I walked from my high school back home, a distance of over four miles. I walked it in heels in across slush that would return to ice overnight, my feet soaked and cold. I walked it in the spring when my shoes sank in the mud near Brandywine Creek. In eighth grade I walked from my middle school to the Flower Market, wearing a frilly eighties blouse over frilly eighties skirt and an ill-fitting bra that clasped in the front. It popped open unexpectedly, when I raised my arms above my head or swiveled my torso towards a boy, a dog, a azalea in full bloom. I groaned and my friends knew what happened. We giggled -- again? Is he looking over here? -- before they formed a protective circle around me while I adjusted and snapped the clasp back into place. From the Flower Market, I walked through Rockford Park, along the rush of the old mill run, then over the Brandywine. Sometimes I followed an asphalt path down through thin green woods, where the new leaves were backlit by late-afternoon sun. I stomped over the swinging bridge that had just been rebuilt, a place where men came to meet other men for anonymous sex. Whatever it was, I figured they weren't interested in me.

It was May and the sun was shining bright. A row of cars sat by the creek, stereos blasting as other people enjoyed the sun. Monkey Hill, a steep road paved in cobblestones, rose above the park. I took off my strappy sandles, so grown-up, by the old fountain. And then I stepped on a bee. As my foot swelled, I hopped the half mile home, dragged myself past the Brandywine Zoo, stopped briefly under the dramatic arches of the Washington Street Bridge. At home, I made a paste with baking soda to soothe away the sting.



I walked home from 213 the morning my mother and I had a fight and she told me to get out of the car, just get out. We were living in Maryland by then and it must have been early spring, because the ground was thawing, had gone from rock-hard to mud, yielding and thick. She couldn't back out of the driveway. Her tires made deep ditches in the mud, but the car stayed in place. We emptied bags of kitty litter underneath the rear wheels; I pushed against the hood while she revved the engine. In the end, we borrowed my grandfather's car, but I had already convinced myself that school was out of the question. We fought. I obnoxioused myself out of it pretty early, right after we made the turn onto 213 from Town Point. Still, it was about three and a half miles back to the Little House, past cornfields on a road with no real shoulder. I remember a couple of neighbors driving by and waving as I picked my way back home, walking in between the road and the gully.

What did I do when I got to the woods? The road there was dark and curvy and any semblance of a shoulder disappeared. Maybe my mother changed her mind and returned to pick me up. Or more likely I clung to the side of the road, walked against traffic. I kept on going.

I have a recurring dream, about once a month, where I must walk from Elkton to Hollywood Beach. I march past traffic, climb up and down the bridge over the C&D canal, stop by the small shopping center closest to home. In dreamland, the store where I used to work is still there, in expanded form, all florescent lights and earnest employees in dark blue cotton uniforms. No one there can help me. I walk out into the dusty afternoon, plodding across brown cornfields where the remains of last year's crop still poke out of the ground and the footing is uneven. At the edge of the woods I discover a path off the road. And that's where I get stuck. I run into D. or I am so scared that I just stop, or sometimes I don't want to walk forward. The trees reach into the sky and it's so quiet that I want to stay forever.

Until now I've never tied the dream to the morning my mother kicked me out of the car, the forgotten fight, the abandonment of those years again, again. It always seemed like a not-driving dream or a stress dream, but now I wonder if it all started in that walk during that terrible time. I wonder what it means, how it ties who I was then to who I am now, whether I should start to peek under the surface of its meaning.



From a writing prompt, a song this time, Tell Your Story Walking by Deb Talan (video above). I spoke to my mother after writing this and she told me that she thinks about our fight, me getting out of the car and walking home, often. She thinks a neighbor gave me a ride home. I think she's right.

