A light snow is falling this afternoon along the North Shore of Chicago. It’s nothing like the deep fallen snow in the photograph below, taken in northern Michigan of my husband, cross-country skiing around the perimeter of a park. But the precipitation feels like potential, a prompt. I offer it here. Lose yourself in the whiteness and see what comes from your fingertips.
“Trailing plastic tubes, Paul made his way across the room, steeped in twilight, and I was struck by how the body sometimes looks like the sea creature it is, a jellyfish with long tentacles, not really a fish at all but a gelatinous animal full of hidden symmetries, as well as lagoons and sewers, and lots of spongy and stringy bits.”
This is the opening line of my favorite memoir of 2012, Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir. It sets a scene, paints a picture and gives us something to think about all at the same time (“a gelatinous animal full of hidden symmetries”).
What’s particularly amazing about this memoir is that it manages to braid a love story with a story of a healing, a mission to educate about stroke and celebrate love of language.
Here’s Diane and Paul in a short Youtube video about the book:
My father and I in 1962/1963.
There are so many ways to connect current events – the present – to a personal past to highlight it’s meaning.
An example from my own life:
What does inauguration day and Martin Luther King’s birthday have to do with a memory of me holding hands with my father and at a civil rights rally forty years ago? I reflected on the connection between two of these events last year for WBEZ.
You can listen to it here.
It’s been a new year’s resolution of mine — for many years now — to reimagine my website and blog and this, finally, was the year!
My intention is to blog – more frequently – about writing process, craft and inspiration through stories from my own writing and teaching-writing life and to link you to provocative and thoughtful pieces, writing prompts and tools on the short personal narrative form.
I’m a cheerleader for the creative process, which we all know can be slow, lonely, surprising and magnificent — often at the same time. My mission is to inspire you to open your window and urge us both to the page.
Feel free to leave comments and/or to share bits of your writing adventures.
My window is always open.
I knew I was a writerly mama. But now, it’s official: I’m a Literary Mama!
I’m absolutely thrilled to direct you from here to my essay Exposed, an essay about the moment the tables turn on a writer who writes about family and
learns what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the words. It was published in Literary Mama on November 3, 2012.
Excerpt:
In the days leading up to talent night at my daughter’s middle school, Emily would only share that she had a short moment on stage. She had been keeping more of her personal and school life to herself; signs of teenagerhood even before reaching her teens. Since she spent most of her after-school hours in theatre workshops, my husband and I expected that she had a small part in a scene from a musical or one-act play and wanted to surprise us.
But when I took my seat in the cafeteria-turned-auditorium, I scanned the handwritten program and saw that the third act, titled, “The Birthday,” was a skit in which she would not only be acting, but had also written. As the lights went out, my stomach began to knot.
Check it out here:
http://www.literarymama.com/litreflections/essays/archives/2012/11/exposed-2.html