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Writing and Healing Idea #30: Chapter Titles

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 29, 2007 in Writing Ideas

This writing idea is offered as a companion to Writing Idea #29: Choosing a Title for Your Quest, which appears below. Say that this same person who needs you to generate a title for your book—your quest—also needs you to generate chapter titles—a structure for getting started. What might you name the chapters of your memoir? As with book titles, other people’s chapter titles can spark ideas. Here are some archetypal chapter titles from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces: The Call to Adventure Refusal of the Call Supernatural Aid The Crossing of the First Threshold The Belly of the Whale The Road of Trials And here are some chapters from Judy Blunt’s Breaking Clean: A Place of One’s Own Salvage Lessons in Silence The Year of the Horse The Reckoning What might your own chapter titles...

Writing and Healing Idea #29: A Title for Your Quest

Posted by Diane Morrow on in Writing Ideas

Imagine for a moment that someone approaches you and tells you that they want to write a book about your life. But they need some help. They need a title for one thing. Perhaps they invite you to call out the first title that comes to mind. Then the second title. The third. Perhaps they tell you they need you to make a list of all the titles that come to mind and when you’re finished they offer to help you choose the best one. And perhaps it might help while you’re thinking about your own list of possible titles to consider other titles. You may want to look around your own bookshelf for ideas. Or a trip to the bookstore might provide inspiration. Or a trip to the library. Memoirs especially can be a good source of titles that embody a sense of quest. Here are four (five actually), drawn from my own bookshelves, and offered along with a brief summary of what each title depicts: Meditations from a Movable Chair. Andre Dubus’ collection of autobiographical pieces, written after Broken Vessels (that searing memoir published after he lost his legs in an accident) and describing life as he sees it now from the vantage point of his wheelchair. Holy Hunger. Margaret Bullit-Jonas’ memoir about healing from an eating disorder and, in the process, reframing her hunger as a spiritual hunger. Breaking Clean. Judy Blunt’s memoir of leaving the flats of Montana and her life as a rancher’s wife to pursue her own dreams. Stronger than Dirt. A husband and wife’s memoir by Chris Losee and Kim Schaye about leaving Brooklyn to start a flower farm in upstate New York....

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 27, 2007 in Healing Images, Healing Poetry

I recently came across a poem, Diving into the Wreck, by Adrienne Rich. (I found it in Staying Alive, the anthology. You can also find it here.) The poem is a quest poem—but it describes a different kind of quest. Not a quest across the surface of the earth. But down. It begins—the first six lines—with a gathering of resources: First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask It’s interesting to me how just typing these lines allows me to pay a kind of closer attention to the language than I do when I ordinarily read. It slows me down. Especially coming to that last line—the grave and awkward mask. So, then: a book of myths, a camera, a blade, body armor, those absurd flippers, that grave and awkward mask. These are the resources for this dive. And no companions. Not this time. The speaker of the poem announces this at the end of the first stanza: she’s not doing this with a team like Cousteau—but alone. A ladder appears. She begins to climb down. Down through layers. Down through blue, then bluer, green—then black. This is a different kind of quest. A metaphorical quest. A quest down through layers. And why keep going? In the sixth stanza, she names the reason for this particular quest: I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done And the treasures that prevail. The words are purposes. The words are maps. And then those lines naming two companions: the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. It seems to me that when it comes to quests we need to know two things—especially for the difficult quests—the ones that involve some exploration of wreckage, some measure of sorrow. I think we need to know that the exploration itself has some meaning—a purpose. And I think we need to know that there’s some possibility—some hope—even perhaps a promise—of treasure—jewels amid or beneath the wreckage. What Arthur Frank would call the boon of the quest. There has to be some boon. I had a writing teacher once who used to say that stories need to be bearable. One way, I think, of making stories of wreckage bearable is to figure out what the treasure is—to recognize the treasure amid the wreckage. No matter how elusive—or unexpected—no matter that the treasure doesn’t look the way we thought it would look when we finally come upon it. _____________________________________ See also: The wounded...

