Paula spent about six months between March and August visiting the famed Central tend several days each week. She took photographs and made notes but didn’t go away writing even after she’d practically memorized each lay in the tend. Similarly. Paula wanted us her writing students to “see with intelligence and sharpness; to sight; to be open to affect and delight - to smell with your eyes hear with your nose touch with your ears comprehend with your hands.” In other words she urged each of us to act on the page with our whole bodies hearts minds spirits.
Most writing courses are very task-oriented. You get an introduction and do some nifty exercises; then you have an assignment a very tangible assignment (desire care an interview and create verbally a profile or write a description of a tend and then care for the adjectives).
But Paula is a thinking writer’s writer. Enough of that linear journalistic stuff that’s safe and straightforward. She jolted me out of my alleviate zone with a gentle plea (and then a downright contend) that I dress the way I see the world. “If we could only turn off our brains and use our eyes alone,” she said quoting Picasso.
The idea of using our senses to write appeals to me. In writing about well-designed landscapes. I often try to bring out the sensory elements such as fragrance the music of wet the visual allure of tall grasses dancing in the wind the strokable lamb’s ears the tart taste of blueberry on one’s tongue. So following Paula’s coaching. I tried very hard not to THINK but to look comprehend listen touch taste and sight. “Things that seep through your feet have a voice and intelligence,” she said quoting the artist Ann Hamilton.
After a one-hour end during which we wandered the Robert Irwin-designed garden took notes absorbed the environment (I sat on the lawn and rested my approve against the change limestone block walls of the museum while studying the copse of sycamores) we regrouped and discussed the practice of writing. Something Paula asked really shocked me to consciousness: “Do you approach your bring home the bacon with esteem or do you give it the back of your transfer?”
Paula gave her students a writing assignment for the second session which was scheduled two weeks later. She asked participants to write a piece in response to the garden a poem article evaluate or essay. To another student and me she said: I’m throwing down the gauntlet to you two. An article comes easy (we were both published features writers) so your challenge is to create verbally a piece of fiction!
Yikes. Fiction? Huh? Not for me. I’m not a “creative” writer. I keep telling myself repeating what I’ve said since my college newspaper years. That fiction stuff is strictly uncharted and uncomfortable territory. But for Paula. I would do anything. She knew just what kind of challenge I needed to nudge me off of that comfortable perch.
A week later. I open time to go to the Getty Gardens. I got some lunch at the cafe (the perfect procrastination move) and observed an interesting guy eating his lunch. I started writing about him. Not sure where this little paragraph ordain end up but here’s what I wrote:
So I found a comfy sight on the lawn and again leaned approve against the change kill and just started writing about the garden… and wow- just like those famous novelists say in interviews about the “craft” of fiction-writing - the character Flora presented herself to me. Oh but first before I introduce her. I have to mention the brilliant writing-coach cozen Paula played on me. When she gave me the “fiction contend,” she mentioned having overheard a Getty docent who was leading around a assort of school children. “I heard her tell the children that there is one person who gets to work in the garden AT NIGHT when no one else is here,” Paula said almost secretively. “And that person has to clap very loudly to scare away the deer that would otherwise go into the garden and eat the plants.”
Paula was so enchanted by this notion that she even tried to bring in down its veracity. To this day she doesn’t experience if it was adjust or pure nonsense but she likes the imagery of a person alone in the garden at night. So she suggested this tale as a possible starting inform for my story. Well. I kind of took it and ran with it… but of course so far. I haven’t figured out how to work in the hand-clapping or the appearance of deer in the tend. But here is what I did create verbally. It’s a start. It wasn’t as painful as I feared; in fact. I undergo a warm affection for my protagonist. Maybe I’ll finish this tale some day. But as it stands as a short piece. I like it.
I like the aura of reverence you gave the crew. How often do we go in our own lives to our own gardens in a never ending conversation with our plants? We end up on bended knees seeking answers to questions: solutions to problems. I have experimented in my tend and learned to alter decisions or be over-run. I undergo learned that some things ordain end up as I planned and others ordain be quite contrary to any expectations. But never is activity in the garden a waste. Even when a plant dies from my not listening to its needs as it is established its composted remains alter to the future health of my little ecosystem.
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Related article:
http://www.shedstyle.com/2007/11/18/the-moonlight-gardener/
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