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Honor Your Lineage by Sage Cohen – from Fierce on the Page

October 19, 2017

This guest post, Honor Your Lineage, by Sage Cohen, is from her book Fierce on the Page which helps you become the writer you were meant to be. I am indebted to Sage for this piece that led to the creation of my free ebook, 36 Books that Shaped my Story: Reading as Creative Influence. I’m so grateful to Sage for being able to share this inspirational essay in full here. Sage is a writing mentor and support to me and many aspiring and practicing writers. Fierce on the Page and Writing the Life Poetic feature in my 36 influential books. Enjoy reading and I hope this piece inspires rich reflections on your literary lineage, as it has done for me.

I have always been magnetically drawn to the books I need as teachers. Recently I cleared a shelf and, with great reverence, placed on it the books I most love—the ones that have shaped me in the way that water shapes stones, almost imperceptibly over time.

Whenever I scan their proud spines all lined up in a row, I think of how this shelf reflects my literary lineage. These are the poets and writers whose work whispers directly into my ear to penetrate my being and reveal what I need to know about being a person and a writer. These are my literary ancestors and immediate family.

I consider each book with gratitude: Sharon Olds’s The Dead and the Living, the dog-eared, tear-stained poetry collection that I have been returning to since my early twenties when I so desperately wanted to write a collection of its caliber that I considered giving up poetry altogether; Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water: A Memoir, which sings through me as if its narrative were a plucked string of the sitar calling forth my own story in accompaniment; Kim Rosen’s Saved By a Poem, affirming my lifelong practice of poetry as sacred medicine; When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chódrón, which has instructed me how to make the crossing from resistance to acceptance in my darkest moments.

This small literary collection, along with the rest of the books on my “lineage shelf” is a funhouse mirror reflection of who I am, what I love, and from where I have come. I imagine the little serif font letters swimming through my cells. The words that come through me now have breathed the amniotic suspended dreams of every word I have admired, allowed in, and sent back into the world. These titles are a bouquet harvested of my desire to enter the universal human experience through poem and story.

Here, in the authority and stability of its literary family, the title of my next project presents itself. It is shy, wobbly, unsure of whether to trust my hand. We sit together, and I listen. Take a few notes. A large fluff of dandelion seed drifts by my open window as the peas in the garden bed below nod in the wind.

By taking the time to name and appreciate my literary lineage, the next step on my path reveals itself to me. I wonder if that’s really all our writing asks of us: to know what we love, to listen, and to give ourselves over to what presents itself.

Be Fierce

I invite you to honor the books you love most by giving them their own shelf (or even their own pile). Then sit with them and appreciate how they have informed your vision, your craft, or your sense of direction in your writing life. Is something inside you lingering on the peripheries, wanting to come through? What work of yours belongs on this shelf, in this company? What knowledge have you gained from these books that now informs your own literary legacy?

* * * * *

Sage Cohen is the author of Fierce on the Page from Writer’s Digest Books and three other books. Her agency Sage Cohen Global crafts communication, education, and empowerment solutions that help people and businesses change the conversation. She serves writers at sagecohen.com and divorcing parents at radicaldivorce.com.

Read about the 36 books that shaped my story

This essay inspired a fabulous journey of revisiting the books that influenced my writing and life story. You can download my free ebook on my literary lineage and the 36 books that have shaped my story – just sign up with your email address in the box to the right or below. You will also receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions. This includes personality type developments, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot and other connections to help express your unique voice in the world.

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Being ‘Fierce on the Page’ – a book review

October 9, 2016

‘Fierce on the Page: Become the writer you were meant to be and succeed on your own terms’ by Sage Cohen, Writer’s Digest Books

I first came across Sage Cohen through her book Writing the Life Poetic which focuses on building poetic voice and putting poetry back into our everyday lives. I also had the opportunity of working on my poetry through Sage’s online classes a few years back. From these experiences, I come to Sage’s works on writing with high expectations of both a pleasurable reading experience and wise, practical advice.

And I am never disappointed. ‘Fierce on the Page’ is a rare and rich read, structured as a series of 75 reflective essays that offer strategies, perspectives and practices to encourage ferocity in writing and in life.

Sage defines ferocity and the fierce writer in her introduction:

The fierce writer ensures that the time and energy she invests in her craft pays dividends of insight and evolution. The fierce writer discovers how to come into his alignment with his authority, leverage his interests, and honour his rhythms, to become the truest instrument of his craft.

From page one of the first essay, ‘You Are Your Best Expert’, I was lulled by Sage’s reassuring voice telling me stories and building on these to make connections. The essays provide a path to navigate the way into writing and into progressing through many aspects of its craft and life.

