Didion: Grammar is a Piano I Play by Ear

Joan Didion in her essay "Why I Write" explains that all of her books began with a picture in her mind, and this picture guided all decisions that she made.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene.* It tells you. You don’t tell it. 

* “Note well.”

Joan Didion "Why I Write"
https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/schools/whitmanhs/academics/english/Why%20I%20Write%20Didion.pdf

Joan Didion "On Self Respect" (Vogue Magazine, 1961)
https://www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961

Joan Didion, novel excerpt, Play It As it Lays
https://people.unica.it/fiorenzoiuliano/files/2014/10/Play-it-as-it-Lays.pdf

A Subject Rather Than a Delusion

In Things I Don't Want to Know, Deborah Levy has created a lyric essay on George Orwell's "Why I Write," a memoir of growing up as a white girl in apartheid South Africa, and an essay about grief, the language of politics, and artistic work:

When a female writer walks a female character in to the centre of her literary enquiry (or a a forest) and this character starts to project shadow and light all over the place, she will have to find a language that is in part to do with learning how to become a subject rather than a delusion, and in part to do with unknotting the ways in which she has been put together by the societal system in the first place. She will have to be canny how she sets about doing this because she will have many delusions of her own. In fact it would be best if she was uncanny when she sets about doing this. It's exhausting to learn how to become a subject, it's hard enough learning how to become a writer. 

In our culture, women are often objectified. It's correct to identify this objectification as a delusion. In a book, an essay, a poem, the writer must break through this delusion. This involves seeing clearly the context and clearly seeing what is at stake for the character. Making a woman a subject requires the writer to allow the character personal agency, to act and to change. The book asks the question: what do we do with knowledge we can't bear to live with?  She concludes with a reference to "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf.  Levy says, "A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly." 

The form of Levy's essay borrows Orwell's thoughts on the motives for writing prose. Levy has used these as chapter headings.

1. sheer egoism: Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered...
2. aesthetic enthusiasm: "Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story"
3. historical impulse: "Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity"
4. political purpose. "Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kid of society that they should strive after." 

The book is slim, and I read and reread it because of its depth. It helped me, as a writer and in my writing. Levy's work has a fine rhythm and her language is pitch perfect. Why does one write? The answer to this question takes one deeply into one's past and political awareness. It's a question that yields good material.

My Geology

 from Night Train Red Dust, Wildwood River Press

Poem and voice - Sheila Packa
Digital film and sound - Kathy McTavish

Poetry at the Zoo

Leap into Action - Poetry at the Zoo

Saturday, February 29, 2020 1:30 - 4:00 pm

Duluth Zoo.

1:30pm  Lyz Jaakola : song, hand drum, and poems

2:00pm  Marie Zhuikov

2:30pm  Ann Glumac

3:00pm  Sheila Packa

World Wildlife Day

The proceeds go to Zoo Victoria’s Bushfire Emergency Wildlife Fund.

The Onsgard room is in the main building right down the stairs. 

It can also be reached by elevator.

Sheila Packa is a fiscal year 2020 recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Essay Daily: Talk About the Essay: Rebecca McClanahan's Selected List of Literary Gea...

Poetry, prose poems, flash fiction, essayettes, and creative nonfiction often borrow each others forms.

First, structures of poetry and prose that bind the lyric essay:

https://www.assayjournal.com/diana-wilson-laces-in-the-corset-structures-of-poetry-and-prose-that-bind-the-lyric-essay-12.html

Second, this list of possibilities to explore when writing an essay, a poem or a hybrid work:

Essay Daily: Talk About the Essay: Rebecca McClanahan's Selected List of Literary Gea...: In her talk on Imagination and the Essay at AWP 2017, Rebecca McClanahan mentioned that she has a list of 72 (as I wrote it down) moves in c...

Approaching the Border

https://vimeo.com/117233282

Poems by Sheila Packa (and voice)
Film, musical composition, and arrangement by Kathy McTavish
Honor song by Liz Jaakola and the Oshkii Giizhik Singers.

This is about trafficking and survival, migration, approaching the border, life, death and rebirth.

This video appeared in an installation "The Road to Williston"
Bakken Boom! Artists Respond to the North Dakota Oil Rush
@ Plains Art Museum January 29, 2015 - August 15, 2015 - Fargo Fred J. Donath Memorial and William and Anna Jane Schlossman Galleries, General Exhibition.