Tags: walks, walking, school, storytelling

Act I

Something is going on with me. I’m sleeping terribly, cry at nothing. Last night at dinner my son asked for another Dress Me Monkey story: “What else would Dress Me Monkey do?” This is our cue to come up with some fantastical new tale about how the toy would spend the proceeds from treasure he never manages to steal. I said the first thing that came to my mind, that Dress Me Monkey wishes he could go back in time to the nights when he ate with his mother and father and they told Dress Me Human stories. "His parents are far away now, and Dress Me Monkey misses those days. He would like to go back for a meal or two."

The dinner had been a difficult one, with the kid complaining about his food and telling me how the refried beans on his homemade nachos looked like dirt, like something worms would eat. I'd spent a lot of the day fighting my initial crabby responses to his normal kid behavior. I was tired. My past has been coming back and poking me lately, spilling out, and meals are one of those difficult times for me. So I came up with a Dress Me Monkey story that fit my mood, inappropriate though the story might have been.

"Why did Dress Me Monkey want to have dinner with his parents again, like he was a little monkey?" the boy asked.

“Because everybody wants that,” my husband said and started to cry. The boy was concerned and snuggled up close to his dad. We explained that Daddy was crying partially because he misses his mother, who has been dead for twelve years, but that also sometimes adults miss the past, the sweet simplicity of the family table. Then it was my turn to cry, because my childhood mealtimes were mainly horrible. The emotional tenor of my those dinners depended on my mother's mood and the man she was dating. She had only three boyfriends over the course of my childhood, but each of them had their own issues, would make me stand at the table or wouldn't talk when I was there or would pull me apart, show my every flaw. When the last one, Kevin, came along I ended up eating dinner alone most of the time.

So. I want my family meals to be happy. Full of love. The food I prepare is part of that love and I try hard not to force the boy to eat things he doesn't like, which is why he eats macaroni and cheese almost every night. Last night the meal was something he has eaten before, but it didn't appeal to him and the whole situation got to me.

I know that his rejection of my food is not a rejection of me, but sometimes I still have that visceral reaction, that and "You have no idea how good you have it, little boy." And I get angry at myself for thinking such a thing. He doesn't "need" to know that. He needs to grow up secure and happy and loved, without the burdens of my childhood thrust upon him. But right now the past is spilling out of me, surprising me with its emotional abundance. It can be overwhelming.

Last night, as I was getting him to sleep, he asked about our day. This rundown of our daily activities is a bedtime ritual. Sometimes I learn more about what happened at school or we go deeper an earlier discussion. When I got to the dinner portion of my synopsis, I apologized for the weirdness of it and asked if he had any questions. "Why did you tell a sad Dress Me Monkey story?" was the first.

The real answer was because I am sad right now. I am processing something deep and fetid, airing out emotions that don’t easily surface. I’m not sure why it's happening and while I don’t like the effects – waking up in the middle of the night or too damn early, occasionally scaring my child, being cranky and sleepy all day – I think what I’m going through is necessary. What I told him was that when I was little mealtimes weren't always happy times and I was feeling sad about it during dinner. And then we moved on to why Daddy cried at the dinner table.

Act II

It happened again last night, the two a.m. alarm clock. I woke up sad, obsessed with an aborted friendship. After a good cry -- quiet, intense -- into my pillow, I went into the boy's room to read and hopefully return to sleep. (He had already migrated into our bed.) When sleep finally snuck up on me, I had a complicated dream. In it, my husband's family was visiting (though, in typical dream style, an old boyfriend of mine showed up, too, looking very much like a middle-aged Eastern Shore type, with a baseball cap, greying beard, and a beer belly). It was a surprise visit. I hadn't had a chance to clean and I was ashamed at how the house looked and angry with my husband for springing them on me.

My dream self went stomping off into the night. Our oldest cat, Zoe, fifteen years old now and a sack of bones, dotty, constantly hungry, followed me. We wandered frenetic city streets, joined the rush of humanity. In one square, mimes performed acrobatic feats and played with fire. The glow of a neon sign drew me into a murky bar. The next thing I remember, Zoe and I were walking home. A rainstorm had blasted through the city and scrubbed away the people, leaving behind damp sidewalks and oil-slick puddles that reflected the shimmer of streetlights. It was spooky, the kind of emptiness where you expect to hear an echo of footsteps behind you. Zoe, frightened by a stray cat, fell behind.

