Writer’s Block? Make Room for Beauty

My wildflower garden is audaciously misbehaved—thick and tall with noble yarrow and coreopsis where the sun shines brightest, slight with purple cornflower, blue flax, and red-pink Sweet William beneath the ledge of tree shade. Nothing uniform in this arrangement. The tallest flowers fall down. The rabbits sip at leggy stems as if they’re straws. The goldfinch tuck their beaks into the newest flower heads. The whole is both overgrown and gappy.

Today I went out to the garden in the early morning hour wearing my long sleeves and faded cap, my green rubber boots and muddy gloves. I swung a three-toothed tool toward the sparsest earth; this was my version of hoeing. I sprinkled in new seeds designed for shady spots, choosing hope despite the late hour of this season.

Will it work? I do not know.

Was there joy in doing? Yes. There was.

I hadn’t been writing like I used to write. I had missed my writing self. The woman who wrestled with form so as to unearth new meaning. The prose maker who snuck her stories into poems. I had missed what I might have learned about me because I chose, for a while, to stop writing toward me. I had missed how this feels, right this moment, now, writing these sentences, testing them, pressing Delete Delete Delete.

(There is so much pleasure to be taken from that button called Delete.)

Why do we stop doing the things we love? What can bring us back toward our gardens, our words, ourselves? Lately, I find myself able to slowly return to words because I have taken a journey toward foreign kingdoms of art. The exquisite planes of Agnes Martin’s paintings. The rhythms of ancient folk songs. The stillness in a Lenore Tawney weave. And, yes, the ungovernable beauty of my wildflower garden.

The beauty stops me, and then it stills me, and then it leaves me inside the canyon of myself. The beauty surrounds me, it protects me, it silences me until, somehow and always remarkably, words do come, and with those words, the joy that words will yield.

So that I encourage you, should you find yourself word stuck, to buy an Agnes Martin monograph or walk around in the mind of Ansel Adams or hang out with some misbehaving seeds, pretending you can offer some dominion. Beauty cracks us open, when we allow it to. Beauty brings us back to us.

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Beth Kephart is a writer and paper artist whose new books are My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (Temple University Press) and You Are Not Vanished Here: Essays (Juncture Workshops). Her new series of multi-media, prompt-rich writing workshops, “Taking Flight,” explores the literary lessons—scene, details, pace, plot—embedded in the work of great artists and offers brand new ways to approach the page. More at bethkephartbooks.com and junctureworkshops.com.

YOU ARE NOT VANISHED HERE

In the hands of writer Beth Kephart, the essay is endlessly elastic—a braid, a collage, a villanelle, an instruction manual, a plea, a letter, musical notes, a story simple told, a flash. In pieces that range from the bright visitations of childhood fireflies to the howls of a dog hotel, from the songs of Siena to a Salvadoran mother-in-law, from the harvest of heat to the history of color, from beloved writers to the act of reading slow, Kephart repeatedly reinvents the form in search of the truest telling. Original illustrations by William Sulit accompany the text, launching each of the six sections with unforgettable characters.

You Are Not Vanished Here is a master class in heart and form.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of more than three-dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher of memoir, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, co-founder of Bind Arts, and a paper artist whose work has appeared in Print magazine (online) and What Women Create, among other places. Recent books include My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (Temple University Press) and Wife Daughter Self: A Memoir in Essays (Forest Avenue Press). You Are Not Vanished Here is her first essay collection. More at bethkephartbooks.com.

William Sulit is an award-winning artist working in multiple media. He is co-founder of Juncture Workshops and Bind Arts. The pieces presented in these pages are original oil paintings elaborated with digital collage. More at bind-arts.com.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing