The Bib, Writing Prompt #20

Posted on
Reply

 

Last night as I drove past the Bayside Diner on Northern Boulevard, I had a flash of memory. Grandma and I had our last meal together there years ago when I was six months pregnant. I had questioned her eating choices (hamburger and fries) and then beat myself up for it afterwards. Had I known the future, I would have said, “Go ahead Grandma, load up on the salt .”

But we don’t know the future. That is why when we are done crying, questioning, and in the process of missing, we take small comfort in words.

THE BIB

Aren’t you supposed to be watching your cholesterol?
I lectured my Grandmother under Bayside Diner’s neon lights.
What? I should never have a little piece of meat and a couple of fries?

She pulled out a lobster bib to the sound of forks scraping plates.
It was saved, like her plastic bags in the closet, Sweet and Lows,
balls of foil and I wanted to crawl under the table

but smiled instead while she ate her French fries.
I wondered why anyone needed all that jewelry, her lovely costume jewelry,
just to have lunch at the Bayside Diner.

Two days later it filled a plastic bag at St. Francis hospital where in fleeting moments of consciousness she said, What’s wrong, Steffie?

Nothing.  Must be that they have you on too much medication.
I reassured her,
Septic shock. The nurse said later when her body started to bubble,   turned purple where drips stuck into the back of her hand like needles
from the pin cushion at home beside her sewing chair.

I was afraid to touch her hand but did, held up the baby’s
blue bib across my pregnant belly, the one she’d been working on since my sonogram showed “boy,”
a bib she carried to the hospital in a portable sewing bag as if there would be plenty of time to sew.

WRITING PROMPT 20:

  • The Symbol.   Take notice of how everyday objects act as triggers. Allow one symbol (diner) to lead into another (bib.)This week, think of memory triggers that are bitter-sweet. I smiled when I passed the Bayside Diner last night, remembering how Grandma thought nothing of pulling out a plastic lobster bib to protect her suit. She was always dressed up and every strand of her dyed blond hair perfect thanks to weekly visits to the “beauty parlor” and tons of hair spray. No wonder, she had the protection of a lobster bib even when she ate hamburgers.
  • Not Another Grandma (or Great-Grandma) Poem.  You are not writing this poem for publication, but you write to stir up the memory of someone you loved  who shaped your life. This post’s for you, Grandma Rose.
  • Hit the Journal. Are you writing everyday? Keep your hand going and free. Pick a line or two from your own words. Let that be the prompt for your next piece.

WHEN YOU FINISH WRITING:

Thank you very much for visiting each week. I consider each click an honor.

Is it Safe to Swim with Crocodiles? Writing prompt #19

Posted on
Reply
Komodo Dragon

Komodo Dragon, Indonesia, by Jessica Lipsey

Crocodiles are not a reality where I live. No komodo dragons either. In the US, we get Alligators, but only in the Southeast and I’m in NY, home to smaller reptiles, like garter snakes.  I once hit an gator in the mouth with a paddle. My daughter and I were canoeing in Florida and I thought he was a log until his jaw opened and snapped into air.

Did you know that alligators can grow as many new teeth as they want so their mouths are always filled with sharpness?

The other night I had a dream I was camping with my family near a lake filled with alligators. I asked the ranger if it was safe to swim and he said, “It could be.”

I wanted a yes or no answer. “No, you can’t swim in the lake!”  or “Go ahead, the water is fine,” but everyone said the same thing, “It could be.” In my dream, I desperately wanted someone to tell me it was safe, but none could guarantee. Meanwhile, my family swam side by side with hundreds of gators. I watched. They swam and splashed until the lake dried up and turned into a fossil bed. I never went in.

Why am I sharing this? a) because perhaps there is a dream analyst out there who can make sense of this, b) because I know you love to write about scary animals, c) the alligators are trying to tell me something.

I looked up alligators in Denise Linn’s book, The Hidden Power of Dreams. She writes that they are a symbol of “hidden, formidable strength and power.” or “Trouble below the surface.”

What do you think? Is there strength and power ahead or trouble below the surface? There could be.

