Volume VI, Issue 27 July 3, 2017 Word of the Week: confluence Dear ,
Happy Fourth of July! Our word of the week is inspired by writer Justin Hunt, whose excerpt below from his upcoming memoir speaks of the confluence of his life and that of his father's. Watching Justin's memoir grow week by week into a finished manuscript has been a gift.
Confluence is such a beautiful word, don't you think? A place of converging into one. It seems a fitting word for the bonding that happened in last week's writing class here at Chautauqua, as we explored our common love of the
written word. I'm grateful to each talented one of them for all they shared with me and each other. (And to Meghan, our fearless selfie taker!)
And also for yesterday's matinee in the newly christened amphitheater, where Beethoven's Ninth resounded from both symphony and chorus. The icing on the cake of such a stirring performance was the
addition of the youngest members of the ballet school weaving their way through the audience to the stage for the finale. Justin's words speak to the fact that our confluence with those we love continues when we are separated, even across years and that great divide from this world to whatever comes
after.
This Fourth of July, take a few moments to celebrate the confluences that have shaped you into who you are.
Upcoming WordPlay
RETREAT AT OLMSTED MANOR
MEMOIR: TELLING THE TIMES OF YOUR LIFE
Our life stories are a precious legacy. Writing them is a gift, not only to ourselves, but to those who love us. They will be treasured for generations to come. Come learn engaging tools and techniques to retrieve and record your adventures, loves, losses,
successes, and more with ease and enjoyment, no matter where you are in the process.
Participants are asked to bring along photos of people, places, or events that are significant to their lives to be used as inspiration for writing.
WHERE: Olmsted Manor. 17 East Main Street.
Ludlow, PA 16333
WHEN: Friday, August 4th – Sunday, August 6th, 2017
COST: $230.00, which includes class, 2 nights stay, and 6 meals
TO REGISTER: To register by phone, call 814-945-6512. You can also register by sending an email to olmstedreservations@gmail.com or online at www.olmstedmanor.org/events.
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FALL WRITING RETREAT
Renew and delight yourself. The Fall Writing Retreat is an opportunity to create new pieces of writing and/or new possibilities for our lives. Enjoy various seasonal prompts; they elicit beautiful material that can be shaped
into essays, poems, stories, or articles. After a communal lunch, you’ll have private time which can be used to collage, work with a piece of writing from the morning, or play with a number of other writing prompts and methods. You’ll take home new ideas, new drafts, and new possibilities.
$97 includes lunch and supplies.
WHERE: South Charlotte area. Details will be provided upon registration.
WHEN: Saturday, September 23rd, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
More WordPlay opportunities here.
WordPlay Success Story
"...I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for Maureen and the talented and committed writers of my [Under
Construction] group." Justin Hunt grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, NC. In 2012, he retired from a long international business career to write
poetry and memoir. His work has won several awards and been published by a number of journals, anthologies and literary prize websites, including The Atlanta Review, Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, WinningWriters.com, Spoon River Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Dogwood, Crossroads Poetry Journal, Freshwater Review, Pooled Ink and Kakalak, among others. Hunt recently finished a memoir about his relationship with his father, who was born in 1897 to Kansas
pioneers.
What Justin says about WordPlay
“In the summer of 2013, I took a one-evening class with Maureen Ryan Griffin and spoke with her about signing up for the fall session of Under Construction. It seemed like the right vehicle for me, but I still wrestled with the belief that I
should be inspired and disciplined enough to write on my own. I should just write what I wanted to write, I thought, then turn my work over to an editor. But as the summer wore on and I wasn’t writing much, I surrendered and signed up.
It was a pivotal moment. Before I met Maureen, I’d written a couple of essays
about my father and my relationship with him. I had a vague sense that I might have a full-length memoir on my hands, but teaming up with Maureen and her Under Construction group gave me the structure, feedback and support I needed to write the story of my dad and me to its end. I finished Dominoes Are Played at Joe’s Place in early 2016 and spent the next year reorganizing its chapters and revising the manuscript, page by page. Throughout the process, I used Maureen and the UC group to
shed light on my blind spots, flesh out passages that deserved more coverage, trim up flabby language and take a scalpel to anything that was maudlin, overwrought or confusing.
