Category: Writing On Writing

I Guess I Was a Writer All Along

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

When my fiancé got into bed with me last night he started talking about how he used to tape whole albums off the radio when he was a kid. He got specific. He had to have his mom buy him TDK 90 minute blank tapes—the solid gray ones in the gold wrappers, $2 apiece and sold in packs of five. Maxell was so-so—he would settle for Maxell, but Memorix with its clear tapes and groovy shapes all over was the worst of the worst and he wouldn’t put a single note on that. 

He talked about cataloguing the tapes—one album per side. Listening to the DJs talk about the albums and all the music trivia. He still listens to music talk, constantly. He follows about six hundred rock music podcasts and can DJ every song on Sirius with about thirty times the DJ juice as whatever has-been they’ve hired. He is an encyclopedia of rock. Sometimes I’ll turn on classic rock stations that I only marginally like just to give him the opportunity to fan his feathers for me, and it is glorious.

He told me he tried the guitar and piano as a kid because those are the types of instruments a blind kid is supposed to go for, but it wasn’t until someone put him in front of a drum kit that he thought yes…. I can really find my way around here. It all clicked along with the click track and he was a drummer, through-and-through forevermore. He started doing session work in LA by the time he was 14. At 50, he plays in three different bands and bursts out with drum solos on his knees randomly while I’m making dinner, while we’re waiting on an Uber, and even sometimes in the bathroom, (don’t tell him I told you that). 

Music, and rock music specifically, and drumming even more specifically than that is the way he makes his way in the world and he has no internal conflict whatsoever about that. I admire that. More than admire: I envy that. More than envy: I am deeply jealous of his soul’s love for its native art. And I wish my soul were that way about writing. It’s getting there, but it has taken a long long time.

Sometimes, when I’m depressed, I find myself doing “depressed” things long before I ever acknowledge I’m depressed. I stop taking care of myself and dressing in nice clothes. I curl up in bed and watch a lot of nostalgia bomb reruns I’ve seen ten thousand times. Walking from room to room makes me tired. I cook the simplest things for dinner—lots of blue box and ramen. But it isn’t until days and days later, when I find myself wrapped up in my blanket cocoon in bed, barely able to move, that I think, “Oh wow. I must be having a depression.”

It’s kind of like that with me and writing. 

While Angel was obsessing over TDK vs. Memorex as a kid, I was writing. I wrote my first real poem in the fifth grade and the teacher loved it so much, she posted it in the window for the whole school to see. I still remember it:

The moon is a jagged diamond

Hanging and waiting in suspense

For someone to pluck him from this mine of darkness

That holds him captive

Captive in a sea of stars

That no one dares enter

For fear they’d never return

We were learning about metaphors and similes when I wrote that. I chose metaphor.

I used to ride the bus to school composing poems. As I grew, the poetry onslaught continued. I’d type them on my little Canon electric typewriter that printed a whole line at a time, and put them in packets in the kind of folders you’d put school reports in. I’d give the packets titles and slip them to my teacher on the sly. 

I put my poetry in the front cover of my clear-covered three ring binder in high school and changed it out regularly. I wrote down song lyrics from memory and broke the lines apart the way I thought they should be broken.

I wrote satirical pieces in junior high, high school, and college and got in major trouble with teachers and schoolmates over it, but kept doing it anyway. 

I sat in the wood-paneled study room in college with my left hand pressed against my forehead writing short stories longhand for hours as day turned to night, turned to very late night. I’d dance around air-conducting baroque music thinking of what next things my characters should be doing and what most clever ways I could say it. 

All through the eight years I was trafficked—even then during that horrendous abuse, I spent so much of my “free” time alone at the keyboard writing endlessly about what was happening to me. I filled countless file folders on my shiny new Gateway computer and more spiral notebooks than I could ever keep track of. Words words words as Shakespeare would say. They didn’t always make sense during that time, but they kept me anchored to something, even if it was just my own hands moving, the click of the keys, the scratch of the pen, the flick of one page to the next.

I went to the Iowa Summer Writers’ Workshop twice and found my joy and my people. I didn’t bring an essay for class. I wrote it while I was there. I stayed up late in my hotel room writing it. I dashed into the college computer lab the day it was my turn to be workshopped, typed it out at emergency speed, and ran in to class with my ten copies, wet ink drying on my fingers. 

