The Monthlies

A woman sits down to write …

… A woman sits down to write. She sits down at the grey trestle table in the familiar room surrounded by other writing women. She notes the beautiful seriousness on all their faces – varied in age and occupation, committed to writing. She has left behind the dust, the dirt, the sticky pots and pans, the soiled linen. She feels the warmth that starts in her belly and slowly spreads throughout her body, and knows that it is time. She writes as they write, the women around her. They have carved out this little chunk of time. They feel, for these cherished moments, their real selves. She knows that, if she is blessed, she will carry the feeling off, out and home, like a secret rhythm …

~ an excerpt from A woman sits down to write … the first book made up of a collection of contributions from various workshops. A woman sits down to write … was published in 2003 by Women’s Writing Workshops.

Who are the Monthlies?

During the first week of every month from March to November, four groups of women attend writing workshops facilitated by Cape Town-based writer Anne Schuster http://www.anneschuster.co.za/

The monthly groups are intended for those who have completed at least one of Anne’s previous workshops and who want the continuity of regular monthly writing practice, as well as the support and stimulation of a writing group. The course offers workshops based on different aspects of writing, and ways to develop the habit of writing.

The Monthlies Blog?

For 2006 and 2007, and after the success of these bogs, for  2008 and 2009 as well, Anne suggested that members of the monthly writing groups ‘develop the habit of writing’ by submitting their work to be posted on The Monthlies’ Blog.

Writers were asked to finish and polish writing from each workshop. They then sent it to a ‘writing buddy’ for feedback and suggestions. From there it went to editor and blog administrator, Maire Fisher, for further editing suggestions. The final piece/s were then posted on the bog, and are open to comment. (Comments are moderated by the blog administrator.)

In 2008 the blog became more of a place to post general news and updates as the stories generated in a new series of workshops (The Art and Craft of story) will be much longer and will take more than a few weeks to be completed).

Workshop assignments

(information updated on a ‘monthly’ basis)

2009

Writing Awry

This year the workshops will follow the eight trigrams of the I Ching.

We will write awry, we will come in at a slant! So fasten your seatbelts – there are exciting times ahead, and what’s more – exciting writing!

October 2009

2009 – A year well written! Read all about it by clicking here.

September 2009

a tale of falling flowers, fluttering … (Christina Coates)

I feel a fresh newness, a clean sweep to spring … (Anne Woodborne)

From spring to autumn – the wanton game (Rosemary Barker)

As well as brightness, the trigram ‘li’ also means to cling to something. And so  September (which, very aptly sees the arrival of Spring in the Cape) saw the monthlies writing with lightness, about spring. But, as with every trigram, lightness is tempered by its opposite or double meaning. and so we found ourselves thinking too about the end of autumn, particularly when we were asked to write an acrostic poem starting each line with a word of Basho’s ‘First day of spring’. This in turn lead to writing with and about nostalgia, and from this writing diastic poem evolved.

While a dose of nostalgia never goes astray, it’s good to lighten up again after looking back on the past, and what better way to do this than by creating characters in unusual situations beset by strong emotions. Priests on beaches, gypsies on railway stations – the strangest of people popped up in the oddest of places, filled with frustration, murderous intent, longing or abandon – to name but a few of the scenarios created for us to write stories around. There isn’t a huge body of work this month – the end of the year usually sees a dropping off of submissions for the blog – but what there is makes for a feast of splendid reading.

August 2009

‘Thunder,’ said Anne Schuster in the August workshop, ‘is the sound made by lightning.’ It’s also the sound made by the zigzag poems and the moments of lightning prose inspired by sounds of thunder and words cut asunder by bolts of lightning.  It all started with a long rumble of thunder and from thereon wonderful things continued to happen! Sudden, swift, surprising and sometimes delightfully absurd – the thunder and lightning writing  from the August workshop!

