West Chester Story Slam diversion

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being yourself, blog, change, Jane Butler, writing

I certainly appreciate all of my readers here and especially those that are very loyal and offer comments, but you might have noticed I have slowed down my postings quite a bit. It’s because I have been changing my writing focus and trying to honor my own sense of what I want to write about. For a long time I’ve done talks to mom’s groups about the importance of playing with our children and actively developing relationships with them. I love doing this and I have tailored my blog to support that. And I will continue.

But I stumbled on the West Chester Story Slam in January and it has changed everything! See my Video tab above to see the stories I have told there.

As a writer I was taken with the opportunity to write a five-minute spoken story that could reach so many more people and get an immediate reaction from them. And, since I love addressing audiences, and since I love writing, I have been focusing all my attention there. This blog has been so satisfying for me as a place to carefully examine my feelings about families and children and, as my tagline suggests, things I am learning while growing up, but the one-way nature of it is isolating and quiet compared to the live audience at the Side Bar Restaurant downtown.

For example. Although I did well the first time I tried telling a five-minute story at the story slam, I tied for first place with two very good story tellers, the second time did not go as well. I attempted to tell a less funny and more serious story and halfway through lost my way and told the audience I had to ditch the effort because I couldn’t regain my footing. Amazingly the crowd yelled out for me to keep going, to try not to give up! They actually shouted for me to try again and not be defeated. I’d love to think that this was because my story was so fascinating but I am pretty sure it was because of the very supportive nature of the group and the spirit of the whole idea of sharing stories in this way. People wanted to see me succeed at what I had set out to do. It might have helped that I very sincerely told them that even I was disappointed because I’d been looking forward to sharing my story. So I did continue and although there was break in the middle while the audience offered counseling, I did complete the task, and felt a resolve to return the next month and get it right. (Which I did with a story about my dead cat.)

So the point is, that the story slam is a place where I have placed great effort in the last few months because I feel a connection with the crowd there. The immediate feedback from them is priceless as I stretch myself to try to tell more broader-based stories.

I’ve noticed that my stories there help me work on my larger project, my memoir, since the stories can be chosen directly from the memoir and honed both for the story slam and for the book. So if you like this blog and if you are out there, feel free to yell from the back row that I should not give up and that you appreciate what I do here, because otherwise I cannot hear you and I am afraid that at the moment the folks at the story slam have got my greater attention.

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If you give a student a choice, you have to honor his choice

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being yourself, Jane Butler, listening, teacher, writing

I am mighty frustrated today by my interactions with my Goth student friend in second period at the high school. My charge today, from the teacher I work with, was to help this gentleman get his essay accomplished since he’d missed a lot of school due to a suspension he fulfilled much of last week.

He wasn’t having it though. No, no interest in working on the essay. His preference, which is the case most days, is to sleep during class. The three adults in the room often, in turn, urge him to wake up. We hand him pens to write with, a book to read, the outline of the essay that was due last week. The other students are working independently, revising their essays, reading the next text or completing a study guide. I offer my help to them, too.

But when I suggest to my Goth student that he and I work on the essay, he says he’d rather read. I say I’d rather write. He says he’d rather read. Okay, I say, read it is. But I feel the pressure from the teacher who asked me to help him get the essay accomplished. I feel the pressure from the student who legitimately chooses to read instead. After all, the entire class is given the same choice, do one of the three tasks at hand: essay, read, study guide.

And he did read, a bit. He read and he dozed, and he read some more.

It’s never a good idea to get in a battle of wills with a student. It is his choice to fail the class. I cannot make him do anything, I can only offer my support. When class is done the teacher, the aide, and me, despite our frustration, appreciate that he did some reading today.

In the end, I gather the spirit of what is supposed to happen here and tell him that maybe tomorrow we can work on the essay together.

He says, yeah, maybe tomorrow.

Guess what, I was thinking about you

Tags

being yourself, express feelings, inspire, Jane Butler, teacher, writing

Funny thing happened today in English class. My Goth friend, who earlier this week literally needed to be woken up from a sound sleep, suddenly was acting oddly interested. I hadn’t planned on it but I told him I’d been thinking about him outside of class. I’d been talking about him to a friend, I told him, for no reason other than that he is a standout in class for having fallen asleep so often.

