Volume VI, Issue 32 August 7, 2017 Word of the Week: reality Dear ,
The answer to "Where in the world is Maureen Ryan Griffin?" as of about an
hour ago is "home" in Charlotte, after six-and-a-half glorious weeks of running around all over northeastern USA and Canada.
I burst out laughing just now when I opened the draft of this week's zine that Morgan had prepped so faithfully for me, with its excerpt from a fabulous short story by writer and professor
Randy Ivey. (When I first read the words "I’ve never known a bookworm that didn’t have some bad run-in with reality" mouthed by one of the characters in his "A New England Romance" I knew I had to share it with you.) We've had this issue planned for months now, knowing what I full day today would be, and I completely forgot I'd chosen
"reality" as the word of the week.
To be honest, arriving home at 10:30 p.m. to six-and-a-half weeks of mail after sitting in a Virginia traffic jam for an hour and driving many more hours through rain, some of it so pelting I couldn't see the road, felt a bit like "a bad run-in with
reality."
And yet. Look who I snuck in a visit with on my way home from my memoir workshop at Olmsted Manor in Western PA. (Not that far out of the way home, and so worth every minute of extra time.)
And look at the smiling faces of the great people I got to spend a weekend discussing and writing memoir with over their weekend. How can I not be grateful? It was a marvel of a weekend, full of laughter and
breakthroughs.
So I'll shoot this zine off to you with a bucket full of gratitude for the gift this summer has been so far—and also for YOU, for sharing in the journey with me via the zine.
I hope you get as much pleasure (and laughter) out of the passage from Randy Ivey's story as I did. Any bad run-in with reality I've had as a result of being the bookworm I have always been
has been well worth it!
Upcoming WordPlay
UNDER CONSTRUCTION:
YOUR
WRITING (Fulfilling Writing Dreams & Goals; Creating New Writing; Revising & Polishing Your Writing)
This class is designed to
fulfill your writing dreams and projects. You’ll set goals and support structures and watch your writing flow! You’ll also get feedback on your work (any genre) and learn revision tools and methods. Each week, writing prompts will generate material for new writing or further a piece in process, whatever your preferred genre. Through examples of accomplished writers, you’ll learn techniques to aid you right where you are in the process.
* For the benefit of participants, an audio recording of the class will be made each week so that participants are able to listen to classes they miss and/or review material covered at any convenient time and place. These recordings are available throughout the class session, along with all handouts, in a shared
Dropbox folder.
We offer both a Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning class to fit your schedule.
Tuesday evening class:
WHERE: South Charlotte area. Details will be provided upon registration.
WHEN: Tuesday evenings, from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m. September 12, 19 and 26
October 3, 10, 17 and 24
November 7, 21 and
28
December 5 and 12 COST: $425
TO REGISTER: If you’re interested in attending, please email us at info@wordplaynow.com to
be put on the waiting list.
Wednesday morning class:
WHERE: Covenant Presbyterian Recreation Center, 1000 East Morehead Street, Charlotte,
28204. Click here for map.
WHEN: Wednesday mornings, 10:00 a.m. – noon. September 13, 20 and 27
October 4, 11, 18 and 25
November 1, 8 and 29
December 6 and 13 COST: $425
TO REGISTER: If you’re interested in attending, please email us at info@wordplaynow.com to be put on the waiting list.
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THE GIFT OF MEMOIR: WRITING PERSONAL AND FAMILY
STORIES (Preserving Family History; Writing for
and about Your Family; The Art of Memoir)
Our life stories are a precious legacy. Putting them in writing is a gift to all who know and love us—they can be
treasured and enjoyed for generations to come. It is also a gift to ourselves. As best-selling author Rachel Naomi Remen says in her book Kitchen Table Wisdom, facts bring us to knowledge, but stories bring us to wisdom. If you are interested in writing family and/or personal life stories—those significant tales of adventure, transition, love, loss, and triumph, as well as lovely everyday moments from times past or the present, come learn specific tools and techniques to retrieve and record
them.
* For the benefit of participants, an audio recording of the class will be made each week so that participants are able to listen to classes they miss and/or review material covered at any convenient time and place. These recordings are available throughout the class session, along with all handouts, in a shared Dropbox
folder.
WHERE: Covenant Presbyterian Recreation Center, 1000 East Morehead Street, Charlotte, 28204. Click here for map.