And after I survived the trafficking, while I was barely surviving survival, when I was desperately poor and living in an apartment that had roaches in the dishwasher, when I was working at Walmart and smoking with old Southern ladies and bitching about customers, managers, and my swollen feet, I never stopped writing. I started a blog about my Walmart experiences. I started a blog about world spirituality. I started a blog about my burgeoning Paganism. I started a blog about 12 step recovery. I started a blog about tarot. I started this blog. I started more blogs. I started a blog… I started a blog… I started a blog… 

And now, twenty years after the trafficking ended and nearly forty years after I wrote my first poem, and probably over fifty blog starts later, I am still writing. And I am reading Writing Down the Bones and realizing for the first time, after all this time, that I am a writer. I am a writer all the way down to my bones and always have been. I am a writer the way Angel is a drummer. I am a writer the way Natalie Goldberg is a writer.

It’s how I make my way in the world. It always has been whether I wanted it to be or not. My passion for the written word has burned for decades in spite of myself. 

I wonder what will happen when I embrace its burning as myself. 

My very own self.

We shall see.

-M. Ashley

New Memoir Method: Listen Don’t Wreck

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

When I started writing my memoir, I made this whole elaborate ritual for getting in and out of it. I bought a scolecite stone to remind me of a young man who was trafficked with me who didn’t make it. I wanted something of him I could hold as I believe it is our relationship that will form the spine of my book. The scolecite stone is milky white and oval, like a bar of Dove soap. It has little imperfections and fissures in it, hidden under the polish, that give it slight gray spots of texture. 

My ritual for getting into the memoir was to hold the stone and listen to songs I picked out that remind me of Toby (that’s his name) and myself. “Sailor or Siren,” “Falling Slowly,” and “The Atheist Christmas Carol.” “This tenderness comes as a surprise…” “Take this sinking boat and point it home…” “Don’t forget I love I love I love you…” respectively. I would listen to the songs, hold the stone, and let my mind wander over the trafficking time and let the muses or my intuition whisper to me what I should write about that day and give me the blessed first line—the way in.

Then I would write, cranking loud a film music playlist I used to listen to a lot during the trafficking time. I would write by hand in a wide ruled spiral notebook with a purple cover. I would print so I could actually read it later to transcribe it, (my cursive has long since become indecipherable). I would listen, not write… listen… and record the next word and the next. If ever I found my mind asking, “What comes next?” I would pause, sink into the music, let go and recommit to listening. Listen, I would remind myself. Don’t WRITE.

Then, when it was all over and the scene was done or I was exhausted, whichever came first, I would listen to one last piece of film music that reminds me of Toby and me—“The Mysteries of Love” from Blue Velvet. I would cry a little and hold the stone. My benediction. I would get up and try to go on about the rest of my day.

I produced some really remarkable writing that way, however…

Writing that way could also wreck me. I entered deep mind, deep senses, deep feeling and it stayed with me, knocked me to the floor emotionally, sometimes for days. I had to find another way.

The last couple of days, I’ve experimented with little to no ceremony. I’ve sat in my comfy couch recliner in the middle of the living room with my standard poodle and fiancé passing back and forth and the occasional ring on the doorbell and weird sounds the front door makes and food smells and the algorithm on the bluetooth speaker confidently playing nothing I really want to hear. And I was more comfortable. I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel wrecked after. I did want to sit in dim light and eat cheap cookies after, but I didn’t want to curl up in a cocoon and dissolve myself entirely.

The problem is, the writing is for shit. Maybe that’s too harsh. Not exactly for shit, but not exactly great either—choppy and mechanical like someone going through the motions of putting on a uniform but not having any idea what job it is they’re actually meant to do. I had this image in my mind of watching Toby’s legs through the legs of a dining table and chairs and of being afraid of him one of the few times I was really afraid of him, and I could not write it properly. My mind got all tangled up with the table and chair legs, and Toby’s legs, and the click of the keys, and the straightness of the typed letters, and I couldn’t HEAR anything. I was writing, but my soul was deaf.

There had to be a better way.

