I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this memoir I’m working on. Thinking about a new structure for it, how the current one isn’t working, where it begins and where it should end, what flashbacks are needed and where they should go. I think about it before I go to sleep and at 3:00 am when I wake up again. I think about it as I walk Nelson every morning, or on weekends driving back and forth to Lake Arrowhead. Thinking about a book you’re working on however is not the same as writing it. It felt like the book, the story, the people in it, were beginning to float away, getting thinner and less defined. So early this morning I began writing. Just writing bad sentences, getting through the story. And it feels real again, like something is going to happen – maybe not with the plodding little sentences I’ve been tapping out on this computer all day, but the sentences are leading me somewhere. And this is the way, as I always tell my students, you find the structure for your memoir.

Here’s a present for you, a poem by Ellen Kort that comes via my friend Nicki and Gabri who read it in church last weekend.

Advice to Beginners

Begin. Keep on beginning. Nibble on everything.
Take a hike. Teach yourself to whistle. Lie.
The older you get the more they’ll want your stories.
Make them up. Talk to stones. Short-out electric
fences. Swim with the sea turtle into the moon. Learn
how to die. Eat moonshine pie. Drink wild geranium
tea. Run naked in the rain. Everything that happens
will happen and none of us will be safe from it.
Pull up anchors. Sit close to the god of night.
Lie still in a stream and breathe water. Climb to the
top of the highest tree until you come to the branch
where the blue heron sleeps. Eat poems for breakfast.
Wear them on your forehead. Lick the mountain’s
bare shoulder. Measure the color of days
around your mother’s death. Put your hands over
your face and listen to what they tell you.

– Ellen Kort, US poet
Wisconsin’s first Poet Laureate 2000-2004