I know that getting Dominoes Are Played at Joe’s Place published is likely to be a long slog. But I wouldn’t be where I am
today if it weren’t for Maureen and the talented and committed writers of my UC group. I wouldn’t have a manuscript to send out."
Featured
Writing
Two Excerpts
from Chapters 9 and
11
of
Dominoes Are Played at Joe’s Place
An
Upcoming Memoir
By
Justin Hunt
When I was a boy, my dad mentioned the State Bank robbery now and then, but only in his conversations with others. He never gave a full account in those exchanges, and I was able to assemble no more than a few, bare facts. I knew that he and his
assistant, Dorothy Meils, had been locked in the vault. I’d heard him say the robbers had dressed like itinerant harvest hands with straw hats pulled low over their foreheads. Once, as he reminisced with his friend Fred Meeker about early-day cars, he said something about “that old Cadillac I chased the bank robbers in.” But he left it at that, a simple reference to an old car in a conversation about old cars.
And yet, the little I knew about the holdup filled a back room in my childhood consciousness, a place that in my dreams resembled the State Bank’s vault. It wasn’t that I had nightmares about robbers bursting into the lobby, their heavy-caliber guns drawn and pointed at Daddy, Ash and me. I didn’t fret each time a stranger pulled up in front of the bank in a car with
out-of-county plates. But I had an imagination. I drew unseen lines. They ran from the secret telephone at the back of the vault over to the loaded Remington .35 and, from there, back to that hot summer day when my dad was only thirty and Kansas was young and reckless.
* * * * *
*
Before me lies a full-scale photocopy of the July 8, 1927 issue of The Wichita Eagle. Under a large, bold headline that reads “Lose Trail of Bank Bandits,” the story of the State Bank robbery takes up over half of the front page. In the center are four large photos: the old State Bank building, where I
would later work summers for Daddy; Dorothy Meils, my dad’s part-time assistant; “Old Man” T.I. Ellis, the bushy-bearded Civil War veteran who’d been locked in the vault alongside Daddy and Dorothy; and Daddy himself, fixed in time by a reporter just seconds before he climbed into his car to race towards Argonia and Otis Howard’s fake gunfight.
It is the picture of Daddy that yanks me into 1927. He
stands next to the open passenger-side door of his 1915 V-8 Cadillac, the car that once belonged to my grandfather, J.N. Hunt. The car’s high top ranges above my dad’s trim, six-foot-one-inch frame, and perhaps he has just put the Remington .35 rifle in the front seat where it he can get to it fast. He wears a loose-fitting suit, a tie and summer hat whose wide brim is turned down. The brim shadows his eyes and face, though not enough to conceal the mustachioed father I would come to know years
later. Leading with his right foot, Daddy leans forward, ready to spring. He faces the camera, and resolve burns his image into the reporter’s film—the same resolve I sometimes faced during my early years, a look that says I have to do what I’m doing now, so make yourself useful, and stay out of my way.
I’ve looked at this photograph scores of times since Daddy died. But it is only
now that I study it. I let the whole of it settle into me: Daddy’s long arms and oversized hands, his driven look, the black and white lines and grainy wrinkles that bespeak another time. In my father, I see myself. And I realize that the questions I would ask him about the robbery are just a bridge to bigger questions, a way to tap the plumes that geyser up at the confluence of our two lives.
A photo of Justin's dad taken by a Wichita Eagle reporter
on the day of the robbery 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
"confluence."
PROMPT:
Find a photo (newspaper or otherwise) of someone whose life has intersected yours. Study it, as Justin did the above photo of his father. What memories surface? What insights about the confluences of your lives bubble up? Write about
them.
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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