I’m just absolutely thrilled to be kicking off National Poetry Month with best-selling poet and artist J. Ruth Gendler. “A bright new talent whose work is at once reminiscent of James Thurber’s drawings, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Zen koans” (Art Kleiner, in the San Francisco Bay Guardian), Ruth’s books include Notes on the Need for Beauty, Changing Light, and The Book of Qualities, of which there are more than 250,000 copies in print. If you follow me on twitter or facebook, some of the post below may sound familiar; when I first got this post in February, I couldn’t help but put pieces of it out to share. It’s an extraordinary story, and a lovely, lovely, lovely and inspiring post. – Meg
As a patiently impatient or impatiently patient person, being a writer has provided the perfect curriculum to teach me about waiting and the difference between procrastination and gestation. Over the years I have come to accept that my books work on me as much as I work on them. I can’t rush them but I can cultivate the discipline of paying attention to the whispers of inspiration. There is so much that is not straightforward about this process. Often I glimpse images, ideas, titles for chapters and books, years before I am ready to write them. It is a process I resist, accept, and sometimes trust.
Thinking and feeling have always been joined for me. Thinking without feeling seems too cold and logical; feeling without thinking seems overwhelming. Bringing thought and feeling together was essential to the writing of my first book, The Book of Qualities, which personifies 75 qualities like Contentment and Fear, Anger, Truth, Loneliness, and Courage. Written in the form of poetic vignettes, Qualities are described as everyday people who go to our schools and live in our neighborhoods, drop in for dinner and bring us unexpected gifts.
People ask me how and where I came up with the idea for The Book of Qualities, and are surprised that the roots go back to childhood. In fourth grade our silver-haired teacher, Mrs. Planteen, read to us from a book of color poems called Hailstones and Halibut Bones,which concluded: “The colors live between black and white in a land that they know best by sight but knowing best isn’t everything. Because colors laugh and colors sing, and colors dance and colors cry…” She asked us to write poems about colors, drawing my attention to shades and tones, starting an investigation into color that continues to this day.
Instead of writing the one assigned poem, I wrote three. After blue, came pink and red. I don’t remember the poems I wrote, but I do remember the blue ink of the cartridge pens staining our fingers as we wrote out our blue headings, blue names, blue dates, outside the window the blue sky of the Great Plains. Around the same time I made up a story about the store where they sell Qualities. More like a trading post or library than a department store or supermarket, one could go to the store where they sell Qualities to taste, try on, and sample various qualities. From time to time as a teenager I made notes about the factory where they manufacture facts and the image warehouse where they store belief systems.
When I was around 24, a friend noticing how stressed I was asked, how did I nurture myself, 
where did I find pleasure? I went home and wrote about a Pleasure who is a gossip and a flirt, who drinks too much and distracts me from my work. Over the next months, I wrote eleven qualities. Another friend suggested that I might make a book of these pieces, and I pooh-poohed the idea. I told her that I had wanted to write books when I was younger, but now my focus was on making art–even as I worked for small local publishers where I was learning more than I realized about the process of bringing a manuscript into print.
Flash forward a few years. An important relationship is ending, I have been in a car accident as a pedestrian hit by a hit and run driver, my publishing job is gone, I am doing bits of freelance work and feeling quite lost. I decide to go to a local poetry workshop and need to bring some work. I dig out the qualities I had written a few years earlier. Before I know it, in a six month burst I start about 60 Qualities, not thinking about writing a book, not planning which Qualities I am going to write about, often feeling like I am listening to a radio which is turned so low I can’t quite hear it, and the volume control is not working. I think of lines, “X drinks pure water,” or “Y builds slow fires but they burn for a long time,” and wonder what Quality belongs to that line. Joy or Ecstasy, Love or Wisdom?
During this process I feel like an explorer trying to penetrate underneath the layers and stereotypes to experience the Qualities more directly. I am turning my skills in investigation and observation inward, focusing on the textures and colors of the emotional landscape, calling on my training as both a journalist and an artist.
