The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Devi S. Laskar are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and her poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Dominican University. Thanks for reading.
I am an academic brat; I was born & raised in a college town & married into a family of academics. This is my way of saying that I’m happiest when I am “in school”—even now I jump at the chance to take a poetry workshop. I love the community of fellow sufferers & the camaraderie. No matter what I have had published so far, I can always learn something new, I can always improve. I’m grateful to my family for instilling in me their curiosity. It is infectious & I can happily report that I have caught the curiosity bug, too.
When I was in graduate school for the second time, I was super fortunate to study with the poet Lucille Clifton, a wonderful teacher & a good friend to me in 1990s New York. I carry Lucille’s suggestions & advice in my writer tool belt & employ her suggestions every time I’ve written something other than a check.
She was a big believer in oral tradition, she believed in reading things aloud, she believed in the gravity of brevity. Her signature poetry was capturing enormous depth in just a few well-chosen words. Over the years I’ve studied with many poets in workshops all around America & in Mexico. I’ve added their tips & tricks to my tool belt.
& here comes the devastating paragraph that I must insert into every essay or work of creative non-fiction that I embark upon in journalism world, it’s called a ‘nut graf.’ I am a poet & a novelist now, but for a long while I was a news reporter for daily newspapers. Nut graf is shorthand for the context I need to provide: out of trauma came a path forward.
Here it is: Through no fault of my own, I lost the bulk of my work on May 17, 2010. It’s a long story, but it involved members of my family, a gunpoint raid by armed state police in my Atlanta suburb town home, & six-plus years of legal battles that resulted in our family’s disentanglement from a mountain of lies. Law enforcement took my computer & even though the charges were dismissed against my family, the bulk of our belongings were not returned.
All I know is that a year after I lost all my work I tried to sit down & write a poem & I found that I could not. I listened to some good advice by my friend Robin: she knew I was a visual artist & a photographer & she also knew that I was a big fan of Julia Child. She made me watch the film Julie & Julia, which is the true-life story of the late Julie Powell, a food writer who gave herself a constraint. Powell challenged herself to cook all 524 recipes of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days. In the process of doing this challenge, Powell grew as a person & as a writer. So, Robin said, give yourself a constraint. Make sure that once a day you either draw/paint something, OR go outside & spend a few minutes photographing something; & post it online so that we, your friends, can keep you honest and on track. The key was not to make the art but to caption/title the art that was made. She said, “I bet if you start this practice of capturing beauty, your words will return.”
She was right. I began my #artaday project on June 23, 2011, and I do it to this day. Within a year, the poetry returned, and a couple of years later, the prose returned.
More than 14 years since I started chipping away, since I began anew my writing practice. This month is the publication release of my debut collection of poetry, Self-Portraits Ex Machina (Finishing Line Press). & next April, my third novel, Midnight, At The War (Mariner Books), will be released. After all these years, I have finally learned to get well acquainted with my friend, brevity. I write poems & essays; I have embarked on a memoir about my natal family’s relationship to food—in the wake of experiencing famine. I write novels that can be read at one sitting.
Here’s the thing: I don’t think writers give themselves enough scaffolding as they build their writing practice. I don’t think writers give themselves enough credit. I’ve compiled and coalesced all these writing practice systems. I call it my Spiral Notebook Technique. It lasts a month. It takes a cheap pen & a spiral notebook & a commitment for 10 minutes a day for 30 days. Afterward there’s an oral tradition component that helps unravel the last of the knots. One of the main reasons I want people to keep a notebook, whether they do it for a month or for the rest of their lives, is that I want them to take credit for not just the writing but the thinking. Most writers get deflated after missing a day or two of writing; but it’s not the writing you really missed. You have failed to take credit about the thinking. Most writers are constantly thinking about a poem or an ongoing project. The tip is to record it: in this electronic age with the notes function on your personal handheld computers, we can still take 30 seconds to give ourselves credit.
You should count all those times that you’re thinking because that’s part of the writing practice: writing is not just writing. It’s researching, it’s reading. It’s thinking about things that scaffold your story. It’s taking notes. It’s checking your watch. If you’re taking the time & putting in the effort, then take credit for all the effort you’re putting in & jot down how long you were thinking about this particular character at the grocery store or how long, while you were swimming laps, you thought about this particular character with this particular setting or situation & when you get out of the pool, write it down, send yourself a text. The goal is to take credit. It’ll only help with your confidence. It’ll only help you finish the current project & move on to something new.
For me, the practice is a kaleidoscope in that the picture shifts, but the underlying colors have remained the same.
Enclosed in this process note is a poem I wrote today, using some of the tools in my tool belt (and thanking my friend Robin for being there when I was lost.)
