Words and Movement

Movement and words. For me, those things are the basics, the two places where I find my core being.

So when I saw a workshop called Writing From the Body, I pretty much had to sign up. It was taught by Joe Goode, a long time dancer, choreographer, and movement teacher in San Francisco.

I admit to having been a bit nervous. The main way my body reminds me that I’m old is with physical limitations. I ache in some spots and have lost range of motion in others.

And, mind you, mine is a body that was never designed for most of the movements associated with dance of the performing kind. I could not do splits or backbends even when I was six.

Fortunately, while there were dancers in the class, the focus was not on those skills. We started with a series of exercises Joe calls “Movement for Humans” that did not require perfection but that, in fact, did wonders for my physical being.

We ended with an exercise that included a motion of throwing things away. And that led us into writing, starting with a thought about what we were throwing away.

This workshop addressed two things that I sorely need.

First of all, I always need movement and these days in particular I’m looking for new movement practices.

Secondly, I need to do things that open my mind to new possibilities. You might call this sparking creativity though I suspect it’s much broader than that.

Now I primarily write fiction, but I have not been interested in fiction classes for a long time. I loved my time at Clarion West and years back took several good workshops for fiction writers, so this is not intended as a slam at those things. It’s just not the kind of learning about writing that I need now.

I appreciate my writers critique group, because understanding how other writers react to the words you’ve put on a page helps me develop it. But that’s peer reaction, not a workshop designed to teach world building or plotting or characterization.

I am not, and never have been, a linear writer. (I am the person who, back in school, wrote the outline the teacher demanded after I wrote the essay.) The things that affect my writing, my general creativity, my overall well-being are not direct things that can be easily labeled.

Which means that the kind of classes I’m looking for are not ones directly related to the writing of fiction.

I’ve just signed up for my third drawing class. Drawing is incredibly useful because it teaches you to pay close attention. I’ll see something I want to draw and then, once I start drawing it, discover all these other lines and shadows I didn’t know were there.

I’ve taken a couple of poetry classes and been writing some poetry not because I’m becoming a serious poet (though who knows where things will end up) but because those classes open the door to new ways of looking at words.

Movement has always done that kind of thing for me. I’ve needed some new ways of getting into movement, though. Walking is wonderful for many reasons (some of which have a lot to do with looking at things). Even the gym is satisfying in many ways. Just moving is good.

But Tai Chi, like Aikido, shows me things through my body I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, which is what makes that different from just exercise. I suspect yoga does that for some people.

The Movement for Humans work did that for me as well.

I can’t always put what I find from that movement into words. I even wrote a senryu about that this week:

My body knows truths
that I cannot give word to,
or at least, not yet.

But that movement is vital. And I need to find more ways of bringing it into my life.