#Writing from a Prompt, a new Tiny Essay:
My Mother is Waiting
Once a month, I run a writers’ meet-up for two hours. I love leading the workshop, but you should know it is also self-serving. Every time I give a prompt and the writers grow quiet as they put pen to paper, I do the same. We are all accountable that way.
Last time we met, we read from Judith Kitchen’s “The Art of Digression” (from the Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction). Sometimes in writing, we approach the page hard-headed and get stuck on one idea, one image, one prompt, refusing to wander.
Kitchen suggests that digressing from our original starting point serves more purpose than we imagine:
To digress: to stray from the subject, to turn aside, to move away from.
The concept of moving away, turning aside, is an important one. This is not quite the same thing as changing the subject, or moving toward something else. Instead it is a natural outflow of association, an aside that grows directly out of the material and builds until it has a life of its own—it is getting a bit lost on the way out in order to make discoveries on the way back.
My advice is to court digression. To court those places in the mind that we usually shut out because they would appear to lead us astray. Let your conversation get away from you; let a new story take over; follow a mental argument to where it begins to eddy in the current of its confusion. If something creeps in unnoticed or else pops instantly into your mind, don’t put it aside in favor of where you already sense you are going. No, follow it up by—to use an expression common to those who work with horses—giving it its head. Something may happen along the way, something to alert you to its relevance. And then trust yourself to find the connective tissue….
After we read the essay, we had two prompts to choose from–The water is rising and My mother’s voice. We wrote one story and then we wrote another, each veering off from the same opening paragraph of our making. Or, if you were me, you wrote two different stories that veered from the same opening sentence….
My Mother is Waiting
My mother is waiting. She sits beside me on a bench in a hospital hallway outside a room marked X-Ray. My legs are swinging below me; her hands are in her lap; she is very quiet. I am four years old, have repeat stomach aches, and am constantly underweight. You’ll have to drink all the medicine, she says finally. You won’t like it but drink it all. She’s right, I don’t like it. They lied when they said it tasted like bubble gum. But I take in as much as I can and she pats my knee. We wait for a while longer. In that next stretch, her voice is soothing and suddenly I ask her what it means to be saved. We are avid church goers, but she is not the one who prays in tongues or dances in the aisles. Still, she is the person I ask. She’s surprised, wonders what made me think of such a thing now. I shrug. She calls me an old soul. But who can really understand the workings of a four-year-old mind? Keeping her voice low, she tells me it’s simple; you just ask and there you are. So I did, and there we were: her standing off to the side in the X-Ray room and me under the light.
. . . .
My mother is waiting. She stands behind me, one hand on my shoulder and the other on my arm. When the pastor nods, she presses me forward. I am seven years old and nervous, though this was my idea. First you get saved, then you get baptized. The rest was still unknown to me. The steps are tall and the water is rising and when I look back she says she will meet me on the other side. As I move down into the water, I lose my balance, fall into the pastor’s arms. The water is frigid. Immediately, I shake and shiver and am glad the baptism seems short: a few words, a dip under water, my long hair wet and dripping down the back of my soaked clothes. And there she is, her hand out, grasping mine and pulling me up, wrapping me in a towel. We skip the rest of church that night, sit together in the dressing room, me warming in fresh clothes, her combing my hair in gentle sweeps. Her voice washing over me in just the same way.
Stories unfold as they will in the beginning: scratchy and messy and flat at times. But even if you digress, if you let your mind wander, no writing is wasted. Discoveries are made. Trust the process.
Or as Kitchen says:
Trust me, the brain struggles to make sense of whatever is put in front of it. So how could you doubt that your brain will find ways to connect what you’re thinking about now with what you were thinking about just a few minutes ago? Your brain will find some connection. Or, if not your brain, then your heart. There may be an emotional connection that defies logic.
Join us next month for Study Hall: #AmWriting on Sunday, August 12th, 3-5pm CST. We meet in person or online.
New Flash Fiction: ‘Didn’t even leave us a message.’
This article about an octopus breaking free from the National Aquarium of New Zealand came across the wire long ago, and I couldn’t resist reading. I also couldn’t resist stealing the first line and quoting the last to create a whole new piece of flash fiction. Just for fun. (After all, what is writing if it isn’t fun?)
