ESSAY - Wisdom from Our Foremothers: Brenda Ueland and Katherine Anne Porter

Brenda Ueland, Photo from the Minnesota Historical Society

Wild River Review’s proposal to launch a Slow Web Movement has struck a chord with me. I know that slowing down is important, but I find myself thinking, “I don’t have time to slow down.” My husband is working eleven hour days often on the weekends, my kids, ages six and eight, seem to require more of my time than ever; and there is always something demanding my attention, anything from volunteer commitments to preventing our household from slipping into complete chaos. And let us not forget emails and the constant intrusion of technology eats up hours of our time, if we let it. 

Recently, I attended a panel session at the LA Times Festival of Books entitled “Inside Publishing.” Panelist George Gibson, publishing director of Bloomsbury USA, spoke about why people are buying fewer books.  To his mind, it is not because of the economic downturn but because people are more time-challenged than they were in the past, including keeping up with their email, tweets and other internet-related activities.  He faces the same challenges and finds that technology has increased the volume of email correspondence he must troll through, the number of manuscripts he must evaluate, and on and on. 

What are the implications of this syndrome for writers?  Writers, after all, have different needs from editors and business people.

In the midst of the constant activity that is my life, I try to write. Conventional theory says that I must seize every free moment and rush to my computer, intent on using every free second on the project at hand.  If not, says the critical elf on my left shoulder, I am guilty of the crime of sloth.

But I know better. And so did other women who came before me. Like Brenda Ueland, a writer born in 1892, who wrote a book about writing and creativity called If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit (1938).  Her wisdom about writing and creativity speaks directly to the challenges that creative people face today and I turn to this book any time I feel a twinge of self-doubt or insecurity about my writing. 

In it, Ueland beautifully explains why slowing down is essential for nurturing the creative impulse. One of the chapters in If You Want to Write is entitled, “The Imagination works slowly and quietly.”  Inspiration, according to Ueland, “needs moodling, long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.” 

Katherine Anne Porter mirrors Ueland's philosophy in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (1964).  In 1962, thirty years after she began to write a full length novel, she completed her bestselling Ship of Fools that was made into a movie starring Vivien Lee, Simone Signoret, Lee Marvin, and José Ferrer. (1970).  Porter (1890-1980) won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for her novel.

She understood that the best of her writing came forth when she was quiet, isolated and unhurried. 

“Perhaps in time I shall learn to live more deeply,” she writes, “and consistently in that center of being where the will does not intrude, and the sense of time passing is lost, or has no power over the imagination.” 

Porter could not will the creation of her greatest stories, for the process of writing them was organic and occurred over a period of time, sometimes years.  She writes that her brilliant short novel, Noon Wine, “wove itself in [her] mind for years before [she] ever intended to write it.”

When the moment came for her to create Noon Wine, she made “quite a number of practical arrangements to get the time free for it, without fear of interruptions.”  She continues: “I wrote it as it stands except for a few pen corrections, in just seven days of trancelike absorption in a small room in an inn in rural Pennslyvania from the early evening of November 7 to November 14, 1936.” 

When the best of Porter’s fiction came forth, she had removed herself from the world.  It was not easy for the writer to isolate herself in order to create, and she struggled with missed deadlines, financial pressures and fallow periods throughout her writing life.  But she understood and accepted her creative process. 

Papers of Katherine Anne Porter, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries

She understood the creative magic that transpired when she found a place of solitude and was simultaneously ready to write the stories of the characters that had lived and grown in her imagination over a long period of time.  Nothing about her creative process was hurried or forced.  The task of bringing to order “the subterranean labyrinths of infancy and childhood, family history, memories, visions, daydreams, and nightmares” was, rather, organic, the product of years of remembering and mulling.

Brenda Ueland, born only two years after Porter in 1892, understood what Porter knew to be true about the creative imagination.  Ueland warns against constant action and efficiency and a go-go-go frenetic way of being in the world that produces “little sharp, staccato ideas” but no “slow, big ideas.” 

The more people nervously pursue one activity after another, she warns, the less they can think large, magnanimous thoughts, which in turn creates more nervous activity in an attempt to create warmth and meaning where there is none.  One wonders what Ueland would have thought of today’s technologically-induced multi-tasking, which can easily find a person surfing the web, twittering, emailing and talking on the phone in one simultaneous drain of creative energy.

