Experiments and Experiences in Writing Morning Pages

So already, since I began Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way course for blocked and aspiring creatives, I have been required to begin each day by writing three longhand, stream-of-consciousness morning pages. These pages are intended to be the repositories for the worries, preoccupations, and concerns that routinely hijack our creative energy, undermining our efforts to coax our long-neglected inner artists out of hiding so that we can become the creative people we claim we want to be. They are also the pools through which expressions of the buried parts of our essential creative selves bubble up, showing us to ourselves, much to our chagrin and relief. 

While writing morning pages was a daily requirement for the first eight weeks of the twelve-week course, reading morning pages was strictly forbidden. Then, at the beginning of the ninth week, without any warning, the prohibition against reading morning pages was lifted. In its stead was the requirement to read all of the morning pages we'd written to date.

from Colleen Neslin's "Needles and Pins" exhibition*

During the first two months of the course, I had alternated between loving and hating writing the morning pages. But the more I loved and hated them, the more I trusted them. When I didn't hold back, I often loathed what I wrote, loathed others, loathed myself--as Cameron had predicted I might. And when I didn't hold back, I often expressed the intensifying hope and connection I was feeling more exuberantly, confidently, and urgently than I ever had before. I could no longer afford to worry about falling short of dreams I wasn't letting myself have, about feeling smart and unflappable at the expense of being deaf to the utterances of my fragile, re-awakened inner self. I loved the prohibition against reading my pages because it made me courageous: I didn't have to read anything that would make me wince.

Which was why when I learned that we had to read our morning pages, I had intense mixed feelings. I definitely wanted to spot and harvest those insight bubbles that had probably risen from the murky depths I'd probed and chronicled. But I recoiled at the prospect of reading the pages in which I'd spewed venom, surrendered completely to sadness or shame, or concocted something so remote from reality that it would probably embarrass me to revisit it. I felt like I was poised at the edge of one of Los Angeles' ancient La Brea tar pits**: as much as I wanted to get a close look at the glossy methane bubbles that languidly breached the surface of the water pooled atop the seeping tar, I was more intent on avoiding the pool's slick, tricky, sticky bottom. I didn't want to end up like one of those ancient mammals that had waded into a water-covered pit expecting to slake its thirst, only to find itself trapped and sinking.

In truth, Cameron was asking me to do only what I'd routinely asked students to do--first at the Pilot School in a course called "Experiments and Experiences in Writing,"*** and later at English High School where English language arts classes were becoming readers' and writers' workshops. In both places, students wrote daily, shared their writing with one another, decided what pieces to revise, revised those pieces, and wrote regularly and freely in journals often referred to as "writer's notebooks." Especially in the workshop model, these notebooks were mined periodically for themes, insights, and ideas for pieces crying out to be written with authenticity, passion, and craft. Granted these notebooks were intended to support students as emerging writers rather than as blocked artists in recovery, but the processes designed to help us toward our different goals were much the same.

As a Pilot School teacher, I felt compelled to read what my students wrote in their journals. They could write "Do Not Read" at the top of pages that were for their eyes only--and frankly, when they exercised that option, I never regretted having fewer pages to read overall. In addition, they were also encouraged to make clear the pages and sections they most wanted me to read and respond to. Every year in my "Experiments" class, there was at least one student who, doubting that I was actually reading, wrote something like "Joan, if you are still reading, put a check mark right here: _____." 

I can understand that my students doubted I was reading. But I was. As time-consuming as reading those pages was, I loved getting to know my students as people and writers through them. Sometimes, I counseled students who revealed details of complicated home and school situations they were trying to handle; sometimes I offered factual information that students seemed to want or need; yet other times, I pointed out beautiful sentences, emerging patterns and themes, and ideas that I hoped they would develop further in future writing. 

Meanwhile, it was not at all unusual at the end of the course for students to acknowledge that, much to their surprise, they'd become more visible and known to themselves as a result of the combination of their private journal writing and their public class writing. "I didn't know I thought that until I wrote that" and "I didn't know that mattered so much to me until I wrote that" were the kinds of things students often said as they emerged through their writing to themselves.

Remembering some of those moments was what finally broke down my resistance to reading my own morning pages. So I began reading them--which doesn't mean that I didn't start and stop multiple times during the week it took me to make it all the way through them. And I did learn from them, did identify patterns of behavior that needed changing, did identify questions and issues that still dogged me, and did recognize that there were some issues I had actually managed to write my through over the last weeks, probably as a result of writing morning pages and doing the various "tasks" associated with each week of the course. 