‘Didn’t even leave us a message.’
Photo credit: W. Tipton on Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC
It was an audacious nighttime escape. Inky would never have considered it had it not been for the young girl who stood at the glass for longer than he could keep his suckers from twitching. She stared at him as he slithered across the tank. He rolled back a tentacle, let it flare and pop in her direction. She was unfazed. He bared his underside. She only giggled. Then he gave her the side eye, full-force, to frighten her really. But she pressed her face closer and shocked him with her own eyes that looked like the water in the deep end of the harbor. After all these years, he had not forgotten: the endless color, the brush of soft kelp against his mantle, the current that ran warm along his dorsal. His head swam in sudden delirium.
The ocean.
He pushed back through the water and spun in a circle, repeating to himself, the ocean the ocean. He would have the ocean. And soon. He told Blotchy outright in the dark of evening as they fed on flaccid herring. And when the kid darted back and forth in panic and inked himself a mess, Inky told him to keep his claw shut about the whole business or he’d wedge his little plastic coconut shell of a house up to the glass and make his window view that of the crab cluster fucks next door. The kid inked himself again. Blotchy hated crabs.
An hour later, Inky regretted what he’d said. Blotchy was dropped into this sterile observation pit before he knew any different. He had no idea about the water that never had to be tested with bottles and drops, about the sand, soft and malleable and deep, or how herring are not supposed to sink white-eyed and loose in the water and be gnawed at–they are to be hunted. With vigor! The next morning, Inky whispered an apology to Blotchy from his corner of the aquarium. If the kid heard him, he couldn’t tell. Blotchy kept to his shell and splayed only two arms outside of it, fluttering them once in a while in a trite effort to stir up an Oooh or an Ahhh from beyond the glass.
That night, Inky hid in the corner of the aquarium near the cloth shreds of sea grass. He squinted his eye and studied the man who came after the crowds left. The man rolled a bucket in front of him and lifted what looked like a withered anemone out of its hull. He squeezed the anemone of all its juices, and Inky shuddered, wondering how much longer he would have before that would be him. Or Blotchy. A twinge of guilt pressed at the back of Inky’s head, but he shook it off. He had to focus. The man pushed what was left of the animal in tiny circles along the middle of the floor. He made tracks, clean wet tracks, that passed over a small disk and led to the door. Inky watched the man leave and then turned his eyes back to the disk. A drain. For years Inky had missed that drain, but he knew it now. And as a trickle of water slid down a winding crack in the tile and into the drain, he knew what to do.
He waited until Blotchy wedged himself into a hill of hard rocks and rested quietly. (How that kid settled into those rocks he didn’t know.) He thought to leave a note for Blotchy, rocks in a pattern that marked the way to escape. But could Blotchy even read patterns? Would he know to look beyond the glass? He opted to tuck him in a little more by shoveling a tiny crest of rocks up against Blotchy’s backside. The kid stirred. Inky whooshed away.
Filling his snout with air, he rose to the surface, the water warming as he grew closer to the red light over the aquarium. He bobbed slow and lifeless, like the squid across the dark room when it had died last week, and floated in the fake current all the way to the tiny break in the top screen. Tentacle by tentacle, his tips stinging in the fresh air, he squeezed and molded and lifted his body out of the tank. He plopped onto the floor, breathless, then dragged himself across the cold tile until he smothered the drain.
With one arm, he felt underneath him for the largest opening. He would have studied the situation longer but felt already the encroaching sense of dry along his skin. So he let himself fall inch by inch through the first opening he could detect, into the abyss, into the sound of water, pretending that he was falling straight into the ocean but rejoicing nonetheless when he splashed into a rancid stream. Sucking in hoards of sour water, he moved with force toward freedom.
His last obstacle: another disk, thicker this time but no match for his will, which doubled in strength after he peered through a small opening and saw blue blue blue on the other side. His body tingled at the thought of ocean so close, and his mind ballooned with memory, with images. The euphoria was almost too much, so he set his thoughts on the mechanics of compressing his body little by little, letting it fill just as slow as each part of him stretched into the other side. It took longer to push himself through the small space but he was driven by overwhelming anticipation and elation. And then–release.