“My biggest joy is improvising—and there is no right or wrong.” —Alison Luterman
Preview: Episode 64, Talent: Making the Most of What You’ve Got
“We are encouraged to do the things we are already good at,” says our guest Alison Luterman. “That gets set in childhood. It is harder to do the thing you have been told you are bad at.” In this week’s episode of Emerging Form, we talk with the poet, teacher, lyricist and playwright about her recent essay in The Sun in which she explores how a childhood wound around singing became an invitation to work through shame and find joy in a creative practice that didn’t come naturally to her. It’s an inspiring episode for anyone who has ever been discouraged from creative play because they “weren’t good enough.” As Alison says, “It’s not magic, it’s coordination. Some people get it when they are kids, and others don’t get that, and we have to hook up that apparatus as adults. And it can be done.”
Alison Luterman's four books of poetry are The Largest Possible Life; See How We Almost Fly; Desire Zoo, and In the Time of Great Fires. Her poems and stories have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Sun, Rattle, Nimrod, Salon, Prairie Schooner, The Brooklyn Review, The Atlanta Review, Tattoo Highway, and in numerous other journals and anthologies. She has written an e-book of personal essays, Feral City, originally published through SheWrites.com, now available through audible.com), half a dozen plays including a musical The Chain about a chain of kidney transplant donors and recipients), lyrics for a song cycle We Are Not Afraid of the Dark, and is currently working on two different musical theater projects as well as new poems and a longer version of her recently-published essay about learning to sing as an, ahem!, older adult.
What We’re Reading and Listening to:
Rosemerry:
I am so grateful for the new anthology Imperfect II, Poems about perspective: An anthology for middle schoolers. If you know a young teen or preteen who loves writing or who is struggling with thinking they are not enough, this is a great anthology with poems about meeting our feelings and finding new perspectives.
For a dose of real life, straight coffee talk, poetic framing and connection, check out the new weekly morning show, The Sentimentalist, a thoughtful and encouraging conversation through youtube featuring our past guest, the wonder-full Jack Ridl (episode 54).
Christie:
I recently read Emily St. John Mandel’s well-known novel, Station Eleven, about life after (and at times before) a terrible flu pandemic swept the globe. The novel was written before COVID-19, and I could not put it down. What really struck me was how it tickled a desire to think about life and society without so damn much technology. I’m eager to check out the HBO series based on the book.
After reading Station Eleven, I pre-ordered Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel, Sea of Tranquility, and I devoured it in two days. I loved so much about this novel that features time travel and pandemics, but my favorite parts are the descriptions of what it’s like to be an author (particularly a female one) on book tour. I’m quite sure that many if not most of these anecdotes come from Mandel’s real life. I can’t wait to read Mandel’s other novels.
The Dark Sounds
—Alison Luterman
Asked to improvise a song
I step forward,
lower the bucket of hope
into a moonless well.
Years of being wrong
rise up in my throat
as the dark sounds release,
a pack of sooty doves,
a wailing wall.
Someone borrows my breath for a minute,
a woman, wrapped in a night-colored shawl,
who throws her head back
sending wolf-cry and raven-croak
out and away
through rivers of air.
Then she turns on flat
calloused feet
and disappears back into the forest.
The notes follow her,
black birds that have soared across steppes
leaving no tracks,
women howling in childbirth,
and the surprised yelp of the newborn
coming into all this for the first time.
Donkey bray.
Endurance song.
Lullaby of dirt and snow.
—Alison Luterman
A Note About Paid Subscriptions:
First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Starting this month, only our paid subscribers will receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support.
This week, we talk with Alison about morning rituals (including sun before screens), singing, what to do with all those journals of morning pages, how to nurture the seedlings of our creative ideas, the benefits and detriments of doing many projects at once, and how all creative advice is not one-size-fits-all.
If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can go now to our website, EmergingForm.substack.com or by clicking the button below. Thank you!
Two Questions:
(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)
If you have been discouraged from pursuing a creative practice in the past, what do you WISH that person had said to you?
What have you learned from pursuing a creative practice in which you have little natural talent?
My response to question number 1. How I wish they would have realized that they needed to say hardly a thing. All they had to say was Tell us about what it’s like for you, doing this. Then they could simply lean in and take an interest in what I loved. Taking an interest doesn’t require knowing a thing, not one thing. They would have learned from me. All they had to be was interested.
In response to question number 2: oh how I love to draw. I have no desire to do it well in the eyes of the knowledgeable. I don’t even wanna know much about drawing. I just want to take my pencil and go where it goes because it always, every single time, takes me where I’ve never been before.