June 2009

‘The earth is still … constantly receptive to the influences of heaven.’ (The I Ching – The Richard Wilhelm translation) Poems that become new poems, sonnets both modern and traditional, stories about the world shifting told in snatched glimpses, nouns that mutated most marvellously into verbs – (see everything as a verb) – all of these exercises drew on and from the receptive earth and resulted in this month’s writing. Shapes were found in silence, order emerged in interesting ways from chaos and the echo of emptiness was filled with poems and stories.

May 2009

Mountain

‘I am you. You are me. We are mountain.’ A line from Megan Hjelm’s poem, ‘I am mountain’, goes a long way towards describing the prose and poetry created by the Monthlies in and after the May workshop.

Quiet,  immovability, stillness, trusting this ‘Unknowable force of Stillness‘ (Ekhart Tolle). These and more were what was asked of us as we wrote and started assembling lines and ideas from our freewrites, reaching, like Gertrude Fester,  for ‘the Stillness of granite, of water, of self’.

I know one associates gazelles with open plains rather than mountains, but the more I saw of the beautiful poetry that came out of the May writings, the more I  imagined mountain creatures called … ghazals. I saw them leaping from rock to rock, across gulleys and crevasses, and then, I saw words tripping them, stopping them, helping them to   listen as the mountain breathed and talked . They became, as we did, the mountain. And just as a mountain can look different, according to the weather, distance and, most importantly, the eye of the beholder, so many of the poems which started as ghazals took on a life and shape and form of their own. Until, in the words of Ilze Olckers, they became ‘all the poems written about all the mountains’.

And, as if all this were not enough between us all we have created a group  poem of epic proportions – Bring Mountain

A wonderful word one connects to mountains is aspects; another is faces. This too is what we explored – the idea of ourselves as mountains of many aspects, many faces, many selves and many possibilities. Mountains of  lives long-ago lived, lives waiting to arrive and lives that might have been. Like Christina Coates, we ‘paint(ed) pictures and dream(ed) of hanging upside down in clouds’; like Nina Geraghty we twist(ed) our thoughts ‘into a mountain, setting (them) free to flow’.

April 2009

Water

The trigram k’an means a plunging in, and that is what happened in the April workshop. we plunged into the abyss, after first standing at the edge, teetering on the ledge, wondering if it was safe to fall. If we did, what would be waiting to reach us at the bottom – presuming we ever reached the bottom that is. For some writers the feeling of being at an edge was a terrifying thought, for others there was a sense of gay abandon as they surrendered all inhibition and dived or flew or ambled straight down. Edges, ledges and the abyss – all of this led to some very powerful poems, mainly  written in couplets.

After a fortifying tea – much needed! – we returned to write a story. And here, once again, we plunged right into ‘the dizzy swirl of the fairground’ (Beth Hunt) – this time with a ready made character, a predetermined scene. So there was no excuse for wandering around in our writing, trying to establish characters and setting. It was all there, all we had to do was to grab those characters and try to make them behave. Some, of course, didn’t. They didn’t even make it as far as the fairground. Others found themselves in weird and wonderful situations. Others were just ordinary people in an interesting setting. But whatever and whoever they were, and wherever they went (or didn’t) they certainly lent themselves to great stories!

March 2009

Wind

‘Wind,’ I say, ‘what did you see today?’ (Cornelia Bullen-Smith).

What did the wind see? She saw a group of women standing outside. They watched intently as the wind played tricks – moving trees, lifting hems of dresses, tickling blades of grass. She wandered inside a room and saw the same women, heads bent, writing-writing-writing. She saw them underlining words and arranging phrases and understood when they said they were trying to compose Luc Bats. She stopped a while to listen as they read their poems aloud, and she rustled her approval. She laughed as they juggled words in alphabetical order and smiled when they gave each other words to write about. She riffled and whiffled slips of paper in bowls on the tables and then sat back to observe as the women wrote – first  in this way and then in another.

The wind saw a lot that day and she was delighted – because they all wrote with her at the back of their minds.