Each contemplative essay is so thought-provoking. My copy is now full of underlining, connections and possible creations sparked by the reading experience. Sage’s practical business writing background is also woven through the pages. There is a blend of wisdom honed from writing experience of all kinds, along with a grounded sense of what works to bring forward new possibilities and how productivity can be enhanced.

Some of the key strengths of ‘Fierce on the Page’ for me are:

Its associative approach: There is an energy of association underlying each essay. An anecdote or story is told or an experience recounted. These reflections then form the basis of the essay. It’s an evocative reading experience as you are folded into each idea and its applications evolve. This associative approach lends a wise felt experience that makes it easy to engage on a very deep level.
The structure of each essay: Each essay builds from its opening to a realisation or discovery and then a practical application. From there, we are given suggested strategies to apply and questions to dive into to enable us to ‘be fierce’ in our writing endeavours. Woven into this are quotes and references from other creatives that provide prompts and shifts to our perspective.
The poetic language of discovery: As each essay reaches moments where the connections and realisations are crystallised, the language likewise reaches a quiet crescendo of feeling. The learning is expressed sensitively and enacted directly, as with the language of poetry. The images and associations created from this narrative approach make the reading experience lived and heartfelt.

For example, in ‘Write Your Manifesto’, essay #55:

I have come to accept that the writing life is expansive enough to hold my many refractions, and that these add up to the whole of what I have to give.”

In ‘A Bug’s Life, A Writer’s Life’, essay #58:

When you are at an impasse of transition, and your next steps are unclear, follow the words. Trust the words. Trust the cliffs, the canyons, the face flowers. Trust your disorientation and your sense of direction. Trust what you find and don’t find. The shadow gives shape to light. These are your stories. The dance of interdependence is a hum of words.

In ‘Get to the Place of Grace’, essay #63:

Whatever it means to you in your life and your writing, be on the lookout for that lift-off in your words and that landing in your being. Hone your attention to the place of grace where you can feel, know and trust that you and your piece of writing have completed your journey.

Sage’s reminds us that: ‘You have everything you need—and you are everything you need—to do the writing you want to do’. These words provide the gentle encouragement many of us need to begin, to continue or to start up where we left off.

I encourage you to seek out the wisdom and practicality of ‘Fierce on the Page’ as a support in engaging in quiet, resilient writing and in succeeding in where you want to be in your writing. Sage’s books are always on my desk as talismans of encouragement and practice. This special book will stay close at hand, gaining more comments and underlining over the years, as I seek to apply its messages and be fierce with my own writing and life.

Thought pieces:

You can visit Sage Cohen’s Fierce on the Page website for more information including a community page to share thoughts from the practical exercises in the book.

The interview Mantu Joshi on Writing and Living Fierce is an inspiring example and shows the power and outcomes that can come from living out fierce and committed writing strategies. In this case, it resulted in a book on resilient parenting, written two hours a week over two years.

Other books on writing by Sage Cohen that I recommend are:

Writing the Life Poetic – an invitation to read and write poetry; fabulous for re-engaging with the spirit of poetry in your life.

The Productive Writer – practical strategies and thought processes to increase your productivity and move from ideas to action and outcomes in your writing life. I’ve written a book review of The Productive Writer which you can find here.

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introversion poetry

Poetry and me – into the light #2

September 20, 2014

Poetry and the writing of it is to me a sacred creative, transcending thing. It has always been something secret, special and introverted, not something I talk about. It’s been an intermittent relationship, a journey with many stops and starts, but a desired and committed journey nonetheless, like an old friend I know so well who is always there to connect with, to rely upon, to give to and to learn from.

And we have been through so much. From early times, when I learned to love the value of words as a passion ignited from some deep place I was unaware of. In ‘The touch and reach of poetry‘, I reflected on these early influences and my enduring love, noting that:

Poetry especially can feel like a driven art with not many places to go. It’s easy for it all to go underground for a while in between other things like work and family, but it springs back up eventually. You cannot keep it down forever it seems.

I have woven poetry into the tapestry of my days, if unevenly. When at university studying education, I also studied literature so I could keep reading poetry and study the writing of it. When doing my Honours year on education and literacy, I chose to do a research project on ‘Poetry in Education: developing affective response’ about the aesthetic reading process, how poetry is taught and why this does not generally ignite a love of poetry. It worried me that so many people leave school without a love for poetry and that the teaching of it seemed to miss its heart.

Poetry became the way I transcended heartache, sadness, hurt and loss – finding the words to hold a moment just so, to fix it, to crack it apart or to recreate it and fashion what could never be except in the shape of the words I laid on the page. It was a way of saying good-byes that could not be said in any other way.

