E.I.: How much of this work (the draft) is the unedited writing process and how much of it have you edited to express the process?


Gary: This question is difficult to address in the sense that, at least for me, there are no clear delineations between 'unedited' and 'edited' once I am in the middle of a piece of writing. I have learned to be (relatively) comfortable with my own (writing) process. That is, once I’ve chosen to begin writing something, I open the channels and allow the words to arrive as they will without me worrying too much about how much sense they might make. At the same time, I might discover in-process that a series of three sentences I've just written are actually 'meant' to be in reverse order, so I'm editing all the time. Similarly, I might splash out a single sentence and then soak in it for a while or return to it often as I continue writing . I will continue to be struck by it, perhaps differently each time and that will prompt me to fire off in other directions so that the writing spreads out in ways that may not make initial sense in terms of coherence. As I return to read your question, I realize I would likely change the wording of the last part of the sentence to read: "how much of it have I edited to CONSTRUCT the process. So maybe what we've come to think of as unedited writing is the finding of expression, or an act of expression, while any ongoing 'editing' and altering and rearranging of the text becomes more of an act of construction.

E.I.: Where exactly would you say inquiry ends and a poem or a prose piece begins?

Hmmm ... right after the question mark? (Or perhaps before the question mark.) This is another question that begs a certain kind of resistance to the kinds of delineations that might be made between inquiry and poetry and prose or fiction or whatever. For me, the best kind of writing, or at least the writing that really interests me, is writing that confounds and plays with these conventions so that the terms themselves are made irrelevant (irreverent?)

E.I.: You’ve written "Draft" on this piece. Can you explain the nature of a "draft"?

'Draft’ is another convention that I sometimes unwittingly subscribe to. It means it's not finished. Or it means I feel vulnerable having someone else read the piece thinking it might be "done." Stamping 'draft' is a convenient way of saying my writing and my ideas are really a lot better than this 'draft' would make them appear. A 'draft' leaves a piece of writing open to further writing. Yeah, it's not finished.

E.I.: This particular approach to (researching writing/writing) is similar to the one Natalie Goldberg advocates in Wild Mind (for example, put duct tape on the delete). How much of an influence have Natalie Goldberg’s ideas had upon your (writing/researching writing) process? Do you believe that this approach is the most accessible to student writers? Who else has influenced your approach to writing? How do you find these approaches useful?

Oh yes, I’ve been a Goldbergian-type for a good long while. I signed up for a Wild Mind workshop on Cortez Island during my first semester as a doctoral student. Just before the workshop was to take place, I got a letter saying that Natalie could not attend (she had been bitten by a dog in France!) Hollyhock (the host for the workshop) told me I could either cancel and get my money back or come and take the workshop from two writers who had worked with Natalie. I went. The workshop was fabulous. A bunch of people cancelled when Natalie cancelled and so there were fewer people and the two women writers/teachers were great.
As for the Wild Mind approach, it truly changed my writing practice (and continues to influence my writing when I remember to embrace her approach to writing practice). I’ve offered my own version of Wild Mind writing workshops for over a decade now and know that they hold great appeal to aspiring and experienced writers. I’m careful to tell people that it's only ONE possibility for writing process. In my experience, as a writer and a teacher, Wild Mind offers ways to help people overcome one of the primary stumbling blocks to writing, that of getting words on to the blank page. Most important, Wild Mind promotes writing as an always-in-process/always-in-progress process.

Many, many other writers have influenced, and continue to influence me every time I set pen to paper. It would be risky to even begin naming them because there are so many. I’m inspired by different kinds of writers/writing who remind me that writing knows no bounds. I read poets and essayists, fiction writers, scholars, playwrights, journalists, etc. and, of course, singer/songwriters (Bruce Cockburn, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Ron Sexsmith, Patti Larkin, Stephen Fearing are a few of my favs).

E.I.: In the conventional creative writing high school classroom, learners are taught that it’s important to outline whenever they write—that it’s important to know where they’re going before they begin. Can you speak to this?