One minute I could see her, the next she was gone. I screamed her name over and over again. I used the dinnertime call: Zo-Zo-Zo-Zo-Zo. And then I opened my eyes, totally awake, feeling the responsibility, feeling the loss.

But at least I was feeling something.



Image: Asher with Nick's shadow. Zoe has asked not to be photographed for the blog. She's an old-fashioned sort who values her privacy, though her name actually is Zoe. She also agreed that this photo was the best fit for the post.

Does it seem like my past is always spilling out? Maybe here. This is different though, like I'm working through something big. I sometimes discount the effects of my childhood and often think I should be over it by now. But it's not so simple, is it?

Tags: dreams, what my son will talk about in therapy someday, think it's time to finally find a therapist again, dress-me monkey, storytelling, cats, Pets, guilt, grief, meals, the family table

The title of this post has nothing to do with anything. It's a song by a band called Morphine, mellow with erotic undertones (to listen, click here), that makes me think of the summer of 1998, when I was in the middle of a divorce and a new romance with Mr. Trinkle, and Mr. Trinkle's mother was dying of cancer thousands of miles away and my mother was living with me in Takoma Park, having kind-of-sort-of left Kevin. I still had Loudon the dog, and Sidney and Zoe were young and acrobatic cats. The song has been going through my head and now I offer it up to you.

But that isn't the point of this post. I want to apologize for being an absent presence in the blogging world. I haven't been up to visiting or commenting on blogs. Updating this one has become increasingly time-consuming. Because of the software I use, every time I have a new post I must export the entire blog and then upload it onto a server, a process that take about half an hour or more. It isn't simple or quick. Writing the posts takes a long time, too, sometimes five or six hours. I have limited writing time and have to start pursuing freelance work. There are a few reasons for this, including the fact that my husband is about to take the equivalent of an 8% salary cut through 21 furlough days in the next year. (Ahhh, California!) I would also like to chip away at longer stories and to deepen my writing which just isn't possible in the blog format.

I'll be a more present online presence soon, one way or another. In the meantime, please don't take it personally that I haven't been by. I'm trying to be present in my own life, figuring out a way to get beyond the longing to immerse myself in deep narrative. To move beyond the longing, I have to leap in or give up. I have no intention of giving up.

Image: Rainbow in Berkeley, June 2009.

Tags: Morphine, blogging, rainbow in Berkeley, writing, storytelling, blogging break, Pets, rapidweaver, california

You think you know me.

Let’s look at the facts as revealed here: I’m a stay-at-home mom with a preschool-aged son. A former librarian, I went to culinary school and from there decided to be a writer. My family is relatively new to Northern California, having moved from the East Coast almost two years ago. I’ve told you my name. Given my birthday (oh, those worries about aging, forcing me to seek comfort on the web).

And if you’ve been here for a while, you know about the defining story of my life, the lifeless premature baby I gave birth to at home when I was sixteen.

But what do you really know?

Jennifer recovering from a late night, 1988? Or another photo to continue the ruse?

How would you feel if I was actually a 25-year-old male advertising copywriter from Peoria? What if I really lived in Buffalo, NY? Or if I was pushing 70, mother to a multitude of now middle aged children, grandmother to teenagers, a Brit using the blog to flesh out a character? This "Jennifer" person you think you've been reading could be someone I’ve been keeping in my back pocket for years. writing to survive might be some kind of grand fictional experiment, an attempt to create a flesh and bones person out of ethereal imagination.