WRITING PROMPT 19:

  • What’s Your Interpretation?  Set your story or poem in a swamp. Are the gators friendly? a symbol of fear? strength? trouble?
  • Get a dream book and flip open to a random page.  Characters dream. Poets dream. Use someone else’s dream in your writing by flipping open a dream dictionary and writing down the interpretation. This gets you off the hook from simply writing about a dream.  In a poetry workshop I took with Kimiko Hahn, she advised us that when using a dream as a resource for a poem, it’s a good idea to not make the opening line, “In my dream….” It’s already been done.
  • Consult the Mythology. In Ted Andrew’s book, Animal Speak, he wrote about the symbolism of alligators as follows, “Primal Energies of Birth, Motherhood, and Initiation.” Animal images live within the collective. “In medieval Europe and earlier…alligator and crocodile were associated with the dragon…the guardian of treasures, often symbolic of hidden wisdom.”  Varuna, god of waters in the Hindu tradition, rides on a crocodile’s back. Go riff on the myth.

WHEN YOU FINISH WRITING:

Thank you very much for visiting each week. I consider each click an honor.

Giants Win the Super Bowl and I Cried When Madonna Danced For World Peace. Writing Prompt #18

Posted on
4

Madonna played at Escapes in Merrick when I was a kid. I had the black and white postcard of the event taped to my wall with her picture. An armful of rubber black bangles framed Madonna’s face. It was the 80′s.

I wore those rubber bangles too, shopped at Unique on Broadway, and got my head partially shaved at the Astor Place Hairstylists soon after that. Oh, I thought I was so cool.

For a minute during half-time, I was that teenage version of myself.  Only I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have cried when the words “world peace” filled the stadium floor. If I did cry, I never would have admitted it online. Wait, there was no “online.”

WRITING PROMPT 18:

  • Get Emotional.  Have you ever cried at a totally inappropriate moment? Or laughed when the “normal” reaction is to cry? Or is the only thing you can manage to talk about after the Giants win the super bowl your own personal reaction to a half-time performance? Let a character (or theme) you are working with be filled with a surprising emotional response.
  • Time Travel.  Tonight, the image of me walking around the East Village in the 1980′s as a teenager wearing combat books was juxtaposed in my mind with the glitzy super bowl of 2012. Take two images such as these and write a poem.
  • Journal Exercise. In your journal, write freely about you, past (pick one time from the past) and present. Alternate lines so that in one sentence you’re shopping for used neon pants and in the next you’re driving the carpool. Go line by line without thinking or stopping. I would LOVE to read these so I hope some of you are brave enough to share.

WHEN YOU FINISH WRITING:

Thank you very much for visiting each week. I consider each click an honor.

Writing Prompt #17: Are you Flexible????

Posted on
2

Without looking at that photo, what does that word mean to you? What happens when your plans suddenly change. Is it “okay” because YOU are “flexible?” Or does it send you into a tizzy that requires days (and/ or medication) to help you bounce back?

It’s much harder to go through the world being inflexible, yet we all have areas where we resist change. Sometimes we just won’t budge.

The best stories make the magic of change happen. They fool the readers into buying into one set of beliefs only to take it away at the end. Like life.

WRITING PROMPT 17: Flexible or inflexible?

  • Get Stubborn. Write about someone in your life (a boss, coworker, teacher, colleague) who made you crazy with their inability to be even slightly flexible. I bet you have someone in mind right now! Make him or her a character and put that stubbornness on steroids.
  • Get physical.  Add some stretches before you write today.  Get out of that writing chair and touch your toes (bent knees are fine!). Slowly roll back up, keeping your knees bent and taking your time. Inhale. Exhale. Breathe in as you raise your arms overhead and exhale as you lower them. Ah.
  • Journal Exercise. In your journal, write freely about your own thoughts on flexibility. Ouch. This can be a painful experiment, but it will feel so good to get those thoughts off your chest. Introspection is just another tool in your writer’s toolbox.

WHEN YOU FINISH WRITING:

  • Come on back to “Leave a Reply”,  post your story, poem, comments, or excerpt below this post.
  • Want feedback on your work? The Sound Cliff Writing Spa is on! Click here for details.
  • Follow me on my new Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/StefanieLipsey.Writer and post there too. Let’s get a conversation happening.
  • Visit my website: www.stefanielipsey.com and blog, writingyoga.com (this blog post theme is shared there this week so check it out) or email me with questions: info@stefanielipsey.com
  • Come back next week and keep writing!

Thank you very much for visiting each week. I consider each click an honor.

Picture credit: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=3229

Writing Prompt #16: Your Laundry Stinks

Posted on
2

Hello, olfactory cortex!  You’re that part of the brain that lets us feel wonderfully warmed by a cinnamon apple scented candle or disgusted by teenagers who leave plates of food in the sink to rot overnight.

Guess what I woke up to today?