Now normally all I’ve ever seen of this guy is the crown of his head, and a glimpse of his pale skin glancing past his long black hair. He’s usually hunched over and usually withdrawn, and usually doesn’t talk,

I guess I felt so encouraged with him looking directly at me, in response to the revelation that I’d been thinking about him out of class, that I just kept going. I told him the whole story of my friend, the person I’d told about my sleeping Goth student. I guess I told them both about each other, actually. And I didn’t hold back. My friend, I told my student, surprised me by telling me about how he too once was an army boot and flak jacket wearing teen who was headed down the wrong path, getting arrested and doing drugs, not that I presumed to know what my Goth friend did outside of class.  But this had in hindsight been a kind of reaction to the long slow painful dismantling of his family over the course of many years. Turns out his dad left the family and his mom was so deeply grief-stricken as to appear mentally ill, and it dragged out for ten years before it felt like it ended.

Checking out, getting into trouble, these were ways to carry on in the face of disaster. My friend said he landed in a foster care situation and then his father did something unusual for fathers who leave their kids, he came back and got his wayward son into boarding school. From there he made it to college and onto a path that was healthier. I told all this to my student in a long exposition I hadn’t planned, and so I laughed at how us adults, this friend of mine and me too, project our experiences and understanding onto others. How he had suggested that maybe my Goth student was like him, reacting to issues at home. I had said, who knows, maybe.

By now my Goth student was quite present with me. I wrapped up my monologue and explained about the power of words and why we bother with the writing assignment before us. About how it’s hard to let kids know the value of learning, and how to communicate through writing, but this assignment is, unfortunately, how we do it. I told him no matter how crappy life is or what you do or do not have, communicating with words can get you all kinds of chances – jobs, college entrance, scholarships, girls, apologies, everything. So let’s humor the system, I proposed, and work on this essay together.

That’s when all of a sudden, he started talking, stringing whole sentences together, and looking right at me.

Teens don’t know it all yet

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high school English class, Jane Butler, writing

Yesterday in writing class, eleventh grade AP level that is, the students got distracted after a TED talk we watched of Malcolm Gladwell discussing happiness and spaghetti sauce, by the animated scene of a wrecking ball smashing in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water. The spaghetti sauce talk was engaging, but this other scene was pretty cool too. Our teacher, who was beginning a discussion on the arguments Gladwell uses to make his point, didn’t realize he’d left the  computer on and that what amounted to commercials were running after the TED talk. The kids were too interested in the wrecking ball scene to hear the teacher’s introduction to the discussion and he had to stop to find out what the ruckus was about. One of the students explained that behind the teacher’s back were pictures of a ‘building being destroyed’.

“That’s no building”, I told him, “that is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water”.

I have been to Falling Water and it is magnificent. It is a place I think about often. Really. It made an impression on me as a monument to following your intuition, and of the power of creative thinking, and of the ability to integrate nature and man’s ideas and needs and physical structures, and so many other things. I bought a lily pad shaped soap dish there that I use every day when I wash my face. So to see a wrecking ball, even an animated one, tear it all down was provocative. I was interested in the scene, too!

My student friend sitting next to me had no idea what Falling Water was, and to him it was just a building and it was just fun to see it brought down by a wrecking ball. But it served to show me the funny way life is. How over time I have gathered a collection of experiences that inform me as an inhabitant of our society in a completely different way than this young person, here only a few years, relatively speaking, since I am 55 and he is 16. So much has passed before my eyes and heart since I was 16 that I have gathered a perspective on life that he has yet to gain.

His view of the world is different and fresh and wonderful, and so is mine.

My published writing!

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Jane Butler, teenagers, writing

When I headed off to college I realized that my parents had left me on the doorstep of adulthood believing everything I did was wrong and useless and stupid. My life as a teenager was highlighted by the presence of several doting boyfriends that helped counteract the unintentionally destructive messages my folks were sending me. Even though the boys were kind of shady at the time they seemed great!