Swimming to Antarctica: A Recommended Book

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 25, 2007 in Recommended Books

Lynne Cox, author of Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer, strikes me as a kind of ideal heroine for this month in which I’m writing about quest. There’s a kind of purity—a single-mindedness—to her narrative that has a certain appeal. She’s one of those rare people who discovered her own personal quest—her purpose in life—at the age of nine. And then she had the good fortune, and the good sense, and the persistence, to be able to carry this out. One summer morning, as she tells it, and when she was only nine years old, she found herself in an icy-cold swimming pool in Manchester, New Hampshire, swimming laps in the middle of a storm. She was there by choice. All the other swimmers in her club had begged the coach to get out of the water, leaping at his alternative proposal of two hours of calisthenics in the locker room. This was a serious swim club. Those children who had fled the cold water for the locker room could look forward to upwards of 500 sit-ups, 200 push-ups, and 500 leg extensions. Lynne Cox stayed in the water. When it began to hail, she stopped her laps and crouched in a corner next to the steps and covered her face with her hands. When the hail changed over to heavy rain she went back to swimming laps, entirely alone in the pool, hailstones floating around her in what she describes as a “giant bowl of icy tapioca.” She wasn’t one of the fastest swimmers on the team. She was, by her own description, chubby, and because she was slower than many of the others, she rarely got a chance to pause at the wall of the pool for breaks the way the others did. What she had was endurance. And a love of the water that was nothing short of extreme. She was nine years old, swimming through ice-water that everyone else had fled, and, rather than being frightened of the storm, she was exhilarated by it: The pool was no longer a flat, boring rectangle of blue; it was now a place of constant change. . . . That day, I realized that nature was strong, beautiful, dramatic, and wonderful, and being out in the water during that storm made me feel somehow a part of it, somehow connected to it. A Mrs. Milligan saw the tail end of this three-hour swim from her car in the parking lot. She was the mother of another girl on the team, a fast girl who had already qualified for nationals. When Lynne Cox finally climbed out of the pool, Mrs. Milligan met her with a large towel. She rubbed Lynne’s back with the towel, at the same time speaking into her ear: “Someday, Lynne, you’re going to swim across the English Channel.” Lynne Cox did swim across the English Channel. A mere six years later, when she was only fifteen, she set a world record, swimming the channel in nine hours and fifty-seven minutes. A few years later she swam across the Cook Strait in New Zealand. Not long after, she became the first person in the world to swim the Strait of Magellan, a body of water between the tip of Chile and the island of...

Writing and Healing Idea #28: Consulting with the Wizard of Oz

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 23, 2007 in Stories, Writing Ideas

I had a dream the other night that a patient came to me and she asked me if I thought that it would be a good idea to bring her illness to the Wizard of Oz and ask him what to do. Inside the dream I thought about it for a while, and then I said, yes, I do think that’s a good idea, but I need you to tell me more about what that would be like for you. What would it be like? Say, that you were the one caught up in the tornado, landing in an entirely new and strange place, and you told a good witch in a lovely dress that you had just been diagnosed with an illness—or another problem had befallen you—stress—loss—some new and thorny problem—or an old and thorny problem—any one of these will do—and say that you told her that what you really wanted was to get back home (as if maybe you suspected that if you only got home you could deal with this—you could figure out what to do next) and the good witch said, well, the smartest one in these parts is the wizard—and I would suggest you follow this road here. . . What would happen next? (And, let’s say, for the sake of the argument, that if this were an illness of some sort you’d already done the usual things—consulted a doctor, seen a specialist perhaps, started some sort of treatment. Say that you were looking for a little more help—not so much with medical care at this point but with the process of healing—figuring out what else you could do, in addition to medical treatment, that might augment the healing inside your body, that might make a difference. As if medical treatment were only the beginning of the quest—say, the crossing of the first threshold—and not its end.) What might the road be like on the way? Would there be helpers? Someone as kind and bumbly as that scarecrow? As innocent as the tin man? And say you made it to the Emerald City? What would you find when you got there? What would you ask? (Would you want to ask something about purpose? Your quest? Your next task? Or maybe just something about getting back home?) What would you hear in response? And then what would happen next? Photo from Telegraph–where photo is sourced from the Everett...

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