Minnesota's Renaissance Women

Duluth and Minnesota Women's History
 


Born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1899, Ethel Ray Nance spent her childhood in an overwhelmingly white community. The daughter of Inga Nordquist Ray, a Swedish immigrant, and William Henry Ray, an African American from North Carolina, Ethel Ray learned at an early age that the color of a person's skin was a determining factor in the treatment he/she received. Ethel Ray Nance had a vision of a world in which "we respond to people not color". She dedicated her life to this vision, spending over seventy years fighting against racism, discrimination and the ill treatment of human beings.

Correspondence:
WEB DuBois correspondence: http://oubliette.library.umass.edu/view/pageturn/mums312-b045-i348/#page/1/mode/1up
Ethel Ray Nance's Letters: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/give/bene56/duboisletters.html
Newspaper Articles:
A Patron of the Arts: Ethel Ray in Harlem: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/nyregion/literary-new-york-hurston-s-new-york-her-eyes-were-watching-harlem.html 
Remembering Countee Cullen: http://harlemrenaissancelibrarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-harlem-renaissance-friends-biography.html
Oral History
An excerpt from Ethel Ray Nance's oral history: (regarding the lynching in Duluth)
http://collections.mnhs.org/duluthlynchings/html/oraltext_nance.htm

Women in the Harlem Renaissance
http://aawomeninhr.blogspot.com/

Climate Emergency & Poetry

Greta Thunberg

"No Time to Lose: Climate Emergency Poetry"
Saturday, March 14th, 7 to 9pm
Wussow's Concert Cafe
324 N. Central Avenue, Duluth

Cancelled due to coronavirus pandemic.

Join several Duluth poets (myself included) to share poems of motivation, optimism, love of nature, sustainability, inclusivity, and poems about the stark reality of climate change.

Writing Workshop & Reading in Hibbing

Sponsored by the Boreal Writers' Guild
Writing Workshop and Reading by Sheila Packa

Contact Sheila to confirm. This event may be cancelled because of the pandemic. 

March 22, 2020 Sunday at 1:00 - 4:00 pm at the Boreal Writers' Guild, 214 East Howard Street, Hibbing, Minnesota: 

Workshop registration: $20

The Iron Range in northern Minnesota has a rich and interesting landscape, history, and people. Using guided writing exercises, participants will draw on their own experiences, memories, family history and landscape to make a story, memoir or poetry. We’ll look at some examples of good writing and play with some interesting and fun approaches. We will also have time to share the stories in our group. This workshop is for beginning and experienced writers.  To register, contact sheilapacka@gmail.com.

The Poetry Reading will be followed by an open reading. 

Sheila Packa is a fiscal year 2020 recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Upcoming Poetry Readings

Poetry Readings and a March Writing Workshop: 

February 5, 2020 Wednesday 7pm at Zenith Bookstore, Duluth
"An Evening of Poetry with the Finns" will be held Wednesday, Zenith Bookstore, 318 N. Central Ave, Duluth, Minnesota

The Finlandia Foundation Northland Chapter celebrates Runeberg's Day (Runeberginpäivä), a national holiday in Finland honoring Johan Ludvig Runeberg, the national poet of Finland by offering a night of poetry featuring Finnish, Finnish-American, and Northland poets.

Featured poets include: Gary Boelhower, Daniel and Sandra Oyinloye, James (Jim) Johnson (read by Marlene Wisuri) Sheila Packa, Steve Leppälä, and Johan Ludvig Runeberg (read by Hanna Erpestad). Special Finnish treats "Runeberg Torte" (Runebergintorttu) made by Beatrice Ojakangas will be served. It's free; donations welcome.

March 14th, Saturday, 7 to 9pm at Wussow's Concert Cafe, Duluth, Minnesota
"No Time to Lose: Climate Emergency Poetry"
324 N. Central Avenue, Duluth

Join several Duluth poets (myself included) to share poems of motivation, optimism, love of nature, sustainability, inclusivity, and poems about the stark reality of climate change.

March 22, 2020 Sunday at 1:00 - 4:00 pm at the Boreal Writers' Guild, 214 East Howard Street, Hibbing, Minnesota: 

Writing Workshop and Reading

Workshop registration: $20

The Iron Range in northern Minnesota has a rich and interesting landscape, history, and people. Using guided writing exercises, participants will draw on their own experiences, memories, family history and landscape to make a story, memoir or poetry. We’ll look at some examples of good writing and play with some interesting and fun approaches. We will also have time to share the stories in our group. This workshop is for beginning and experienced writers.
A Poetry Reading by Sheila Packa will be followed by an open reading. 

April 5, 2020 Sunday 10 am at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Virginia, Minnesota

"Poetry and Sacred Texts" presentation of poems and a few excerpts of sacred texts by Sheila Packa