And my stories? What if these were figments, scraps from my mind, absolute fiction masquerading as angst-ridden past? It could be that you've been reading full-blown literary lies à la Margaret B. Jones, the wannabe memoirist who made up a gangland childhood. Turns out my parents have been married for forever, I waited until marriage (or at least love) to have sex, and I’ve never touched a drop of alcohol. Oh, and that isn’t my son, he’s a nephew (never mind that I have no nephew).

Would you feel betrayed?

Don't worry. I don’t have it in me to lie like that, though you'll mainly have to take my word for it and trust your gut. There were times in high school and college when I was a serial liar, self-serving and hidden. My mother believed the stories about my solo nights, even when my boyfriend's car was parked right outside the Little House ("Oh, the car? Dirk leaves it there when he goes to the Cassady's. Sometimes he's had too much to drink, so he stays at their place for the night." "That's exactly what I thought, Jenna.") Later, I hid my unfaithfulness from my college boyfriends, created a protective distance by pursuing empty hopes with relative strangers.

Living a life of lies is a dirty business. I was becoming unrecognizable, murky, untrustworthy, a bad friend. So I stopped lying and regained a hold on fidelity. And while those old kinds of lies are no longer tempting, I still struggle with my tendency to exaggerate minor facts or to deny my feelings. Attempting to be good is a life-long process.

There is a difference between making things up to avoid punishment and creating stories to entertain. Stories aren't lies (and sometimes the lies we tell in our life stories aren't fibs either). If the blog tale is well-told, the characters believable, the created world tangible, so real you can taste it, does it matter if it actually happened? How would you know if it did?

We’re taking it all on faith in this blogging world, want to believe that everyone is who they present themselves to be. For the most part, I think people are genuine. Yes, we have plenty of time to shape our online selves, but we’re generally real. Still …

There must be bloggers, perhaps ones you read every day, who have created fiction under the guise of truth. Their blogs are ostensibly about their day to day existence, may even include some pieces of fiction or poetry or personal essay, but some of the facts have been turned inside out.

Maybe the writer doesn’t want to be identified, or is playing, having fun being someone else. The character that demanded life is finally born in a blog, fully realized, solid, interactive (the fresh-eyed college graduate moving back to her hometown; the landlocked fly fisherman reminiscing about his days of streams and trout; the tech-savvy doting grandma with an herbal tea obsession, a minor character in a SAHM's life). Or they add a totally fictional detail, erase a husband, gain a Weimaraner, make a virtual move from Asheville to Albany.

And what of it? Readers are entertained, the writer has an enthusiastic, satisfied audience. These are tenuous connections we have, the lengths of spider's silk stretching across the ether from blogger to blogger. Many of us have never even spoken. In these circumstances, does the truth matter?

I'm still trying to figure that one out.

Tags: blogging, truth, lies, fiction, faction, facts, fictional characters, trust, memoir, openness, storytelling

Photo of Gertrude Stein from Ovation TV.

I was possibly the only seven year old in the world whose mother read Gertrude Stein out loud to her. At the kitchen table Mom would puzzle through the books she checked out of the Wilmington Public Library, boring her reluctant audience of one. It became a joke between us, the dazed child resting her head on the table, lulled into submission by the tediousness of Gertrude Stein. “A cheeseburger is a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger,” I would tease Mom, and we’d laugh.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when she picked an Edgar Allen Poe story as a Halloween treat for two nine-year-olds. We were living in Newark, Delaware, in a one-bedroom, student family housing apartment. My friend Marie was spending the night and we did the rounds of our complex. Many neighbors didn’t expect trick or treaters, and the ones that did weren’t passing out Hersey bars or KitKats. There were several international families living there and I remember getting strange candies, sweet wafers, little trinkets.

