First A Dream

If I listen I can hear My Self
calling out to me,
singing in a higher key,
a voice that feels both old and new,
and small, but with a large word
waiting to be heard.

I used to hear my minister father talk about his feeling that he had been ‘called’ to preach.  He passed along to me a desire to find a place and a work in this world that was uniquely mine.  It was presented as both a gift and a challenge to be called, to hear and to respond to any inner stirrings nudging me in a particular direction and toward a particular purpose.

I don’t remember exactly when my writing life began.  My mother has poems saved from as early as second grade, but I was a skinny, high school bookworm trying to hide a southern accent and a spiritual and sexual identity crisis when writing became a way of life.  Like so many who feel forced into hiding for one reason or another, writing became a way to be the me I was often too afraid to be except on the page. 

Over the years writing would be at times a course of study, an extracurricular activity, a vocation, a part-time or full-time job, a comes-and-goes-career–and always my dream.  Regardless of whether I published or was paid, it remained the place where I felt most at home, most at peace, and most myself.  It was a way of coming out long before the official kickoff of that process.

In The Right to Write, bestselling author, poet, and playwright Julia Cameron says that writing is like breathing.  We are born with a gift for language, and words give us power, but at a very early age, we start to lose our power over words.  Some of us start to feel that we might have the right to consider ourselves “writers” but most of us settle for using language as we need it and don’t dare consider ourselves worthy of that title.

 
Right To Write Coaching/Tutoring
Have you secretly longed to write a novel or a collection of poems or a memoir but convinced yourself you didn’t have the talent or the discipline or the time that it takes? Are you a writer struggling to find your muse or the self-discipline you think you lack?   Are you simply in need of a skilled, objective eye and ear to assist you in shaping, structuring, or polishing your words?

As a published poet and freelance writer of fiction and nonfiction, I understand both the desire and the doubt that often accompany the writing life.   And I agree with Ms. Cameron that whatever our aspirations or hesitations, “We should write because writing brings clarity and passion to the act of living . . . because it yields us a body of work, a felt path through the world we live in.”

As your Right To Write coach/tutor, I will support you in the process of:
• dispelling the many myths about the writing life
• learning to let yourself listen
• drawing from the well of your own experience
• discovering your own voice
• disproving the “Time Lie”
• ‘hearing’ what you’ve said and helping you say it more clearly and powerfully

Whether I’m writing a poem or an essay, a blog entry or a novel, whether it’s for a byline or a paycheck or an opportunity to help someone else say what they mean, I’m putting myself on the page.  It’s my way of choosing to answer the only calling that has ever really made sense to me-and working from the only place that truly feels like home.

Master the first trick to being a writer by starting where you are.  Contact me via email at dan@dansville.net today to reclaim your “Right to Write!”

Please click here for samples of my published work.

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