writing wenches

Joyce moved to South Carolina. So now, our writing group involves skype. Shenanigans ensue.

Divisadero

Joyce snuck me into a small soirée thrown by the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. Michael Ondaatje signed copies of his new book, Divisadero, and hobnobbed with local booksellers...and one covertly hid botanist. Reading The English Patient at sixteen made me realize there was a world of literature outside the classics, Piers Anthony, and those young romance novels with girl's names as titles. My favorite was Joanna. She rode horses, was fiesty, and I'm pretty sure she smooched the stablehand.

"having brain surgery is the fast track to gratitude"

Tonight, I made my way to Noe Valley for the renewal of my writing course. The focus this time around is looking inward, writing experiences in the form of memoirs and personal essays and so on. I'm just excited to write more, to work that part of my brain, and feel that part of alive. Folk seem eclectic and vibrant and already I learned a new made-up word: glitchy.

"Memoir"

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life.
The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
If I wrote that story now---
radioactive to the end of time---
people, I swear, your eyes would fall out, you couldn't peel
the gloves fast enough
from your hands scorched by the firestorms of that shame.
Your poor hands. Your poor eyes
to see me weeping in my room
or boring the tall blonde to death.
Once I accused the innocent.
Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty.
I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow.
And one October afternoon, under a locust tree
whose blackened pods were falling and making
illuminating patterns on the pathway,
I was seized by joy,
and someone saw me there, and that was the
worst of all, lacerating and unforgettable.

-Vijay Seshadri

befuckled:

When you are not really sure what just happened, but you are pretty sure you just got screwed.

-definition by Ruth.

Ripe Fruit I

In January, I began taking a writing course through Ripe Fruit, a writing school in San Francisco. On Thursday nights, a group of us gather in Leslie Kirk Campbell's (the instructor and guide) living room, drinking tea, eating apples, and taking part in creative exercises focusing on writing and energy. In one such session, we composed a collective poem from our in-class writing.....everyone contributed a line until we had an eclectic piece that is at times humorous, at others, poignant, and always interesting. As always, these things are best when read aloud (allowed).

"They Laughed But I Didn't"

I
My hair needs to sleep
Piano filled my car; nothing else, only piano
Listen to the voices of your ancestors
Dating the devil to find heaven
You block out the world if you pull the covers over you
and open your eyes
Great expanses of black spandex
Out with the wigs and spf strongest
Depression makes a great gardener
Black space opens to bright wilderness

II
It's there all along all the time
Wake up and start fresh tomorrow
She told me life would be easier if she didn't see me
We cry as babies, we cry as children, we cry as adults
To spend the day immersed in blood
dripping through pipes of inertia
Maybe if I think less more will happen
We all pull from the same lexicon
They are not lies; they are stories
A prism to fix the astigmatism
Silver droplet of eternal soul

-Collective Random Poem
Ripe Fruit I
2/08/07