“It feels like you have written yourself into a corner.”

This comment, offered in total sincerity by a fellow participant in my writer’s guild responding to a short story I’d shared with the group, really struck a nerve. I saw myself with long twitching whiskers, beady eyes, and a scraggly tail, pawing my way through one of those laboratory mazes, a little mouse stuck in a corner, unable to find the cheese. Not a helpful image regarding my efforts at writing.

I tell people that writing is new to me, an excuse to allow for my mistakes, but in truth, I’ve been writing since I could hold a pencil. Left-handed and clumsy, I was still eager to make something happen across a page. I struggled with letters, but images came more easily, and playing with images on a page was pure pleasure. Drawing came naturally as if instinctively inspired to make a mark. In the competitive, quick-to-label atmosphere of first grade, I was dubbed the class artist. That label held, and holds still, many decades later as I continue to paint, sketch, sculpt and create in my studio. I did eventually figure out letters (still working on numbers) and began using words to write about my artwork. I wrote and published several academic papers in a few journals. But was I a writer? No, not yet, at least in my head.

To be able to accept the label “writer” I needed to experience the same sense of inspiration I feel when I am painting, express something deeply personal in a way that hopefully communicates the same feeling to the reader. Like with my painting, I have trouble calling what I do “art” unless it moves somehow beyond the level of being purely craft that follows step-by-step directions rather than following my heart. Otherwise, it is no different than a 1960s paint-by-numbers kit.

Words were always somewhere in my paintings and my drawings, and soon the words took on a life of their own. My narrative art evolved into narrations on a page. My earlier writing on art that was accepted into journals was craft, and well crafted, something I am proud of, but I wanted to push it further beyond just reporting, infuse more of myself somehow into the mix. Be a writer.

In the past I have painted myself into corners plenty of times, started something that goes in a direction I don’t like, or worked on a painting that flops around but fails to fully come to life and be what I intended, but I never felt the same degree of stuck that I do with writing. What do I do with my painting that is so different from my writing?

I am courageous in the studio, immune to the fear of failure. I learned that bravery from an instructor in art school. He had us doing charcoal figure sketches on one single page, over and over, the whole semester. The model would strike a new pose every ten minutes. After the first week our overlapping sketches disappeared into a mess of dark lines, and in time we were blindly sketching black charcoal across a black page. A lot of students walked out of this class. The rest of us kept sketching the model.

On the last day the instructor shouted out, “Turn the page!” The results were extraordinary. Loose, confident strokes and bold capture of form, figurative sketches unencumbered by the nervous need to get it right. Each new figure, now on its own page, was a marvel. It was as if our hands knew what to do when left to their own devices. It was the best class EVER.

So why not do that with my writing? Shake it up. Turn it upside down. Backwards. Inside out. They are words, not delicate crystals, they can take it. Like my hand knowing where a line should go across a black page, trust the words to settle where they belong.

The first class I took at Project Write Now was Poetry with Laura Cyphers. I don’t do poetry, which is why I took the class. Something new. I struggled, I wanted to sound poetic, but I also wanted to make sense and make something amazing, but the results weren’t.

Reviewing one of my less-than-spectacular poems, Laura suggested, “Try rewriting this from the bottom up. Make the last line the first, and so on.”

I did, and strangely, the poem lost its lockstep and worked much better. I began to see how the techniques I use to free up my painting, such as turning the canvas upside down. stepping back and taking a hard look at what is really there rather than what I wish was there, using my right hand instead of my left, challenging the status quo in some way, could also work when applied to my writing. Dump that maze upside down, liberate that poor little mouse stuck in a corner and let those words confetti out across the table. Do the very thing that we did well as children but sometimes forget to do later on: PLAY. It worked for me in first grade, and it still works for me now.