The Blue Heron

Logic and trees

I have loved many things best about writing. At this point my favorite is logic. I can’t claim this is the exactly right word for what I mean, though I just looked it up and found a definition that gets at it.

”A formal definition is based upon a concise, logical pattern that includes as much information as it can within a minimum amount of space .”

It has to do with putting words in an order that demonstrates my observations of the order in which things happen in the world, and how that order both takes time and comments on time. Much of my work on any day is writing several things and then finding the most logical relationship between them. It sounds like this might be objective but in a story the logic reflects the sensibility and world view of the writer. Let’s say I am writing a scene about a person sitting at a cafe in Paris and suddenly being caught in the middle of a demonstration. (So many of my memories of Paris and Italy have to do with suddenly being inside of a demonstration.) I am not writing about the event as news, but as experience. What does the character/person notice first, next, and so on. That’s one line of logic. Another will be about how they make sense of what they notice. Observing and making sense can occur in two different time registers. It becomes a puzzle to write sentences and paragraphs and images that build an argument about what is happening, how it is being understood, and what it means.

I am at the end of my residency, taking a day now to think about what happened here. I know I wrote 75 new pages of a novel, started a story, completed my promotion package, did a number of interviews for Fellowship Point (out in paperback now), read galleys and wrote blurbs, and generally worked hard all day everyday. I got lessons in watercolor and acting out scenes as a form of prewriting; I walked a lot without pain; I made new friends. I mostly spent 22 and a half hours a day alone for 5 weeks, and that kind of solitude brings up F. Scott Fitzgerald’s marvelous statement, we are all queer fish. Nothing like being alone to show you the illogic of your own habits, mental and physical. I have had the hundreds of trees all around to keep me honest.

Such solitude prepared me for a full-hearted response to an experience I had the other day. I was in the woods alone. And at this spot

…a blue heron flew right in front of me at the height of my face. There was no doubt that the sighting was a message. I looked up the meaning, which had to do with a new path, enlightenment, a coming prosperity. What path? What prosperity?

Stay tuned!