that writing a memoir (something I send a lot of time on with my students) is a bit like this dog.  If we try to over-plan any piece of writing we risk squeezing the life out of it.  We force it to be something it isn’t, like this dog.  Writing, you see, is always linear.  It is always sequential.  Life isn’t sequential.  It’s always a gestalt.  So writing about life is always going to be to commit violence upon it, as we try to constrain it into managable dimensions. In fact Memoir, which is the way we recall our lives, has all the life and unpredictability of an unruly dog who wants to sniff lamp posts and chase cats and bark at mailmen.  And that’s what dogs are.

Rendering the truth of living experience doesn’t depend upon taming the life out of it.  It depends upon letting it be itself; messy, unruly, alive. We don’t have to include every detail, or have processed all the emotions.  And somewhere in all that movement and fuss we’ll smile and say, yup, that’s what life is.  Good dog.

I’ve just finished teaching at the 2007 Institute’s Summer session - a week of workshops, celebrity presentations, discussions, readings, laughter, and good old fashioned hard work inspired by all of the aforementioned items on the list.

This year I worked with my writers on the notion of ‘listening to you life’.  I’ve found so often that once we listen to what we say in our writing, rather than worrying about what we think we ought to say, the writing tells us two things.  First, it tells us what we need to say next - it directs us to the road ahead as new ideas come to mind that stem directly from the piece we’ve just written. Second, as we follow this road we discover that the writing will tell us how it needs to be written.  It tells us what tone to use.  The key in every case is to start with an event that feels to the writer to be filled with energy; so filled, in fact, that we feel we have to write it no matter how it comes out. Elegant writing is not the goal at this point.

I was blessed with a small group this year, which meant that I was able to work more intensively with the people I had, and I have to say it was a real privilege to be able to do so.  That’s not an empty statement.  When people take their courage in their hands and write what they feel to be their truth some remarkable things can happen.  And they did.  Not only did the writing become vital, but it really did tell each writer what needed to be done next.  And - God Bless them - my writers did listen to their own stories and went ahead and wrote the next section, and the next… and the next. By the end of the week we had pretty strong ideas as to how each of them could shape the whole trajectory of their Memoirs over the coming months.  We’d identified a framework.

I’ve taught large groups for years, so I know my insights work.  But to teach a small group in such a concentrated time period showed me just how startlingly well the system can work and how far writers can move when the fires are stoked, when the furnaces are roaring.

Perhaps we were just lucky.  Writers are a little like eggs, I sometimes think.  Nothing much seems to happen to an egg for some time until suddenly one day it hatches and you’ve got something much more active to deal with. So, to my newly-hatched writers I can only send my congratulations, because these were not chicken eggs that produced cute fluffy chicks.  Nope.  These are strong, imperious-looking fledglings.  I reckon they could turn out to be eagles.

On Wednesday writer Dennis Watlington gave a presentation at Curry College for the Blue Hills Writing Institute, based on his memoir Chasing America. Dennis is perhaps better known for his documentary film and tv work and as a playwright. He’s got an Emmy and a Cine Golden Eagle award and he wrote for General Hospital amongst other things. But his memoir of growing up on the meanest of meanstreets in Harlem, of his two heroin addictions - one when only 13 - has smashed through to claim a different kind of attention.

Now, before you groan and say, not another story of how hard it was to grow up black and how unfair the world is, I have to say that Dennis is not inviting us to any kind of pity party. He doesn’t want to bring us into a place of outrage and sadness.  He says quite straightforwardly that of course things were bad, yet we’d be much better served looking at how far we’ve come in the last two and a half centuries so we can focus on moving things further in the right direction now.  It’s about how we dissolve racism day by day, everyday, by refusing to go into a place of woundedness.

Two things caught my attention above all.  Dennis is a magnificent speaker and he is that way because he describes himself as ‘a Warrior for Peace’.  When he said that I almost fell of my chair, because it was so true.  He is living the Warrior-Lover archetype I’ve written about in Stories We Need To Know.  He doesn’t just talk about this stuff, he lives it every day, and he inspires others to see things differently as a result.  Now that’s about the finest example I can think of to describe the way the Warrior-Lover moves into true, full, Monarch phase.  The Monarch doesn’t  fight all the battles himself.  The Monarch inspires others to join the fray so that peace and progress can grow.

Most of us don’t get to meet a real Monarch every day.  We’re lucky if we see one or two in a lifetime.  I was lucky enough to have dinner with one on Wednesday; we laughed uproariously about important things over the salad and asparagus, and I’ve never had a better time.  And I’ll never be quite the same.

Dennis is a truly Great Soul.  Catch his readings whenever and wherever you can and if that means being rude to your mother-in-law to get there, do it.  Better still, bring the old lady along.