I wrote in Poetry: into the light about the freeing up of poetry and the revisiting of it. Sage Cohen’s book, ‘Writing the Life Poetic‘, became a touch-point for poetry being pulled down from its pedestal and integrated more into my daily life. I re-engaged with my poetry writing, organised and reworked my years of drafts of poems and engaged directly with Sage and her teaching through her inspirational online poetry writing courses.

Wanting to reconnect more with poetry and modern poets, I’ve recently started the Massive Open Online Course, ModPo, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, led by Al Filreis through the University of Pennsylvania. It’s a wondrous journey and community and especially celebrates the ‘close reading of poetry as a social act‘ via online connection. People from all educational backgrounds from all over the world link to discuss poetry for mostly no other reason than the joy of poetry. It is simply so grounding and freeing to see and hear poetry being discussed, read and enjoyed in this way. Starting with Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and stretching to the present time, the language and art of various American poets is widely shared.

And then there’s the world of publishing poetry – old and new. Once upon a time, poetry success was judged by publication in literary journals and only very few poems could be seen this way. This option still exists but poetry accessibility is now more opened up with people publishing their work through the internet on their blogs, through print on demand, chapbooks and various other media, and with Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook as ways to get poetry out there and to communicate with readers. Though it seems poetry has remained a publishing challenge generally and especially for e-readers.

Witness however: ‘Tyler Knott Gregson’s poetry cracks the best-seller’s list‘! Tyler has been incredibly committed to poetry and to social media, writing “at least one new poem a day for his blog over the past five years”, sharing his work on Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook without missing a day. He now has 259,000 followers on Tumblr, 184,000 on Instagram and 31,000 Twitter followers. And from this, his first publication of poetry has hit the best-seller lists. According to the Wall Street Journal article:

Mr. Gregson doesn’t edit or revise his work. He simply types the poems on scraps of paper—boarding passes, receipts or pages torn from notebooks—and posts a new one online each day.

It’s refreshing and inspiring to see how far poetry can be freed up and communicated and loved so widely.

I am learning from Sage Cohen, ModPo and Tyler Knott Gregson about how poetry can be taken off its pedestal and loved and communicated widely via new approaches, especially via online learning and social media.

And for me? Writing poetry has been a key love of my life but it’s been a stop start affair, partly because I make it so sacred sometimes, maybe too sacrosanct and special. I have a body of work of some nearly 200 poems now, crafted over time. I have been published – in literary journals, in a local writers’ anthology and online including on my own blog (apparently that counts as publication these days!).

It’s time though to dust my work off and let it shine and let more light in so there can be more growth and more light.

As Sylvia Plath famously said:

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

So I will learn from these key people about freeing up the writing, the reading and the publishing of poetry. A first step will be gathering what has been published of my work here in one place as a starting point, getting this, my body of work, into the light. Then working on the next steps…

What are your thoughts on freeing up poetry – writing, reading and publishing…I’d love to know!

poetry transcending writing

Poetry: Into the Light

June 3, 2012

I’ve always loved poetry, read poetry and written poetry, on and off and over many years. It is the great life-blood of transcendence: celebrating the small moments; recording how you or others uniquely see and link ideas; connecting with the highest joy and worst of grief; and making sense of the deepest pain and anger so it doesn’t stay with you, in that form, forever. It’s the working through to light, mostly, though this often involves working through some elements of darkness. It’s the reworking of feelings and perceptions in order to understand them, hold them in time for a moment and then move on.

As Sage Cohen writes in ‘Writing the Life Poetic‘:

Poetry gives us an opportunity to experience our lives twice. First, as it happens, in real time. And second, in heart time. The poem gives us a kind of cosmic canvas to savour a moment, make sense of it, put a little frame around it, and digest it more completely. It also gives us a way to travel profoundly into experiences that are not our own and, if we are lucky, alight on a moment of truth about the human condition now and then. (p1)

So here’s to bringing my poetry, and the poetry of others, into the light here as part of a journey and record of transcending.

Narrative

She starts up high, facing north

towards slow mist,

watching the sea wash

into the rain’s drift below.

She is called to the beach

as if to a baptism, bride-like,

white as the air, stepping

down the rough rock stairs.

She narrates her life,

writes as she walks,

as if the sand and shells are

the bones of her story.

And the pieces connect her:

an imperfect white oval shell,

a fig leaf from a canopy,

the sketched black lines

of a creature’s moving home.

Cool and tight limbed,

she ends in another place,

as if washed by waves,

her contours, clear and shell-lined

as the Borromean grottoes

of Isolabella,

her white shining lights

coming home.

Previously published on the net at Sage Cohen’s ‘Writing the Life Poetic’ – Poetry for the People student poems.

