PROMPT: A well-worn scrap of sandpaper. Often I put out a collection of objects for writers to choose from, but this particular object is apt to draw a very different response from each person. It reminded me of my husband, whose shop I confiscated it from, and the many things he's made for me--including dinner!
Writing from Sandpaper
His smell whiffs from
the bracken of grit halted
on this scratched scrap.
It’s the part of him that's
buff and press and snow—
his pattern as it smooths its way
into my tables
my shelves
my chairs.
Into a cabinet of earrings singing secrets.
Into an island where herbs chiffonade
PROMPT:A sound and the emotional response it calls forth in the writer. The sound I chose was a coffee grinder, but others may work better for you--a tea kettle whistling, an alarm clock or clock chime, a train whistle, footsteps on stairs or a sidewalk, a knock on a door, a dripping faucet or hose, splashing in a pool, rain. I usually suggest several but allow writers to choose one of their own. Or you could go around the writing table and ask each person to contribute one to create a list of sounds all can draw from. Write in the direction of uncovering something new about yourself; see if a metaphoric quality emerges. Concentration on one of the senses may make you more aware of other sensory data as you write. For instance, my example begins with sound but appeals to sight, taste, smell and feeling as well. My title also serves double-duty as first line of the poem, but it's not necessary for yours to do that.
Beneath the Roar of the Grinder…
Beneath the shoosh
and splutter
of scalded
spit-out water…
Beneath the
schmush of the scoop
like the child’s
tin-painted shovel in sand…
PROMPT:The title is the prompt, and the weather today may work to stimulate your creative juices. But you could really substitute any weather: three times of sun, three times of rain, three times of wind. Or change "times" to "kinds." Or switch out the idea of weather for another noun, like "mothers" or "houses," "yards" or "jobs," "cats" or "husbands." The possibilities are, literally, endless. I actually wrote this poem in summer, at a workshop I led in my home several years ago, which goes to show it may be easier to romanticize winter when it's 90-degrees outside. You decide!
Three Times of Snow
First there’s the dancing snow (probably in November but after
Thanksgiving): big flakes that light on my outstretched tongue
or melt on still-warm earth.
Then there’s the driving snow (usually in January but always firmly
in the New Year): sharp crystals that blow me inside by the fire
and turn my thoughts to cocoa, tomato soup, grilled cheese.
Finally there’s the packing snow (which could come any time but
I cross my fingers and wish for): to build forts and mold grenades to lob at
my brother’s head. And when he runs inside, cheeks red, to tattle
this is the snow I lie down in and spread my wings.
PROMPT: From my Nov. 6, 2011, workshop at Nora Branch of IMCPL. First we read the poem “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks and talked about the idea of negative capability in writing (see a related handout under the "Resources" tab), Then I asked attendees to write about something that had presence and meaning in their lives because of its lack. Here’s what I wrote…
A psychic I met in grad school said she saw me with three children AND I would write three books. It took me most of the years between then and now to realize the two were the same thing: books are a writer’s children. She saw me that way, and I’ve been saying I wanted to be a novelist since the fourth grade, and yet to date, I’ve written no books, though I have managed to raise one human daughter.
I have written a great deal of nonfiction and a lot of this and that, including disparate parts of two novels. I have a vague idea for a third. My problem is I can’t seem to sustain the work—to string together the many pieces and fill in the blanks between them. I’m not getting any younger, either. Last birthday I logged 55 years this incarnation.
Sometimes it’s life that gets in the way: helping my husband, my daughter, my dying mother, my elderly father, my difficult mother-in-law, my sick cat. Sometimes it’s internet shopping and computer games. I always have an excuse.
Each of my two novels in progress has its own mini-library of books on geographic or time settings. One novel takes place in present time in an invented town in the Finger Lakes Region of New York, while the other is set in Ancient Rome circa the reign of Caesar Augustus. The wall of my studio holds a large, framed image of my muse. It’s the reproduction of a fresco from a home in ancient Pompeii entitled “The Poetess.” The artist painted her head and shoulders in a rondelle, and she holds a book of wax tablets and a stylus, ready to make her mark on them.
Some people say she is Sappho, the famous Greek poetess from the Isle of Lesbos, but there’s no evidence of this. For one, this young woman is dressed as a well-to-do Roman. For another, she is too young to fit our idea of the middle-aged Sappho. My young woman is not far out of girlhood—perhaps 15 or 16. Her pose is a typical one used by itinerant artists and chosen by families wishing to immortalize someone, often someone who has recently died.
So into the vacuum of identity surrounding this I've projected an identity and made her the central character in my novel set in ancient Rome. I see her as someone who actually lived and whose family we know a great deal about, though we know little about her specifically. I see her as Sulpicia, the daughter of the orator Sulpicius, granddaughter of the jurist Sulpicius and niece to the general and statesman Marcus Valerius Corvinus Messalla, her mother’s brother and a contemporary of Caesar Augustus.
