Volume VI, Issue 17 April 24, 2017 Word of the Week: perhaps Dear ,
I hope you've had a good, albeit rainy,
day!
I took advantage of the fowl weather (yes, this is a bad pun, not a typo) to work on my memoir-in-process. True confessions again this week: I absolutely love days when I can stay in my pajamas and write, and this is
how bad I look when I do it, with my hair unbrushed.
Can you tell how happy I am, having spent much of the day writing? (I have so much of my scarf showing because I wanted to show you my "lucky writing scarf." I almost always wear this talisman I bought at my beloved
Chautauqua Institution while I write. I got this idea from retreating at the Well of Mercy, where, on Friday evenings, prayer shawls are made available for those who want to remind themselves physically of the presence of the Creator. Rituals, even simple ones keeping a special object
nearby or lighting a candle, serve many writers well, and I am one of them. Are you? Give this a try if you haven't.)
It felt so good to do this after a full weekend, jazzed up no end by a "sleepover" at a writer friend's house up in Huntersville, during
which we shared and critiqued each other's work (so much fun) before driving up to Greensboro together to attend the North Carolina Writer's Network's Spring Conference.
I always get good value from NCWN events, and this one was no exception. The best part, beyond all doubt, was Melissa J. Delbridge's workshop on "Asking the Five Hard Questions: An Approach to Revising Memoir." It was fabulous, from the questions themselves to the examples shared to illustrate them.
Memoir, Melissa pointed
out, "is based in truth. But there's room for fantasy. Just tell the reader." I had to laugh when she called this "fair use of fantasy" "perhapsing."
It's easy. When you want to write about something that you (or, for writers of fiction, one of your characters) can't possibly know or just can't remember, you are free to conjecture by using words and phrases like "Perhaps...,"
"Maybe...," "It could have been...," "She might have..., "I imagine that...," etc.
It's also something I love to do! In fact, just last week, I worked on two "perhaps-based" pieces for my memoir-in-progress, Erasing Texas. In one of them, I revel in the word perhaps, and in the other, I use this very technique to write a piece about something I don't remember.
So how could "perhaps" not be the word-of-the-week?
Both pieces began as prompts in one of my Under Construction classes, I'm happy to say, and I'm sharing them with you in their perhaps-not-finished form, in
the interest of modeling "writer at work" for you and all my other WordPlayers.
Want to try some "perhapsing" yourself? Scroll on down to the prompt. And, on the way, check out the upcoming "Writing Our Way to Happiness" class at the John Campbell Folk School in the North Carolina mountains next month. Perhaps
you'd like to come!
Love and
light,
Maureen Upcoming WordPlay
WRITING OUR WAY TO HAPPINESS
Only two spots
left!
(Learning New Practices and Strategies for Our Writing and Our Lives; Creating New Writing; Expanding Our Well-being) Come explore time-tested ways writing can increase your happiness level! This class will not only teach you how to use writing as a tool to increase your sense of well-being, but also jumpstart your pen and provide inspiration and knowledge about the process of creative writing, whether you want to write memoir, fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. For
writers of all levels, including beginners, who are interested in expanding their writing practice—for personal fulfillment or for publication.$630 for one week-long session (lodging and meals are additional – options can be found on the Folk School
website)
WHERE: John Campbell Folk School, 1 Folk School Road, Brasstown, NC 28902
WHEN: Sunday, May 28th – Saturday, June 3rd, 2017.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- POETRY ROCKS
(Learning the Ins
and Outs of Poetry; Strengthening Your Writing Skills; Adding a New Layer of Literary Beauty to Your Life) Would you like your writing — prose and/or poetry — to be more graceful, powerful, beautiful? Do you sometimes find poetry confusing or intimidating and wish you could “crack the code”? Or do you enjoy
writing and reading poems, but want a more thorough understanding of what makes a poem good? Then this poetry extravaganza is for you.
Expect a good time exploring what makes a poem a poem, gaining the knowledge you need to confidently create and revise poetry, and strengthening your writing skills in all genres.
It would be a joy and an honor to share what rocks about poetry with you!
HERE’S WHAT YOU GET: - 23 poetry creation tools, delivered one per day (Monday through Friday) to your inbox — in honor of National Poetry month. Use
them as you get them, use them when you can, use them over and over to create poems. Each tool zeroes in on one aspect of poetry and provides an innovative method to approach writing a poem. Many of them are great for creating prose, too. The tools include:
* a purpose, so you’re clear what you will
learn
* background information when helpful
* “how-to” directions to create a poem
* an example that illustrates the poetry tool in action
* a short reflection to solidify the concepts covered
* “Hone Your Craft” suggestions for further exploration
* a short reflection to solidify the concepts covered - A PDF document of each tool that you can print or save on your computer
- An audio recording of each tool, so you can learn by listening and/or reading
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writer, and the process of revision, including a handy Revision Checkpoint Chart — this information can be applied to strengthen your prose as well as poetry
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TO REGISTER: To register for Poetry Rocks online, click here.
More WordPlay opportunities here. Featured Writing Two excerpts from
Erasing Texas
(my in-process memoir about how
our 33-year marriage almost came unraveled
by what happened in Texas, but didn't)
by
Maureen Ryan Griffin It may be helpful for you to know that, inspired by Abigail Thomas's Safekeeping, Erasing Texas includes first, second, and third person pieces. Here's a great interview with her about why she chose to switch points-of-view in this way:
Hope you enjoy these two pieces from somewhere in the middle of the memoir.