Most people didn’t even open their doors, like the hulking single guy who now lived in my friend Belinda’s old apartment (student family housing?). Belinda had lived there with her mother and younger sister and we had spent most of the previous summer together, organizing skits in the little playground and running around the adjacent field where the University of Delaware marching band held their practices. A long scar traced the length of Belinda’s chest, the mark of two surgeries to correct a congenital heart condition. She had another round of operations scheduled in a couple of years. Though Belinda didn’t seem particularly fragile, I wanted to protect her from harm. When she and her family moved to Michigan in late August, we were both bereft and worried about dealing with new schools on our own.

I wanted to go to her apartment, stare down the guy I blamed for her move, get a little restitution Halloween candy. MaryAnn and I walked up the stairs through the dreary light of humming florescents, up one flight to Belinda's place. The strings of my Cousin It costume kept getting under my feet as they brushed against each stair. The hulk's television was on, blaring some sports event. “Trick or treat!” I yelled, pounding on the hollow metal door. No response. Marie looked at me skeptically through her Wonder Woman mask. “Let’s just go back to your place.”

Poster available from All Posters.

Maybe my mother decided to read “Murders in the Rue Morgue” to help us get over our candy haul doldrums. Perhaps she was hoping for a good, old-fashioned Halloween scare. The story, written in 1841, starts slowly (so slowly that she couldn’t have possibly started at the beginning. Even a nine-year-old raised on Gertrude Stein would have protested), but it sped up when she got to the crime scene. Two women have been brutally murdered. Here is the description of one of the corpses, courtesy of the Poe Museum:

"After a thorough investigation of every portion of the house, without farther discovery, the party made its way into a small paved yard in the rear of the building, where lay the corpse of the old lady, with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off. The body, as well as the head, was fearfully mutilated --the former so much so as scarcely to retain any semblance of humanity. "To this horrible mystery there is not as yet, we believe, the slightest clew."

We didn't get very far through the story before Marie became hysterical. She was frightened. She wanted to go home. Finally, Mom called her parents and they picked up my friend half an hour later.

She never spent the night at my place again.

Tags: Gertude Stein, Halloween, Edgar Allen Poe, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Mom, storytelling, Delaware

I’m standing before a pool of pristine water, circling my arms through stifling summer air. The sun is a hole in the haze, a bright round portal to nowhere. Marked by its unchecked rays, my shoulders are beginning to blush, the pink deepening to red as I kneel by the pool’s edge.

Like the Bay in November, the water looks thick, as though it’s huddling against itself for warmth. I insert a hand and quickly remove it. Too cold. I straighten up, circle the pool, and try dipping a toe in the water. I can’t do it. There will be no swimming today.

Off I go to the air-conditioned house to blog about my inability to leap.

I haven’t written anything substantial for weeks. Today was a lucky day. The kid is napping as I type, a rare occurrence. I took care of a few blogging tasks, ate lunch, and decided that today was the day I would take a look at my months old short story.

This was serious stuff. I set up the laptop at my new, improved writing space. Knowing how distracting the Internet can be, I disabled our wireless connection, told myself to be strong. I opened the file with anticipation.

Every word was questionable, every description hackneyed. I circled the edge of the story, but couldn’t submerge myself. And now I sit writing a blog entry about how damn hard it is to write fiction. Hard because what is in my mind is so difficult to get on the page. Hard because I want to write layered stuff and what I’m writing at the moment seems so simplistic and clichéd. I know that that writing takes practice, but I want to be good at it. RIGHT NOW!

I could look at the bright side. I’m writing more now that I ever have. Even when I am working on a blog entry, I am still writing. When my brain is unlocked, I am capable of just letting the words flow.

Writing blog entries is easy, relatively quick, and satisfying, with almost instant positive feedback. It gives me a chance to organize my thoughts, to mine the mysterious subconscious. Sometimes that puts distracting thoughts to rest so that I am able to write about things outside of my own experience. Writing fiction (or even creative nonfiction) is more plodding and risky. But, oh, for the chance to do it well, to create something that gets beyond the walls of my own skull. Surely the benefits are worth the pain? There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to keep at it.

