First Principles

Many thanks to everyone who responded to the post about The Help!  Julie, Emily, and Christin told me about three other links, and I'll get those up here posthaste.

In the meantime, I'm prepping for class tonight:  a graduate workshop in creative nonfiction--memoir, specifically.  Getting ready to meet new students for the first time always feels a little sacred, a little mysterious, like I want to burn incense and murmur some incantations and ask for good weather as we pursue our work.

Here are the touchstone passages I'm thinking about as I head into the classroom for our three-hour marathon this evening, the first such marathon of fifteen or so.

You know, it's easy to get caught up in the ambition of being a writer.  It's easy to get caught up in loving literature and wishing to be the person on the dust jacket.  This ambition, as innocent-seeming as it is, can very easily muscle out your deeper, more delicate, more difficult ambitions.

~Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream

First thoughts are also unencumbered by ego, by that mechanism in us that tries to be in control, tries to prove the world is permanent and solid, enduring and logical.  The world is not permanent, is ever-changing and full of human suffering.  So if you express something egoless, it is also full of energy because it is expressing the truth of the way things are.

~Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

Be generous and delicate and pursue the prize.

~Henry James, "The Art of Fiction"