Johnnie Mazzocco Contributes

Johnnie Mazzocco

Writing Through the Body

           One of the many things I love about my writing practice is that it affords me access to my subconscious on a regular basis. I love knowing I can dig deep and mine endless treasures from within doing something I love.  But sometimes I’m slow, and it takes awhile for me to recognize a great idea, even when it’s right there in front of me.

            As a college writing professor, I always told my students to write with their whole selves. I said this over and over. Every term, to every class. Some students would nod, but I don’t know if they – or I – truly understood what I was asking of them.     My eventual understanding would take twenty years to come to light, long after I experienced flow in my own writing on such a deep level that I was permanently transformed. In fact, it saved my life.

            While I was working on the first draft of my novel, Miranda’s Garden, many strangely “coincidental” events occurred that aligned my life with my main character’s life in ways I could never have dreamed. In short, we became a team: I would tell her story with integrity and honesty, and she would help me navigate the most difficult time in my life.

It would take time and reflection to understand that while writing Miranda’s Garden, I had achieved a level of flow that purged me. Since that time, I have been able to lead a more authentic life and have stayed steady on my path of personal evolution. All thanks to my writing. 

Many years after that experience and after creating my Divination Deck based on the seven main chakras of the body, and becoming familiar with the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Candace Pert, I finally had my eureka moment, and the light of my intuition would swell from a soft, but persistent, glow to a full on beacon.

            Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian psychology professor, is known for coining the notion of flow: that experience of performing an activity we love and feeling the rest of the world fall away, time becoming non-existent. Pert, a pharmacologist who was doing significant work in mind/body medicine before she died in 2013 and who became dedicated to understanding where our emotions come from, discovered that they’re generated at nodal points in our bodies in the exact location of the chakras. This led her to make this declaration: “Our body is our subconscious mind.”

And then it hit me: If we’re to write in flow, we must access our subconscious, and if our body is our subconscious mind, we must write through the body.

            After this revelation, I was finally able to create what my intuition had been nudging me to do for nearly two decades: my Writing Through the Body™ process that utilizes the seven main chakras to help others banish writer’s block, achieve flow, and tell their untold stories.

Some days, it’s hard to not think about how many more people I could have helped in the twenty years it took for me understand what my intuition was saying. But truth be told, I wouldn’t have been able to teach the process the way I do now all those years ago.

What I love most about teaching Writing Through the Body™ is showing people how they don’t have to wait for a fickle muse and that they have the power to open themselves up in a deep way to tell more profound stories and to live authentically, with purpose.

Johnnie Mazzocco is a filmmaker, writer, editor, and writing coach, and the creator of Writing Through the Body™. She made a 30-year progression from the mid-west to the west coast and resided in Oregon for 26 years until 2014 when she sold all her belongings, except for what would fit in her car, and set out to house sit in pursuit of her dream: to become an entrepreneur and live her passion and purpose. Little did she know she would find her home at her second house sitting job in Truckee, CA, where she's currently living another dream: to reside in a cabin on a lake in the mountains. Johnnie is fiercely committed to living a life of authenticity, and it is her mission in life to help others do the same. She holds a B.A. in fiction writing, an MA in English and film studies, a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies, and an MFA in Digital Arts. 

Writing over the Ego

What keeps us from getting the story onto the page—the one that will knock their socks off? It’s that internal editor, the voice on your shoulder that has no backbone, no faith in your abilities, no nerve.

 If you’re writing a memoir, beware of this sniggeley little creature often referred to as the ego. It’s worried about what people will think, of hurting Aunt Gladys’s feelings—that the whole damn family is going to be mad. Never mind all that because if you’ve made the decision to write your story, you have to make it an honest story. No one wants to read the version of your life where you take out all the juicy stuff—the substance—and everything just sails along and you’ve done all these interesting things and met all these interesting people, but no one ever does anything wrong. No one has kept you up at night, betrayed you, or cheated on you. What about all those lies you told to get into graduate school? That’s going to make a great backstory, let people know you’ve done some brash business in your day—but maybe you just don’t want anyone to know about the real you. If that’s the case, put the manuscript away and take up painting.

       Trouble is, painting has the same danger zones. If the artist makes calculated brush strokes instead of letting the paint brush fly across the canvas without a thought about the critics, the result is flat. The painting lacks authenticity and does not evoke emotion or pull anyone in because there’s no real emotion behind the brush strokes.  It’s too calculated.

      Tell the whole story and don’t self-critique as you go.  Now I’m not saying go ahead and out Uncle Albert, I’m suggesting that the best writing flows freely from a place where the ego and the critical mind gets out of the way, steps aside and lets the story onto the page. Later on, during the second draft, make sure the reader knows what you know. Look for ways to improve your exposition, correct your grammar and enrich your story.