Sulpicia is important because her few poems are the only poems written in Latin by a woman to have survived the centuries. We know from historical sources that educated Roman women did indeed write, and fragments of writings by women in other genres do exist. Her poems survived only because someone tucked them into the final volume of poems by Tibullus, published after his death. Tibullus, one of the Latin elegists, was a friend of Sulpicia’s uncle, Messalla, a patron of the arts. Sulpicia, Tibullus and Sulpicia’s younger brother are thought by historians to have been part of the circle of writers Messalla helped support.
It's thought she wrote her poems around age 15 to 19. But all we know for sure is what’s in them: She had a great and forbidden love with someone not of her social station. After that, she simply disappears. Scholars postulate she either married and wrote no more or died. My novel is about what happened to her—in my imagination, of course. I identified with her for all time when I read these bold and insistent lines, addressed to her lover:
This day has brought a love
it would shame me to conceal—
won by song and prayer
Venus gives him to my arms
and all that she promised comes true.
Let my love be told by the loveless,
my letters go unsealed
and any read them who will.
If I sin, I glory in sinning:
I will not wear virtue’s mask—
the world shall know we have met
and are worthy, one of the other.
She lived. She loved. She wrote about it. She disappeared.
Will I do the same?
I have imagined often what it will be like to finish my days on earth and not finish my stories—never to complete what I set out to do, what I told everyone I wanted. Will someone like me, centuries from now, discover my bits and piece and imagine what connected them? What’s missing? Will she wonder what I wonder of Sulpicia? What happened to her? Where did she go? Will I speak to this future writer from my grave of paper wads and empty ink cartridges, as I believe Sulpicia speaks to me from her grave of wax tablets and papyrus?
Someone in a writing group I attended once asked when I finished reading an excerpt, “How is it that someone with your talent hasn’t already written many, many books?”
The honor she paid me touched me deeply, and my eyes clouded with tears because of how it filled me up and emptied me out all at once. The answer I gave her works for all the questions in this essay: “I don’t know,” I whispered and bowed my head. I felt shame.
I still don’t know. I feel like a failure most of the time, but I keep writing something.
A Postscript
Part of what sets apart my writing workshops is that I take the same risks I ask participants to take: I write along with them and read aloud what I wrote at least once in each session. When I finished reading this piece, again there was a hush. I let the silence ride. Eventually a woman spoke. "I thought I was the only one who felt that way," she said. Others voiced and nodded agreement.
It helps to know we're not alone on this journey. Sulpicia had the Messalla Circle. I'm glad to have all of you. Love is not the only thing it shames us to conceal.
Please enjoy this recording of Gwendolyn Brooks reading "The Mother."
Listen to an interview with humorists Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel, or read the transcript, as they discuss their collaboration on the just-released novel Lunatics. The story is told by two very different characters in alternating chapters.
Here's how it worked: Barry would write his chapter from his character's perpsective, then send it to Zweibel, who wrote in the other character's voice. Whenever the latest chapter arrived in their email inbox, they really never knew what to expect and had to move the story along with whatever the other person had given them.
You can try this for fun, and who knows? You may end up with something you want to shop around to publishers. This pair suggests you choose someone you get along well with but whose writer's voice is the opposite of yours. This opposition is what will give the story its energy and keep readers interested.
They also said they only met about twice during the whole process, that all the "work" was really done by email. So if you have a writing pal who doesn't live close, this is a fun way to keep in touch!
PROMPT: Choose a poem you think will work well as a prompt. At the E. 38th St. IMCPL branch in late October 2011, we started with "Fire" by Joy Harjo from her book What Moon Drove Me to This? Cross out every other line (it doesn't matter whether you start with the first or second line) and write lines of your own to fit with the remaining original lines. Then, cross out the remaining lines of the original poem and write more lines of your own to go with those you already wrote so that what you end up with is a poem that's wholly yours.
Here's what I wrote...
Between the Lines
No one hears
a voice unspoken.
Each person must walk into
the timbre of her own breath.
Every One must dance into
the beauty of her own resonance--
flirting, flitting from word to word to word
like lovers wrestling in the damp night.
A body must journey into its deepest throat
no matter what the cost. See--
the cancer cut from inside my neck
was not the end but a new start. My voice
goes on and on even as I sleep
like water rippling in moonlight.
My dreams, my pen become a tongue
for those weary of talk. I am become
a breeze that bristles dry autumn leaves
to ground. I mulch the earth's madness
with whatever laughter or tears
I launch into the darkness.
PROMPT:Write about your associations with a particular food. Here's what I came up with...
Ice cream scoops and churns its cold, creamy sweetness through memories of my family as we grew up together.