Poem as Bird & Birdcage
They present as song sparrows.
Sometimes I call the robins
on leafy branches & sometimes
I hear the house finches sing or
better, the mourning doves bicker.
Sometimes I can’t hear the northern
cardinals, but I see them when I’m
on my old street. They are far away,
like memories tend to be, & I
watch their crimson wings expand
& collapse against the snowy bough.
Sometimes in my new room I hear
the bevy of Steller’s jay
foraging, but they’re out of bounds
past the peripheries of my old eyes.
At first, I tried to lure the birds
with promises of food & shelter.
They parroted the crows’ mocking
laughter. Then I tried to trade silk
scarves for the horseshoes they often
gifted me. But their plumages dazzled
without my help. I can’t force them
into the cages. They go inside
when they are ready for the door
to close behind them as they perch,
still life, on the tiny swing forever.
This poem is in my forthcoming collection Self-Portraits Ex Machina (Finishing Line Press).
Some words will be repeated at least twice, some three times
like a mantra, some words are there for the free food and some
words
are sitting in the back row, trying to start a forest fire
Splatter Static Superfluous Skinny
Spent Sum Saddened Solace
Shards Sinister Storm Shards
Steel-cut Shame Sedentary Silence
Sari Seismology Stark Standard
Stale Saturate Stupidity Scour
1. S is
for radio ______, not knowing the ______ of the out______ world's ailments,
cluster upon cluster of broken moments and deaths, when the world was at war
and war was ______ with famine.
2. S is for the ______ never lasting long enough in the emptied Ovaltine jars
for the ants to get in: my Didu ______ it over ______ and ______ di______s
alike, because ______ ______, how will enjoy the ______ without tasting a bit
of the ______ underneath? My Dadu's voice echoing from the other room, we are
so lucky to have ______ at all, because there was a time before you were born,
when your mother was a ______ little girl, that there was no ______ at all.
Using a teaspoon to measure out ______ heaps until the glass jar was only
holding Kolkata air and ______ to the open pump next to the koi pond to be
wa___d.
3. S is for the ______ little girl who later became my mother, the girl who
grew up to have a big ______ tooth, a girl who remained ______ throughout the
years and could not abide my fat. S is for the ______ girl who grew up and got
married and had kids of her own and moved to America and had American dollars
in her purse and could eat what ______ liked and was never ______. Because that
kind of ______ never goes away.
4. S is
for Mary Poppins, and watching the
movie again and again, the children cleaning up their rooms while ______ ______
A ______ of ______; wishing I could ______ my fingers to have the toy ______
march themselves back into the chambers of their deep chest.
5. S is
for the ancient porcelain ______, chipped on one ______, matching cup broken
and long retired to the landfill on which rested a few ______ chilies and
wedges of lemon, the kind that gave off the best ______ but wasn't too
______.
6. S is for the ______ from the ______, large crystal formations flavoring all
of the food put before us, often on wide ______ of banana leaves: the mango
lentil soup, the tiny fish in pungent curries with names longer than their
lengths from top to toe, it was years before my parents would realize the fish
they craved so much in India was called buffalo carp in America, and that it
was considered black food in their tiny ______ hamlet, that most of the white
people didn't even know what to do with it.
7. S is for ______ Wars playing at
the Varsity theater playing 8000 miles away, a movie my mother vows never to
let me ______ because galactic battles and the death ______ are examples of
witchcraft.
8. S is for ______ out with my friends and ______ing it for myself.
9. S is for another ______ afternoon at my grandparents' house, the ______
girls rinsing the dishes with extra care because my father was coming to lunch,
Jamai Babu, the ______-in-law.
10. S is for ______, the way my grandmother would ______ when her ______-in-law
would say to her I don't have enough money to come back with your daughter next
year for a visit – her ______ ______, and ______ would always reply,
"______ what you can do. ______ you ______." And he always managed to
bring her back. ______ was right.
Devi S. Laskar is a poet, novelist, visual artist, photographer, songwriter, former newspaper reporter. Her debut poetry collection, Self-Portraits Ex Machina is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in November. Laskar is the author of the award-winning novel, The Atlas of Reds and Blues, and recently, Circa. Her third novel, Midnight, At The War is forthcoming from Mariner Books (April 2026) and her first spoken-word album is coming winter 2025.
Links to three poems that’ll appear in the book:
https://concis.io/issues/winter-2016/laskar-unanswered/
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Maw Shein Win's latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently been published in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The Bangalore Review, and other literary journals. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, and the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Awardee. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and in the Low Residency MFA Program at Dominican University. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a literary community. mawsheinwin.com
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