Well, I guess I’d say there aren't really any conventional creative writing high school classrooms. In fact, any high school classroom that has a creative writing program is doing fine by me. I think that many of the creative writing programs that exist in high school are likely doing a good job of giving writers permission to ignore the 'outline' and pre-planning kind of writing. I could be way off on this one . . . . It seems more likely, or at least it seems more convenient, to stereotype the English class where outlines and other writing schema can take precedence over learning to follow one's own writing to find out where it might lead. But again, this is too easy a generalization to make. You’ve read my piece, so you'll likely know that I’m a great fan of not knowing where I’m going or what I’m necessarily doing when I write.

E.I.: After researching writing or after the inquiry, there is then the task of discerning and determining what to leave in and what to take out. How do you decide what to use of what’s been unearthed?

It depends. Sometimes, I’ll do the kind of writing I do and then let someone else take the writing and let me know what they like or don't like or what suits their purposes. It depends a lot on timelines, too. How long I’ve worked on it, how long I’ve got to get something in for a deadline. Alas, I use deadlines as ways to force writing out of me.

E.I.: Was there something that was occurring in your life at the time you wrote this piece that influenced your inquiry?

Yes, I suppose. I live a busy, hectic, schizophrenic kind of existence. I have bunches of projects, the main one being my two children, right now. My son is 4 1/2 and my daughter is 2. I’m usually with them, though I have two windows of time during the week solo (Tuesdays and Thursdays during the day). With this writing project for EI, I dropped the kids off and headed for this particular cafe and tried to quickly drop into the writing pocket. So, that's the sense of present tense in my life, so to speak, that informed the piece. My attempts to draw from my doctoral past in Vancouver, based on speaking with Lynn Fels who let me know about the kind of audience I’d be writing for also led me on a nicely haunted return to a wonderfully charged time of my life . . . lots of good ghosts to inform the work. It was also Spring, so of course, there's the light, the sense of everything being possible once again, clothes being removed in layers.

E.I.: Were you looking for something specific when you began working on this piece?

No, not really. I’d had several conversations with Lynn Fels (by phone and by email and, unfortunately, NOT face-to-face over espresso at Vancouver’s best . . . .)

I set out, as I most often do, to follow the muse that often appears if you offer the right series of incantations, keep your software compatible with your hardware, invoke the necessary rituals (walk three times round the espresso maker, etc.) A voice or voice(s) usually find their way to the surface and I follow for a while, exploring what arrives. There’s something like a pocket or a sweet spot or a hunger that keeps me swimming in a slipstream of sorts (hmmm, let's see if I can mix any more metaphors . . . .) No, I wasn't looking for something specific. I often start where I am (a Goldberg kind of strategy: I’m sitting at a smallish table near the window with people settling in around me, a woman near the counter is wearing an outrageous scarf, etc., and while I do this I try to hold some inner thought(s) or feeling about what I’ve gleaned from whatever conception/idea/notion/fancy I carry in with me regarding the specific project). In this case, it was the conversation with Lynn.


E.I. Could you comment on the ideas of "writing towards a goal" as opposed to "writing as a process"?

Again, these need not be diametrically opposed. It’s too easy to do that. You can use your own (writing) process to move towards a goal. There are many, many ways to do so. The unhelpful dichotomy, I suppose, is to characterize writing toward a goal as too mechanistic, etc., and writing as process as too messy and circuitous.
I think each of these can serve the other, and there is likely an entire dissertation waiting for the person who might choose to explore the movement back and forth between process as a kind of 'current reality' and the discrepancy between it and a vision being sought.

E.I.: Can you comment on the idea of writing as an act of trust?

Absolutely, it's a nice little turn of phrase, I think. Trust. An act of trust. We can read/write this at a number of levels. I believe the first level of trust is a personal one, that is, trusting one's self, trusting one's inner self, trusting within. If you don't trust yourself, the words and the work won't flow. Of course, the writing moves from within to without, Self to others, etc. We must trust in ourselves, trust ourselves that what we have to say is at some level important/valid/valuable to and for others. The vulnerable act of writing opens out into the act of reading so that reading and writing become bound by a certain trust.