February 2009

Heaven/Sky

“Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you as you write?’ (Doris Lessing) We found those empty spaces in the first of this year’s workshops. We became expansive, we stretched, we discovered the tension that comes from being pulled between two places, we opened ourselves to the vastness of the possibilty of the things we could write. We moved unhindered from place to place, constrained only by the ping of the timer. And from this workshop came scrambled poems; poems that are open to a multitude of interpretations – as they are read crossways and downways and prose that allowed for a story continue within a work in progress or that became a highly satisfying short read. The exciting thing about of all of this is that there will be more to do next month, and the month after that – 8 workshops in all – !!!

2008

The Heart and Craft of Story

September 2008

As always, Portfolio Day was fabulous – it’s been such a productive year for a group of women who go from strength to strength to strength!  Very exciting was the news of the workshops that Anne has planned for next year – Writing Awry .  The name suggests that we are going to be stretching every writing muscle we possess, and the blog will be back in action for submissions. Look out  2009 here we come!

August 2008

It hardly seems possible that another writing year is drawing to a close, but next month we’ll all be meeting to celebrate the year’s achievements on portfolio day. It’s been a challenging year – coming to grips with the Art & Craft of story writing – but it’s also been rewarding: pushing our writing out of the comfort zone; tackling longer short stories, and even submitting them. The August workshop was no exception – we looked at what it is that restricts our writing and then looked again to see if those restrictions could be evaded. And what about rules? Are they there for a reason? Sometimes they are, sometimes they need to be broken so that our writing can transgress a few boundaries! (Sometimes the ‘rules’ are self-imposed.) But hang on a minute – what about time? what about structure? don’t we have to follow rules as far as these elements of story telling are concerned? Perhaps the only rule we need heed is the one that says ‘don’t confuse your reader’. As for the rest we can experiment, try different approaches, see if playing with time and structure works for a particular story. We were given wonderful examples to show us how exciting writing with this liberating brief can be. ‘Girl’ by Jamaica Kincaid follows none of the ‘rules’. It grasps you by the throat and doesn’t let go until it has shaken the last gasp from you. An excerpt from Agaat from Marlene van Niekerk showed us how time can be bent and brought back upon itself in telling the story of two women’s lives. Read more about Agaat here

July 2008

Say the word ‘dialogue’ and many writers will pale visibly, swallow hard and respond with a quavering ‘Ye-es?’ It’s one of those bug-bear areas of writing, and one about which there is no end of theories, useful thoughts and tips. What people say and how they say it is integral to the telling of a story. Who a character is is reflected in how she or he chooses to speak. So how do we ‘get it right’? This was the big question in the July workshop, where once again we visited the battleground where the forces of Logic and Rationality were ranged against those of Creativity and ‘Simply Allowing Things to Happen’. We wrote rapid two-way conversation, we invited our left and right brains to speak and be seen, we spoke directly to a friend in a letter, we created two diametrically opposed characters and forced them into the same room. And finally to make 100% sure that our writing remained venturesome and unfettered, we broke away from the safty of the mainland and wrote a story about heading for the islands.

June 2008

This month we looked at how to approach the idea of writing to a specific subject or theme. Anne used the Modjaji Books call for submissions for short stories connecting in some way to the idea of Bed as springboard for a very (!) intensive workshop. Now the fun part starts – taking the story opener we wrote in the workshop (or allowing another to surface) and getting a short story of 3000 – 5000 words written by the end of July!

May 2008

What is the difference between plot and story? Are the two interchangeable? Or is the story bigger than the plot? If it is (and it was from this basis that we started to work in the last workshop) how do we find our way through the story by plotting? Some people don’t use the word plot, preferring to talk rather of shaping, just as a sculptor uses a chisel to find the form in a piece of unshaped wood. Another way of looking at the action of plotting is to imagine a page filled with dots. How will they be joined? What picture will emerge as they are joined? Or if one stares hard enough at the big picture, will another swim up and into focus from within it? Once we had looked at this question, we moved on to looking at what ‘drives’ a story. Is a story action or character driven? What is the dramatic need of the character? Do events inside or outside the character determine the outcome of a story? Is there an epiphany, a moment of realisation , a time when things change? And if that wasn’t enough – there was more to think about – namely ther idea that there are two basic types of narratives – the one where the character is under siege or trapped, and the other where the character is on a quest, searching for something. Once again, two contributions from Monthly writers Jacqui L’Ange’ and Annaleen Erasmus give great examples of the work done in the workshop. During May, Patricia Schonstein spoke to the Monthlies at the first of the seminars that Anne has organised for this year. Erika Coetzee reports back on the seminar which was incredibly valuable for the monthly writers.

