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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

Fierce on the Page - book cover

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Master the Margins

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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creativity writing

Step by step: a narrative

September 24, 2016

I’m at the beach at my favourite spot looking out from the shade to the bluest and clearest of spring September days. It’s Monday, a day I’m normally at work but I recently started a job share arrangement. This means I work three days a week to free me up to work creatively, get some balance, be me and have ‘an actual life’ as my friend Will described it so accurately.

From the fig tree

On this day that I’m writing, it’s the first day of this new sense of freedom and the waves are lapping quite loudly and incessantly, a restlessness and churning that I feel matched with. As I’ve shifted to this transition time, I’ve had a chest infection and asthma and I’ve been on steroids to open up my airways. The excitement of this time of transition and its opportunities, along with the medication, has made for some idea-filled attempts at sleep.

The ideas are so deep and complex and I keep a notebook beside the bed at night. I want to capture these thoughts; they are defining, connective and empowering. I know that if I let them float into sleep and try to remember their unique associations in the morning, it won’t happen. I need to capture them like precious butterflies and hold them gently with all their beauty before they fly away. They are the gateway to so much, gifts from another place, and to contemplate them, weave them and enact them is the richest of experiences. I work to coalesce them into a body of work I can take forward and lead to support and enrich my life and the lives of others. The dots are connecting and the planets are aligning and calling.

And to write. Writing here – the coolness of the sand against my feet, the cold brick wall behind my back – is like meditation. It’s my life’s breath over the years that I need to breathe deeper into and exhale through, finding and expressing the voice that is uniquely mine. I’m breathing so deeply now as my airwaves clear. My senses are coming alive: I’m seeing so sharply, noticing;  I catch the scent of salt and jasmine; and the waves are crashing like loud applause.

My beach walks always seem to have some form of narrative, thoughts shaping into a structure as I wander. Today’s is ‘step by step’.

As I walk on the hard sand, I feel the calm of each step, one grounded thing at a time, and the mindfulness of the moment. I’m wary and watchful of the pitfalls and traps as I step: the moss on the tidal rocks that can slip me up; the larger waves that can catch me unawares and wash me down.

I feel a stillness in each step. I’m walking tall, feeling the ground beneath, scanning the terrain and savouring being at home here on the beach and in myself, looking out.

It’s hard to believe it’s here – this opened out opportunity like this clear blue sky and all this water reaching out to the horizon. Everything is so sharp and clear though that it must be real and I’m breathing in its quiet strength, one breath at a time, one grounded step at a time.

 

gunyah-5sept

Thought pieces:

My mind is an associative one so I as I post, I plan to add some thought pieces, some creative connections, influences and resources.

For this post, ‘Step by Step: a narrative’, I offer the following thought pieces:

Beach walks as narratives:

I’ve written before about beach walks as narratives; here is a poem about that in a previous post, Poetry into the Light. There is nothing like walking on the beach to restore your mind and soul, ground you and help make connections. For me, there is something like a narrative that builds as I walk and I intend to capture my narratives more consciously as I move through this time.

Tarot card for the day and the times: Nine of Cups

The card that I drew on the first day of being at home at the start of these new work arrangements was the Nine of Cups. It’s a card I’ve also drawn again since so clearly a card for the times.

9-of-cups

The above Nine of Cups image is from the Sakki Sakki Tarot Deck.

And the message?

From Rachel Pollack’s Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom:

At times, especially after troubles or a period of long, hard work, nothing can serve us better than a simple good time.

And Brigit Esselmont (of Biddy Tarot) in The Ultimate Guide to Tarot Card Meanings has chosen this quote by Theodore I Rubin (Psychiatrist and Author) to illustrate the key meaning:

Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes from the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best.

It has certainly been a time of both troubles and hard work for a long while so the pleasure of  ‘a simple good time’ and ‘the afterglow of satisfaction’ are especially savoured and sweet.

