An Interview with Author and Therapist, Jan Marquart

Jan Marquart is a psychotherapist and author who has written in every imaginable genre from fiction to memoir to poetry to self-help. She won the Writer's Digest Self-Published award in 2000 for The Breath of Dawn and the Achievement in Poetry Award by the International Library of Poetry in 2005. She is founder and CEO of About the Author Network, an organization dedicated to helping authors write, publish and sell their books.

She will be leading a Story Circle Network Writing from Life workshop November 2, 2013 in Austin, TX. For information and to register visit: http://www.storycircle.org/Workshops/

Lisa: How did you become both a writer and a therapist?

Jan: I was born in Brooklyn and lived there until I decided to go to college in California. I quit a great job as a legal secretary on Wall Street which disturbed my parents, but I couldn’t see myself taking shorthand and typing someone else’s ideas forever. I wanted to find out what I thought and desired to write since I was eight but tucked it away when my parents didn’t show an interest. When I enrolled in UCSC I met a friend who recommended I keep a journal. I have written every day since June, 1972. I studied philosophy and then got my master in Social Work.

Lisa: What do you wish people knew about you?

 

Jan: That is a great question. I have felt misunderstood most of my life and I realized that the thinking many people do is so limited and fearful. I suppose that’s why I write so much. When the pressure builds inside me I have to say it somehow, through some genre and still keep hope and faith. It takes a lot for me to ask for help, not because I can’t ask but because I don’t believe my life’s problems belong to anyone but me. I’d like people to know that for anyone who is suffering, me or anyone else, to receive an offer of help restores faith in humanity.

 

Lisa: Evidence for and trusting one's own intuition seems to be a major theme in much of your writing. Can you speak a little about that?

 

Jan: In the last twenty something years I had quite a few people tell me I couldn't do something while something inside me told me I could. They thought I just wanted to battle with them but I wasn't battling. I wasn't being recalcitrant. I truly knew I could do what they said I couldn't and proceeded from there. Turns out I did everything others told me I couldn't. So when people tell me what they think I am or am not capable of, I listen to the message from my gut. Sometimes my gut agrees and sometimes it doesn't. When I know better and I rationalize a reason not to listen to that voice, I suffer terribly. Listen to everyone but rarely take their comments to heart, especially when it comes to your capability.

 

Lisa: Of all the various genres you have tried, which seemed to come most naturally? Which was most challenging?

 

Jan: Once I start writing I don't feel as if I'm struggling with any of them. I think poetry is the most challenging because I don't know any formal poetry styles. I just write according to the power that comes through me.

 

Lisa: Do you use an editor or agent?

 

Jan: I had an agent for Kate's Way. I got her name from Lynn Andrews after asking her for and endorsement for [my how-to book] The Mindful Writer. As far as editors – I hire retired school teachers, friends, strangers, and anyone who would read my manuscripts. I like getting ordinary readers to give me their comments. All writers need to know that it takes other people to tell them what they like to read. We write in isolation but we must come out into the world with our manuscripts to see if they even make sense. I only make the changes that don't compromise the integrity of what I've written.

 

Lisa: What advice would you give to beginning writers?

 

Jan: Don't worry about how to discipline yourself to write. Don't worry about whether you can write or not. If you have something to say simply say it. You can't edit or publish anything unless you have written something first. I hear writers tell me in my workshops how frightened they are that someone they love will be angry at what they write. In my experience too many people don't do what they desire because of the criticism of narrow-minded and fear-based people. This is a dangerous place for writers. Write. Let other people decide how to behave around what you write.

 

To read the full interview visit: http://www.storycirclebookreviews.org/interviews/marquart.shtml 

 

 

From The Mindful Writer: Still the Mind, Free the Pen

 

"As a writer, going spelunking into your own experience may awaken ghosts and reveal black hearted wishes. But life has ways of forcing us to come to grips with the darkness so we can find the light in order to survive. What is your way to the light?"

 

"We call it 'writer's block' but there is no block. There is only our personal rhythm of experience."

 

 "I have found that all of life takes courage, relentless courage, and writing is no different."

 

 

From Echoes from the Womb: A Book for Daughters

 

"Daughters cannot help but take their mothers with them into their own old age. From conception to death we carry our mothers with us."

 

"We do stop crying and our pain can ease up if we face it with courage and hope. Learning how to suffer is a skill."