Beginning next week, the kid will be in school three mornings a week. I will have guaranteed, uninterrupted time to write in the daylight.

I expect mornings of glorious suffering and struggle.

That’s not too much to hope for, is it?

Tags: storytelling, fiction, wasting time, writing

Skipped my Sunday morning run. I’ve been snapping at my family. My mood is foul and it’s best to stay away from me (thank you, H, for taking C to the birthday party). I’m trying to stop my snarls, but my emotions are simmering, close to the boil.

And I’ve been trying to figure it out: why?

I am filled with untapped ideas and complex emotions. They are waiting in my mind, rapping at the walls of my skull, tugging at my brain: Give us life! Make us real! They are desperate for description, for a life on the page.

But I don’t have the language. The words aren’t coming. My subconscious is hog-tied.

If I knew the why of it all, then maybe I could fix it. So I try to feel whatever it is that I’m feeling, try not to beat myself up with what I should be doing or how I should be spending my precious moments of free time. What is the emotional component to this word clog? Which key will open the box?

One clue: I’ve been struggling with the never-ending stillbirth story. What felt complete looks like it will need a rethink, mainly based on the suggestions of a couple of shrewd readers. Their comments weren’t critical, but instead showed other paths I could take, the way it could expand even within its strict confines of time and place.

Aha. The key. My subconscious isn’t hog-tied. It’s working.

I was sixteen and living in an unheated two-room summer cottage adjacent to my grandfather's house when I became pregnant. We called the cottage the "Little House," or the "Upper Room," names taken from a children's story and the bible, symbols before the fact, names repeated in an irony-free world. This was where I lost my virginity, where I got pregnant, and where I later gave birth to a preterm baby who never took a breath.

My life in the Little House was free from supervision. It was full of lies and neglect, tears and isolation. The events leading up to and directly after the stillbirth, combined with other emotional scars from childhood, have defined how I feel about myself, have colored my interactions. I know how to keep a safe distance.

As I keep on writing that particular story, it changes. Not the facts, but the feelings. I find other ways of telling, understand how the experience that separated me can also connect. The distance falls away, I uncross my arms, open my heart and mind.

I sometimes, however, ignore the darker emotions of neglect and anger associated with that event, wash them away in a wave of sympathy for my under-equipped parents. I don't know how to feel the feelings, to give them voice, without directing blame. Is it possible to forgive but still be angry? My writing turns into a mincing dance around the unspeakable.

The story is worth the work. But I also want it out of my head, done.

The feelings need time. They will out.

Tags: existential angst, storytelling, teen pregnancy, forgiveness, writing, the stillbirth

In retrospect, the story lacked muscle tone. It had no structure. I couldn’t build a sound narrative, but kept on getting distracted by a warp in the wood, by plans for an addition, suddenly fascinated by trees off in the distance. None of the boards were true.

I tried to tackle it again a couple of nights ago, started a post about the drawn-out death of Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend. There was his actual end, a very long day in the hospice, waiting as his lungs and heart slowly gave out, waiting for that last long sigh, and the prelude to the end, six months of hospitalization, the horror of it all.

And what about the back story? Or the story before the back story? I couldn’t determine what was important, when to stop my tortured, embarrassed typing. It was overwhelming. The process became a story on its own, a tale of tale-telling gone mad. I canned my original account and the post, though it is still worth writing, provided I create a sound framework.

Good short stories require limits, a set period of time, a riff on one theme or maybe two. Limits create the freedom to explore something in depth, to stop glossing over and really, finally, maybe start get to the bottom of things, to make a stab at the truth.

And so it goes with the stillbirth story, the thing I’ve been working on for a year now. In the process of writing and rewriting it, I’ve been working through the feelings, airing out my tamped-down grief and omnipresent guilt. So I dragged the last 23 years through the mud. When I tried to tie it to the present, give it a neat resolution in my sweet adult life, the story fell apart. It wasn't a story, but a timeline with representative examples.

