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Odd Lots



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Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to PinterestThursday, October 27, 2016

Writing Retreat

Revised 11/4/2017

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

e 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


Th You will find
  • 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 f
rom 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.



ail ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookWednesday, September 14, 2017
Time Flies


Especially when writing has been such a struggle. I haven't produced anything usable

all summer and it's been so frustrating. So to help inspire some creativity or resurrect

some memories, I've started working on a playlist of the music that provided a

soundtrack to my childhood.

When I was very young, my father had eclectic taste in music with a strong leaning

toward rockabilly and country. My mother favored the melodramatic and anything that

told a complete story. One grandmother enjoyed gospel music and the other the parlor

music of her youth.

So here are some of the songs I hear in my head when I'm writing. With a little luck, I'll

soon have links to all of these.


  •  Dead in the Coach Ahead
  •  The Little Old Ford
  •  One Saturday Night in a Barroom
  •  Nadine
  •  Honky Tonk Angel
  •  Moon Light Bay
  •  Detour
  •  Mairie’s Wedding
  •  Rising of the Moon
  •  Wild Side of Life
  •  Only A Bird in a Gilded Cage
  •  Lydia, The Tatooed Lady
  •  Teen Angel
  •  Whispering Hope
  •  The Band Played On
  •  The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze


Thanks for reading.


editing and coaching services quoted upon request



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