Tag: writing
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Attic
All day I have been hearing jazz faintly playing in my room. It does not seep through the wall nor does it rise from the chambers below. The riffs are generated within my mind. My ears glimpse phantom sound waves—unseen, invisible. Their nonexistence will startle me any longer. For I am a music box of…
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Observing a Sneeze
Leaving the country for the summer can be kind of a big deal for 15-year-old girls. While it is not always the case, a venture like this can be a game-changer, moreover, a life-changer; going to Rome for three weeks of the three months of freedom between academic years did more than alter her worldly…
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Penned Out
Ideas, once inked in permanence, are now buried beneath an ever-growing, pixelated timeline. (Is it so much different than having them closed between bound pages and set up on rarely visited bookshelf, the stacks in the library surrounded by thin carpet tread upon no longer?) They are suffering silent agony in the bottom of a…
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Radical Writing Mantra
Plunge beyond the blue yonder. Sail high. Shoot visible tingles out of your fingernails. Explain an event. Order disorder. Keep the details to a minimum. Do not provide a frozen description or a still life. Provide action. Zoom in while walking backward. Invent the compression shot on paper. Purger thyself.
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Sixth Floor Paradise
After ascending a slew of concrete stairs, you reach this door. Throw your shoulder into it or else you won’t get it open. Once you do, though, you step through this threshold that separates the desolation of the staircase column from a plateau of peacefulness. You could turn to the right and trot into the…
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Cloth Doll Daughter Story Discussion
A slender woman standing in front of the chalkboard points her chin toward a boy seated in the second row of desks. “Go ahead.” “That’s not the way I see it,” he says, pulling his right arm down and crossing it across his chest on top of his left. “So,” Miss Marcy begins, “what do…
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A Cabinet of Coffee Mugs
My father was a quiet, weathered man. Ignoring conventional rules you find in writing manuals, it would be accurate to use the old cliché that he was akin to a closed book. He was reclusive, but pensive. He had been places. More accurately, as he used to tell me, places had visited him. He did…
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Story-telling Self-talk, or Overcoming the Nothings
There is this story in my mind and there it seems fated to remain. I cannot determine whether that’s because I read too much or if I do not write enough. Or do not talk enough. Or do not feel enough. There are these stories in my mind. Some might call them memories. Unreliable, jumbled,…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 