In the beginning chapters
of World Enough and Time: On Creativity
and Slowing Down, Christian McEwen describes her childhood growing up on an old estate near Edinburgh, Scotland:
A place of beautiful shabby rooms and scented gardens… a kind of paradise, [where she] spent immense amounts of time alone: hunched in the dark angle of attic stairs,
or mooching dreamily from room to
room. There were days when it seemed a place in a fairy tale, each piece of furniture trembling with incipient life…Often I felt invisible, even to myself,
as if I had drifted out of contemporary
chronology altogether, and been reduced to some
ethereal essence: a ghost child, some kind of passing spirit.
She was describing a place I knew: Great Island, a glacial remnant of rock and
evergreens a mile around, smelling of pine needles, and sunshine, and the pure,
sweet, spring-fed waters of Lake Sunapee. It was a place of mystery, with
dappled light, and carpets of moss and odd creatures, like blood-red salamanders,
and speckled trout, and small brown bats that flew out of the shadows in the
evening, dancing over the water like large moths. For me it was a place
endlessly new and changeable, yet timeless, as slow and enduring as the rock
deposits left behind by the receding ice 11,000 year ago.
Not so much a place as a
state of being.
As writers we know this place.
We know it as well as our own backyards or our childhoods. We are always trying
to get to it, to cultivate it, to invite it in: this place, where we are
somehow intensely present, but at the same time removed, aswim in that dream-like
state where perception and imagination meet.
For Christian McEwen,
writer, poet, teacher, the road to this place is best traveled slowly, with a
kind of attention that borders on reverence. It is akin to the notion of mindfulness:
the idea that deep awareness of the world around us makes us more alive, more
thoughtful, more compassionate, and certainly more creative.
Creativity takes time, and
not just hours, but unhurried hours, the daydreaming kind where the mind is
free to wander. Modern life is against us here, McEwen writes:
Nowadays time... eyes us from the edge of
our computer screens, or the dashboard
of our car; ticks away the minutes on the
clock beside our bed. There are clocks set into our ovens, our cell phones, our Palm Pilots: a
pantheon of tiny fretful gods, each
one berating us under its breath for not meeting our commitments right this minute.
It is a pressure writers
feel particularly keenly, and the subject often comes up at retreats, or in
workshops, or at author talks: endless questions about PROCESS. Writers want to know how other
writers, especially successful, if not prolific, writers, do it: find the time,
energy, and focus to get words on the page. There is sense that if only we
could be more efficient, more disciplined, more dedicated, the words would flow
effortlessly, like an open tap.
For McEwen, though, creativity
comes not from regimenting time, or finding more time, or using time more
efficiently, it comes from stepping outside of time, from slowing down long enough
to let the senses take over, to make new connections and let ideas take root. She quotes Mary Oliver,
“What I write begins and ends with the act of noticing and cherishing, and it
neither begins nor ends with the human world… I am forever just going out for a
walk and tripping over the root, or the petal, of some trivia, then seeing it
as if in a second sight, as emblematic.”
Writers are first observers, and that means learning to pause, to see
with new eyes, and to connect through stories and conversations, and quiet,
even silent communion with ourselves, and each other, and the natural world.
Child Time, In Praise of Walking, The Art of Looking,
A Universe of Stories: the chapter
titles in World Enough and Time, read like poetry and the writing overall is
meditative, the language and style nicely evoking the message of the book. These
twelve linked essays can be read straight through, the themes, examples, and
characters interweaving and building in meaning and effect, or they can be read
randomly and in part: each chapter a collection of tightly knit observations
that McEwen likens to “ …daily reading, so-called lectio divina or divine reading, giving you a chance to muse and
ruminate, and acting as encouragement for your own creative work.”
“Tactics” at the end of each chapter quote a
wide range of artists and writers, and offer effective, evocative practices in the art of slowing down and cultivating
awareness.
World Enough and Time, is
not a craft book. It will not tell you how to write more fluidly, or correct
your punctuation, or tighten your plot line. What it will do is encourage you
to exhale: to relax into your creative work, cultivating your own island of
stillness and repose, where such work begins. And where, according to
McEwen,“…despite the daily
onslaught of racket and distraction, it still remains possible, even now, to
turn things around: to spin straw into gold, time into eternity, anxiety into
ease and inspiration.”
Please join SBWC and Christian McEwen
for a reading and discussion
Monday, December 7, 2015
6:30 - 8:00 pm
Thayer Memorial Library
Hollis Shore is the President, Program Director, and co-founder of the Seven
Bridge Writer's Collaborative, and graduate of the Vermont College MFA in
Writing For Children and Young Adults program. She was the 2012-13 Boston
Public Library Children's Writer in Residence, and a winner of the PEN New England
Discovery Award for her novel, The
Curve of The World, out for submission shortly. Contact her at Hollisplus@gmail.com.
