Bakken Reflections from VWRS...

*The quotes I’ve included are only what I was able to jot down from listening, so I can’t promise they are verbatim!

“You have to sit in that room and hope your muse shows up.”  —Chris Bakken

Here Chris was speaking about the little time we sometimes have to write, and how he wrote one of his works by always going to his office and writing (or attempting to) every friday morning. I love listening to other writers talk about writing. Writers always seem to acknowledge that writing is just hard, and if you want to be successful, you have to keep doing it. Even if some days all you do is sit and stare and think.

“Find the thing that you never do and then do that. It’s the best thing you can do for yourself as an artist”  —Bakken

I loved hearing Bakken say this. It reminded me that the sense of comfort writers establish in their work is most valuable when it’s shattered. I think what excites me most about writing is trying new things, releasing myself from my own expectations, going out on a limb, and being okay with the fact that what I produce will most likely be shitty. I realized that in my first creative writing class here at Whitman, and I think it’s the most liberated I had felt in a long time. Being reminded to push myself outside of my own writing patterns brings me back to that place of relaxed freedom, and makes me authentically want to write.

“filling up her soul-well again” —Bakken

This line of Chris’s work really stuck with me. He used it when describing his friend who spent nine months out of the year giving all her energy to provide support to people living in destitute situations. For her, spending the summer in Greece, surrounded by beautiful things rather than tragedy, allowed her to fill up her “soul-well” again. Thinking about that woman prompted me to write the beginnings of a poem:

Broken down and unbeautiful,

the wild dripping out of her,

trying to remember the flavor of fullness,

sipping at their suffering,

knowing not to take too much,

knowing in a few months

she gets to be touched by beauty,

again able to taste her bliss.