The book of the moment: ‘The Heart Aroused’ by David Whyte

One of the simple pleasures of being at home during the week is being able to do everyday things like go to the post office. On my first day home, this gorgeous book arrived in the post and I had the pleasure of sitting to open it over a coffee in the local cafe.

the-heart-aroused3

I’ve had a number of David Whyte’s books sitting in my ‘thinking about it’ wish list for a while. After connecting with a lovely new friend Katherine recently, she wisely reminded me of David Whyte and how his work is potentially an important piece of this transition time. I ordered his books and these words in the frontispiece of ‘The Heart Aroused’ just sang to me as I opened it, :

Only a few achieve the colossal task of holding together, without being split asunder, the clarity of their vision alongside an ability to take their place in a materialistic world. They are the modern heroes…Artists at least have a form within which they can hold their own conflicting opposites together. But there are some who have no recognised art form to serve this purpose, they are the artists of the living. To my mind these last are the supreme heroes in our soulless society.

Irene Claremont de Castillejo

Here’s to ‘the artists of the living’ and the clarity of their vision.

4 Comments
poetry

Poetry: December

December 1, 2014

December

You take the calm upon you
freely as a dress
flows in summer.

Something about sprinklers spinning
over lakes of grass.
Something like the cool hand
of the sun going down.

Each day is suddenly
a song you recognise
easily as fish swim.
What was that storm that raged
its way under winter’s skin?

Published: December, Terri Ryan  (now Connellan), 1989 poetry — Appears in: Mattoid , no. 35 1989; (p. 41)

creativity introversion writing

Making space to speak

July 29, 2012

The balance between partnerships and creativity, between being together and being alone, between doing/being and reflecting on the doing and being, is often a fine line. Like many people, I have sought to manage and maintain the balance. It is often easier to create when you have space and solitude; but relationships, family, work and friends are all so important.

Tillie Olsen’s, ‘Silences‘ published in 1978, is about the conditions for creating art, and the circumstances that inhibit and foster the development of writing and other art forms. She examines what works for creativity; the circumstances that she analyses include gender, race and economic situation. A product of its time, ‘Silences’ identifies the high number of women, for example, who have not married or had children and created works of art. Certainly the personal and social situations we create, choose and find ourselves in are an influence in what we create and the conditions in which it is created.

I wrote about this some time ago in a poem that still holds true for me about the balance between relationships and creativity:

Half a Man

If I had even half a man now
could I write the night,
out into its waiting wings
to penetrate delight.

If I had a part of one
who tried to gather all,
I’d run because his promise
is not wiser than the call.

If I had a whole man
who could teach me to receive,
I’d write between the space he gave
and love with sudden ease.

Sometimes , the space itself, when we do find it, can be almost too much, overwhelming in its vacancy to fill. The feeling of all that open space in which to create, once we have organised it or when it is just there due to circumstance, can in itself be intimidating as May Sarton writes in ‘Journal of a Solitude‘:

The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it? (p12)

I love the approach of Australian writer, Kate Grenville, to capturing every inspiration and opportunity to create. As she documents in ‘Searching for the Secret River‘, Kate uses a series of mantras to keep herself writing: ‘never have a blank page,’ ‘don’t wait for the mood’, ‘fix it up later’ and ‘don’t wait for time to write’. She further writes:

I learned to work in whatever slivers of time the day might give me – one of my favourite scenes in ‘Joan Makes History‘ was written in the car waiting to pick up Tom from a birthday party, on the only paper I could find, the inside of a flattened Panadol packet. I had slivers of time, so I wrote in slivers of words: a page here, a paragraph there. Eventually the slivers would add to something. (p145)

So it seems there is no perfect formula for making space to speak. Whilst some conditions might make writing and other creativity more likely, if we are serious about it, we need to write and create in whatever situation we find ourselves. It’s possibly also that waiting for the perfect conditions is just another form of resistance to getting down to work.

That’s why this blog is so important to me; it’s a stay against silence, a way of creating space to speak, a way of practising making space, so that my writing here now (nearly) each week is an achievement, a making of space in an otherwise very busy life.

So with all this in mind, what habitat suits you to create? What conditions help you write or create art? What have you learnt from your experiences in creativity over time ?

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