 

"You can pick and choose which pieces you want in the quilt of your future life and which ones you don't."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wanting What I Already Have

Recently I have made a commitment to begin my days reading something spiritual. My first selection is by Joan Chittister, OSB, a profoundly wise little book, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today. It amazes me how this book, published in 1991, before the world wide web, still speaks of the same challenges we now face: how to live a holy life in a world that is ever closer and more connected, with technology that dominates our time and consumerism that invades our consciousness. "In a world in which the planet has become the neighborhood and our personal lives are made up of unending streams of people," she writes, "the Rule of Benedict with its accent on the spiritual qualities of life lived in common may never have been more relevant. I have begun to see under the covers of this age-old monastic rule a semblance of sanity to the insanity of   the world around me." (p. 11-12) What would she have made of the "unending streams of people" I can speak to  and they to me via the timeline of my Facebook page? Or a world in which I can download an entire library to my Kindle in less than an hour? Or a BOGO culture in which I get two blouses when I only really needed one, just because the second one was free?

 

The craziness of this massively inter-connected world is that amidst this plenty we can find ourselves very empty indeed. The shallowness of constant conversation via email and social media does not make up for the lost intimacy of a real, deep, nourishing conversation with a true friend. A closet full of clothes can hide the few, precious, beloved garments that bring back the best and brightest memories. A shelf full of books can camouflage the wisest and most life-changing favorites (like this one) amidst all the others I've "been meaning to read." Wisdom Distilled from the Daily gives us one approach through the ancient Rule of Saint Benedict as interpreted by this wise woman. "We have to come to understand that we have been allotted our portion of the goods of the earth; we have not been given the goods of the universe for our own personal consumption. We own this earth in common with the poor. We have to learn the difference between needs and wants so that the needs of all can be supplied, which doesn't mean that my own life must be narrow or restricted. It simply means I must come to understand the difference between having it all and having everything." (p. 72.)

Having it all vs. having everything. Having it all doesn't make me happier, it just creates more work, more things to dust, more things to wade through. And it leads to a world where a few have too much and too many have too little. Having everything is simply having that--and only that--which is necessary to live a life in balance, where work and leisure, solitude and companionship, the mundane and the sacred exist in equal measure. That kind of monasticism does not require I renounce my family or give away all my possessions or move into a convent. It simply means that I must focus on wanting what I have rather than trying to have whatever I want.

An Interview with the Story Circle Network's 2012 Sarton Memoir Winner, Monica Wood

Lisa: Your memoir, When We Were the Kennedys,  tells the story of your father’s sudden and unexpected death of a heart attack and how your family experienced that staggering event. How were able to write about such a painful time?

 

Monica:  Oh, but the writing was the opposite of painful! I loved being “back home,” even in the fraught year I was revisiting. I have such wonderful memories of my childhood, and my family at that time. Being with them again was a balm to my soul.

Lisa: Who were you thinking of as you wrote?

Monica: My audience for this book, for the first time in forever, was me. Just me. I’d hit a rough patch, both professionally and personally, and I was writing for comfort and consolation, not for publication. It was the most joyful writing I’d done in years.

Lisa: Your memoir is full of your early experiences with the love of words and books and stories. You describe in great detail the reams of beautiful paper that your father brought home from his job at the paper mill and the hours and hours you and your siblings spent filling the pages with drawings and stories.

Monica: Well, I come from Irish stock, and a love of words is in the DNA. Everyone in my family tells a great story. I do wonder, though, if being from a paper-mill town might have nudged me along the writing path. I love paper: I love its smell, its feel, its possibilities. Unlike a lot of writers, a blank page fills me with joy, not dread.

Lisa: Let’s talk a bit about those great family stories. What makes them so powerful?

Monica: I teach memoir writing now, and I don't think I'll ever go back to teaching fiction. I've seen first hand the power of speaking stories aloud, of simply putting on paper the tragic or ordinary or quirky or mundane. I teach in a women's prison and I see every week how their stories not only make them reflect on who they are, but how their stories connect them to one another in a place where human connection can be really risky.

Lisa: What else did you learn from doing the book?

Monica:  I learned that I have one memoir in me. I learned that voice is the key element in memoir. I learned that my skills as a novelist served me well in writing nonfiction.  And I learned that every particular family story is universal.