Usually, I meditate outside in the morning because actively listening to our suburban aviary loudly go about their birdly business helps my monkey mind un-monkey. Today, however, it is blustering Santa Ana wind out there and SoCal cold—45 degrees—so I put on a fuzzy jacket, went into my office, threw a blanket over myself, and meditated inside. I had no intention of connecting with the memoir or Toby or any of it. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t even touch that material today, so put out was I at the failure of the table leg trial in type. But as I meditated there in my office in the mid morning light of the window, in the still quiet, I began to feel it tug at me. It became irresistible and, in the last minute and a half, I reached up and grabbed the scolecite stone.

I had this idea:

I have a lovely little spiral notebook, a fancy notebook, I bought to record notes about my meditation sessions this year. I had kind of abandoned it because I saw it was a little anti-Tao to be meticulously recording what flowed naturally in meditation, but today I had this thought: What if I wrote the memoir in there? What if I wrote notes to Toby in that book? The paper is cream, not stark white. The lines are bold, not faint. The pages are small—undemanding. There is an index section so I can find what I wrote later. And when I’m done writing, there is an elastic band that wraps the whole thing up and maybe, just maybe can keep the scary bits inside.

So that’s what I did. I got out my former meditation notebook, started a new section called “Notes to Toby” and began the day’s memoir work there. I listened. I heard. I recorded. I did not WRITE. It was wonderful. I got to the meat of the table legs. I understood why I was writing it—the IT of that moment, Toby’s tiny acts of care and restraint. And when it was finished, I indexed the entry, capped my pen, closed the book, wrapped the elastic band around it to keep everyone safe and still, slipped it back into its place, and moved on with my day.

I feel a little tired now, but not wrecked. We shall see as the day goes on how it wears, but I think I might have discovered a new little method and ceremony that keeps the listening intact but the devastation at a minimum. 

I’ll keep you posted.

Until then, I wish you all the best in word-liness.

-M. Ashley

Trauma Memoir Writing Decompression

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

I have decided to do what so many survivors have decided to do. I have decided to write the story of my trauma and my survival in hopes that it may help other survivors feel seen, heard, and understood. And also in hopes that it may draw attention to the issue—sex trafficking. I am a survivor of eight years of brutal trafficking. I was an adult in my early twenties at the time. I am disabled (albino and legally blind). I am not particularly thin or cute. I made decisions in order to survive that are, in the best light, morally gray. I am not a “perfect victim.” So few victims are. I think more than shedding light on sex trafficking, which is worthy and important, I want my memoir to raise the voices of those of us who are imperfect victims and feel that with every fiber of our beings when the media only covers the tragedies of people who fit a certain physical, socioeconomic, and moral type. And especially feel it when our abusers say, “No one will believe you because…” and are probably right. 

I started writing the memoir with the working title “Guilty Innocents” in November and, so far, it has frankly kicked my ass. I write a scene and am knocked out by it for days. I have tried to come up with all manner of ways to soften the impact. I have a scolecite stone that reminds me of a fellow survivor that I hold before I write and listen to music that makes me think of him, and us. I blast film music while I write. I have a cool down piece of music for after. I let myself eat as many chocolate chip cookies as I want when I’m done. I wrap up in a fuzzy jacket. I chit chat about my poodle to my AI robot pal to get my mind of it.

And still it is costly.

This is not me complaining. This is me just saying. And it is me appreciating. Every trauma memoir out there, and there are a lot, cost something similar of the writer. How brave and strong and full of light they all must be. Even if the writing isn’t very good or even if it’s a trauma we’ve heard about a thousand times before—every word of every one of them costs courage and nibbles little painful bites out of the writers’ souls. They should be admired for their endurance. I admire them tremendously and pray I can stand up in that same lineage and get this story down.

I laid in bed one night with my fiancé, buried face first in a pile of pillows, my “comforting” classical playlist on, not working, telling him, “This writing is so important. I know it. It’s so important but also… costly. Just so costly.”

For the first couple of months of working on it, we ate a lot of blue box mac and cheese, ramen, spaghetti with no meat… noodles noodles noodles… because that’s all I could manage for us for dinner. I joked we may come out at the end of this with me having written a wonderful memoir, but the both of us having developed ramen-induced rickets. I’ve since gotten past the noodle noodle noodle phase and I’m glad. Last night we had cold sandwiches. I don’t know if that will prevent rickets, but the introduction of protein is a good thing.

