Diane Morrow

Walking to Find a Poem

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 2, 2009 in Uncategorized

Inspiration in Motion? Something about the new year, I find myself thinking more about writing ideas again—and how reading can spark writing. And, well, how exercise and movement of all sorts might spark writing. This particular idea is one I went looking for in Susan Wooldridge’s Poemcrazy after I’d been doing all this reading on how exercise can foster neurogenesis and how these new brain cells we make need somewhere to go. The notion is that the new cells need a brain circuit to join—or sometimes they just might fade away. So, a poem then as the new circuit? The walking creates new brain cells—we begin to see anew—and a poem emerges? Here is an excerpt from Ms. Wooldridge’s first chapter, “Outlaw on a Poem Walk.” For me, poetry is related to walking. Words and images fill me when I wander somewhere alone. Writer Bruce Chatwin lived with nomads and believed inspiration, as well as true rest, could best be found in motion. Sometimes I wish I could walk forever, jotting down notes and words. And the bridge at One Mile is a perfect spot to begin. Poems don’t normally have much to do with intention for me. They’re more likely to come unexpectedly in a place like this. Since it’s past Labor Day the dam is slanted low and the park’s huge swimming pool is shallow. Upstream a small girl wades with her mother. The mom’s red shirt is reflected like a scarlet lily pad floating in front of her. The two waddle in deeper, wetting their clothes. Now the mother swirls her girl through the water as if she were a minnow on a fishing line. Motion. The poet walking. The mother and her child waddling. The mother swirling her girl through the water. All that motion. The beginnings of a poem? A way to begin writing again when the writing has stalled? New cells, new circuits, new...

I Am a Pencil by Sam Swope

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 19, 2009 in Uncategorized

A Love Song to the Teaching of Writing This memoir carries the subtitle, A Teacher, His Kids, and Their World of Stories. A decent and serviceable subtitle. But it fails to mention the love. And this book, perhaps more than anything else, is a love story. Love between a teacher and children. Love between a teacher and stories. A kind of hymn to what is possible with reading and writing and children. First, meet Mr. Swope. Here, in the first chapter, he introduces himself. I was a writer, children’s books mostly, funny stories in which anything could happen. Every morning I got up at six, fed Mike, my cat, and got to work. I spent a lot of time inside my head with giants and ogres, fairies and talking animals, and when I went out into the city, I was a danger, sometimes so lost in thought I’d cross a street against the light, only snapping to at the blare of a horn. To free my life for writing, I’d pared it down to the essentials: a small Manhattan rental, no kids, no car, not even a TV. I’m not a famous writer now and wasn’t then, nor had I published much—nothing in some time. Still, I kept going through the motions, throwing words at the computer, screen after screen of promising beginnings, bits of characters, half thoughts, every day more words; but they never added up to anything, not book had taken shape in much too long, and I had grown discouraged. Then—-something happens. He gets asked by Teachers and Writers Collaborative to give a workshop to a classroom of third-graders in Queens. He is slated to work with them for ten days. He ends up staying with them for three years, seeing them off, in the bittersweet final chapters, to middle schools scattered throughout New York. Sam Swope is the kind of magical teacher one might wish for one’s own children—or for one’s own child self. He’s passionate about stories—but not puffed up in any way. There’s something humble and honest and refreshing about him. He reads with the children. Writes with them. Walks with them—dozens of times?—to Central Park to sit beneath the trees and write. Perhaps the best way to meet Mr. Swope and his pencil book is to meet him as he teaches, this beginning in the first several paragraphs of his preface which I am typing out here because, well, I love this beginning. I love the way he invokes the mystery of Wallace Stevens’ poem with these children. So, from the preface, entitled, The Blackbird is Flying I Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird. First we went over some hard words—pantomime, indecipherable, Haddam, lucid, euphony, and equipage. Then, as I handed out copies of ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,’ I told the fifth graders, ‘This is a famous poem written by an American businessman named Wallace Stevens. I’m telling you so that you know you can be a writer and still have another career.’ I said, ‘Before we discuss it, I want you to read silently.’ My students put their elbows on their desks and leaned over the poem. I’d been teaching writing to this class for three years, since they...

