Today in Angel Fire, it was rainy with wild wind gusts. I ventured only to the post office to mail letters, and to walk from the house to my barn office. What was I going to post tonight in my self-imposed daily Maintaining-Happy missives?
When I checked my email this afternoon, I had one from a gal I’ve been corresponding with at the Amherst Writers & Artists. AWA is an organization whose mission is to support the voices of established and emerging writers, to free silence and marginalized voices, and to promote respect for the artist in all writers through the use of the AWA method, developed by Pat Schneider. At one time, I was an AWA Affiliate. And I led workshops out of my home and at WomenCare, a safe haven for women recovering from cancer, in Soquel, California. Basically the AWA method is a writing prompt method of writing. At some point, I let my affiliation lapse.
As part of my MFA in creative writing curriculum at Iowa State, I am taking a pedagogy of creative writing class, and teaching a Micro-Memoir class in the OLLI program this spring. It has caused me to entertain ideas of how I might teach in the future, and prompted me to email the AWA and asked if they’d take me back as an Affiliate. Welcome back. Pay the yearly dues, I was told. Then today, the gal I’ve been corresponding with asked if I could remember where I had taken the training, and with whom? My tax records I thought, and serendipitously I still had receipts in my 2007 tax files.
My American Girl Doll, Kit Kittredge. My husbands’ granddaughters don’t care about their dolls anymore. We’re pictured below on an Easter Sunday.
As I hoisted my tax box on top of the other boxes it has sat upon for three years, I noticed the box under it. That box contains my American Girl Doll clothes for writer/reporter, Kit Kittredge. (When my husbands’ grandkids were into American Girl Dolls, I had to have one. Kit resides on my bookshelf here in New Mexico.) I pulled the box out, and opened it, taking out the boxes with Kit’s dresses, her camera, notebook, and typewriter.
Some of Kit Kittredge’s clothes and reporter tools
But under those boxes, I spied a plastic container containing my Radio Shack tape recorder, and a pile of tiny cassettes. One had the notation: Wayne Dyer, Sept ’07.”
While I lived on Maui from 2002-2004, I had opportunity to organize several events with Dr. Dyer for Unity Church. And while I lived on Maui, I tried several times to interview him for Maui Vision, a holistic magazine I wrote a column for, and edited. Of all the self-help Gurus I met while organizing events for Unity Church, Dr. Dyer was, in my opinion, the most authentic. He was kind and generous with his time, gracious, and “The Whole Enchilada”—a phrase he used during his fundraising campaigns on PBS.
Pictured with Wayne Dyer after his fundraising presentation for Unity Church on Maui, circa 2003.
Slipping the tape into my Radio Shack recorder, I hit play to find the batteries working, and Wayne’s deep voice saying, “I write in the middle of the night when everyone else is sleeping. Around 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning.”
“Wow!” I said.
“And I write that early uninterrupted, because Rumi said, ‘the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.’ You are closest to God,” he continued, “when you have the least interference—no noise, or distractions. You know how in your dreams, you can write and write and everything flows perfectly. And then you wake and try to recapture it. And you can’t find that effortless perfection because your mind gets in the way. You have to create a sacred space to write. I have a candle near mine.”
That day I finally got to interview Wayne, he listened to my adoption story, my desire to write a memoir about it, and gave me all sorts of writing advice.
I’d forgotten.
Until today when a request to provide proof I’d taken an AWA training led me back to a box with a tape that contains the voice of Dr. Wayne Dyer.
