One rainy day in November I wreck my antique VW Beetle on my way to meet Bob Ray. Bob is a novelist, a teacher, a man who knows writing. He invites me to writing practice. Writing in a café, using a timer. A technique he learned from Natalie Goldberg in Taos, New Mexico.

Okay, I say. I'll come to your cafe, but I warn you I write about sex and violence, blood and  body parts. Write what you need to write, he tells me.

My first writing practice session takes me to the B & O Espresso Café on Capitol Hill in Seattle. It is December 18th, 1991. There are ten people scrunched around a long table - refugees from Bob's writing class.

We jot start lines on slips of paper and toss them into a hat. Someone picks a start line. "I remember that day." Bob starts the timer. I write for ten minutes. Furious. All those people. Then something happens. I forget about the people and the clock and I forget about where I am and who brought me there-I'm into the words and the scratch of my pen on the paper. The feel of the pen on the paper. Something happens. Don't know what happens until I read aloud, in short, sharp bursts. The words are hot and electric. A new energy rips through me as I expose my fresh new unedited uncerebral loose awful words to the group. If I go to a Jungian psychologist, he'll tell me I'm having an abreaction-a break through of emotional energy when the unconscious pours material through the corpus callosum, bringing image and power and excitement and-truth.

No one says anything. Each of us reads. There is no critique. This is writing practice. This is the first time I have ever been able to induce a creative state, induce it. No waiting for it to come (inspiration), no forcing the words to the page (construction-cerebral construction) but inducing it with these tools: a room, a group of writers, a start line, a timer, pen and paper.

I remember writing and I remember reading but I don't remember what I wrote or what I read. But I do remember the powerful feeling of that first exposure of my unedited writing to complete strangers. Something exciting had happened. I had lost control. I had no control over my mind, the words came. I lost Self. I discovered the Mythic Wave.

Typing it Up
I go home. I type up the writing-"I remember that Al Slater had a tattoo on his belly that he got in Singapore from a Dragon-lady in a red dress and blood red fingernails sharp as the needles she used to ink his skin..." Body parts and blood... I notice this as I type-my handwriting got worse the longer I wrote until at the end it was little more than ink stains on the paper. I decode it. It's as if I read straight from my brain into the keyboard using the ink stains as a mnemonic. As I type, I once again feel the charge and the energy. The mythic wave has persisted through time from table to paper to machine.

I am changed by writing practice.
Never again will I compose at the keyboard.

Making the Pilgrimage to Taos
I practice timed writing for six years before I take Natalie Goldberg's Workshop. Taos in winter. Cold. Snowy. Ice on the ground at Mabel Dodge Luhan house. There are fifty other writers that winter.

We gather, listen to Natalie talk about the Internal Editor, the keeper of the jewels, the editor who doesn't want us to get to the treasure trove locked in the unconscious. Natalie talks about Memory. She tells us that Writing Practice is a river. When you walk in the mist, Natalie says, you get wet. When you let go, you get free. When you let the hand run, you dive into mind. Mind connects to mind. Writing begets writing. Write under all conditions.

I write in the room with the others. I write in clusters of two or three other writers. I write at night. In cafés. In coffee houses. In bars with other writers. In cold rooms, in hot rooms. At the breakfast table. I write. Late into the evening I write. I write and read. Set the timer. Write. Read. Listen to other writers who break down walls, break into God Mind, transform, glow, dive again, peel away the fear and terror, abreaction after abreaction until the whole congregation swirls in new light, new feeling. There are tears and forgiveness, pains and dead mothers. Abusive fathers and incestuous brothers litter the landscape in Taos...In Taos. God Mind riding the mythic wave.

I stare at my own work, see what was wrong before. I had not honored my own living, my own life, my own experiences. I hid behind the masks of characters. I hid behind obscure, arcane images. I hid. But there, in the New Mexico winter, I found that I had to write about what I had done and been and seen. I had to write about the women I loved, and who had loved me. I had to write about the women who hated me and the women I had betrayed. I had to write about the story of life and the lives of the others who had crossed my path. In Taos, Natalie Goldberg gave me the power of Memoir. The source of it all.

A year after Taos, I have written One Year in the Time of Violence, a memoir about my journey in South America with Ramon Barrientos. I have written the core of Memoirs of a CIO (CIO means California Improved Okie). I have written stories, poems, essays, novels. They all come out of Writing Practice. I teach a memoir class with Bob Ray. We teach Writing Practice as foundation. Our writers write memoir using the most powerful tool. With Writing Practice, memoir writers tap into God Mind.

I have changed. Writing makes its own shape. Writing gives me structure, structure gives me story. Writing is a river. Writing Practice has changed me, changed my life, changed my art.

Forever.