“Ask a Writer to Write and the Words Flow”. Sharyn.

Sharyn (of The Kale Chronicles ) has been reading The Kitchens Garden for years and years! I am very excited to have her a guest after all these years. I will tell you a secret – you know how often we associate people with colours. Every time I hear from Sharyn I think of purple, not a dark purple: an old lilting light-filled purple.

Celie invited me to write a guest post about writing. Ask a writer to write and the words flow.

Why do I write? I can’t not. Writing is basic to me, like breathing. I am a naturally expressive person and I grew up with parents who read in the evenings (The absence of a television in my earliest years may have been a contributing factor). I was surrounded by people who read and my mother’s family was a storytelling family: when we got together in any subset of the family we told stories. My father sometimes made up bedtime stories for me and my older brother Kevin. My Mom read us fairy tales and poems from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” I remember the day my mother took me to get my first library card and I got to choose books to bring home. Surrounded by stories in books and stories at the dinner table, I began to make up stories for my elder brother to entertain us on car rides.

I also saw my parents writing, whether it was Dad scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad or Mom writing to-do lists or letters. I grew up before home computers and cell phones: you wrote with a pen or pencil or crayon and answered a phone attached to a wall jack (Contemporary people call these “land lines.”). Long-distance calls were expensive and rare in those days, so we wrote letters to keep in touch with friends and family.

Less benignly, in our household children were often discouraged from expressing our opinions or making known our feelings. I was, however, given a diary soon after I learned to write. I loved having my own book to write in. I did not love hiding it from my brother.

I received encouragement for writing early on: elementary school teachers sent my earliest poems to the PTA newsletter where they were published. In junior high (aka “middle school” and high school I received awards in English and Creative Writing and Mrs.Todd required that her writing students keep a journal. “Journal,” she said, is from the French “jour” meaning day. You may write whatever you like, but you must write every day.” Writing a journal became the backbone of my writing and I kept an unbroken journal from age fifteen well into my thirties.

When I was forty-two I went to Taos for a writing workshop with Natalie Goldberg, the author most known for her book “Writing Down the Bones.” I was attracted to the fact that she included meditation in her workshops and I began attending silent writing and meditation retreats with Natalie several times a year in Taos, New Mexico, steeping myself in her teachings and becoming a member of a community of writers. I’ve studied with Natalie for over twenty years and became her dharma heir (a teacher in her lineage) during the pandemic.

How I write: I pick up a pen or open a laptop and start writing. Write now I am lying on my side in a borrowed bed typing in my email program. I write the words that appear in my head, trusting that they are what I have to say. I “let it rip,” as Natalie would say — I can edit later, although I often don’t have to. I carry a notebook and a couple of pens with me at all times so that I always have something to write in.

What I’m writing now: I keep a blog called The Kale Chronicles, which used to be about seasonal recipes. After a few years I realized that I cooked a lot of the same things over and over and had few new recipes to share and so I let the blog morph into other topics. I started with a food blog. because my writing friend Neola said “I like it when you write about food” and because I love shopping at farmers markets. I had a garden for awhile in San Leandro where I grew tomatoes, butternut squash, lettuce, arugula, chard, berries, figs and dent corn. I planted a fig, a persimmon and a peach tree there. I have also begun a memoir called “Leaving Kensington,” about the process of leaving my home town and my home state at the age of 66.

What else I do: I teach Natalie Goldberg’s writing practice on Zoom. My flagship group is called the Monday AM Practice Group. We begin each meeting with ten minutes of silent zen-style meditation. Then I throw out writing topics and we write and then read aloud to each other. What we don’t do is critique or comment on each other’s writing: the emphasis is on writing, rather than on feedback. I intended the group to be a supportive community for writers. It has been operating continuously for over three years and is a friendly group for people who adhere to Natalie’s methods. I will be taking September off to travel, but I hope to teach a fall quarter in October through December if I have a stable place to live by then.

Publication: Other than my self-published blog, I have self-published songs by releasing three music CDs: “Paris,” “Clueless,” and “The Border Song (Canción de la frontera).” You can see and hear me playing my original blues song “Clueless” with my former partner guitarist Johnny Harper here:

Questions? Please ask. Or check out the blog: http://thekalechronicles.com

Thank you for reading.

Sharyn