I enjoy listening to Dr. Christiane Northrup on Hay House Radio, and she often talks about keeping her sink shiny at the end of the night as a way to seal in the day. I love this evening ritual, or the idea of it at least, but the kids went to bed long after I did.

Maybe the day’s lesson was more about giving up control than having a clean house.

In this week’s prompt, we will be exploring scents in our words and how those scents get aired. Without air, a breeze to float something delicious or hideous up to our noses, scents do not exist. There must be some movement even if only one tiny molecule at a time.

Enjoy this week’s prompt and let’s hope I have a cleaner kitchen this week so I can spend more time writing!

WRITING PROMPT 15: Your Laundry Stinks

  • Go through a current manuscript and add smells. How descriptive are you in your writing? Do you think you could find one or two places to add fragrance? Remember that smell and taste are connected. Perhaps it is a taste or even a feeling that you smell as in, “I felt worse than those dirty sock scented dishes.” (not the most artful sentence, but you get the point.)
  • Go shopping for scents.  Make a list this week of everything you smell. Make that your smell dictionary for your work.
  • Journal Exercise. In your journal, write freely about what you wish to air this year. What qualities can you set off in the breeze? You have already journaled on what you wish to plant. Now, air that quality out. How can you bring that quality (maybe it’s courage, joy, or compassion) out into the world?

WHEN YOU FINISH WRITING:

Writing Prompt #15 Justice. Honoring Dr. King.

Posted on
4

Is there someone in the world or in your life that you can honor with words? Who has changed your life? The course of history? The history yet to come?

Martin Luther King, Jr. photographed by Marion S. Trikosko, 1964. LC-DIG-ppmsc-01269 Source: Library of Congress

Today is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  In my journal I wrote about the passing days, politics, the work before us in trying times, about a world still filled with too much fear and misinformation. Do these words have a place in my novel or poems? Yes.

WRITING PROMPT 15: Justice

  • Write a poem without being sentimental.  Yeah, I should talk. It happens but poetry is much better with out it. Honor someone in your poem by revealing a truth. All of it. Let the reader come to their own conclusions. 
  • Journal on Justice. We tell children “you get what you get and you don’t get upset,” but it’s hard not to feel slighted when you get the short end of the stick. Is there a place in your life where you’ve felt slighted? Are you the one slighting?
  • History in the toolbox. A work doesn’t have to be in the genre of “historical fiction” to borrow from history. Blogs, essays, poems, refer to and reveal the past. Connect the dots in a piece of writing. Your choice. Use the ol’ “what if?” question. What if a certain event never happened? What if it happened differently?

WHEN YOU FINISH WRITING:

Writing Prompt #14: Blueberries in the Journal

Posted on
Reply

I seem to be on a food kick. Last week cookies, this week, blueberries. Do you think I’m revving up to hibernate? On Saturday in New York, spring teased us for a minute, luring bears and dormice out into the sun.

Speaking of bears, one of my favorite books for children is Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey. Maybe I feel sentimental because it was one of the first books I read during storytime as a new children’s librarian. Or maybe I just like the way little bear and little Sal walk up and down the mountain slopes, beside the wrong mothers, separating all distinction between species.

I know that there is comfort in its repetition, alteration, and onomatopoeia, the sound blueberries make when they hit the pail, kuplink. kuplank. kuplunk. Did you hear that? In the story, Sal and her mother, little bear and his mother, have nothing to do but pick blueberries and get ready for winter. Simple days and tasks, yet imperative to survival.

This week’s thematic word is PLANT, planting blueberries or planting the seeds of your intention for 2012, it’s all the same. How do you see your life on the other side of the year?

WRITING PROMPT 14: Kuplink, kuplank, kupunk.

  • Write freely using aliteration and onomatopoeia. Be child-like. Be silly. Creativity loves play. Pick something from your kitchen as a place to start. You can stand at the table canning berries or leave to hike mountain slopes. See where the blueberries take you and then brainstorm lots of words: bees buzzing blueberry seeds. Use those words as your palette for a poem. 
  • Mistaken identity. In Mozart’s Opera, Così fan tutte and the 70′s TV show Three’s company, characters are mistaken for other characters. Little bear, little Sal, and both of their mothers are so engrossed in the day that they don’t know who is who. How can that happen? Write a story, poem, TV sitcom or Libretto that employs mistaken identity.
  • Blueberries in the journal. In your journal, write freely about what you wish to plant this year. What qualities do you wish to see in your life? Pick one word that you would like someone to use to describe you. Courageous? Joyful? Compassionate? Write about how THAT would look and feel.

WHEN YOU FINISH WRITING: