WRITER'S LIGHT: HOW RADICAL WRITING WAS DELIVERED TO THE PAGE in MICHAEL GRAVES' HOUSE

In the summer of 1996 I sat down to assemble the material that would become Radical Writing, today an online course in the revelatory power of self-expression. A compilation of my life’s work of creativity, self-exploration, and metaphysics, the project required a level of concentration I knew I wouldn’t be able to achieve in my everyday surroundings, distracted by animals, friends, art work, and the minutiae of ordinary responsibility. I needed remove. I needed my own private Yaddo.

With one phone call – to Michael Graves, a longtime friend  – I secured the ideal retreat: his own house. Michael’s star at the time was still in the ascendant, his image, his work, his words ubiquitous in the worlds of international architecture and cultural power. He traveled among the pantheon of star architects in a moment of recent history philosophically obsessed with style. He had broken early from the Modernist pack and, radical for the times, became a lightening rod for his controversial  reintroduction of color (not beige?!), classical form, and narrative  into contemporary design. It was the hot topic of the 1980s and 90s, and Michael was peripatetically designing, drawing, lecturing, writing books, having exhibitions, teaching at Princeton, making appearances, and sustaining his practice. In 1982 he won a competition to design a municipal building in Portland, Oregon (Philip Johnson was a juror and supporter) which is widely considered to be the first built example of postmodern architecture. It is a broad-shouldered office block set atop a two-story base with pilasters, keystones and other elements of classical architecture blown up to almost cartoonish size and used to decorate the exterior of the upper floors. Ironnically, for an architect, he is perhaps best known popularly for the teapot he designed, first for Alessi and then for Target. A little bird sits at the tip of the spout and sings when the water boils (its progenitor, an Art Deco era teapot he found at a flea market, still sits on a kitchen counter).

While Michael traveled (constantly), he sometimes allowed friends to stay at his house. Among them was Fran Lebowitz, the writer/raconteur. Fran suffers from noise phobias and likes to get out of Manhattan when she has to concentrate. Unfortunately, she claims that even the leaves falling in Michael’s garden were too great a disturbance. My timing in asking if could come for a stay was lucky. Michael was leaving the country for several weeks, and his entire house, he told me, could be mine for the duration.

The house, known as The Warehouse, was constructed as a storage facility in 1926 by the Italian stonemasons who built Princeton University. Michael had moved into the "ruin of a building"  in the 1970s, needing a place to live after a divorce. An Italophile, he was struck with how the building resembled a Tuscan barn --  rugged, a tough building whose strength appealed even though it had no plumbing, no heating or cooling, bad wiring, and a seriously leaking roof. He renovated room by room, year after year, “living like a student", extemporaneously within the small rooms as it evolved. By the time of my encampment, the 7,000 SF of raw space had become a gracious villa with a wisteria-covered terrace, double-height library, and rooms furnished with blond Biedermeier tables, desks and chairs, silk embroidered rugs, polished wood floors, Art Deco kitchenware, and walls hung with paintings and drawings. Equally satisfying, the rooms were filled by day with sunlight and a soft, quiet darkness by night.

The term for the individual glass panes comprising French doors and windows is “divided lights.” The Warehouse is a gentle prism of skylights and divided lights. I located my sleeping sanctuary in a second-floor bedroom with north-, east, and west-facing French windows. Downstairs, I established my writing desk in the breakfast room, under a two-story-high skylight bathed for hours a day in a shadowless ambiance. This was fortunate: the work I was doing centered on revelatory self-expression, including the deep shadow of the psyche. The atmosphere literally kept me alight.

From the light of the rooms of The Warehouse and out onto the tree-filled surroundings, I felt bathed in dappled illumination. The lot on which Warehouse is located adjoins a park. A stroll though it brings you to the Graves office. The Joyce Kilmer National Forest is also nearby and, I came to see how, truly, that poet had it right. No poem is as lovely as Princeton’s trees – willows bending like ballerinas en reverence, statuesque elms, and centuries old poplars and oaks.

As my work progressed, I grew nomadic, moving with my laptop from one room, one corner, one chair, one window to another. Each location provided a different surge of energy or soothing of spirit. When the weight of thoughts and meanings grew too heavy, I sought the leafy canopy of the garden outside the kitchen. When I needed animation, I sat under the wisiteria-twined pergola to enjoy the parade of linear shadows cast by an allee of sycamores.

By the end of my stay, I’d accomplished all I’d intended. Radical Writing was born – the structure formulated, the tone established, my confidence intact. Now the heat of composition lay ahead. The subtropical Miami light that filled my own house was well suited for that. Still, it was hard to leave The Warehouse. For weeks I’d been pampered with a light so quiet, even Fran Lebowitz, I thought, could try it again. I had been drinking in the grace of quiet illumination, and I was grateful.

In 2003 Michael was overtaken by a meningitis-like infection that ate away at his spine and left him paralyzed from the chest down. Still, he managed to lecture, make appearances, and nominally participate in his practice. He became a leading voice calling for reform in healthcare design (arguing that hospitals and medical products were not just thoughtlessly made but often soul-sapping for patients). He was a superb visual artist and had sketched continuously throughout his life (as a boy, his mother would have him “come out and draw” for company as a kind of “performance”). Throughout his illness, he continued to spend much of his time painting (gouache landscapes and portraits of his young son) and drawing. "Whether I was paralyzed or not, I would draw, because drawing for me is like playing the piano," he told CNN. "You've got to keep practicing, got to keep doing it. It's not that you lose it, but you don't draw as well if you don't draw every day." Like writing. Like Radical Writing.

Michael Graves passed away in 2014 at the age of 80. He died “suddenly and peacefully” at home. I take comfort knowing that he spent his last days in The Warehouse. Where else could he have been so surrounded by familiar beauty and the blessings of writer’s light.

http://michaelgraves.com/portfolio/the-warehouse-graves-residence/ 

http://www.aptonline.org/catalog.nsf/vLinkTitle/MICHAEL+GRAVES+THE+WAREHOUSE

How Creative Writing Propels Personal Growth!

Baseball great David Ortiz was the once-ferocious hitter who could not hit anymore. His futility grew week after week and left the Boston Red Sox wondering if he would ever be formidable again. When Ortiz was beyond weary about being unproductive, he decided it could not hurt him to try to an altogether different approach to resolving his problem. He decided to play the carefree 12-year-old he once was. He simply woke up one morning and told himself “to act like a kid and just go and play baseball, that’s it.” Ortiz stopped taking extra batting practice, stopped obsessing over videotapes and stopped listening to every tidbit of advice. Not long afterward, he became a solid hitter again.  He is still playing today, years later, near retirement, but still playing....like a kid.

The point of this story is to demonstrate the power of the left brain, the side of our neural anatomy that works analytically, logically, processes everything as if it were measurable data. Today research has shown that when trying to solve a problem—any type of problem -- it can be greatly beneficial to go offline, mentally. That is, rather than fixating on analysis, a more productive approach is to engage the right brain and allow your thoughts to wander. The result: fear diminishes, new ideas flow, and your personal growth surges.

The left brain is the seat of scientific, logical, or linear thinking which is based on the objective weighing of fact and detail. The left brain calls on a mode of seeing devoid of imagination, and therefore incapable of refreshing the conscious mind and anxious body. Right brain thinking, on the other hand, is nonliteral, nonlogical, instinctual. It draws on the imagination and is therefore imbued with imagery color, texture, and detail. Determinations, such as Ortiz’s to return to an “instinctive” way of playing, are invigorating. They interrupt futile repetition and propel personal growth by introducing new energy and ideas into stagnant situations.

Creative writing workshops, such as RADICAL WRITING, allow the hand, work with the right brain to allow your fingers rather than your head to do your thinking. The result is an immediate intimacy with your thoughts in a safe, supportive creative environment. By writing out feelings in the free and exaggerated way RADICAL WRITING teaches your become fluently self-expressive. The writing stimulates awareness and thereby perpetuates personal growth. This act of writing purely for self-expression alchemizes your mental activity and provides fuel for liberation, creativity, transformation, and healing.

Right-brain writing, which is to say creative writing, provides direct access to the imagination. As it expands your awareness, your instincts grow keener. You relax in making choices and decisions. You breathe easier. RADICAL WRITING makes creative writing as fluid as a reflex. RADICAL WRITING makes personal growth effortless. RADICAL WRITING holds up to you a forgiving mirror in which, like David Ortiz, you can go out again and play.

 For more information on creative writing go to:

http://www.radicalwriting.com

http://www.lauracerwinske.com

Creative Writing Workshops – What Do You Gain!

As the authors of the stories we tell ourselves – about ourselves and everything around us – we have the power to recast, reframe, redirect, and reinterpret the action in our own personal dramas, whether we acknowledge this power of not. The most significant benefits to creative writing workshops such as Radical Writing are the power and focus they bring to our ability to act in the world. Radical Writing shows us how we have been serving, consciously or unconsciously, as the novelists of our own lives. The discovery of our fictions and their “re-visioning”  (i.e. revising by seeing differently) makes us conscious authors of scenes past, present, and future. Creative writing processes like Radical Writing offer power-building tools that enlarge our focus and make us more effective at applying our personal power.

Our subconscious minds record every thought and every feeling we have, whether mundane or profound, subtle or overt. The act of simple observation of these thoughts and feelings releases them into conscious awareness. Radical Writing enables us to return to a state of pure responsiveness within the sanctuary of the page or keyboard where we can express ourselves in uncensored abandon.

A sanctuary is a place for worship and cultivation of spirit. It is a place of safety and refuge. At times this means a place of order and tranquility, a retreat away from disharmony. At other times it means a place to indulge in creativity, to seek meaning in life, to do the work of transformation, which often calls for descent into pain and chaos. A sanctuary is a hallowed setting in which the work of transformation can be undertaken safely, a hallowed ground in which to embrace our shadows. Radical Writing provides just such a sanctuary.

When stepping from the world of one belief system into that of another, we must feel protected, enveloped in a climate of reassurance. Our old stories have provided us only with illusions of safety. Now you can look to your writing as a safe place to create new stories, unbound by the familiar restraints or old parameters. The process allows us to forego the expectations we typically have when we are talking or interacting.

The more we consciously cultivate awareness, the keener our instincts grow. We relax in making choices and decisions. We breathe easier. The resulting shifts in our tastes, interests, and perspectives erase “blocks” to creativity. We achieve a level of fierce focus that is instrumental in bringing about manifestation. Like all creative acts,  Radical Writing is full of surprises.

Learn more about Radical Writing and Laura Cerwinske’s other courses at http://www.radicalwriting.com

HOW WRITING GENERATES SELF-EXPRESSION

She Watches Her Words       Laura Cerwinske

Something potent happens when we put pen to paper and allow the hand, rather than the head, to do our thinking. We gain an immediate intimacy with our thoughts along with a detachment not usually available through talking.

In the act of writing, we process information differently than we do when thinking or talking. What’s more, the three actions do not produce the same results. Undirected thinking and talking perpetuate mental and emotional chaos because they further enroll us in our unconscious beliefs. On the other hand, writing out feelings in a free and exaggerated way is liberating. The writing stimulates awareness and thereby perpetuates release.

Stories are magic and medicine. They stimulate adrenaline and neutralize destructive energy. They have the power to comfort, heal, and transform. They invigorate the imagination and build spiritual muscle. They illuminate the path to the subconscious. The power of our stories launches us into galaxies of self-awareness.

In Western literature, traditional stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the writing process used in this book, our stories can go on eternally. They become vehicles for healing when we mulling them over, entertaining twists and turns, finding their sources, bestowing them with new meaning, and enlarging their possibilities. As our consciousness of our stories grows, healing occurs and our awareness of our inner power enlarges.

