[Dalya’s note] This guest post originally appeared on February 25, 2013 on  writer and ecologist Hannah Miller’s blog, Hannah Miller. The book featured here was written by my friend and colleague, Louise Dunlap. Louise used to be  a member of the National Writers’  Union alongside me. Her work complements mine very well.

Whatever it is you have to say is still within you. It never goes away. It sits inside of you, enclosed in a black box, a flight data recorder that will be read only if you are cracked open utterly.

Conditions we fail to notice at all shut down our observation, our criticism of the conditions of life, and even our acts to change it. It still, all, always, starts with words. Whatever’s there in the black box deep inside of you. For the writers gathered in the Temescal Branch of the Oakland Public Library last Saturday (I think dissidents would be the proper word, that’s a great one), the question was, what keeps the words in?

Writer-of-writers Louise Dunlap, clad in a U.S. Social Forum t-shirt and a bike-titanium sense of humor, coaxed words, tears, laughter, squirming discomfort, and murmurs of Namaste out of a roomful of Bay Area writers. Undoing the Silences was the title of the seminar, and going around the room for introductions, Louise asked us to tell our names, what we would write, our strength, our weakness, and what keeps us from doing this. The cloud of ideas and thought that emerged from the room was world-toppling as nuclei are: children’s books, naturalism, peace, harmony. I said I wanted to invent a new language, a statement which surprised even me.

But Louise was not there to coach us through our chicken-scratches – she had come to Temescal with New Village Press to address the blocked arteries.

“Fear and despair,” she said. “That’s what I am hearing.” Pixie cuts, curls, shorn heads all bobbed. I just sighed. (see The Rest of this Blog, by Hannah Miller.)

Apparently, there is a sort of judo you can do on these things, that Louise knows and practiced on us. They seemed rather innocuous, free writes with prompts like: Write about a time you last teared up. Write about a time you ate chocolate. Seven minutes each, for the express purpose of “removing the editor.” I wrote about my boyfriend and my work, and I learned a lot, but what really bowled me over was this magic being practiced on us.

Here’s the secret: what we often think is external – fear and despair created by the conditions of the world, or the futility of journalism, or the futility of organizing – is actually just our internal editor clocking in for their horrible, bloody, imagination-slaughtering shift.

The exercises Louise had us do really shut down the butcher; her book is a judo textbook for this sort of thing. It’s not completely obvious – why would shutting down your internal editor really work, if the world is burning up and everybody is still at each others’ throats etc etc? It works because of something very special that I was so grateful to learn: that creation has a buoyancy of its own, a self-contained power source, an explosive magic like a tiny seed in soil.

And it grows as you do it. Words create hope as they push forward, and hope does its own photosynthesis. Hope is its own power. Love is its own power. It is so mysterious, sharing the same undefinable properties as life itself.

“The goal,” said Louise, “is to find a channel where the words can come from your heart.”
May my heart never be blocked again.