April 2008

A compelling single voice, an exaggerated personality, a larger than life character … these are all attributes of the fictional ‘I’ narrator, and it was these narrators who peopled the stories written by the monthlies in April. Was the first person narrator a reliable one? Did she tell the truth or was her version of the truth to be trusted? Did writing in the first person and with that person’s voice securely in our heads lead towards writing that was more humorous, or, for that matter, more poignant? How easy was it to maintain the voice of the ‘I’ narrator ? Was she fallible? Was her view of the world skewed? How informed was she of the situation? These were all great questions to ask!

The stories written by Gill and Karin which are up on the blog show what a wonderful point of view this is to use in short story.

March 2008

After having fun with our names and a lively discussion about Penelope’s story (sorry!) it was time to come to grips with POV, point of view. No matter how you say it, it isn’t easy. So much links to it – voice, character, approach, structure … and so the exercise Anne asked us to do to move from one point of view to another within the space of a story, wasn’t easy at all. But then again if we’d wanted easy …

More homework, this time to finish the story we started in the workshop, or to start a completely new one, inspired by another picture.

March is barrelling along – we can only wonder what Anne has up her sleeve for April!

February 2008

The taste of my writing this year will be …

the texture of my writing this year will be …

Great prompts to start a year of writing where we will need to stay fully connected to our senses as we explore the short story. And how better to start a journey like this than by asking ‘How do I begin a story?’. Three writing exercises followed this question, each of which took us to a place where stories began – and from there we wrote. Not finished pieces by any means – that’s what the homework is going to be this year – but the beginnings of wonderful stories. Doing this didn’t mean that we sat and picked the structure of a story to bits. No – we leapt in and started ‘fictional dreams’. And judging by the beginnings that were read out there are some excellent stories waiting to be finished!

2007

Writing the Self: Developing the Writing ‘I’

September/November 2007

Portfolio day was, as always, a fantastic way to celebrate the achievements of the wildly wonderful women who call themselves the Monthlies. All of the groups gave Anne a present for her 60th Birthday, definitely a year to celebrate in style! Never let it be said that the monthlies gather without writing though – and the result of the last meeting of the year is the renegade Septemba Renga that just won’t end!

August 2007

Pure awareness and our connection to the greater world beyond …

From cinquains to sapphics, from angels in flight to Joy Harjo’s ‘night wind woman’, from the shape of stillness to beyond: the seventh and final chakra sees this amazing 103 piece collection of prose and poetry – the last of the formal Monthlies Blogs – but by no means the last of the Monthlies’ writing! Watch this space for the Septemba rengas – and more!

July 2007 – seeing, both physically and intuitively – seeing the whole and not the parts – the energy of integration – the union of selves. All these and more are are attributes or characteristics of the Sixth, Brow or Third Eye chakra. After a freewrite on ‘seeing and not seeing’ we then worked in groups to create group poems of phrases or sentences from our freewrites. This then led to thinking about opposites, and to clustering on chosen group of opposites. Ah, great, we thought probably another poetry exercise … as indeed it was … But then! We were asked to take the poems we had created and convert them back to prose! (Quite a bit of sighing was to be heard during this time.) But the results – the incredibly poetic prose or prose poems, were well worth the effort! After tea, the fun began. We were given four lists, each numbered 1 to 10, and filled with fascinating and enticing words and phrases like seafarer, underwater, amulet, and the truth will surface. Using the last 4 digits of our telephone numbers we landed up with a key character, a setting, an important object and a key theme. And once we were equipped with our powerful words we were led – through a series of timed freewrites – to writing a modern myth.