Ueland tasted the vibrant life of Greenwich Village during the 1920s, but she lived most of her life in Minnesota.  There she walked daily for hours around the lake near her house in all kinds of weather.  Ueland understood the power that children possess: the power of “dreamy idleness.” 

She says that we should write like a kindergartener slowly stringing beads on to a necklace, and she has a lot to say about the inherent creativity of children and their ability to lose themselves in their imaginations.  This is why I find such intense pleasure watching my children when they engage in imaginary play, seemingly able to talk to themselves endlessly.  If children are not jerked about from place to place, they will naturally begin to play, to create, and to dream.  They recharge their batteries by living in the present moment, with no thought for the past or the future.

Ueland thus believes in idleness as restorative, as essential for recharging one’s spirit and for the development of slow, big ideas.  We, like children, can restore ourselves “when [we] walk alone for a long, long time, or take a long, dreamy time at dressing, or lie in bed at night and thoughts come and go, or dig in a garden, or drive a car for many hours alone, or play the piano, or sew, or paint ALONE.”

I remember one friend telling me that she did not have time to take hot baths. I will admit here that water is my place of rest and my comfort zone, so almost no evening passes without my taking a bath before bed. Now, when I am walking home from volunteering at school on a Monday morning and am exhausted from the weekend, I do not try to work. If need be, I put my yoga mat outside, and I lie down and listen to the birds.  I no longer feel guilty about doing nothing, especially when I am completely drained, because I know that, unless I rest and recharge, I will produce nothing, or worse, I will produce something that is frenetic and meaningless. 

We all have some time off, some small moments to ourselves, even if it’s at ten o’clock when our children have finally fallen asleep.  But if Ueland is correct, we must never again feel guilty about dawdling, about doing nothing at all, for it is during these times that we are “being slowly re-charged with warm imagination, with wonderful living thoughts.”

Ueland believes that “what you write today is the result of some span of idling yesterday, some fairly long period of protection from talking and busyness,” and I believe that she is correct and very wise.  We might all learn from her and turn off our televisions, computers, and cell phones, if only once in a while. 

Turning off the technology in our lives is part of letting go, of relinquishing our sense of control so that we can live in the present moment.  It is human nature to want to have control in our lives, even control of our creative processes.  And it is human nature to want things to happen quickly and in accordance with our own timelines. 

When I was newly married, I had ideas.  I was going to finish my dissertation, revise it into a book, get pregnant and give life to a child, all within a span of a few years. I never let go of the vision of what I wanted to accomplish, but I did have to let go of my self-imposed timeline.

After more than three years of trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant, my husband and I pursued a dream to adopt a child from India.  When our daughter was nine months old, I got pregnant, and now we have two daughters, nineteen months apart.  I finished my dissertation and my book, but that, too, required more than three years of trying to work things through with my advisor, after which I spent another seven years staying home with my girls and rewriting my dissertation in accordance with my own vision for the book.  Time has passed since I set my newlywed goals.  Twelve years, to be exact.

Everything that I originally dreamed of and wanted to happen quickly has come slowly and over a period of years.  I was often frustrated during those years when months would pass without my being able to work on my writing project, only to face it again with angst because it seemed that I had to begin the process all over again.  But the truth is that every time I had to reread the archival materials that are the foundation for my book, I had new insights, slow ideas that came over a period of time.

I remember one night, during a bout of insomnia, I crawled into the guestroom bed so as not to wake my husband, and all the chapter titles and organization for a large segment of the book came together in one fell swoop. I had not a clue how this had come to me, but there it was, and I had the core of the structure for my book. 

It is so tempting to believe that inspiration comes like a bolt of lightning, but this has never been so with me.  That night in my insomnia bed I did have an hour of complete inspiration during which time I moved my project forward faster than I had in months. But that inspiration came because I had dedicated so much time to my material; for me, for better or worse, ideas form in my head over long periods of time, and I have learned patience from this, as well as gratitude.

I embrace the Slow Web Movement because long experience has taught me that, as frustrating as waiting and slowing down can be for an impatient person, there are wonderful benefits to both.  Raising small children requires that you slow down to meet their needs. And, for me at least, waiting for the finest ideas to come and slowly grow requires the same. 

To support our mission and passion for good storytelling, please make a tax-deductible donation by clicking here:  Wild River Donation.