 

To read the complete interview visit: http://www.storycirclebookreviews.org/interviews/wood.shtml

You can learn more about Monica Wood on her website: http://www.monicawood.com/

“The Catholic tradition of my childhood—which I recall with affection, some awe, and a measure of yearning—did not allow for randomness. Every word and deed, every sorrow and triumph, every birth and death belonged to a Divine Plan. If at times you thought this Plan unreasonable, senseless, or just plain mean, you were asked to trust that even the most extreme sorrow had to be a blessing in disguise. Almost everything essential came to you in disguise.” P. 160

“We listen, all three, absorbing the sound as children from the coast might absorb the tidal sighing of a nearby sea, an ebb and flow so enduring that after a time the sound appears to be coming from within your own unsuspecting self. It’s been a long seven months, April to November, a tender time bracketed by death. A father, a president; the one grieved only by us, the other by a whole spacious-sky, purple-mountains-majesty, grain-waving country. I listen, with my sisters, in a kind of stupefied surrender, as the mill’s enduring breath smoothes over us, inhale, exhale.” P. 198

 

Book Review: When We Were the Kennedys

Monica Wood is the author of four works of fiction, most recently Any Bitter Thing, which spent twenty-one weeks on the American Booksellers Association extended best-seller list and was named a Book Sense Top Ten pick. Her other fiction includes Ernie’s Ark, Secret Language, and My Only Story, a finalist for the Kate Chopin Award. Her moving memoir, When We Were the Kennedys, is the winner of the Story Circle Network's 2012 Sarton Memoir Award.

 

“Our story, like the mill, hummed in the background of our every hour, a tale of quest and hope that resonated similarly in all the songs in all the blocks and houses, in the headlong shouts of all the children at play, in the murmur of all the graces said at all the kitchen tables. In my family, in every family, that story—with its implied happy ending—hinged on a single, beautiful, unbreakable, immutable fact: Dad. Then he died.”

 

Monica Wood’s writing is simply luminous as she magically conjures up a lost place and time — a small industrial Eastern town on the eve of the Kennedy assassination. The story of her father's sudden shattering death and her family's attempt to cope with the incomprehensible loss is brought

to vivid life through her precise and poetic prose. Her skill at characterization is so refined that I felt as though I really knew each of them personally: her no-nonsense little sister, Cathy; her solid, dependable big sister Anne; her forever-young handicapped sister Betty; her overwhelmed and anxious mother and heart-broken Catholic Priest uncle, "Father Bob;" her sometimes incomprehensible Lithuanian landlords the Norkuses and, of course, her beloved dad. Wood’s story begins the morning of her father’s death of sudden cardiac arrest on the way to his job at the local paper mill. Told through the perspective of her fourth-grade self we experience her shock as she struggles to understand what the loss will mean for herself, her mother and her siblings. Her poignant realization that anyone can be taken from us at any time is painfully raw and moving. Through her eyes we watch her family's sometimes incomprehensible response to grief, her mother, a widow, standing still and alone in a dark room, unable to return to her empty bed; her beloved uncle’s hidden alcoholism and brief institutionalization. “We were an ordinary family;” she writes, “a mill family, not the stuff of opera. And yet…my memory of that day reverberates down the decades as something close to music. Emotion, sensation, intuition. I see the day—or chips and bits, as if looking through a kaleidoscope—but I also hear it, a faraway composition in the melodious language of grief….” (p. 7) We watch as young Monica escapes her grief by delving into the world of Little Women and Nancy Drew and attempts to write her own novel poignantly titled The Mystery of the Missing Man. Here is a child in love with words, who copies them over and over on the beautifully made paper her father had brought home from the mill. Here is a child with the keen observational skills of the gifted author she will become.

 

This is an excerpt from a review that first appeared in the Story Circle Journal and on the Story Circle Book Review Site. To read more visit: http://www.storycirclebookreviews.org/reviews/kennedys.shtml

 

 

In Honor of Labor Day: What I Like About Weekends, Weekdays and a Little About the Sabbath

Being a piano teacher means most of my home is a public space. My living room connects to the dining room where my piano is located, and all that separates the dining room from the kitchen is a counter. In other words, my students and their parents can see almost the entire house except the bedrooms and the master bath. They have access to the other bathroom off the hallway.

Consequently, on teaching days, most of my house needs to be immaculate. I dust the living room and dining room, completely clean the kitchen and "guest" bath, vacuum and if I have time, sweep the sidewalk and porch leading to my front door. With the labor day weekend, I get a little break from the "my house must look perfect" compulsion.

With that in mind, and in honor of the Labor Day holiday, I thought I would write another list like the one I did about "how I know it's summer." So here, in no particular order, is a list of what I like about weekends. To keep a balanced perspective I followed it with, "what I like about weekdays."