June 2007 – The fifth, or throat, Chakra is related to communication and creativity. And what better way to communicate than by using our voices? But the problem then becomes – what is my ‘writing voice’? Do I even have one? To find our voices we need to find ‘the pitch of myself’ and this was the first writing prompt of the workshop. From there, another freewrite, and from those the process that led to the creation of the immensely powerful incantations that are posted on this month’s blog. Truly words woven on a ‘chanting loom’ – thank you Karin for a perfect title for this month’s work!

After tea (always a welcome and very necessary break after 1 1/2 hour’s hard work!) we then wrote a ‘melody for two voices’ in which a future self looked back on two episodes of her past life: a time when her voice was silenced, and a time when she found her voice and spoke out. This was not easy writing – for each self who spoke did so from her point of view and in her own voice. But the stories, written by a ‘multiplicity of selves’, are brilliant!

May 2007 - Writing with Empathy or in the words of the poet Diane G Fisher, with ‘the ability and the willingness to recognise each other’s humanity’. This was the theme of the May workshop, one that links closely to the attributes of the fourth, or heart, chakra. And so we explored the concept of kindness or compassion, using as a starting point the wonderful poem ‘Kindness’, by Naomi Shihab Nye. From freewrites on kindness we we then constructed tankas – a Japanese verse form in five lines, the first and third composed of five syllables and the rest of seven. Although the syllable count is not adhered to strictly in Western tankas, the idea of one short, one long, one short and two long lines is what is aimed for, often with the cenral line forming a pivot and allowing a subtle turn at the center of the poem.

The stories this month were written after we had listened to a writing partner tell us of a wounding experience. We listened carefully, with compassion, and then wrote these stories. BUT – there was a lovely twist at the end, where we imagined and wrote a redemptive ending wherein wounds were healed and nasty people put well and truly in thier places! Very satisfying!

April 2007 - What happens when a character is allowed to take over a story? This is what the April workshop was about – giving characters independence, and not forcing them to follow the plot we may in mind for them. We wrote furiously, and just as we thought we knew what might happen to one character, another entered and took the scene away – and out of our control. The third chakra asks for a redifinition of power, that we see power, not as a contol over another, but as integration: power from within. By surrendering the power to our characters, letting them do as they wanted, we also surrendered to the story as a whole, having to trust that it would reach its own outcome. And from those stories, ballads were composed – some standing alone, some accompanying the story which inspired them. The result is the wonderful stories and ballads on this month’s blog!

March 2007 – This month 55 glosas and short stories were submitted to the blog – each more lovely than the last. Exploring the second chakra – the cente of sexuality, emotion, sensation, pleasure and nurturance in relation to who we are as writers was difficult. To do so meant doing what Seamus Heaney, whose words are quoted on the blog this month, talks of: writing towards a ‘revelation of the self to the self’. The element of the second chakra is water, and so from freewrites based on water we devised a four line poem which then became the lines used in a glosa written by another poet. A glosa is indeed ‘like a curious marriage – two sensibilities intermingling’ and writing towards a given line meant reaching – both deep into ourselves and out to the meaning of the lines of the glosa. The results speak for themselves!

If facing Eros ‘head-on’ made Barbara Kingslover ‘pretty nervous at first’, imagine how quite a few of the monthlies felt at the prospect! But following Audre Lord’s advice and feeling ‘acutely and fully … in the doing’ unleashed ‘great oceans of energy’ whether the writing that came from this exercise described the act of love, tending roses, waking a sleeping daughter or buying a dress. Feeling, seeing and touching – immersing ourselves in the moment – led to amazingly living, naked writing.

February 2007 - the assignments this month were challenging to say the least. Aimed at developing a ‘writing voice’, at encouraging the deep connection in writing between our inner lives and the words we place on the page, our writing took us ‘to the bottom of the now’ in freewrites based on phrases from Helene Cixous’s ‘The School of Roots’. We then opened ‘the back door of thought’ and walked though four doors: real, remembered and imaginary. From this work come the palindromes, poems and prose for February – over 50 of them! Writing a prose or poem palindrome is not easy! But the result of simply reversing writing, line by line or sentence by sentence, is magical. Trusting in intuition, Palindrome Power ( and losing the fear of things not ‘working out’), the Monthlies have written wondrous poems and prose.