Recently a few stories from my teenage years were published in an anthology called Unclaimed Baggage: Voices of the Main Line.  It is presently available on Amazon.com if you’d like to learn more.

Book launch including some of my stories

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being yourself, dreams coming true, Jane Butler, writing

My writer’s group, the Main Line Writers, has put out an anthology of poetry and short stories. I’d love for you to come and support me as I take my first steps into sharing work from the memoir I am writing. My piece, Rolling in the Meadows of Our Minds, tells the story of my first date, at the age of fourteen, with a boy I have only met moments before on the telephone. Revelations follow as I discover a social world far different from the one I know on the vast isolated estate I live on miles away, where my family seem to be serfs in a feudal kingdom. How can I ever go back after that?

Come join us at our book release party at Nestology (a cool pop culture store) in the King of Prussia Mall this Sunday, 27 October, from 1 to 3 pm! 

Here’s our facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com//mainlinewritersgroup

and here are the details of the book launch:

https://www.facebook.com/events/428094900630423

UNCLAIMED BAGGAGE: Voices of the Main Line Writers

Baggage. We hide our treasures inside it when we travel. But sometimes fate makes us leave it behind. It becomes unclaimed baggage waiting for a new owner.

Inside this collection are 21 treasures from the authors of the Main Line Writers Group. Open Unclaimed Baggage and you will find stories of bravery and horror, loss and reconciliation, ghosts and demons, racial violence in Malvern and death in Amsterdam.

Hope you can come and cheer me on. If you cannot and would like a book, let me know and I’ll get you a copy ($9.00-ish) or you can get a copy for your Kindle after the launch. Wish us luck!

Jane

My secret life as a writer

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express feelings, Jane Butler, writing

Writing is a way to get something that is in you, out of you. 

There once was a time, thirty-five years ago, when I went to work every day and marveled at how possible it was to do virtually nothing all day and have it go unnoticed. What I did instead of working was sit at my desk trying to get rid of my extreme feelings and still act normal, because I guess I didn’t feel awful enough to not care about appearances anymore. I just sat at my desk writing. Writing is a way to get a thing that is not exactly concrete, from inside your body to outside your body. Apparently the act of putting a representation of it on a piece of paper feels cathartic. Writing is a way to unload feelings and express them because they no longer reside in your body and mind, but instead on a piece of paper where they can be seen by someone else. You are no longer alone if you put it on a piece of paper. So that’s what I did. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.

The weird thing is though, that I was so miserable, and so insecure, that I dared not write anything anyone would ever see lest they judge it or be upset by it or react. I couldn’t risk letting anyone know what I was thinking, or feeling because who knew what terrible thing would happen then. But yet I kept writing and writing because I had to. I had to get it out. So instead of writing words and stringing sentences together that might mean something, I wrote only the first letter of each word that I was thinking at the time. No kidding, just pages and pages of pure gibberish made up of the first letter of each word I would have written if I’d had the nerve to say out loud on paper my thoughts. Instead they were kind of encrypted. To protect the innocent.

I was guilty of nothing more than having extreme feelings I couldn’t manage without some way to cope. So writing it was. I coped through writing. I probably ate or burned the potentially crackable coded pages I wrote endlessly before I found more productive ways to carry on.

So all of this is to say that I feel better now.  The proof of that is in the idea that I am working on a book about my life where I write down and share all kinds of things I once felt sure were too secret to say.

 

Maybe the purpose is to just keep trying

Tags

being yourself, fear, Jane Butler, psychotherapy, relationship, writing

It is a crazy long and slow process of getting myself out of the cloistered existence I am so good at living. I have lots of excuses for staying hidden away, but psychotherapy has been my way out.

So of course you’ll understand that even though it may sound terrible to you, I gladly went to a group therapy weekend last year. A whole weekend of working out issues, with the help of strangers.

I spent my time that weekend trying to figure out why I wrote what I think is a very good book and have not tried very hard to get it published. We talked at length about what was holding me back from taking the next steps since I clearly care about this project and have worked hard to make it as good as I can. The large underlying problem is that secrets were the mainstay of my childhood so telling anything that might be secret to the world feels wrong. But an entire memoir seems pretty deliberate doesn’t it? I kept telling myself that sharing my ideas was somehow going to hurt people including myself and so I couldn’t possibly publish my book. Also there was the problem that the people who’d read it so far knew me and therefore their rave reviews were probably because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings, or liked it because they knew me personally. So people I was meeting for the first time that weekend agreed to read it to help dispel some of those fears.

