Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (review)

Lush,sensual, and delicious are powerful words that can aptly describe a piece of fruit, a woman's body, or a style of writing that draws from within one's very core. Gayle Brandeis combines all three elements in Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write. In the preface, the California author and poet relates how a high school writing exercise, which involved experiencing a single strawberry with all of her senses, launched her life's quest to unite body and word, language and flesh.

"As we open our senses our capacity for connection with the world outside and within us increases tremendously," says Brandeis, "and we open the way for some amazing writing to pour forth." She defines fruitflesh as our intelligent and spirited flesh. "It is the soma, the place where body and mind and spirit have no division. Our bodies are the repository for all our experiences, all our emotions, all our truest stories. We can capture our own wholeness, our own integrity on the page, when we allow our fruitflesh to speak."

The structure of the book follows the growing season with chapters, meditations, and exercises that mark each stage in the evolution of a piece of fruit, or a piece of writing, from seed to full ripeness. Though Brandeis speaks directly to women, the text and exercises can be adapted to writers of either sex as well as any genre. She encourages fiction writers to use the exercises to get to know their characters in a deeper way. Poets may use them to jump-start a poem with a body-centered image or sensation. Journal writers or essayists may gain a greater sense of self-awareness to enrich their material. The exercises range from a winsome romp with a pineapple to teach us to be playful with our writing, to a more thought-provoking use all of our senses to define home, be it a place or a state of being.

In the delightful segment "Emily Dickinson's Foot,"Brandeis encourages all writers to take heart from, rather than be intimidated by, writers they admire. It is advice she has certainly followed, as nearly every page of this book includes a marvelous quote, a paragraph, or an entire poem by one of the dozens of highly acclaimed writers she admires. So, we get to hear Annie Dillard telling us to give voice to our own astonishment, taste the fruits of change in Lesley Dauer's poem "Aging," smell the scent of a muse in a poem by Rita Mae Brown, see Katherine Mansfield's example of synesthesia, which is a blending of the senses, and learn to become more tactile in our writing as Virginia Woolf teaches us how to embrace the prune.

Brandeis has concocted an ambrosial approach to bring writers' seeds to fruition. She also stresses the importance of being relentless about the creative process even more than the finished product, "allowing whatever wants to emerge, emerge, pulsing on the page, to be groomed into respectability later, if the occasion calls for it." Most of her exercises would work equally well in a classroom, in a writing group, or in the hands of a novice writer, though she offers a fresh source of inspiration to seasoned writers as well.