Writing Retreat

Revised 11/4/2016

     Last weekend I attended a writing workshop that, in some ways, I found transformative. A diverse group in age, geographic origin, style, and more, it was incredibly informative to be immersed in my craft and to be exposed to such variety of voice, tone, and style. Hosted by the talented and inspiring Ariel Gore from the Literary Kitchen, it helped me explore topics that I usually avoid. One of the writing prompts inspired the following which I plan to use as I work on my novel during NaNoWriMo 2016.

On the Altar of Writing

• The perfect journal
• My music playlist/mix tape – music that features in the book
• Museums everywhere – Vermeer, Van Gogh, Velasquez, Khalo, Gentileschi, Cassatt, Matisse, Mondrian,
• The family picture in which I wear a yellow sweater and all of us wear frightened looks
• My passports – past and present
• Rocks from the beach where three oceans meet
• The sound of my mother’s voice reading aloud
• The warmth of my father’s gaze when he was happy
• The loss and gain of moving and moving and moving…
• My mother chewing her lower lip
• My Granny, hand on her cheek, little finger on her lip, and all her memories in one dented cookie tin
• My grandfather’s round belly which is now always with me
• My grandmother’s tight-lipped mouth and saved ration cards. You can’t use the cards if you have no money.
• Uncle Larry’s glass eye
• Long dead aunts and uncles I never met
• Colored pens and pencils
• The grocery money that sent me to junior college dressed as a candy striper
• A long history of women making bad decisions over men and making bad decisions in general
• The memory of dead babies – hers and mine
• Every word I ever read
• Australia, Africa, Antarctica, China, and all the other places I have been
• The sound of my father, my father, my father
• Every word, every word, every word…

I seek the perfect journal; the one which will reveal all the stories I have to tell. Hand-tooled leather. Silk wrapped. Hand-made paper. I have shelves of failed attempts at perfection, some still wrapped in plastic. All beautiful but sterile. They offer no respite from this longing to deliver what waits inside me.

I know only parts of my mother’s story, the parts that intersect with mine. She is puzzle forever missing pieces. I see her as if from the corner of my eye, fleetingly in and out of focus. Gone before I can turn and catch her.

Someday, somewhere in a nursing home, I will show my passports to anyone who stops to pass the time with me. “See,” I will tell them, “I went to China to teach English. To Antarctica to see the penguins. To South Africa the year that Nelson Mandela went prison for life.” I was not always this remnant, this cast off. Men and women came when I crooked my finger or smiled a certain way. 

Not one of them knew I cared.

tbc