What I like about weekends:
I can allow books and coffee mugs and knitting projects to accumulate on the living room tables.
If there are a couple of balls of dog fur fluff on the carpet, I don't need to panic.
If my husband leaves out his shaving cream and my daughter's toothpaste globs are congealing in the sink, I can ignore them.
I can wear my sweat pants or baggy jeans and a stained t-shirt with socks and flip flops if I want to.
It's OK if there are dirty dishes all over the kitchen counter.
I don't have to set the alarm clock.
I can stay up late and watch a movie.
There are people in my house to share the chores and to have fun with and talk to.

What I like about weekdays:
There are no people in my house; it's quiet and I can get work done.
Things don't get very messy because I have to stay on top of it.
Afterwards I get to read, play piano or work in a nice, tidy, comfortable space.
I get to do things my way.
I get to dress up and put on makeup which is creative and fun.
I have to get up to get my daughter off to school, so the day is longer and I get more accomplished.
I get to do work I'm passionate about and which is rewarding, interesting and even fun.
I miss my family, so appreciate them more when we sit down to dinner and talk about our days.

When all is said and done, what I really like is the switch from one mode to the other, from workday to rest day, like the change of seasons. Maybe that whole Sabbath idea is a good one. I like the idea of the Creator resting after six (or five) days of making something intricate and awe-inspiringly beautiful.

A Lesson in Being Human

Recently I have recognized a tendency I have to cover embarrassment or being at a loss for words with humor. The trouble is, in such situations, there isn't enough time to reflect on the impact of what I'm saying, and what I think is funny might truly be insensitive or even cruel. One of the harder lessons of life is how easy it is to hurt people even when your intentions are good. Humor can be a way to turn an awkward moment, to bond people together, to lighten the mood. But it is tricky and fraught with the capacity to harm. My fat mouth gets me into trouble. And once words fly out of your mouth, you can't take them back.

I'm not always sure how to make amends. Often, too much time has passed, or the conversation has moved on. Sometimes explaining what made me uncomfortable--what led me to try to fill the awkwardness with humor--only makes the situation more awkward. How hard it is to redeem myself in my own eyes! I know I'm only human, but I want so hard to be a good person, to be a kind person. I want to make peoples' lives easier, not harder and more painful.

Sometimes I find, the only answer is prayer. Meditation on my faults--if I am not afraid to admit them--is an important exercise in humility. And by humility I don't mean groveling on the ground and bemoaning my wickedness. Humility is not humiliation. "Humility" derives from the Latin word, "humus" or ground, earth as in dirt. So to be humble is to be grounded. It is to have a right mind about your place in the grand scheme of things, to not take yourself so seriously. Humility can actually be very freeing because it allows us to be human.

 "Humiliation may teach us a lot about oppression, or a lot about underdevelopment or a great deal about anger, but it will not necessarily prove that we have learned anything about humility. Benedictine humility frees the spirit; it does not batter it." 
from Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of Benedict Today by Joan Chittister, OSB.

One Thing

 

After reading Gretchin Rubin's latest book, Happier at Home, I decided to discover some simple rules like she had which I could follow to make my life happier.  Instead of writing them in a journal, though, I would write them on the bathroom mirror with a dry erase marker where they'd be the first thing I'd see in the morning and would be right in front of my face periodically throughout my day. The first rule I selected is what I call "one thing."

"One thing" is the idea that you can only really ever do one thing at a time. It's been called the practice of "mindfulness" or "attention"--what spiritual guru, Ram Dass, called "being here now." Mindfulness has gotten a lot of press. It's made it's way from a new age, hip, Eastern-inspired spiritual discipline to main stream psychiatry where it's being used to treat everything from chronic pain to depression to addictive disorders. I became interested in it as a way to bring spiritual discipline and awareness into my daily life.

Too often I've found myself cranky, impatient and stressed out by my "to do" list.  "One thing" helps me step back and take a breath--I can enjoy the feel of hot, soapy water and the smell of the dish soap when I wash up after supper instead of feeling crabby that I've got a sink full of dishes to finish on the way to some other chore. I can focus on the story my 14-year-old is telling me instead of mentally fast-forwarding to my next appointment. I can relish the feel of my husband's hand in mine and not get distracted by the mental chatterbox in my head. And the funny part is, when I focus on just one moment at a time and eek out all the sensory richness of it, time seems to slow down. I may not always get more accomplished, but the day feels more complete and, well, holy. It turns out, "one thing"really can make a difference, one thing at a time.