On Doing One Thing Instead of Another

Hi!

What are you meant to be doing instead of reading this?

I'm at my desk in my office at the Marion Davies Guest House. I'm meant to be working on poems. Instead, between you and me, I'm

-- checking email,
-- reading a letter from a friend (an actual letter! on paper! from an envelope! with a stamp!),
-- grading some late student papers,
-- looking up movie times for A Star Is Born,
-- watching a video of deer walking into a very blue lake,
-- comparing prices on long sweaters with fringe,
-- texting my sisters, and
-- writing this blog post.

But you know what? Procrastination is my prewriting. Procrastination doesn't look much like the prewriting I learned in poet school -- It has a lot more Arclight seating chart and a lot less "make a list of 20 nouns" than that. It's happy tasks, filling entertainments, that get my mind right to write. I'm not a very disciplined or from-a-dark-place writer -- I write from joy.

So procrastination? The stuff I'm doing instead of writing? Joy fuel. I'm meant to be doing exactly what I'm doing right now.

What if we all felt a little less guilty and a little more in the moment? What if everything we did other than the the thing we were supposed to be doing was exactly the thing we were supposed to be doing?

Here's a still from the video of the deer walking into the very blue lake.

Hope your procrastination is fruitful today. You probably should have a coffee now.


-- Catherine Coan, 10/29/18

Reading, Writing, and Chromatophores

You know that feeling when you encounter something really great and it makes you want to create in the same vein? Like you have a great meal, then want to cook. You see a great painting, then want to paint (or, in my case, apparently, to buy paint, so so much paint). You read a great poem, then want to write.

Today was my third day working on a new book of poems as writer in residence at the Marion Davies Guest House. When I got to my office, I decided to prime the pump -- drink coffee, read a little Richard Wilbur.

Richard Wilbur's work is gorgeous. Sometimes difficult. Generous. Melancholy. Encouraging. It makes me want to write. And it's also a little depressing, sometimes, reading it. Because let's face it, I'm never going to write as well as Richard Wilbur writes. He does things like this, from "The Beautiful Changes":

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

I mean, come on. Write something that great in your entire life. You've done it? Hooray! You're lucky, and good.

So I drank my coffee and read a little Richard Wilbur, and the pump pulled up water: a draft. And I'm at the Marion Davies Guest House to draft. And to drink coffee, and to read a little Richard Wilbur, and to look past a bouquet of waxy white flowers out a window at the nearly empty autumn beach, where a few people hold their Converse and socks in their hands and test the chilly water with their sock-printed toes and decide maybe, no, nope, not to wade in.

Well, next time, then. You don't have to be brave every day.

Room for Everyone

When I read Richard Wilbur, I think

I must write immediately and also

really, why write ever again?

With Richard, you get how the beautiful

changes: as a forest is changed

by a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it.

With me, you get some stuff

about a carnival fish, Love’s Baby Soft,

the idea that to Prince,

mini marshmallows were regular size.

But there is, as they say, room for everyone.

The carnival fish was a guy I won

with a quarter, took home,

and named Carl. He lived for years

before the bathroom funeral,

the long spiral into nothingness.

I might recall Carl’s little orange body

with a smile when I am ninety.

I might remember that for a few days

in 1984, I kept Carl in his bowl

in my junior high locker, which smelled

of Love’s Baby Soft and wet wool jacket.

Carl swam around in there

past and past a page from Tiger Beat

taped to the door: Prince,

resplendent in white, glowing purple

under stage lights, his lace jabot

the envy of the Venticelli.

And after the concert, his assistant made him

an instant hot cocoa with marshmallows

of regular size, to his thinking,

as I attempted metachrosis,

tuning my skin to my locker, trying 

to be invisible or really anything else at all.

-- Catherine Coan, 10/24/18

Welcome to incoming Writer-in-Residence Catherine Coan!

Poet and installation artist Catherine Coan is onsite working on a new collection of poetry in the residency office at the Marion Davies Guest House, October 17 through December 19, 2018. Her public programs take place Tuesdays, 10/30, 11/27 and 12/11/18. All are invited to chat with her about her literary practice during her public office hours, which are 11am-2pm on 10/22, 10/29, 11/5, 11/14, 11/19, 11/26, 12/3, 12/10, and 12/17. Call ahead to the Beach House to confirm availability at 310-458-4904.

Note: Catherine Coan is spending her tenure at the Beach House writing and revising poetry. Coan's visual art, which includes the practice of ethical taxidermy, is a part of her artistic practice, and she discusses this work and its connection to her writing during her first public event in October. However, Coan’s project as Beach House Writer-in-Residence is solely concentrated on poetry and the art of writing. 

Artist's Statement on Ethical Taxidermy:

I practice ethical sourcing in my taxidermy work. This means that I do not use animals who have been hunted or killed for my work. I have relationships with breeders, farms, and others who provide me with animals who’ve died of natural causes. I also sometimes repurpose taxidermy which has already been completed. – Catherine Coan

Catherine Coan is a poet, professor, and hybrid taxidermist living in Los Angeles. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Poetry Northwest, the Seattle Review, and Terrain. Her first book of poems, Aviation, was published by Blue Begonia Press (Yakima, WA) in 2000. Catherine grew up in Montana, went to school in the Pacific Northwest, and has lived in L.A. for eighteen years. She is deeply interested in the wisdom and humor that can be discovered at the intersections of the human and animal worlds, and her hybrid taxidermy can be found at fine art galleries in Los Angeles and nationally. More at catherinecoan.com

TRICKS OF THE TRADE

Hello and welcome from another Saturday at the Annenberg Beach House in Santa Monica.

