3 WAYS TO BE ETHICAL IN YOUR WRITING - OR - How to Love your Grandma even after she's gone

NOTE: I know that this post was supposed to be about using the Clearness Committee process for a writing group, and I have that post almost ready, I promise, in a day or two.  Today, though, other thoughts took over.

I am thinking today of a rather remarkable woman named Hermine Bozeanna Merker Forhan.  Born in Dux, Bohemia, she came to this country by way of Canada, and settled in the high mountains of Montana on a homestead she worked with her Irish-born husband, Billy Forhan. She spoke little English, and even years later when I (among the youngest of her many many grandchildren) knew her, she struggled with the language.

She was slight in stature, strong in spirit, gentle in nature.  She worked incredibly hard, suffering the loss of three of her children, the loss of her husband, and challenging and uncomfortable changes in the world around her - all faced with the softest, kindest eyes I have yet to encounter in my own

Hermine Bozeanna Merker (center)

increasingly long life.  I grew up listening to her heavily-accented voice talking, almost daily, over coffee with my mother - listening to her stories of Bohemia, listening to her laugh, watching her eyes sparkle, watching the weariness that lay heavier on her shoulders year after year, particularly as her memory began to go.  She died when I was away at college, and it had been some time since I had seen her.  

It occurs to me that few these days have the experience of direct exposure to someone like her in their childhood or in their lives.  She was an immigrant (one who might not make it into the country these days, and certainly one many pundits and wannabes would like to see kept out) - but she was also one of those who built this country.  A tiny woman, a powerful heart.  I won’t speak here of the conditions she faced when she fled her home country, or the challenges she overcame here.  I am thinking today of her, and of words.  I was in my garden with a friend recently and she said, “look - some plants are coming

up...some….”  …. And I said, “nasty-turtiums.”  She looked at me strangely, and I said, “Nasturtiums - it was what my grandmother called them….nasty-turtiums.”

“Didn’t she like them?”

“She loved them - it was just how she said the word.”

It hit me later how much of my long-lost grandmother has stayed with me -- the comfort in the memory of her kindness, the strength in the memory of her spirit, and even the humor of how she found her way around the language, and her own way to remember difficult words.  Like ‘nasturtium.’  I am fortunate (all of us in my over-large family are) to have known her, to have heard her stories, to have been exposed to her strength and the rich and meaningful arc of her life.  Not all are so fortunate.

Any time I think of good fortune, I am reminded by my upbringing (thank you to both Hermine and my mother, Margaret Ann) to remember also the obligations that good fortune brings - and this brings me to the relevance to writers.  In any fortune that we have - good or bad - we are ethically bound to honor it in our writing, lest we become merely hacks.  Here are the ways that I think we must, if we dare to call ourselves truly writers, meet our obligations to the past:

1. Honor the past.  Honor your past.   This is not simply avoiding the admonition that you might otherwise be doomed to repeat it - it is also a soul-deep obligation to be thankful for the gifts that past gives to you.  Whatever values, whatever skill, whatever inherent generational/genetic gifts it brought to you, those should be reflected in your writing.  My ancestors were all working people - homesteaders, brewmasters, bakers, seamstresses, nannies, railroad conductors, auto mechanics, cooks.  They worked hard - sometimes rewarded for that, sometimes cheated because of it, but always performed their work with pride.  They were honest, they loved to laugh, they cared more than anything about family.  Always I find the theme of the dignity of working people surfacing in my writing, and, each time I notice that, I feel gratitude for the past I have, that I was given.
2. Work as hard as your ancestors did.  Not one bit less.  Whatever they did, whatever they were, it meant, to one degree or another, working for it.  No skimping, no slacking, no sense of entitlement.  Pour that into your writing.  Never let a draft go out without carefully considering every element, every word, every transition, character, and scene.  Find the perfection that your grandmother found in every cross-stitch, that your father took in every polished piece of wood.  Do not be sloppy - your grandparents - and your readers - deserve better.
3. Do not forget.  Tell the truth.  One of the hardest things for working-class people, for people from oppressed groups, to hear is “you have forgotten where you come from.”  It is hard, because it cuts to the core of who you are, and so much in our culture urges us to break away from our roots, to become better than. It is a choice, this breaking away,  and not one you are required to make.  It is entirely possible to become the best writer you can be, and still be the child of your parents, of your culture.  Do not let it go.  Do not bury it.  Tell the truth about it - this is how literature is made. If your goal is to write pulp/popular fiction, then do that - but do it within the truth of the past you know, not some fantasized past.  