“I want to ride with Uncle Jack,” my cousin Beth said on a trip our families took together to Cooperstown and the Baseball Hall of Fame, “because whenever you stop at an ice cream stand along the way, Uncle Jack buys you the big cone.” Beth’s mother was only a year behind her brother, my dad, in school, but when it came to ice cream they were an ice age apart.
We had an ice cream snack from a grocery store carton nearly every night growing up. And then wasn’t like now with all the gourmet brands and exotic flavors. Mostly it was vanilla, chocolate or fudge ripple. And it tasted of the freezer’s dull breath before we ate the carton empty, but that never kept us from scraping out every last layer and smear.
I remember...
I remember rides in the country to find farmers’ dairies where they made their own, and dad chattering about how he cranked it for my mom’s dad when they made it down on the farm in Dayton, Pennsylvania. They had to eat the whole freezer-full up in one sitting because the only refrigeration was a spring house. Some problem to have, huh?
I remember how dad always had change for Klondikes all around when we stopped in Joe Roebel’s store for a pound of chipped ham and a loaf of bread and how he was the only dad on the block who’d spot all the kids for a drumstick or a fudge bar or a Bomb when the ice cream truck ambled past our house in Rolling Hills, near Irwin, Pennsylvania.
I remember trips to the shopping center in Pittsford, New York, where dad bought each of us one of those slabs of Neapolitan ice cream stuffed between two waffley cream crackers, like a sandwich. I remember trips in my jammies to the Elmira, New York, Dairy Queen and my first chocolate sundae with Spanish peanuts I wanted because they sounded exotic but loved for the combination of salt and crunch mixed up with the sweet and cold.
Jewels, jobs and journeys
When my parents decided to invest in a piece of family jewelry, they chose a brooch shaped like a crown. I was the one who came up with the idea for arranging the birthstones: two each for mom, dad, each of my two brothers and myself, which translated to four rubies, four amethysts and two pale blue topaz. Whenever mom wore that crown pinned on her shoulder I thought “Dairy Queen” and my mouth would water and long for creamy coolness.
Not surprising, then, that my first job was at a Dairy Queen in Southport, Indiana. I remember practicing my curls at the ice cream machine when we weren’t busy and cutting the undulations of soft-serve off at the cone lip into a bucket the owner would recycle into more soft-serve. I learned how to make ice cream into Dilly Bars and Buster Bars, Blizzards and sundaes and Brownie Delights.
I also remember going to the Dairy Queen with a neighbor whose daughter was my best friend. He let us order not just the biggest cone, but anything we wanted. I had my first banana split in the back seat of his Thunderbird, with the top down on a hot summer night, and I couldn’t finish it. He was a doctor, a cardiologist, and it was banana splits all around—for me, his daughter Gail, her brother Steven, and his friend Pete. Except for Doc. He got a Dilly Bar. Every time he ever took us, Doc got a Dilly Bar, along with a bag of Dilly Bars in a take-home sack. I thought about this years later, every time I made the Dilly Bars at my part-time job.
When I began to question some of my childhood experiences that were more about cold than sweet, I dreamed I was trapped against a deserted Dairy Queen stand at the edge of a park. I climbed up onto the service counter and huddled against the shut and locked window. A vicious dog barked and snapped at my feet.
I don’t eat ice cream so much anymore—too fattening, too habit-forming, too charged with comfort and with sorrow. But when I do, I sculpt away the melting edges like an artist working in soft clay, and I let the spoon linger in my mouth until all the creaminess has given up the metal and sunk into my tongue. I never stopped loving it.
Ice cream and end times
In the last couple weeks my mom was alive, I tried to entice her to eat by bringing her whatever she wanted. Included in the food order was always a vanilla Frosty from Wendy's. Eventually, she left the solid food untouched, and the Frosty was the only thing that tempted her. When she could no longer feed herself, I spooned the Frosty into her mouth. She had trouble talking, but she managed to get me to understand she wanted bigger spoonfuls. The last couple days, she wasn't allowed anything for fear she'd aspirate it. She seemed hungry, thirsty. It was difficult to see her that way and not be able to do anything about it.
These days, since mom's passing, I sometimes eat lunch or dinner with my dad in the dining room at the assisted living place where he still has an apartment. He always asks for and they always bring him a scoop of ice cream for dessert; usually he asks for butter pecan. And I watch back through the years as the bowl empties, when it empties. Sometimes now he only takes a few bites and leaves the rest to turn to mush, a thing he'd never have done years before. His look is far away. We both miss mom.
My life has been filled with so much coldness and so much sweetness. What to make of both? Like chocolate and vanilla, each sharpens my taste of the other. Maybe the only answer left is to share dad's scoop with him. We'll do it for mom, who always hated to see anything go to waste. Wish she could join us for one last bite.
