SUMMER 2005: Called to Write?

I’m inspired. Today birds possessed the trees in my favorite woods and I rescued an ailing duck lying on its beak in the muddy edge of the pond. Summer is upon us and when the early morning fog trips in on its well-worn little cat feet, I like to rise early and stand very still on bare feet listening to the grass – and think about workshop.

I have been teaching workshops on writing the memoir the past couple of years, and I love entering into the lives of the students I work with and listening to what we know as the Call. It can be illuminating to hear opinions of writers on their identity as writers, especially in summer when we’re all sitting around in shorts and sunscreen slurping from bottled water containers wanting to be brilliant.

The poet Mark Jarman delivered an address at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico a few years back I thought you might like. Here's an excerpt from that address where he spoke to fellow writers and artists on the Voice of a Calling:

"I made up my first poem at the age of twelve. A dreary ballad that I wrote for my seventh grade English class. It thoroughly absorbed me for days as its composition unfolded. I remember even now the physical feeling of the rhythm as it took hold, and the welling up within my chest at what I thought was its sad beauty.

Called or not called, summoned or not summoned, bidden or not bidden, God is present and will be present. All of us [artists] here have heard, or in some way experienced, a call. It may have been a voice in the night or a dawning awareness, a lifelong natural inclination or an epiphany impelling us to change how we live altogether. How we respond to that call is manifested in our lives as artists. I like to think that what we do and what we make are ways of saying to God, "Here I am. I am present, too."

But we -- you and I are present.

If you’d like to read Mark Jarman’s entire address, visit www.imagejournal.org, Number 36, Fall 2002.