WHEN: Thursday mornings, 10:00 a.m. – noon. September 7 and 21
October 5, 19 and 26
November 9 and 30
December 14 COST: $275
TO REGISTER: If you’re interested in
attending, please email us at info@wordplaynow.com to be put on the waiting list.
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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. Randall Ivey is the author of a novel, Where the Streets Are Paved with Gold, three story collections, A New England Romance, The Shape of a Man and The Mutilation Gypsy, as well
as a book for children, Jay and the Bounty of Books. He has published nearly one hundred stories, poems, and essays in journals, magazines, anthologies, and newspapers in the United States and England. He teaches English at the University of South Carolina Union, where he also directs the annual Upcountry Literary Festival, a gathering of some of the South’s best writers and musicians. On seven occasions he has been named USCU’s Distinguished Teacher of the
Year.
In 2015, Ivey attended Maureen Ryan Griffin’s writing workshop in Union and was immediately impressed not only by her obvious teaching ability but her overall personal warmth and magnetism. He knew that this was someone who really cared for writing and writers. He invited Maureen to read at the 2017 Upcountry Literary Festival, and her presentation drew unanimous praise from the
audience. Featured
Writing
An excerpt from by Randy Ivey
“Jane Poage’s problem is she has a sentimental streak in her a mile long. And her head is in the clouds much of the time. If anybody’s to blame, I would say it was her mother, Myrna. Myrna never treated Jane like a regular little girl. Whenever Jane got upset or lonesome, Myrna wouldn’t give her cookies or dolls. She gave her books. Fanciful books about fanciful people and people who don't live in the
kind of world you and I know. For a long time we lived a few blocks from them, and I remember many times glancing out the window and seeing that child come struggling up the road with an armload of books then shaking my head and thinking something someday was going to go terribly wrong for her. I’m twelve years older than Jane, so I felt I had some insight into these things. I’ve never known a bookworm that didn’t have some bad run-in with reality. And I’ve seen too many people hook themselves
up to one thing or another and pretty soon be driven to distraction by it and to catastrophe. I don’t care if it was money, drink, religion, books…”
“Love,” Doreen interceded wistfully, as though recalling an old paramour to herself in all the clear detail of his attractiveness.
“Love,”
Georgina repeated, her voice like a hard-pressed organ note. “Doesn’t matter what it is. It’s just not good for somebody to let her whole life rotate around one thing. It’s not healthy.”
“Is that what happened to Jane?” Doreen asked with some caution, fully aware how a foolish question could set her friend off. “She let her life rotate around books?”
“Not so much the books themselves as what was in them. Now, please don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against books. I wish I had time to read more books myself. Anyway, whenever she and Myrna came to the house, she would rush right to the bookcase in the den and after a few minutes come right back with the most pitiful look on her face. She was disappointed because all we had were cookbooks and paperback romances. She asked, almost with
tears in her eyes, why we didn’t have Nancy Drew or Treasure Island. Treasure Island now! For a girl! Or if I was visiting them and went up to Jane and asked her if she knew anything new, she’d recite a poem or tell me she had decided to be an aviator like Amelia Earhart or go to Africa and chase lions and tigers.”
“She was a child, Georgina. Children are creatures of fancy.
Didn’t you dream like that when you were a little girl?”
“Yes, but she kept on talking like that when she was well into her teens and older, although her ambitions got a bit more sophisticated though not much more realistic.”
“Well, all this began to worry my mother, who is Myrna’s sister, you
know, and one day, and this was when Jane was a senior in high school, she asked Myrna if she didn’t think it was time to turn the girl’s thoughts to more practical things.
“Oh no, Esther,” Myrna answered her. “I’m not like you. I’m not going to tell my children how to live their lives and put them in some sort of strait jacket of my own making and have them hate me for it. I’m going to let them
follow their dreams.”
“’Well,’ Mama went on, ‘I sure hope their dreams don’t lead them into a ditch.’
“Myrna just laughed and said, ‘Oh no. That’s not going to happen. I believe in my children and I believe in my children’s dreams.’”
“Georgina, why did Myrna keep referring to her ‘children?’ I thought she only had Jane.”
“Myrna was a dreamer herself, Doreen. She always hoped she’d have others, even though the doctor told her otherwise and she was past forty by then.”
“Oh. Well.”
“And Myrna meant what she said too, about not telling her children how to live. She was practically a conspirator in all the craziness that followed, if not the chief engineer. She indulged that girl’s every whim, no matter what it was…."
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
"reality."
PROMPT: Write about a "bad run-in with reality"—yours or anyone else's, fictional or actual.
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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