There were four important changes in my life as a result of the pages:

My Mother Inquires Into a Tree

• I wrote my way into a better relationship with my mother. For months, her resistance to suggestions for ways to ease her adjustment to her new independent living situation--she and my father moved into an attractive, well-run retirement community last December--completely frustrated me; I wrote about it angrily and often. But when The Artist's Way course required me to recognize and probe experiences of loss in my own life, I began to understand the ways in which her move represented all kinds of losses for my mother--and as I imagined them, I wrote about them. Thanks to my morning pages, I became more understanding of and patient with her. When I get angry and frustrated with her now, I'm able to let it go more quickly. I'm so pleased and  relieved that she and I are doing so much better together now than we were a couple of months ago.

Egrets on a Good Wading Morning

• I wrote my way out of my habit of putting friends' needs and desires before my own--what Cameron calls "the virtue trap"**** (96-100). During the first weeks of the course, my morning pages often recounted my anger at having over-scheduled myself socially again--and my regret over having been too flexible about where and when I'd meet up with people. When a few weeks later the course asked about conditions that fostered my personal creativity, I described long, uninterrupted blocks of time for writing, and other blocks of solitary time for walking, reading, being.  After that, it was easy to make two guiltless promises to myself: to accommodate other people's needs and wishes only to the extent to which they are willing to accommodate mine, and to just say no when enough happy and responsible things are already scheduled for a particular week. Yes, I can be a friend to my friends and to my emerging creative self.

• As I wrote about in my last blog post, I wrote my way into being able to imagine and dream--again, as a result of the combination of "tasks" associated with each week of the course and my morning page reflections on them.

Lena River Delta*****

• Finally, I wrote my way into conviction that for me personally, creativity is a matter of spirit, essential self, and world (in its multitudinous places and realms) bound together in charged, ongoing exchange. In my mind's eye, these three elements define and anchor a plane, a G-d-infused force field on which human creativity takes place and from which emerge varieties of energy, vision, and truth given form. Able to be discerned and experienced, these various forms have potential power--they might shift consciousness, galvanize change, stimulate emotion or interest, make beholder and creator each feel more attuned to and grateful for her own humanity and the world itself. During the fourth week of the course, I wrote morning pages about my inability to write an Artist's Prayer (90). But after reading my morning pages at the beginning of the ninth week, I drafted the beginnings of one. Slowly I'm writing my way into that, too.

After reading my last blog post, a friend contacted me. He was struck by my admission that my habit had been to dream safe and small, a common practice among blocked creatives--and a really harmful, self-defeating one at that. He wrote to encourage me to dream and work big. 

Spring Tree #1 by Scott Ketcham******

Write a book, create a world, have fun, he counseled. Reacting to the idea of my writing a book with fear and embarrassment, my old play-it-safe self issued a judgment: "It would be presumptuous for you to write a book." But my new daring-to-dream self loved the idea. Creating a world was something I was already thinking about because so many people in the South Shore Scribes, my weekly writing group, have shared chapters, short stories, and verses in which they're doing just that; why not me, too? Having fun--that sounded  . . . well, really fun. I've been trying to speak true in my blog--and I enjoy the challenge of trying to speak true and the satisfaction of actually managing to do it. But my friend was talking about joy, not satisfaction--and he was particularly recommending the fun that would come from foregrounding and cultivating imagination and seeing where it might lead.  

His advice to me is good: it keeps making me smile. My imagination is Tin-Man rusty, but I have the desire and will to get it moving. I think if I keep up my morning pages, I might just be able to write my way into creating a world.
 

* This work is featured in her exhibition entitled "Needles and Pins" currently on view at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection: http://50years.mcmichael.com/colleen-heslin-needles-and-pins.
** Screen shot of freeze frame of the following wonderful video, which was "Winner Bronze Telly Award 2012."

"La Brea Tar Pits: An Urban Mystery" by Michael Edelstein. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7FK59waeo0
*** As the following blog post explains, the experiments writing course was developed by Diane Tabor and Richard Hermann, and later slightly revised for use at High Tech High and other places by Rob Riordan. Cady. "Experiments in Writing #6: Friday, April 28th: Blindfold Trust Walk." Web log post. Experiments in Writing. Blogger, 27 Apr. 2006. Web. 9 Aug. 2016. <http://experimentsinwriting.blogspot.com/2006/04/experiments-in-writing-6-friday-april.html>. 
**** Cameron, Julia. The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Los Angeles, CA: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Perigee, 2002. Print.
***** Lena River Delta. 2002. NASA Earth Observatory: Earth as Art Series, Russia. NASA Earth Observatory. Web. 12 Aug. 2016. <http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/2000/2704/landsat_art_lena_lrg.jpg>. 
****** Screen shot of http://www.scottketcham.com/post/119541798937.