Laura Westlund

A Reflection for Students

Congratulations to all the participants in the 2022 Edina Reads writing contest—you are all winners. You have discovered a valuable activity, craft, challenge, therapy, hobby, and very satisfying use of your time: transforming the ideas dancing around your mind into ordered words on the screen or on paper. No small accomplishment that, and sharing your work with our community is a generous gift.

My only advice to all of you is to keep writing. In any way, in every way, in whatever way works best for you. Like ice skating, or gardening, or playing the ukulele, you will reach new levels in your writing the more you do it, and you will find out how your creativity develops and the new directions your language takes only by continuing to write. 

There are many ways to flex the writing muscles, and as with every good workout, a variety of exercises is best, as well as the recognition that the workout that is right for you is the one you actually enjoy and do, regularly. Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist’s Way, recommends “morning pages”: writing three pages every day, about anything, in any form, just fill three pages with your words. The benefits of such a free daily practice are multiple, and it doesn’t matter whether the morning pages are the first thing you do each day, or your afternoon break, or an evening habit, or right before bed. Getting those jazzy, jitterbugging thoughts down at any time, whenever you can, is the goal.

Almost every poetry unit I had in school began with haiku, the lovely traditional Japanese three-line poem of 5–7–5 syllables. A friend of mine wrote a haiku every day, about anything—an owl she heard as she walked along the Mississippi River, a delicious piece of cake, mallards celebrating spring in her front yard.

Search for the right words

and seventeen syllables

so your message sings.

A few years ago I learned another poetry form in Athens, Greece. I spent an afternoon in the shadow of the Acropolis, wandering to artists’ studios and galleries. I visited a graphic designer who wrote and printed four-line poems, with each line composed of one four-letter word.

EACH

POEM

LIKE

THIS

Write poetry every day, stretching for vocabulary and improving your agility as you score the best expression. Saying it succinctly is an excellent target, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, acknowledged when he stated that perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Despite the stereotypes of the solitary writer struggling solo, writing can be social and fun, even a party game. Gather around the table, and all write an essay that starts with the same phrase, perhaps “What I wasn’t expecting was . . .” or “It never would have happened if . . .” or “The funny part was . . .” Ready, set, write—everyone! The bonus of writing classes and writing groups is that you get to hear everyone else’s stories as well as write your own.

Other writers would agree with my advice. The American poet Elizabeth Bishop meets Saint-Exupéry’s standard of brevity when she declares “(Write it!)” in her poem “One Art.” Samuel Eliot Morrison reminds us to first live our dreams before we write them, and Benjamin Franklin graciously gives us a choice, to do something worth writing or to write something worth reading. The best route to writing something worth reading is to write, write, write, and then write some more. I look forward to reading your submissions to Edina Reads, and I’m also excited for what you write next, and after that.

Laura J. Westlund is the managing editor of the University of Minnesota Press. She has enjoyed writing classes in the mountains of New Mexico, on an island of Massachusetts, and next to Lake Superior, and she often writes her morning pages after midnight.