2006

March 2006 – The theme of the workshop was ‘Touching the Earth’ and writers were asked to submit a story and/or a pantoum. The response was phenomenal: 40+ writers submitted 40+ pantoums and 25+ short stories.

April 2006 -the theme of the workshop was ‘Desire’, and this time writers were asked to submit either a 100 word drabble (or as close as possible to 100 words) or a story of desire. April was a difficult month – fractured by public holidays. Despite this, more than 30 people sent in work – some of whom had not submitted before, and so the list of ‘Monthlies … writers and poets’ grows!

May 2006 – The theme of the workshop was ‘My selves’. Writers were asked to write a story or a triolet. The workshop generated wonderful poems, stories and personal accounts.

So far the blog has been a great success with over 1000 visitors!

The feedback has been hugely positive and as well as sending emails to say how much they are enjoying the blog, people are starting to leave comments on the wonderful stories and poetry from the Monthlies.

June 2006 – This month we were asked to submit two pieces: stories that wrote into the spaces around dialogue, and poems created from a list of words. The list grew as we chose words from workshop writing, and we then had to use 16 favourite/beloved/precious/heart words in a poem.

July 2006 – Becasue there was no workshop in July, the Monthlies were asked to send in writing from previous workshops – perhaps a piece they would have submitted if they’d had time to finish it, or otherwise something they particularly liked, but hadn’t sent because they had been asked to submit a poem or story, not both. The result is Orts & Fragments – a gathering place for beautiful poems and stories.

August 2006 - Communication & creativity, vibration, sound, rhythm & language. Speaking one’s truth & writing one’s real voice. These were the challenges for the August workshop. oggendtee/morning tea, a poem by Anjie Krog, provided the inspiration for the poems on the blog this month: a form chosen to encourage ambiguity, playing around, working with lines within lines, stretching lines, logic and meaning. The stories were based on a newspaper article, and told from the point of view and the imagined voices of the people who featured in the story.

September 2006 – Self-reflection, seeing both physically and intuitively, integration, seeing the whole, the union of selves. This month’s workshops explored the intertwining of darkness and light and our ability to see the world, physically, and through the dreams that manifest inner visions. And most beautiful writing came from this. Amazing villanelles (not easy as most people discovered – not easy at all!), dream sequences where we wrote our way in other worlds, and the sheer exburance of the poems inspired by reading Grace Nichols’s Break/dance as a round – loudly, actively, and extremely loudly!

By May of this year 1000 people had visited the site – we are now nearing the 4000 mark!

October 2006

‘writing the chakras,
I come to the seventh, violet,’

says Romaine Hill in her poem ‘Violet’.

And so, with seventh chakra, a series of workshops ends. In the space of seven months we have written our way through seven levels of awareness. Anne Schuster’s inspired interpretation and adaptation of these has produced the phenomenal writing on the blog for 2006.

In the October workshop violet, the seventh or crown chakra, took us beyond the confines of sequential time to ‘unchanging, eternal present’. The result is Violet poems and purple prose, where writers were asked to submit either a poem, or a prose poem version of it. And then came the epiphanies – writing into and holding onto those times of heightened awareness and realisation, to where ‘This moment is still’.

November 2006 – Portfolio Day

The end of another year’s worth of writing, and The Monthlies gathered to celebrate and to show their work. It’s only when you look back over the year and decide what to bring to Portfolio Day as a sample of your writing, that you realise how much you have produced!

Of course, no gathering of The Monthlies would be complete with without some writing, and the result of November’s session was the wonderful pantoums, explained on the main page.

Still to come before we say goodbye to 2006 and write our way through 2007, is Clare Gibbon’s selection of the best of the blog.

But as far as writing goes, that’s it for this year …

Exciting News

The exciting news page provides a place for the Monthlies groups to share their excitement about writing successes and projects.

Suggestions and comments

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