Writerly Wednesday

Writerly -\ˈrī-tər-lē\ adjective:of, relating to, or typical of a writer

Writerly Wednesday: writing prompts, ideas, book reviews, tools, resources...whatever!

From Joyce Carol Oates in Naming the World:

In my Princeton Fiction Workshops I define my role, or one of my roles, as that of an ideal editor: not a rejecting editor, not a censorious or severely critical or interfering editory, but one who defines herself primarily as a friend of the text and a friend of the writer, in that order.

Here are some prompts to start stories:

1. "An unsolved mystery is a thorn in the heart." This is an opening line of a short prose piece you are to write, meditating upon an "unsolved mystery" in your own life. You may wish to transpose this into purely fictional terms.

2. As minutely as possible, you will describe a significant place, conveying by means of language the emotion generated by this place in your imagination.

OK - here's my go at #1:

It is said that an unsolved mystery is a thorn in the heart. That is true, I think. There is a pricking, a sharp and insistent pain, that always walks beside me. No matter how happy my life is, I am always searching, looking. Memories elude me; they float around in a creamy soup of details, bumping into each other, sometimes floating to the surface, but mostly resting at the bottom of a deep bowl. More and more frequently, though, I get the sensation of inky arms twirling up through my brain, carrying a bit of information from the bottom of the bowl, some tiny morsel of my history, and placing it lightly on the doorstep of my consciousness.

This happened to me today. I was planting tomatoes against the back porch, the only place that ever seems to get any sun on our pine tree shaded lot. I wasn’t too hopeful, but had decided to give it another try this year. Despite being raised by a father with an amazing green thumb, I am a classic gardening failure. But the allure of luscious home-grown tomatoes calls to me every year. This time I’m trying container gardening, so the tiny plants I purchased at the hardware store are going into white plastic buckets full of the best dirt money can buy.

Kneeling beside the buckets, using my garden spade to make holes for the Better Boys and Early Girls, I realized I was seeing, or rather remembering, a swing hanging from the limb of a huge oak tree, a small girl perched there, swaying just a little back and forth, singing softly. She has long brown hair and a red baseball cap pulled low over her eyes. She is wearing white sandals and shorts with a blue tank top. The sandals are dusty and the shorts have a dark brown stain on the front right pocket. I can’t make out the song she is singing, but her voice is soft and sweet. The scenes always come to me like this, as a surprise. They are on me, fullforce and vivid, before I am totally aware.

“Hush, Jenny. Hush.” She said. “Mamma will hear you crying and make us both go back inside.”

I knew she was talking to me, that I was standing inside a playpen, on the other side of the tree from her swing, crying. I felt the sensation of pushing against the pen’s netting, of it giving way a little and letting me lean out, but still I could not reach my sister. It was hot and humid. The sun was bright, directly overhead.

My sister. I know this beautiful girl is my sister, older than me by a few years. She is not a new detail. I have been seeing her now for years. Probably all my life, but only in the past five years have I realized she has been with me all along. It’s hard to explain. It’s like I remembered that I remembered. It was a fact that had always been with me, it’s just that my mind only recently let me in on the secret.

Sometimes she is in dresses, black patent leather shoes, and frilly white socks. Sometimes she is playing and running through a yard, brown hair flying out behind her. Sometimes she is sitting in a chair, legs dangling over the side, reading a book. I don’t know her name, but I could describe her face to you: the freckles, the blue eyes slanted like a cat, the thin pink lips too small for her face. I could pick her out of a classroom of children the same age.

But here’s the mystery. I am an only child. I have no sisters, no brothers. My name is not Jenny; it’s Eve. I was the long awaited miracle child born to older parents. My mother and father thought they would never have a child, and had given up, but God blessed them with me, they said. And I was enough, my mother used to tell me. One of me was all they needed to make our family complete.

So these memories, what are they? Are they mine? Am I remembering something that doesn’t belong to me? No, I don’t think so. I know these memories are mine the same as I know Emma and Jake are my children. I have carried these memories in my body just as I carried my babies. Over the past five years, it’s like the time has come to give them birth. They are ready to be held, examined, cared for.

I have not told my husband about these memories. I am afraid of what he will think. Am I crazy? Possessed? The logical person to talk to would be my mother, but she is dead. She and my father were killed in a car accident six years ago, just after Emma’s birth. There is no other family. A friend? I have none good enough that I could trust with such crazy thoughts. A counselor? Maybe. But where would that lead? Medication? Hospitalization?

I am breathing hard, now. There’s a humming in my head that always accompanies these memories, high-pitched and whining. I sit down on the grass, feeling the damp earth begin to seep into my jeans. I close my eyes, turn my face up to the sun, waiting to see if anything else surfaces. Once it passes, I will go to the house and write everything down I have remembered today in my notebook. I started keeping the notebook thinking I needed to make sure not to lose anything that I was being given. Now, four years later, I’ve almost filled it completely. What do I do once all the pages are gone? - BHF

Now you give it a try with one of these prompts. Post on your blog and let me know...or write in the comments on this entry. Have some 'writerly' fun!