I met Jonathan Neeley about two years ago. We were introduced to each other through our mutual friend Hector who, like us, is also a writer and an Ultimate player. Since then, we’ve discovered that our lives and our writing endeavors have been intersecting in multiple ways. We’ve been writing alongside each other in our respective writing groups, talking more and more about the creative process, and supporting and challenging one another in our work. This post is the first installment of a new writing collaboration as old as writing itself—one that employs pen, paper, stamps, and moves at the combined pace of handwriting and the US Postal Service.
2/22/23
Dear Jonathan,
I must admit, after talking about letter-writing for some time now, along with the fact that we speak to one another on a regular basis, I find myself going back to square one in a sense—asking myself: What makes this form of communication unique? And in asking the question—even in the simple writing it down, I remember. I’m reminded of the same thing I feel when writing anything by hand—the physical connection between myself and the world. And now I’m thinking about the world—the world of the mind, the body, the inner landscape, the thoughts and feelings and stirrings that are flowing through my body, through this pen, received by this legal pad, which will soon enter another world of the US Postal system, will pass through the hands of human beings I will never see, get sorted into stacks, run through machines, marked and shuffled, get transported on trucks by people listening to music, or podcasts, thinking about their own worlds, bundled with envelopes of similar size—most of them junk mail, bills, credit card offers, flyers, and the occasional other personal letter. And then, after a few days, it will, by yet someone else’s hand, be placed into your mailbox, or perhaps pushed through a slot, where you will find it, read it, whereupon these words, this ink, this paper enters your interior world, where some kind of internal process is happening—a digesting, a metabolizing that will lead to yourself picking up a pen, responding, and sending something back.
I’m thinking about a game of catch—how a simple spinning object moves across time and space carrying specific information unique to the person who threw it and unique to the world of that person in that moment in time. A game of catch in slow motion. I love that the process, for me, allows me to surrender to the process itself—a process that feels like it moves at the pace of nature. In the same way that the natural world unfolds in myriad invisible ways, there is something that seems to draw out a kind of invisibility in the letter-writing process that is not so easily accessed in other, faster, more urgent or time-efficient modes of communication. All of this is making me think about The Overstory (Thank you for recommending it to me!) which I have become immersed in, am loving, am becoming lost in—or rather, I am losing my hurried sense of time within, which is being replaced by the unhurried, patient, almost invisible pace of the growth of trees, and a reminder of how my own human scale is but a small fractal within a much grander pattern in the unfolding of life . . .
I wonder what will unfold here, in our correspondence. I’m noticing, also, how that thought—wondering what will unfold—takes me into the future, how it makes me pause for a moment, how it breaks the flow of the writing, and how in that pause, the that many possible directions appear, and how all those possibilities also bring with them the possibility of overthinking—which I am prone to do, which I really do not want to do, and which is why I am writing about it right now. I am reminding myself to follow my own rules—to keep the pen moving, to stay in the flow and out of over-thinking. To stay grounded in this moment, in this activity. I’m thinking about how we have many things in common—as Ultimate players, as writers, as writers writing about our relation-ships with our fathers, as men interested in our emotions, in healing, in personal growth. Somehow, naming what this is to me feels important in this initial letter, and within this slightly on this challenging edge of inhabiting this intimate space of sharing personal letters while also letting our readers in on the process. It feels exciting to me and also somewhat vulnerable which I think is always the case when starting something new and unknown. I wonder how it is for you, how you are thinking about it and how you are approaching it. For there’s a difference, I find, between talking about what we think or anticipate will happen and what actually happens. Which is one reason why I love that prompt you use to start Writing Groups: “Right now, I am.” I’ve noticed that while sometimes I am clear about what I want to write, beginning with those four words has the power to snap my attention into the present moment, almost like a meditation bell, where I often find that what emerges from my pen is not what I thought was going to emerge.
I’m finding myself curious about your own relationship to writing now, how it has evolved, or even how you approach teaching the kids—is it at a middle school? Now that you’ve been doing that for a little while, I’m wondering what impact it has on you, how it might influence your thinking or even your process. I’m remembering how when I first started teaching drawing, it wasn’t until I started having conversations with students that I became aware of how I think about drawing. And now I’m wondering how our co-creative correspondence will change the way I think about collaboration, creativity, writing, art, closeness, distance, and all the spaces between.
Thank you for your willingness to pick up the other end of this tin can telephone.
Sincerely,
This is Letter #1 in an ongoing handwritten correspondence with my friend and fellow writer Jonathan Neeley.
To read Jonathan’s response, follow this link to Letter #2.
Good Pain 2023 Spring Tour
On April 1, I’ll be performing in Denver, CO to share Good Pain and facilitate a Wall Sit Drawing workshop at the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT) Annual Conference. If you are in the Denver area, please reach out!
I am honored to be sponsored by the Schneider Museum of Art to bring Good Pain to the Oregon Fringe Festival in Ashland, OR. Two evening performances, April 27 and 29.
And to round out the Spring tour, I’ll be performing Good Pain in Portland, OR at the Alberta Rose Theatre as a fundraiser for Ultimate Peace, an international organization that confronts cultural division and societal inequity through its groundbreaking ultimate, community-building, and leadership programs for youth. Proceeds from the performance will help fund Camp Ultimate Peace this coming July, where I will be teaching performance art and coaching ultimate to youth from diverse communities all over North America.
New Writing Group begins April 6
Enrolling now. Click here to learn more.