It’s a gloomy Saturday at the beach, hardly in feeling, but definitely cloudy with a high today of 63 chilly degrees. Not that you can tell by everyone on the sand. There are a lot of young kids today. A small group of boys are playing touch football and the volleyball courts seem to be ruled by a women’s team from a local college. All the bikes from the rental stand are out, so it just goes to show you the resiliency and can-do spirit of Angelenos who would consider this weather ‘storm watch’. We have rain expected next week and you would think it was the tornado that took Dorothy away from the talk at the Du-Par’s early this morning at the Farmer’s Market on Fairfax. I actually heard someone sigh with disappointed concession, “I’ll have to close the windows”. Such is life in paradise. Even my own aged mother was prophesizing, “Ow, my arthritis – there’s a storm coming!”

I find writing here quite comforting. On Saturdays there are small groups of people who traipse through the office on a guided docent tour. I seem to be the tail end of the tour because after a look in at my marvelous tiled 1927 restroom, the docent will talk about when Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst died. There is usually a strange judgement pause when the guests figure out how different in age these lovers were. I guess you can say that my office is the sobering moment of the tour. I am the last thing you see before the video presentation, so there is always one stray who will come back and take another look at the room again after having seen it in its 1927 glory on screen.

The other interesting facet of being here is having everyone ask me what writers do.

In some ways they want to know how I live, make money, whether I sit there for eight hours, etc. But what I think they really want to know is ‘how’ I write.

I’m not one for not having ideas. I try my best to stay full of inquiry in my life. I still do that try to learn a new word a day trick. I save every interesting article and I believe that every great play starts with a really great character. All great characters have great stories attached to them, versus great stories that sometimes lack really interesting people telling them. So, I do a lot of tricks around who people are. I love a book about acting by the great Joseph Chaikin that contains a series of essential questions one should ask a character as they attempt to build one. ‘The Presence of the Actor’ is what it is called. He asks a question that always informs the quality and interest in my characters; what is the one thing that people cannot see when they look at you? I find that question so interesting because each one of us has a series of events, secrets, stories that live in us that make up not only how we live, but how we will move on. In similar fashion, he asks ‘Is there a part of you that has not lived yet and what would it take to make it happen?’

Suddenly, there are mysterious to be solved in plays and how people live in them. I love the amount of information that a character will give you, if you let them. I also love this way of working because I never lose interest in the character or the story. I am always trying to unpack something, to the very end.

Oh, I have a ton of these kinds of exercises and they always come in handy when one needs inspiration, a new way forward or just a trick to get going again.

Especially on an overcast day in Santa Monica.

-Luis Alfaro, 2/10/18

Hello Friends,

Greetings from the Annenberg Beach House in Santa Monica where my residency continues.

It’s Saturday and I am sitting out here on the porch watching the water, the volleyball games and a gigantic group of what look like High School kids try and do a human pyramid. To the human spirit!

Or to beach culture, at least.

I live about thirty minutes from here, but it never fails to surprise me, week after week, how this is another world unto itself. The beach, nature, does something to you, it opens things; pores, lungs and mind. There is such a lovely sense of community next to the water, no one can really own something as large as the Pacific Ocean. It equalizes one and all.

It’s a chilly, freezing California 68 degrees today, but still, the transplants are treating it like a summer day. Lots of folks are playing volleyball and the towels are all laid out on the sand.

I am having an amazing time. It’s been a productive period, generating a lot of material. Not all of it good, of course.

Writing is a lot like cooking; you throw a bunch of seemingly compatible items in the pot and hope for depth, innovation and taste, but a good deal of the time it’s more like; ‘wait I’ve had this before’ or ‘my casserole has become mush’. Nevertheless, the process is the point here and if I knew where I was going, I probably wouldn’t go.

I love writing.

Lately, I have been writing all through the night and sleeping during the day. Maybe because I am writing about the culture of what happens overnight, I seem to have just gravitated to those hours. It’s a mess on my system, as I still have daylight duties, but naps are coming in very handy.

I continue to investigate the state of homelessness in Los Angeles County. The statistics do not lie. According to the Los Angeles Times; “The number of those living in the streets and shelters of the city of L.A. and most of the county surged 75% — to roughly 55,000 from about 32,000 — in the last six years. (Including Glendale, Pasadena and Long Beach, which conduct their own homeless counts, the total is nearly 58,000.)”

So, what does the Beach House have anything to do with that?

The beach house is as much a refuge as it is an experiment for me. It is giving me an opportunity to research, to write, but most important of all, something we never get to do, and that is to dream.

The meditative space. The space for clear and practical thinking. It is one of the most essential elements of art making – the conceptualization period – but one we in our culture don’t give much time to. Partly, because there is so little time!

So, when I come here, I slow down. I sit and think. I look at the art. I look at the sky. I look at the water. And I am in a state of wonder, literally, a kind of dream state of asking. Full of inquiry.

I love the way time passes here. It seems eternal. And yet, there are always people moving through here, on a tour, so they stop time, and stop me, which I find healthy and good. They make me articulate who I am and what I am doing here. I personally think it’s good to name yourself and your process, so I find it refreshing. Lord knows, I ask visitors to talk about themselves all the time.

So, when you come visit; come dream. And don’t feel bad about interrupting me. That’s part of the ball game here. This is a public space, so graciously donated by the Annenberg Foundation and run by the City of Santa Monica.

I feel grateful here. It’s not at all what I expected.

And that’s one of the joys of making art.