Healing through story
Robert Frost once said about writing: “a poem is never a put-up job—it begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” Mannequin Monday this week looks at the brokenness at the heart of any impactful poem or story.
I include a sample from my upcoming book Surfrider, the second in the Film Crew series.
“Show us a world we’ve never seen before.” A sense of place in writing. Not simply setting. A place. A world. Almost a character in itself. This Mannequin Monday finds us working on creating worlds with our words. I visit one of Louise Penny’s novels, The Long Way Home, for descriptors of a unique world.
I include a piece of my own writing. “The Rain is a Thief.” A short story of tragedy – and release – set in a black night of rain.
I am participating in a writing course from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. This week’s lesson centers on setting.
One of the instructors tells us, “Show us a world we’ve never seen before and we’ll never see again.” She continues. “You can create that kind of singularity simply by overlaying an emotional reality over that physical reality in a way that’s never been done before in quite that sense.”
Elsewhere in the course, “You’re not just setting into place pieces of landscape in which your characters are moving around. You’re also getting a chance to do some major work to show the gears that are turning inside of those characters, show what’s important to them, show what’s haunting them so fully that nothing in their gaze, nothing in their perspective is like escaping the sway of whatever that emotional situation is.”
Continue readingA tiny yellow flower in a sidewalk crack brings hope to a boy and an old man. The story “City of Silence” comes from Teen Ink to open another week of Mannequin Monday. In the ashes of a devastated city, “one day there will be life and love and laughter again.”
A joy-filled story of hope rising out of the ashes. Today we dress the blank form with a flower, with hope.
And – Cabe Wray walks away from his lucrative sales job to follow his obsessive search for his long-lost twin sister. I offer chapter one of my novel Apart for your reading enjoyment.
Once again, creating the word on Mannequin Monday. This week, Africa-based fantasy fiction, with Nnedi Okorafor sharing her stories and her journey.
And viewing Hamilton this weekend got me thinking about some of the show’s lyrics. George Washington sings of Alexander Hamilton, “You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story”.
To close, I offer my own story, “The Kiss.” You have no control after a word is spoken.
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