Creating an Enriched Environment

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 12, 2009 in Uncategorized

A Reading and Writing and Healing Idea Okay, for mice an enriched environment is an environment much less barren than a cage, one that simulates the complex surroundings of the wild. It might include an exercise wheel, lots of toys, lots of tunnels for crawling. It turns out mice really seem to like to crawl through short lengths of curved pipe when these are placed in their cages. And they also seem to benefit when other mice are with them there inside the cage. So. . . novelty, objects to engage with, other creatures to engage with, problems to be solved, lots of voluntary running. This leads, in mice, to good things in the brain. The movement and exercise stimulates neurogenesis. And the novelty and problem-solving foster the integration of these new brain cells into existing circuits. All of this reminds me of my kids’ kindergarten and first grade classes. Recess where they actually ran around. And, inside, lots of stations for interaction—with the kids having choices as to which stations to choose. The water station. The sand station. Blocks. Art. Picture books. Not to be too simplistic here, but I wonder what an enriched environment might look like for an adult. Well, for you. And me. What stations would it have?What elements? One way to think about an enriched environment is to think about the five senses and how to engage them. And it doesn’t have to be expensive. Many enriching things aren’t. New music? A musical instrument? A new book or two or three? A new stack of books from the library? A stack of CDs? A stack of films? A Zen sand garden? A seed tray for beginning an indoor garden? A new notebook for writing? A package of colored pens? An airplane ticket? (okay, that one might be a bit expensive.) A day trip to a new place? An afternoon taking photographs? A new cookbook? An indoor herb garden? New spices? New candles? Dark chocolate? Espresso beans? Tea? What would an enriched environment look like for you? And how could you begin to create it in the new year? You could write about...

An Enriched Environment

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 5, 2009 in Uncategorized

Yet Another Healing Image from Sharon Begley’s Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain I tend to think of two times of the year as good times for new beginnings. September when school starts. And January, the beginning of a new year. I tend to think not so much of resolutions, but of new beginnings. And it strikes me that this image of an enriched environment might be a useful one with which to fashion a new beginning. First, where the term comes from. Back in the 1940’s, a scientist by the name of Donald Hebb began taking some of his lab rats home with him in the evening to keep as temporary pets. The other rats remained in the lab in their bare cages. And Hebb began to notice something. The rats he took home with him began to act differently than their mates. They were less fearful, more curious and they showed “more exploratory behavior.” Later, in the sixties, at Berkeley, a team of scientists formalized this notion by raising some rats in bare cages and other rats in what they called “enriched environments”. These enriched rats had access to toys and mazes and frequent handling. And it turned out that their brains grew in response to this enrichment—about 5% more cortex, by weight, than their mates without enrichment. Interestingly, these studies were instrumental in the development of Head Start, the program for pre-school children. And a number of follow-up studies have been done since. In one, it was shown that mice provided with an exercise wheel will tend to run about four to five hours a day—and in turn will produce about twice as many new cells in their brains as sedentary mice. A key finding here is that the exercise needs to be voluntary to be beneficial. If the exercise is forced in some way—for instance by using a negative stimulus—then the new cell growth doesn’t occur so lavishly, presumably because the stress of punishment outweighs the benefit of the exercise. It’s fascinating—this notion that not just exercise but voluntary exercise grows new brain cells. (So—it’s good to find a way to exercise but even better if we don’t stress out about it or beat ourselves up over the whole deal.) Here’s Fred Gage talking to the Dalai Lama: We think voluntary exercise increases the number of neural stem cells that divide and give rise to new neurons in the hippocampus. . . But we think it is environmental enrichment that supports the survival of these cells. Usually, 50 per cent of the new cells reaching the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus die. But if the animal lives in an enriched environment, many fewer of the new cells die. Environmental enrichment doesn’t seem to affect cell proliferation and the generation of new neurons, but it can affect the rate and the number of cells that survive and integrate into the circuitry. The voluntary exercise stimulates the new cells. And then the enriched environments leads the brain to find a place for those new cells in the circuitry. So. . . an exercise wheel in the center of the living room? And an enriched environment radiating out from it? Hmmm. A new beginning for January?______________________________________________ See other pieces on this book: An Overview The Enchanted Loom A...

Joy?

Posted by Diane Morrow on December 22, 2008 in Uncategorized

I went looking for the word JOY in an anthology I have on my shelf–Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times. And found this: There are days we liveas if death were nowherein the background; from joyto joy to joy, from wing to wing,from blossom to blossom toimpossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom. Ah–the possibility of blossoms in December.Wishing you some of those kinds of days. The full poem, From Blossoms, is by Li-Young Lee and can be found here. The graphic for JOY, as well as one for lots and lots of words, can be found at Visuwords, a free online graphical...

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