The Qualities sit in notebooks while I return to graduate school to study art therapy/art education at the California College of Arts and Crafts. I write a paper on Women and Creativity that deepens my understanding of the rhythms of creativity and women’s struggles to create. I start editing Qualities, typing and re-typing on my electric typewriter, looking out the window from my second story room. I re-write and re-write and re-write. Listening and waiting and listening more. I begin sending batches out for feedback, and finally decide to submit a manuscript then called Cups, Bowls, and Baskets, a phrase from the Intuition Quality, to ten publishers. If no one takes it, I can publish it myself. After all, I have been working in publishing for most of my twenties, my close friend Marian O’Brien is designing book covers for UC Press, I am acquainted with the great friend of small publishers Malcolm Margolin, and I know that I will need editing (which is a fact many people who go the self-publishing route forget.)
By now I have decided not to finish the graduate program. Four rejection slips into the process of submitting the manuscript, I commit to going the self-publishing route, naming my press Turquoise Mountain Publications. Marian and I comb through eleven of my sketchbooks looking for drawings to accompany the words. Eventually we choose 35 line drawings. Because we are designing the book ourselves, Marian is free to come up with a format that is playful and elegant, with full page and half-page drawing as well as seven wraps where the drawing and type are integrated. (Remember this is before computer typesetting!) The title of each Quality is written with a brush by the calligrapher-poet Sandy Diamond. At the last minute, I am convinced to use a drawing of my own on the cover, and I change the title from Cups, Bowls, and Baskets to The Book of Qualities.
The Book of Qualities comes out in the fall of 1984 around my thirtieth birthday and has been in continuous print since then. The turquoise-covered Turquoise Mountain edition went through five printings, and I sold 35,000 copies–an accomplishment that seems astonishing in today’s publishing climate. It was a very organic process; each year for the three years I was publisher I sold more than the previous year. I sold German rights and the rights to the Quality Paperback book club before selling the book to HarperCollins in 1987.
The Book of Qualities has been translated into several languages, including a recent Swiss German release, has been excerpted in psychological journals and educational publications, quoted in sermons and speeches, adapted for theater and dance. In 2010, after being in print for 26 years, Qualities made it into the New York Times when Robert Sapolsky quoted two in his essay on metaphor.
Just as writing the Qualities profoundly changed my life, creating something that has been so durable and useful has opened doors that I didn’t know existed. The whole process has deepened my intention to make work that offers sustenance and delight.
The Book of Qualities also led me into my work with children and carried the seeds of my third book, Notes on the Need for Beauty. Visiting a friend’s son’s eighth grade class, I invited the students to personify Qualities that were helpful or challenging, and soon found myself making classroom visits in California, Washington, and Nebraska. I became a California Poet in the School and a strong advocate for the importance of honoring the imagination and creativity in children. Again and again I have seen that human imagination is not rare, but it is precious and needs nourishing.
One of the Qualities that seems most misunderstood and trivialized is Beauty. I ended the Beauty quality with the lines “Beauty doesn’t mind questions and she is fond of riddles. Beauty will dance with anyone who is brave enough to ask.” Turned out that was just the beginning of my third book, Notes on the Need for Beauty, a contemplation and celebration of the Beauty that responds to our courage and our invitations, the Beauty that dances at the edges and center of our lives, the Beauty that builds bridges between the senses and the soul.
Even though I am still impatient, I do know my work takes a long time to gestate. The Book of Qualities had its roots in the poems about colors I composed in fourth grade; Notes in the Need for Beauty had its origins in The Book of Qualities. Much of my current art work focuses on images of bowls, the bowl of soul which holds food and water, light, air, and language. And yet, it is in the first pages of The Book of Qualities that I wrote about the Wind who carries big blue bowls of rain with her and Pleasure with her silver bowls full of liquid moonlight.
In our world with its ever increasing emphasis on speed and measurement, it is hard to trust the rhythms of creativity and soul. Yet, I know from my bones the gifts of sustained and patient attention, the value of being willing to stay with images for a long time, and the reciprocity of creative endeavors. – Ruth