I needed to do this. Writing it out, the long version and short version, the angry words, and the passages full of self-recrimination, was necessary. The words weren't wasted, but the piece did not transcend.

Then -- a thought: limit the story's timeframe to two weeks, to the just before and the right after. And no initial perfectionism: keep on typing, let my subconscious do its thing. I would clean it up later.

There it was, a story. No pat endings, no struggles to reach peace in 2400 words. The limits freed me.

Tags: storytelling

I'm up early this morning, enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee before anyone else is awake, cherishing my time alone, time to think before the day begins in earnest, before I have to answer to the needs of the kid.

When I started this blog in late December of last year, I wasn't in a good place. All the things I've been writing about since then were burbling just below the surface, barely suppressed, waiting to be given form and shaped into a story. I used a pseudonym -- Anonmomous -- and wrote pretty freely about my angst at the time, my desperation, the stifled creativity that I blamed on my daily mundane existence mixed in with a childhood hangover.

I had no creative outlet, but a strong desire to write and figured that starting a blog would force me to do it on a regular basis. Maybe I would find others out there like me, or attract an audience (even an audience of one would have been wonderful). But nobody reads a blog if they don't know about it. I started using my real first name, joined blogcatalog, and things started to look up.

Most of my early posts are gone, but I recently found an interesting one from right before I "came out." I've reproduced it below.

Thanks to Geoffrey for asking some questions that got me thinking about the early days and how the process of self-expression has actually changed the story I've created for myself.

I also have to thank The Fearless Blog for her kind profile of writing to survive, and her words of encouragement. As usual, she got me thinking about how a positive attitude can change the equation entirely.

Manufacturing interest
18 February 2008

As I was thinking about whether I would post tonight, not sure if I had anything to say, I decided I would manufacture something of interest to write about: the manufacturing of interest in what I am writing here.

I have no idea how you arrived at this blog, whether you find it entertaining, or relevant, or worth five minutes of your time. I could probably come out of the closet, quit being anonymous, and invite people I know to read it, or at the very least passively put up the address in my facebook profile and e-mail signature. Perhaps then the blog would spread like a benevolent virus across cyberspace, e-mailed here and there: you simply HAVE to read this.

Would more people read? Maybe. Would it affect what I write here? Most definitely. In a good way? I am not sure. Currently, I can write corny or stupid or revealing stuff here without worrying about hurting anyone's feelings or worrying about looking corny or stupid. I would probably remove anything non-writing related, which may be the cleaner and kinder way to go. I still have much mulling to do on the topic.

H and I took advantage of our holiday Monday babysitter to go into the city. We wandered around North Beach, did some vintage shopping, had lunch. We ended up at City Lights and I was suddenly overwhelmed by all that fiction, non-fiction, poetry, ecology, etc etc, titles and authors I have never heard of and will probably never read.

What a crazy idea it is to write when there are so many talented people out there who can barely sell a book.

But I can't worry about that now, can I?

Tags: writing, secrets, storytelling

I've never thought of myself as a good storyteller. Getting the sequence of events in the right order, building the proper tension -- I can't do it out loud. Maybe it's a self-confidence problem, or it's my ever-present worry about getting things wrong or saying something horribly offensive (that's a childhood hangover right there), but piecing together a narrative is real work for me, work that I can't do with an audience. Trapped in an ice of anxiety, my imagination retreats and my mouth ceases to work properly.

Then my son started asking for stories before bed. Yes, my internal editor even made an appearance here. I had to thaw my mind, to stop caring about being bad at storytelling. Of course, he is a very receptive audience, a three-year-old with a love of the surreal. He throws out an idea and I run with it, with a little input when necessary (fun fact: did you know that monsters eat pears?).

It's freeing and satisfying, this flow of connected silliness with just a touch of plot. Good practice for writing.

If only he would fall asleep after the story. Perhaps I should be more boring.

Tags: sleep, storytelling