In what ways has poetry helped you move into the light?

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creativity poetry transcending

Gems #9 Shining light on yourself

September 27, 2010

Some gems about shining a little light back on yourself…

Just at the same time as Chris Guillebeau is enjoying great popularity with the publication of his book, ‘The Art of Non-Conformity’ , he writes an excellent post shining the light back on his readers. That’s one of the reasons I love Chris and his work: expect the unexpected. I always get such a wonderful blast of fresh thinking and often the reverse of current trends; hence his specialty, ‘nonconformity’, I guess.

In his post, What’s your message? Why not share it? Chris starts by referring to the current trend in social media of talking about others more than yourself. Chris turns the spotlight squarely back:

..ultimately people will follow you because you are doing something interesting, not because you are good at passing on other people’s messages.

A point very well made with much relevance for blogging, tweeting and much of life really:

Be interesting. Be yourself. Do something worth talking about.

Chris then encourages readers to comment about their message. There is much to learn and enjoy in the responses as people focus back on their message and reflect it out again.

Danielle LaPorte’s post on ‘The initiated woman’ shone a light on a very deep place and I knew exactly what she was talking about. It starts with bleeding, vulnerability and giving of the quintessential:

she’s bled from poor decisions that sliced her esteem wide open; and from unguarded boundaries being obliterated; and she’s bled willingly because that’s what you do when people you love are anemic or have been hit by life — you give them your blood. Here, I have lots, it’s fresh and warm. I’ll make more.

And it moves from there to describe a place where the outcomes of experience become a wisdom and strength that can help others. Read it – it is the most beautiful piece of writing. It reminds me of the wonderfully understated words from the song ‘You’re a Heathen of Love’ by Marian Bradfield:

‘Cause experience in a woman never goes astray.

And because Chris says ‘tell us your message’ and ‘be yourself’ and because Danielle says:

She’s so tender she prefers to whisper about her true nature, or write a poem. Abstract. Protected.

…here’s a poem from me. It was written and crafted during my time in Sage Cohen’s highly recommended ‘Poetry for the People’ classes and was featured along with the work of my fellow students on Sage’s ‘Writing the Life Poetic’ blog.

Narrative

She starts up high, facing north

towards slow mist,

watching the sea wash

into the rain’s drift below.

She is called to the beach

as if to a baptism, bride-like,

white as the air, stepping

down the rough rock stairs.

She narrates her life,

writes as she walks,

as if the sand and shells are

the bones of her story.

And the pieces connect her:

an imperfect white oval shell,

a fig leaf from a canopy,

the sketched black lines

of a creature’s moving home.

Cool and tight limbed,

she ends in another place,

as if washed by waves,

her contours, clear and shell-lined

as the Borromean grottoes

of Isolabella,

her white shining lights

coming home.

Image, Inishowen Mirror by Janek Kloss from flickr and used under a Creative Commons license with thanks

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creativity music & images transcending writing

Gems #2

June 9, 2010

I am absolutely thrilled by Susannah Conway’s announcement of her book deal. As Susannah says, ‘Here’s some proof that if you put a dream into words – and put it out there – the planets will align to help make it happen.’

What started as an e-course will become an ‘Unravelling’ book full of beautiful concepts, photographs, creativity, an ‘elegant journal with polaroids slipped between the pages…’ It already sounds delicious and 144 people have so far commented that they will read and buy, and buy for friends and family. And through the pages of Susannah’s blog, the opportunity to engage with the potential readership is already unfolding. Inspirational!

I am a great lover of Australian singer songwriters. Well, any singer song writers really, but there are some special Australians I love in this genre. Stephen Cummings is right up there: singer, song-writer, poet, novelist, rock star…I love his song, ‘Fell from a great height’:

‘I fell from a great height
Scrambling with myth and light
Surrendered to a dream
That was absolutely right
I fell from a great height’

The song has such layers and depth, continuing to evolve as you listen over time. Beautiful. The song was also a duet with Toni Childs and appeared on her compilation album, Best of Toni Childs in 1995. I especially love the acoustic version on Stephen’s album, ‘Close-ups.’

And finally, Sage Cohen has a gem of an opportunity for poets with ‘The Life Poetic iphone contest.’ You are invited to submit up to three, unpublished poems that you feel represent the spirit of “the life poetic” for consideration by July 4, 2010. Sage will choose her favorite 365 for inclusion in a “Life Poetic” iPhone app that features a poem a day for a year. What an enduring way to celebrate the life poetic!

Image by jmtimages, used under a Creative Commons license.

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Honor Your Lineage by Sage Cohen – from Fierce on the Page

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