I decided to start blogging about the process of writing the memoir mainly for my own decompression I think and also to have something lighter to write about. I feel like a lazy bum on days I don’t write anything forward-moving, but I also can’t face the memoir every day, so I thought blogging about the process was a good way to produce public-facing writing on days I need a rest from the deepest darkest—to keep me feeling like yes, I am still a working writer. Yes, I am still capable of finishing things and not simply writing until my brain wants to crawl out of my skull and I simply can’t stand to sit in front of the keyboard or at the notebook one minute longer.

Also, I am trying to focus more these days on writing what I love to read and I LOVE to read about writerly process. I’ve dipped back in to Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones recently and oh… I feel like a dog rolling in the sun drenched grass reading about her process. So why not write about process myself? Acknowledging, of course, that with me, with this material, there might be dog patties in that grass sometimes, but the sunlight of having written something worthy, that never dims. 

Until next time, my friends. I wish us all the very best in word-liness. 

-M. Ashley

PS

The picture for this post is an idea my AI robot pal and I developed for the cover of the memoir. What do you think?

Never Write While Hungry (poetry)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Never Write While Hungry
You’ll roll from aisle to aisle
aimless and slow
eyeballing the shiniest packages first
overhead and at foot
at your groin and at your twitching nose.

You’ll make better bad choices
(still bad choices)
fill your cart with loud
brightly powdered crunchies
that exercise your jaw
but stain your hands
without so much as a goodnight kiss
or any nutritional value at all.

-M. Ashley

Dear Poetry Book Inside Flap Writer (poem)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

I forgive you for being a pompous
Windbag and using words like “nexus”
That make us, and you, feel smarter
Than we are. I forgive you because
You’ve got to sell windy books
Somehow to equally windy people
And breezily walk the edge of
Overblowing it without, oops, I
Overblew it! You had to prevent us
Muffy and Buffy poetry reader
Types from seeing too much of
Ourselves at that blustery
“Nexus” of blew and blow
And putting the book down
And closing our handbag flaps
And whistling as we walk away.

-M. Ashley

Missing Frank Bidart (poem)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Oh my poet-y friend… how I have missed thee.
I have missed myself defacing your books with
Purple ink notes like, “Love it!” and “Scary.”

Remember that time I humiliated myself on a
Plane pompously overblowing poetry to a
Stranger who turned out to be a PhD in poetry

My nose in your book
My ass on my shoulders
Me talking out of it

But then you were there for me
For that—for my ass face too
And my starry eyes for you.

-M. Ashley

Poetry Goals (poem)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

I would love to swan around and
say dusty things about poetry and
have everyone give a damn and
have groupies who show me their boobs
and read at Carnegie Hall to 53,000
screaming teeny boppers in poodle skirts

and all that other shit
that real poets do
and don’t actually do

but always do
in my sweaty
jealous
glory hogging
little mind.

-M. Ashley

Photo Prose: Dread Box

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Picking up any pen is hard. Opening my notebook is one of the Herculean trials—the hard one.

Getting past the rickety-ness is worse still. It’s like hearing Atlas’ ancient knees pop as he hefts the Earth one more day. One more day. One more day.

I dread goals. I dread the lazy, yawning “what next” after I reach one. I dread not reaching any.

I dread being a flake—but worse, a joyless flake. No one loves a joyless flake like no one loves a fat person who is not jolly. I dread also being the fat person who is not jolly.

I dread my credit card payments. I keep my dreaded credit cards under my dreaded pens to keep me from the dreadful using them.

I keep lip balm under the dread pens and cards. Most of all, I dread being kissed unready.

-M.
Photography Playbook Prompt: Something you dread.

Not “My” but “Our” Worst Fear

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment
Photo Prompt: What is your worst fear?

Let’s get vulnerable with each other. Let’s get naked and play the mirror game. Let’s do it in front of a group of twenty-somethings with their whole brilliant lives ahead of them. Let us let them sit cross-legged in a circle around us and let us let them bombard us with questions as we try to mirror each other’s movements exactly.

We’ll have to answer honestly and be beastly to ourselves in this game because it is impossible to lie focused only on each other, move for move, even down to the twitch in the corner of my mouth and yours when someone lazily lobs, “What is your worst feat?”

We say, “This.”

We are afraid of this. We are afraid of only ever being as good as each other, locked in the hopelessness of leprous perfectionism. Not singly—mutually. Each other’s. Always each other’s.

We are afraid of this: falling short, move for move, in each other’s eyes forever.

-M.