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Stories at the Table, Beginnings and Endings, and a Prompt

I love how, in continued practice, techniques naturally unfold and lessons slide into place. 

Stories

Last Saturday at our monthly creative writing class, a few core writers and I sat around the table and read our stories based on the previous month’s prompt, After the storm. We followed along the lines of Barbara Hurd’s essay, “Wordwrack: Openings,” which begins with a beautiful first line:

A nor’easter smacked into Cape Ann last night, and this morning the wrack’s dark line lies tangled and heaped.

Like Hurd, we told our own stories of storms and the debris left behind, markers – some physical, some emotional –  that became signs of relief as much as evidence of our fears.

The amazing part in listening to these stories this month was witnessing how the writing in this group has morphed from a very natural, everyday style of storytelling to a strong use of technique. A few writers made the decision not to begin their stories in a traditional way, with a mini-prologue of sorts, but to open with the moment that carried the most heat, weaving in backstory when necessary. Their stories read like true flash nonfiction: “discrete, sharply focused…[revealing] the secrets of human nature contained therein” (as Dinty Moore says in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction).

And, the way these writer told their stories segued perfectly into this month’s topic: beginnings and endings. 

A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.                                          ~ Graham Greene

Because the pieces we write in this group are so short and only a glimpse into our experiences, beginnings and endings are both critical in holding our readers attention or in conveying our message.

Beginnings

“[T]o begin is to commit, to stay, to hold.” ~Jenny Boully

Embryonic moments from an experience – like In the beginning or When I was born – don’t always mark the perfect opening for a story; a great beginning is when a certain energy strikes the page, when the reader tightens her grip on the book or the listener narrows his focus on what he is hearing. 

Endings

“An ending tumbles toward you over and over again; an ending will not stay flat, will not stay put; an ending troubles and taunts; an ending is sleep lost. . . . [An ending] is an emptiness that tugs you to read the ending once more, to read the beginning again.” ~ Jenny Boully

Likewise, endings do not always bring us to a nice, clean close. As in real life, endings can come without warning or they can leave us deep in thought for days, even months afterward. They might even push us to return to the beginning, to search for clues or to simply recover the emotion lost or gained in the experience. 

A wonderful example of all this is Vicky Mlyneic’s essay on BREVITY, “This I Am Allowed.” Read it, see where she begins; consider what she leaves out and where she stops. Then, turn to your own story. The place you begin and end can make all the difference. 

The Prompt

And then it happened.

* Photo credit: taliesin from morguefile.com

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From Writing Prompts to Props: Introducing Toshio Ninomiya

Great writers will always surprise you and leave you thinking of their stories long after you’ve reached the end. This is true of my friends at the Retirement Living Center, who came to our monthly writing class last Saturday with not only stories, but props in tow.

We wrote on cloth and memory, a prompt which drove them to search attics and storage rooms and the backs of closets. Each story they read was rich, absolutely. They filled the room with laughter and an amazing energy. I wish you could have been there.

As a “next best thing” to sitting at the table with me, I asked one of the readers if I could post his story. Toshio Ninomiya agreed. During his turn, Tosh prefaced his piece by saying, “In order to read my story, I have to put on this hat.” His eyes lit up then, and he cracked a mischievous smile. And, I thought, Oh my, this is gonna be good. Enjoy!

Old Hat

by Toshio Ninomiya

It’s a real old hat. I bought it for $2.50 about 70 years ago in San Francisco, just before I took a trip to Japan. Most men at that time wore hats and ties whenever they ventured into public areas, just as ladies wore hats and gloves. San Francisco was a very conservative and formal city at that time, unlike what it is today. I expected Japan to be even more rigid in the way its people dressed in western style.

I was sure it had hat stores in large cities, but I doubted most of them had English-speaking employees. I, on the other hand, didn’t know how to say hat in Japanese. I was glad I had the foresight to buy one beforehand.

I discovered in an English newspaper where I found a job, that everyone from the type setter to the managing editor wore a suit, tie and a hat. It was de rigueur, especially for a cub reporter who had to go out interviewing people, mostly foreigners to Japan.

That was just the beginning of the hat’s life history. The three years in Japan were nothing as far as it was concerned. It was the following decades of sitting on my head that took its toll, accompanying me from frigid Alaska to tropic Equador.

Eventually, it not longer had the sharp crease and the snappy brim that once provided a subtle touch of masculinity, male libido you might say, to its wearer.

The question then became what to do with it. It wasn’t like a pair of worn out shoes. It was my companion of many years, my alter ego. Consigning it to a garbage dump was unthinkable.

I made a decision to use it as my hat during fly fishing. Not only would it protect me from the elements, it would label me as a gentleman fisherman, unlike those who wear baseball type caps, that is, people of lower caste.

That too, came to past and the last four years it lay dormant in the storage room of Harwood Place, until yesterday. But from here on, it shall stay in my bedroom closet where I can take it out and put it on my head every once in a while, just for old time’s sake.

Tosh is a long-time member of the group and a published author, having had one of his pieces appear in Glimmer Train. I’m so grateful to him for sharing his work here and his stories with us at the table every month.

~

Next month’s prompt comes from Midge Raymond’s Everyday Writer:
Write about a time when something small – a chocolate bar, a smile from the right person at the right time, a martini – made you happy.

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Monthly Writing Prompt: Pathways to our Past

A heavy trunk with a broken lock takes up a good part of my attic space upstairs. Inside are remnants from my past: yearbooks, a folder full of dramatic poetry from the sixth grade, letters from my best friend the year she moved to Korea. More than letters and photos, though, there are shirts and a blanket and a costume I wore in my fourth-grade talent show. My kids call it the treasure chest; a sense of excitement fills the air each time I crack the lid. They love digging through my history.

At the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison a few weeks ago, I attended a presentation by Beverly Gordon on Cloth and Memory. She spoke about the power of textiles — from clothing, to handkerchiefs, to the blanket a child refuses to give up or (years later) a parent refuses to give away. Fabric holds memory, and “threads are pathways,” Gordon says, connecting the past to the present.

For years, a terry cloth shirt and pair of shorts has stayed buried in my trunk, has moved with me from house to apartment to house again. It’s gone the distance from Texas to Wisconsin. I wore the outfit when I was six or seven. Embroidered on the shirt is a pair of tennis rackets.

I never played tennis, but, for a short time, my parents did. My sisters and I would pile in the car with Mom and Dad on a warm Saturday and hit the courts. My father would teach my mother the art of the serve, the trick to the backhand, and my sisters and I would hit tennis balls along the backboard with badminton rackets. I wore that outfit often to those outings, and the terry cloth became my tangible reminder of those sunny afternoons: basking in the sunlight and in the sounds of my parent’s laughter. Pure bliss.

THE PROMPT

We save a favorite shirt, our mother’s scarf, our father’s hat that he wore on Sundays, because cloth connects us through time and place. Write about something of cloth that holds memory for you.