Today, “the age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace,” the New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen tells us.  Since “the letter fell out of favor and education became professionalized, with its goal less the expansion of the mind than the acquisition of a job, writing began to be seen largely as the purview of writers. Writing at work also became so stylistically removed from the story of our lives that the two seemed to have nothing in common.”

On the other hand, when we write purely for self-expression, we alchemize our mental activity, and, our stories become the fuel for liberation, creativity, transformation, and healing.

Expressive writing teaches us ways of seeing ourselves as novelists of our own lives. The rediscovery of our fictions and their “re-visioning”  (i.e. revising by seeing differently) makes us conscious authors of scenes past, present, and future. The process is full of surprises.

Visit www.radicalwriting.com to learn more and sign up for online writing courses.  Start learning about yourself and expression!

WRITING FOR PERSONAL GROWTH

Liberty's Ladies    Laura Cerwinske

 

Modern psychology is based on the therapist’s recognition of the stories taught to us by our parents, teachers, clergy, and peers and of their effects on us. Out of this tapestry of history and values, we began, as children, to weave our own story, subconsciously accepting certain threads we’d inherited and rejecting others. Eventually the stories we swallowed and digested began living in us, governing our emotions and choices. They became the stage for enacting our beliefs. The more we identified with our stories, the more power they gained to shape our view of reality. With this power we continue to subconsciously enroll everyone we encounter into believing our stories just as we do.

Even Sigmund Freud likely recognized that what he was doing was very close to literature. He wrote, “Imaginative writers are valuable colleagues—[in] their knowledge of the human heart they are far ahead of (others) because they draw on sources not yet accessible to science. . . . With hardly an effort, creative writers . . . salvage from the whirlpool of their emotions the deepest truths, to which others have to force their way.”

Words hide the world.

They blur together elements that exist apart,

or they break elements into pieces,

bind up the world,

contract it into hard little pellets of perception.

But the unbound world, the world behind the world –

how fluid it is, how lovely and dangerous.

At rare moments of clarity,

I succeed in breaking through.

Then I see. I see a place where nothing is known,

because nothing is shaped in advance by words.

There, nothing is hidden from me. 

            Steven Milhauser. “History of a Disturbance.”

It makes no difference whether the story we tell ourselves or the world is “true” or not, healthy or unhealthy, constructive or destructive, tragic or romantic, debilitating or liberating; as long as we are unconsciously immersed in it, the story runs our lives. To whatever degree others’ stories color our own, they too are running our lives.

The nature of the role in which we have cast ourselves is irrelevant. Regardless of how we see ourselves  -- as the good child, the happy wanderer, the loyal friend, the outlaw, the martyr, the perpetual parent, the perpetual child, the hard worker, the heroic survivor, the perpetual victim, the die-hard rebel, the serious thinker, the devoted lover, the responsible citizen, or the free spirit -- we have invested our role with tremendous power—the power to define us and guide us, the power to destroy us, and the power to heal us.

Scientific, logical, linear, or left-brain thinking, which is based on the objective weighing of fact and detail, calls on a mode of seeing devoid of imagination. Myths and legends, on the other hand, which are nonliteral, nonlogical, and imbued with imaginary color, texture, and detail, cannot fully be understood without entering into a right-brain or metaphysical state of mind.

The subconscious mind is purely literal. It stands ready to follow the orders our conscious mind sends it, regardless of their degree of emotion or veracity. For example, the subconscious perceives no distinction between jealous rage and simple doubt; both represent equal commands to annihilate.

We fear uncensored, wholly passionate expression when we subconsciously believe it will either irreparably disrupt our lives or bring harm to the object of our thoughts. We also resist writing out our raw feelings for fear of seeing them recorded in black and white. The very thought of making intense emotion—or even minor anxiety—concrete can easily deter us. Yet only the safe acknowledgment of our most repressed or unacceptable thoughts will free them from the subconscious and drain them of their power. When we write in an undirected way (i.e., using an explorative process such as I teach), we find not the facts, but the fiction—the stories—that lead us to the truth.