       The best writing is in the rewriting, but the first draft is a blank page upon which you are channeling your story. Knock that twerp off your shoulder, relax, and let the words flow from the deepest, most honest place in your soul with all the talent you have for stringing words together and engaging your readers. It’s a wild party, and you can clean up the mess later.

 

~Camille

schoolhouse2@comcast.net

Storytelling on a Radio on a Ship

On May 24 I pulled on my yoga pants, a fraying shirt from a long-ago running race, and the pair of boots I used to wear on snowy days in Minnesota but that I now clomp around in when I fear I might be going somewhere where something heavy might get dropped my toes. May 24 was a writing day.

So, this writing day was not going to be about actually putting pen to paper but about supporting the greater community, the greater writing community and the greater arts community.
I traveled to North Portland, to Green Anchors, a boat dock just north of the St. Johns Bridge, where a slate-colored 150-foot tugboat built for World War II was being transformed into a studio for the Steam Radio Syndicate, an audio recording collective. Specifically, the project's leader and his merry band of volunteers, among whom I was about to be counted, was readying the ship for its ambitious inaugural event, a four-hour live radio broadcast of music (a set orchestra and a lineup of bands big and small) and storytelling.
As a writer and editor, I was most interested in the latter--that Portland transplant Brian Benson, whose memoir is soon out from Plume, would be reading fiction alongside Joanne Rideout of the famous Ship Report radio program out of Astoria, Oregon, among others, and that they'd be doing so on a converted ship, one had been scheduled for the scrapyard, was so exciting to me.

Repurposing an old ship is a lot like wordsmithing, metaphorically, at least. I selected right-size pipe from the pile onshore and carried the tubes--some a little dinged but still serviceable, some jazzed up with fittings--to the ship, where they'd be used to repair a railing. I pulled electrical cable, choosing the right kind for the job, daisy-chaining when I came up short, taping the ends to protect against the weather. I might have been finding previously cut sentences that hadn't been useful in their original homes but would beautifully fill in gaps in new stories; I might have been writing transitions and shoring up the weaker parts.

And, of course, I was interested in being a part of an exercise in diverse storytelling. We may create alone, but expression only happens in relationship.

Learn more about the Steam Radio Syndicate


Kristin Thiel is a writer and editor based in Portland, Oregon. She reads from her most recent publication, an essay in the collection Spent: Exposing Our Complicated Relationship to Shopping, at Powell's on November 4, and fills her days helping others with their words, editing for independently publishing authors, publishing houses, and universities and other businesses. She can be reached at kristin@kristinthiel.com
 

An Eaux-mage to Karbohemia

Karbo Bakes Another Cherry Pie

...and makes my Oyster Stew!

How do we write? Why do we write? Where do we get the job done? These are the questions and discussions and buzz on every writing website on the planet. We write alone in our bedrooms in our pajamas,  at coffee houses, buried in laptops, at the kitchen table ignoring plates of stale pizza. We're alone in this, lonely mis-fits with our noses in our belly buttons, answering the call of the voices in our heads. We say thank-you or good-bye; we figure it out and make sense of the senseless, explain our meaning of life. But, if you are as infinitely clever as Karen Karbo, you create a series called Kick-ass Women and you let the women of your dreams do the talking. Alone? Shit no. You're having a party with some of the most entertaining women who ever lived: Georgia O'Keeffe, Coco Channel, Katherine Hepburn, and most recently, Julia Child. There are pies in the oven. I can smell them baking in my own corner of cyberville. Someone's in the kitchen with Karbo and she invited the entire writing community over to hashtag, LiveLikeJulia. Pick a chapter and go for it. Indulge your longing to hang out on social media sites and type in cute things. And do this about Karbo's upcoming and fun-filled episode of life with Julia. And I mean LIFE, because this woman knew how to live by the magic of her convictions. She believed in butter, cream, and everything French and trussed and caramelized. It was genuinely fun to grasp an enlightened concept of life, and I have become wiser for it, by living like Julia Child in chapter nine of the new book, Julia Child Rules. I was able to at least consider planting my flag in front of my true, if unworthy, self and not worry about keeping up with those who are more popular, more successful, and more deserving than I. That would be most people. But Julia didn't worry about such matters, she simply hogged the spotlight, liver spots and all, with glee. Living like her for a week or so helped me forget, for a moment, the worries of the adult world in which I live. She will always be a part of me and has joined the choir in my head. One day in the future Julia will appear to me, flour covering the front of her apron, and remind me to write the truth, my truth.