Perhaps
She met her husband at the Harris-Teeter on the corner of Idlewild and Independence. By then she was living in her fourth apartment since moving to Charlotte four years earlier. First Cedars East, then Hunting Ridge, then Lake Hill, then Village Lake. There was a pattern: alone, with roommate, alone, with roommate…
She remembers meeting most of the boys she dated—well, no, she remembers WHERE and approximately WHEN she met them, the general circumstances, but not the actual meeting. Hard to believe that the first time she saw Bob Wilson push back his perfect hair that almost covered those beautiful green eyes, the first time she heard Mike DeMastry’s voice, is gone from the videotapes of her life she can watch whenever she
likes.
Perhaps they will come back to her, as memories can do, triggered by an offhand comment, a scent, a dream. (Her daughter texted her just yesterday to say that her three-year-old son’s new word of choice is “perhaps”; perhaps he picked that up when he lasted visited her!) But her husband, she remembers meeting
her husband. Perhaps the best thing about their meeting is that it makes a good story: the man carrying a pound of bacon and a Time magazine; the woman with chocolate chip cookies in her cart for a Sierra Club camping trip; how he approached her in the bread aisle and told her that when he was in the service, in Germany, those cookies had a lot of bargaining power.
He told her later he’d seen her back in produce and had been keeping his eye on her, looking for an opportunity to speak. How funny that it was the cookies that provided it.
He was tall, smiling, articulate. She liked that he was purchasing a Time magazine. She liked that he spoke so enthusiastically about his work as a printer. She liked that he was tall. She gave him her number.
Five years later, she hosted a baby shower for a friend. One of the
guests worked at the Charlotte Observer. It came up that she and her husband had met at a grocery store, and it turned out that one of the reporters at the paper was working on a feature article on grocery store dating. He would, the guest said, be very excited to talk to a couple that had gotten married after having met at a grocery store. The reporter interviewed each of them separately, so she
had no idea what her husband had said until the article came out. The biggest surprise was the line following his saying he knew he had to wait and see how it would work out between them. And then, this: “You don’t marry just any floozy you meet at a grocery store.”
Wow. She wished he hadn’t said that. Why did he
have to be so blunt? She knew what he meant, but still.
She wished his words hadn’t made her mother so angry. Her mother couldn’t see that he wasn’t actually calling her a floozy, or at least, hadn’t meant to. Yet another nail in the coffin of all the reasons her mother thought she shouldn’t have married
him.
It is quite a tribute that eventually, her mother grew very fond of him. He didn’t mind fighting what her mother referred to as uphill battles. In fact, he seemed to thrive on them.
I Must Have Shown Him My Childhood World
I must have walked with him down Old French Road to 39th, past Mason’s fruit and vegetable stand, past the house with the plum trees that dropped their fermenting fruit on the sidewalk every September, past the VA hospital, and then across 39th, where I could choose to walk down Fruit, or Sunset, or
Parade.
I would have taken him down Parade; it was my favorite. Would I have shown him the shortcut through the small apartment building’s parking lot, the route I took when I had to really, really hurry to make it to school on time, instead of just hurrying like I usually did? Was there ever, in that house I grew
up in, a school-day morning that wasn’t rushed? Did I tell him about the time I picked up the chunk of rock salt my nine-year-old self believed was an actual gemstone? Surely.
Those times we came to Erie before and after we got married, we would have driven to St. Luke’s for Mass on Sunday morning, the five-minute
trip reminding me how short the distance really was. How long it seemed when I was 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.
Distances do that, don’t they? Shrink with time. Well, some of them do. And some of them expand, grow apart. Like the cracks in the sidewalks on my way to school, caused by tree roots, most of them, so tiny at
first, widening over the years. Widening enough to break.
~ from the in-process memoir Erasing Texas WordPlay Now! Writing
Prompt This is WordPlay—so why not revel in the power and
potential of one good word after another? This week, it's "perhaps."
PROMPT: Do some "perhapsing" of your own.
Either, as in the "Perhaps" piece above, weave some
conjecture into a piece of poetry or prose, or, as in "I Must Have Shown Him My Childhood World," write about an event or a time or a circumstance the way you, or one of your characters, imagine it was. Remember that words and phrases like "Perhaps...," "Maybe...," "It could have been...," "She might have..., etc. can help you to do this.
MAUREEN RYAN GRIFFIN, an award-winning poetry and nonfiction writer, is the author of Spinning Words into Gold, a Hands-On Guide to the Craft of Writing, a grief workbook entitled I Will Never Forget You, and three collections of poetry, Ten Thousand Cicadas Can't Be Wrong, This Scatter of Blossoms and When the Leaves Are in the Water. One of her long-held dreams came true in July of 2015 when Garrison Keillor read one of her poems on The Writer's Almanac. She believes, as author Julia Cameron says, "We are meant to midwife dreams for one another."
Maureen also believes that serious "word work" requires serious WordPlay, as play is how we humans best learn—and perform. What she loves best is witnessing all the other dreams that come true for her clients along the way. Language, when used with
intentionality and focus, is, after all, serious fuel for joy. Here's to yours! |
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