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.