There are many ethical obligations in our world - certainly those obligations abound in our current climate, and no less for the writer.  If nothing else, as writers and as human beings, we have the obligation to honor those who got us, for good or ill, to where we now are.  

A New Approach to Writing Groups

Several years ago, I was the focus of a group called a “Clearness Committee.”  In a Clearness Committee, the “focus person” is both the luckiest member, and the one most on the spot.  The “focus person” is generally the one who convenes a clearness committee, because they have a problem to solve, or a decision to make, and are struggling.  In advance of the meeting, the focus person writes up their problem in as much detail as possible and gives it, ahead of

The Mabel Dodge Lujan House in Taos, New Mexico
Where my Clearness Training took place

time, to each member.   In the meeting itself, once it convenes, the members of the committee are only allowed to ask questions, not to comment or advise, and the focus person may either answer, or pass on a question.  Those who attend such meetings usually have training ahead of time, and the questions may only be what are called “Open Honest Questions” designed to help the focus person examine their own thoughts and feelings - never should the questions be leading, or advice masquerading as a question.  That is, no such questions as “Have you tried X?” - or - “Don’t you think the real problem is Y?”  Learning to ask only  open, honest questions is the real challenge in participating in a clearness committee, and takes a lot of practice.  The challenge for the focus person is to be as honest and thoughtful as possible with herself and the members, and to be ready to face thoughts and feelings that may be uncomfortable.

I volunteered to be the focus person for a group in training for Clearness Committees (as I was in training as well) because I was having a problem with a troublesome coworker.  I wrote up as much detail as I could, submitted it, and showed up for the committee meeting.  I had participated myself as a member several times, as all of us in this training were fairly advanced in the process, and had participated in several such committees as well as workshops and discussion groups.  I was prepared.  I thought.

There were, inevitably, a few questions which felt less than completely open, as though they were trying to lead you to an answer preferred by the questioner, and, in those instances you can (and I did) quietly say that’s how the question felt, and the group would move on to the next questioner.  The majority of  questions, though, were thought-provoking and revelatory.  I found myself facing ownership of more of the problem that I had previously realized, and, for the rest of it, realizing the best course was simple forgiveness and letting go.  I was never again distressed or concerned over the troublesome coworkers behavior, which continued unchanged, but which no longer felt relevant to my own job, even though her ire was quite clearly directed at me.

Recent life events have had me reflecting on that experience, and the need for that kind of focused clarity as I go forward in my life.  In addition, I was struck by how much I would like to have a writing group that functioned like a clearness committee - helping me to mine my own goals for a piece, explore the characters as they exist in my mind, and uncover the depth of purpose for a story I’m crafting.  I’ve been in many writing groups, and, as long time readers of this blog will recognize, there is at least one group, though I am no longer attending, that I dearly love.  Such groups, though, tend to practice essentially the same - a piece of writing is either submitted ahead of time, or brought to the group, the group reads and marks, and then gives line editing feedback, pointing out logistical errors or point of view problems, and reflecting on the construction of character, or the mood, or the arc of the story.

What if a writing group abandoned that, and simply asked the author questions, open honest questions, challenging her to mine her own intentions, her own purpose, her own goals for the story, in order to hone them, and hone it to a fine point, to it’s own ultimate clarity?  

In the following two blog posts, I am going to explore  a) the structure of Clearness Committees and how they could effectively function for a writing group, and b) the process of structuring (and answering) open, honest questions, again in the context of how this could work for story/character/theme development for authors.

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END NOTE:  Clearness Committees are a regular practice of Quaker Communities.  I became exposed to them through three years of training in a group developing Formation practices for Higher Education - adapting Quaker spiritual guidance processes to the development of authentic educators and pedagogy.  This practice and the training was begun by Quaker author/philosopher/educator Parker Palmer, and I am forever grateful to him for introducing me to a way of thinking which enriched my life, widened my mind, and calmed my spirit.