It was 1976, my senior year in the future-farmers and future-farmers ’ wives, jock-centric, rural high school, when a friend introduced me to Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America.
I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon. “Excuse me,” I said. “I thought you were a trout stream.”
“I’m not,” she said
Even though I didn’t have any aspirations to write, for this awkward and closeted misfit living in a net of all things sensible, all I could think: Wait, what?! It’s ok to write like this?!
I hadn’t yet been introduced to Emily Dickinson, but while reading Brautigan, I experienced her lines: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Trout Fishing in America took the top of my head off, not because it is refined literature, but because it gave me a hall pass to be slantly weird.
With this revelatory permission, I happily essayed toward my final physics term paper, assigned by Mr. Downey. He was a sad alcoholic who chain-smoked in the back of the dim, gym-sock-scented classroom, while showing endless reels of black and white science films narrated by lab-coated, bespeckled white men. I was emboldened by the dubiousness that he would actually read my paper. So I happily settled in a limping wooden chair in a corner of the library, rapidly transcribing pages of overlapping whispered conversations. … any cigarettes? … bottle of Boone’s Farm … what’s a verb? … greasy hair… saving for an 8-track … and now I’m grounded… I hate babysitting those … don’t need algebra … UFO in Mr. B’s cornfield … stoned under the bleachers …. These pages were sandwiched between plagiarized content from the outdated textbook. I received an A.
Around 1978, two of my closest fellow misfits and I ferried a Drive Away Car from the farmlands of Michigan to the megalopolis of Los Angeles. Not being old enough to legally drive the car, I spent unbroken hours as a hypnotized passenger. A few days into the trip, what looked like the Rocky Mountains began wavering in and out of the distance. Some strange fire ignited in my belly, and words appeared out of a clear blue nowhere, insisting that I write them down quickly.
I thought I caught a glimpse of the mountains,
No, it was just the inverted skyline laughing at me.
This was a new and compelling experience. I wanted more of it. Those lines became my first poetry publication, which appeared on a Kalamazoo, MI bus placard. In my mind I had achieved a major coup!
A year later found me in Portland OR, scrawling a small flurry of letters to the Trout Fishing in America friend living in San Francisco. Equipped with a cheap Bic pen, yellow legal pads, and the backs of flyers for local bands, I filled pages with lyric fragments, complaints about my roommate, and jejune observations, such as there must be more to a life than baptisms and obituaries.
Upon moving to San Francisco later that year (the decision literally made by flipping a quarter; heads I remain in the hometown of Powell’s Books; tails I move to the home of City Lights Books) the writing stopped, after barely getting started. The muse packed up and left in a pout.
In 1980, I attended a poetry class at San Francisco Community College, ready with a beautiful new notebook and great expectations for myself. And yet, I didn’t write all semester. Not a single word. I didn’t want to write anything less than take-the-top-of-my-head-off language in that precious notebook.
At the time, I was renting the upper floor of an almost-Edwardian house in San Francisco’s Cole Valley neighborhood with my first girlfriend. The owner boasted that Kay Boyle once lived in the house. I choose to believe it was true. And yet and still, even living within the walls of this prolific author, I could not wake my writing from its slumber.
I wrote virtually nothing until moving to Sonoma County about ten years later. Having struck up a friendship with a fellow quirk, we’d get together and write in graveyards, in garden sheds, and in junked cars at the old creamery in Bodega, CA (where many painters, writers, and musicians took up residence in the reclaimed space). We’d take turns picking a random phrase from any book and then… go… stream-of-consciousness writing for about ten minutes. Then we’d read our first-thoughts-best-thoughts to each other. Writing this way felt like entering the fifth dimension, a flow state. As Gertrude Stein said about losing oneself:
The thing one gradually comes to find out is that one has no identity, that is, when one is in the act of doing anything. Identity is recognition, you know who you are because you and others remember anything about yourself but essentially you are not that when you are doing anything.
During this time, I returned to college. At Sonoma State University, I had the good fortune to take a poetry class taught by Gillian Conoley. Exposure to a wide range of poetry, along with the accountability of turning in poems, further oiled the rusted writing cogs. I began submitting pieces to journals. My first acceptance was with the Denver Quarterly. I received a $5 check from them and never cashed it—opting to hang on to the original as a keepsake.
Over the years, multitudes of poetic sages have generously shared their wisdom with aspiring writers. What follows is an iota of this collective guidance.
Find yourself a “Courage” of other writers and artists, and meet with them regularly to share the good, the bad, and the ugly drafts. The phrase “Courage of Poets,” used as a collective noun for a group of poets, was coined by members of the Sixteen Rivers Press. I’m grateful for my Courage of Poets as we en-courage each other through what Mary Ruefle refers to as “madness, rack and honey.”
It’s ok if you happen to come to the writing table later in life, don’t let that stop you.
Don’t let the perfection of a strict daily writing practice be the enemy of any writing practice, no matter how irregular. But also, don’t wait for inspiration, because it is a wily beast that may never visit until you sit down and start putting words down.
Allow yourself to write volumes of embarrassingly bad lines.
It’s very tempting to release work into the wild before giving it, and more importantly, giving yourself time to undergo a process of fermentation. After this timeout in the dark, any wobbliness of the poem becomes evident. Then the work of mending and polishing can begin.
Avoid notebooks that are too precious to write in, and use pens that make you happy.
Kill Your Darlings! But don’t bury your deceased darlings, instead keep an X-File–– you never know if they could be reincarnated elsewhere.
Gertrude Stein’s perspective is that the illusion of knowing where one is going risks subduing the writing’s soul in the straitjacket of Knowing:
I do not know the answer. I really do not know, I really do not. I do not even know whether there is a question yet alone having an answer for a question. To me when a thing is really interesting it is when there is no question and no answer.
In thinking about my relationship with writing, I do know one thing, without question: the grace of collective wisdom has shored me up with curiosity and trust in the process of poem-making. Gertrude Stein’s realm of I really do not know, I really do not has long been my favorite place to write from—as if dipping one’s toes into a refreshing stream of consciousness. And yet, for all its wonder and verve, entering this realm can be terribly fraught—there be dragons there! The B-side of the I really do not know mind risks being construed as an invitation by the dodgy Imposter. Here she comes, barging in with her muddy boots and harsh opinions, trampling all things beautiful and true, leaving a rack of dis-courage-ment in her wake. These are the times to stand up, wipe off the mud, and call upon your Courage of Poets.
Marjorie Stein is the author of unRavel, which was selected by Elaine Equi for the 2025 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. UnRavel is forthcoming in May 2026 and is available for Pre-Order. An Atlas of Lost Causes, Marjorie’s first book, was published by Kelsey Street Press in 2011. Another poetry project, In the Hinges of the World, was shortlisted for the Lost Horse Press 2020 Idaho Prize for Poetry. Her work has also appeared, or is forthcoming in American Poetry Journal, Blood Orange Review, The Denver Quarterly, Interim, Mary, New American Writing, VOLT, and other publications. Marjorie lives in Northern California with her wife, where she is privileged to spend time playing with words. More information at: www.marjoriestein.org.
