What is a Writing Marathon? Pure Awesome-sauce!

Right now I'm fortunate enough to be at the Greater Madison Writing Project Summer Institute at Madison's lovely Olbrich Gardens, where I'm writing, reading, learning, and questioning for the month of July with a group of the most warmhearted and thoughtful educators.  On day one, we participated in a Writing Marathon, which I had only heard alluded to before in Natalie Goldberg's writerly memoir Wild Mind.  Basically, a Writing Marathon is where you travel around to different locations, which you respond to and attempt to capture in the moment.  For our marathon, we used a series of readings around the theme of appreciating sensory detail to also prompt us in responding to what we were seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling in the gardens, and to get out of our everyday & abstract-obsessed monkey minds. 

Writing Marathon Stop #1: Thai Pavilion, Olbrich Gardens, Madison, WI

            In response to Helen Keller’s “The Seeing See Little” and Maya Angelou’s “Punch”

            What are ways I see without my eyes?  What are ways I hear without my ears? There is nothing as delicious as the sound of the tall branches running her fingertips through the endless breeze.  There is nothing as satisfying as the warmth of a spot of sun or the cool of dense spread of shade. But how often I have cursed the birdsong for waking me during those first early weeks of spring or have felt defeated by my lack for the names for things!  I stand now and learn to notice, to wonder about just the essence of each thing. How the chirps and tweets embroider the sky like the edges of a clear blue linen. 

            How do I greet this world without giving up, overwhelmed by its beauty or too often, my  defeat? How do I let my wild mind wander and settle, like water in a fountain’s pool just kissing the brim? And how do I know when to dive, and let the splashing, the rocky pebbles, and the luscious heat drown me?

Writing Marathon Stop #2: Pine Pavilion, Olbrich Gardens, Madison, WI

            In response to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

            The path, as the three school marms had strolled from the Thai Palace to the brand spanking new pine pavilion, was probably one of the most carefully manicured paths the three of them would ever have the pleasure of walking upon in their three short, industrious lives. It curved lazily with the flirtations of the gardens whose vivacious attractions were framed so carefully by the trail’s discrete swells, the flowers  held just out of reach by constant reminders, “DO NOT SIT, DO NOT TOUCH,” that to Nancy’s mind, openly invited her to dip her toe and break the seductive surface of the ebony pond. The day was heady yet promising. Above the sky was a thin drooling of clouds left a sticky streak across an otherwise perfect sky, and as the breeze caressed the three schoolteachers’ beaming faces,  palms slapped at  knees, at elbows, and against the tender, soft underside of shins and thighs.

Writing Marathon Stop #3: Prairie, Olbrich Gardens, Madison, WI

In response to Emile Zola’s Nana

            She could not focus on the directions. Squatting above a sewer grate, she gazed at the large blooming orbs. They consisted of soft white petals and thin hairy sprouts; the plant was tender and more alien-like than anything she ever expected to find in the natural world. Then, suddenly, the sound of plastic tinkling against the metal of the sewer grate snagged her from her reverie. Her pen cap now lay barricaded from her, in a sopping puddle of mulch and yesterday’s drainage.

            “I am guilty!” she gasped.

            But no one had heard her, and no one had noticed.  The chirping in the trees chirped on, and the trucks at the construction site trucked by. Her two companions sat, only a few feet away, completely aloof to her catastrophe and vandalism.

            “But no one will ever have to know,” she whispered, as she looked up from her notebook with at least a little more manufactured grace.

Writing Marathon Stop #4: Front benches at entrance, Olbrich Gardens, Madison, WI

            Response to Willa Cather’s to excerpt from “My Antonia”:

“I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

I am just one girl on one bench of eleven (within eyesight),

Looking up at the vines that weave in & out

Of simple rusting slates.

I feel almost entirely asleep.

Perhaps this is what clarity feels like,

What health feels like.

“The tram is coming!”

“It smells like cucs…”

A girl passes with a shovel & broom.

My skin is warm, splotched itchy and red,

And I am drunk with comfort.