What are your -ologies?

How to analyze and expand your writing

What -ology or -ologies do you tend to gravitate toward?  What well do you frequent, filling your bucket again and again, that allows you to mine the depths of your writing life?

I have a few solid contenders: biology, zoology, psychology and mythology.  These four are my tried and true.  Of course, I haven’t consciously sat down and decided to focus on these four areas, because although I am a nerdy introvert, I’m not THAT nerdy.  But in working to understand my writing process better and being reflective, I have recognized those are where I draw my inspiration from.

Analyzing -ologies is helpful because I can pivot and find new ways of thinking and exploring my writing practice if I’m aware of where I have trod a lot before and what unexplored areas lay before me.  It’s exciting and challenging to try subjects, research, voices you haven’t before; maybe you create something entirely new, maybe you come up with a hybrid of what you’ve done and something else.

Remember my first poem?  The one I felt such guilt about copying—the grasshopper who stepped on the elephant’s foot and made him cry?  The one that I changed into an ant and a chimpanzee?  I think it’s pretty common for kids to be interested in and drawn to animals.  My exploration in zoology continued into high school, as one of my favorite subjects to write about was our dogs.  I remember one poem I wrote for a night course I took through our local community college (no title):

Puppy loving     p u p p y     l o v e

is lying with his

m u z z l e        m u z z l e d     in my lap.

Lapping at my face      I           face     his        gaze

and see his soft, brown nose

            i   n                 e

c  r                  k   l

with a yawn.

(That was much easier to type on a typewriter and yes, I was in my e. e. cummings phase.)

After I left grad school and got my first “real” job, I moved to Virginia.  My then-best friend gave me her cat to take with me; we had bonded and she wasn’t happy living with her wife and the other three animals.  Now, she would be in a one-animal household and I would have a familiar companion 800 miles from home.  This was the first time I had lived with a cat and I was learning her habits and quirks.  I found myself wondering why she behaved certain ways—did all cats do this or that?  I wondered if her ancestors would have been around to be worshipped as a god in Egypt.   How would her life have been different?  With those questions I jumped from zoology to mythology and I wrote a poem which was eventually published years later (The Binnacle, 2014):

Domesticity Undone                          

Wary of water, she steps

into a small puddle collected

on the windowsill.

Shocked, she backs away

shaking her paw with conscious spasms.

When she goes to drink from her dish

she dances, padding her paws,

gently easing forward.

The whole of her neck arches over the dish,

her tongue touches the tippy edge

on the opposite side of the bowl.

She drinks, finally.

It was so dry in Egypt,

lounging around the Nile,

baking in the oven of sand

and never needing moisture.

It came anyway,

unexpectedly, all that flooding;

thousands of her sisters washed away.

She remembers, fears the water

is tricking her, intent on

swallowing her whole.

Her stillness, her half-opened mouth and the way

her fur separates itself haunches to back

as she lingers over the bowl;

the only threads that save her

from sinking.

It’s a fun exercise to look through what has motivated your writing—what -ologies run like a thread through your work.  And what is left uncharted as of yet: genealogy, sociology, medicine, history, geology, chemistry, alchemy?  I know, I know, not all of them end with -ology, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth exploring! 

Here’s to digging deeper into our work and exploring new ways of writing, new ways of saying what needs to be said.

(I never say what my artwork materials are, so I’m going to begin doing that. The first picture is homemade walnut ink on watercolor paper, the second is watercolor and embroidery on watercolor paper.)