I shipped three copies out into the mail to people I’d just met. And then yesterday, months later, a package arrived back to me. It was the manuscript and these words, I finished your book… I cried at the end and I can’t remember crying at a book before. I was so touched by the continual effort you extended to connect with your family and the love you did and did not share. Guess I’m being selfish applying your experience to my own life but I have been at a point where it’s been easier not to connect with certain family members than to risk continually coming away hurt and crying! But you have planted the idea that perhaps the purpose of life is to keep trying.”

Planting seeds of hope for building or rebuilding relationships is exactly what I wanted to do and I thank this reader I barely know for spelling it out, and sharing it so I can see better why I am so engaged in this labor of love, and that I AM able to convey this important message.

It is corny to say I felt the love at the Philadelphia Writer’s Conference?

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change, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, love, Philadelphia Writer's Conference, psychotherapy, writing

Here’s something I don’t understand so help me out and tell me. I know how I got out of being an unhappy person unable to connect and engage rationally with others, it was psychotherapy and lots of it. I have often thought that it is a form of love, sold for those who can pay and whose hearts are not clamped shut so tight they cannot be methodically and incrementally pried open by a professional. In general, in life, I’ve noticed other people who seem to know, claim that love is the power that matters.

It is the most powerful force on earth. I don’t understand how the prolific writer Jonathan Maberry got out of his issues, and he mentions a few, to share love freely as he does today. Or how anyone changes for the better. A profound transformation has to occur. It’s not casual, you don’t just think, oh I’ll embrace the concept of love now. Something more provocative has to occur. It must have for him, and for the others at the Philadelphia Writer’s Conference last month, because love is indeed what I felt there. The leaders were tossing it out so I snagged some and carried it home.

It is a powerful thing that finds its way to hurt and injured folks and changes them into people who extend themselves and who care and who try to make love grow. Maybe I am always just in the mood for love, but whatever it is I am struck by the power of the idea that benevolence, generosity, kindness, patience, understanding and the like can move mountains in me.

I leave myself messages…forgiveness and love

Tags

being yourself, exchange student, joy, relationship, writing

Sometimes I find I’ve left myself messages. Breadcrumbs to follow to where I need to go. Apparently it is too scary to go directly from point A to point B so I must leave myself writings, blog posts, or essays, a whole book I’ve written, or stories of my life before, so that I can find them and read them and know the truth of what I must do. I must get myself out of the isolation I live in even though to you out there it must look as though I am terribly engaged. I am but I’m not. I must share the book that I’ve written. I put it on the shelf for some years and decided it a great exercise, but not anything anyone needed to know. That was a trick. It seems I needed time to catch up in my heart with what I wrote from my head. Leave myself some breadcrumbs to follow. Stories about how I used to be lost in the world so I can see that I am not anymore.

My boy came back from a year away in South America, yesterday. Waiting for him at the airport was like waiting to give birth. I tried to be calm, not make a scene, that’s what he asked for, so okay, but let’s let it be whatever it is. So we waited and watched, grew anxious, and then thrilled at the sight of him, and grabbed him to us in a tight four-way hug all around, all of us together loving each other like I have never known before. I did it. I created a family that loves out loud, that cares and misses and loves together. I am sure of it because when I laid eyes on him tears burst to my eyes and I thanked god for the gift of this day. This day where my world is fantastic and joyful and great. I thanked god as the plane landed, that I have made it to this point in my life where I can see the changes in myself, perpetuated forward through my children.

When I read some of my stories I am shocked at what I see. A girl so lost and alone and confused. I left myself these stories so I would have no way of convincing myself it happened any other way. Seeing my son come home to us after a year away, us all truly joyful on his return, is a message to myself, a breadcrumb to follow. I have come from far away and live among others now and can see that my kids love me and love me and love me. I am not lost anymore.