This persona thing is harder than one might think; at least it is for me. I have been writing what I want to write, on my own schedule, from my vantage point, for so long that it is a struggle to do anything else. When we first received the journal assignment, there was a distinction made between a writing journal and a diary. Now obviously I know the difference, but that doesn’t always mean that I insist on the difference. You know, the whole “every square is a rectangle but not every rectangle is a square” thing. That is this.

In an effort to expand outside of what I “normally” do, I have been making a concerted effort to play with different voices. While role play can be uncomfortable, it is more so when you know it is going to be outed in public. I know there are always parts of me in the words I place on the page. I can only assume others know that as well. The apprehension comes in when you try to guess how much of yourself will people assign to person and how much persona. After they decide that, what assumptions, judgments, innuendos will they create? What whispers, side eyes, pearl clutches will they read? It is enough to make you throw the whole keyboard away.

Right up until you don’t. Right up until you find the courage to just say “fuck it” (told you it’s a tactic I employ pretty often) and you just decide you are going to create the thing you want to create in this moment and, if met with ridiculousness, well then, let’s all get ridiculous.

There was a little of this when I decided “Black Barrel” was something I could turn in. I wanted it to be sexy, but I was a teeny bit afraid to write sexy. I mean how much is too much? How much is too little? Where is the Goldilocks of sexy for a writer who is not really versed at it? I dunno so I just went with it.

Interesting fact: The more often you do the scary, the less scary it becomes. I had the same type pause with this next assignment. I really enjoyed doing it. The process was a lot of fun. And, it was one of those creations that guided itself. I can assure you that I had no intention of writing about the aging challenges of women. None. But there it was. And I kinda liked it. But it needed a title. “Menopausal Momentum” was the very first thing that came to my mind. Like really fast. But I threw it out damn near as quick. There was just something too raw, too close, too intimate. I tried a few different things that were so inferior that I can’t even remember what they were now. So, I did it again. “Fuck it,” throw the title on it, turn it in before you can think about it anymore.

And it works. At least I think it does.

Creative Writing Exercise #3 – Voice

Pick a song on your iPod, phone, or a playlist at random and let it influence you as you quickly write a first draft of a poem.

 Menopausal Momentum
  
 Momentum moves
 Saving grace
 Sitting still
 Headspace
  
 I open my silent mouth
 A mermaid song
 Drowned in crashing despair 
 Tides of wasted potential
  
 Wrong place, wrong time
 Sound wave hits my ear
 Confused light at my eye
 Misstep. Again
  
 There was a time
 When I could be considered
 Considerable.
 Today I am considerate
  
 Time made change of my dime
 Inflation devalues the stock
 Thought I was broke in the beginning
 Different hole, different depths
  
 Angry isn’t the word
 Rage radiates into the frizz
 Hair pulled out
 Shedding the gray
  
 Salt burns eyes
 Creates questions in stone
 Melts into watered down comfort
 Things best done alone
  
 Soft petals recall spring.
 I remember.
 I knew how to be lonely then.
 Winter makes me hard
  
 Fur lined coat
 Feel good fake warmth
 Move through the fantasy
 Until momentum returns
   

Creative nonfiction has always been my primary lane. I say primary because I have, on occasion, done different things. I won my first writing competition in the 5^th grade. It was a Red Ribbon Week essay detailing my amazing 10-year-old insight into the dangers of illicit drugs and my philosophy on how to avoid them. It was revolutionary for its time. Really.

Not surprisingly, my hormones turned me to poetry. I still have stacks of yellowed typewriter paper (because that’s how old I am) that I have attempted to go through to see if there is anything salvable. I can’t do it. It is just that bad. Of course, I have only tried to do it sober, so maybe I am gonna need a little help. Really, it’s horrible and there’s a lot of it.

Poetry, with the exception of this small little tryst in my teenaged years, has never been my thing. I don’t read it (which is probably why I couldn’t write it), and I’ve never really “gotten” it. I had the good fortune last semester to have an amazing professor for American Lit. Dr. Town did two things that, although I didn’t know it then, has set me up to be a better writer and a more interested reader of poetry:

• She was okay with the fact that I didn’t like it. She just needed me to engage with it enough to ask an intelligent question.
• She didn’t insist that poems meant anything in particular. We were free and encouraged to find our own meaning in them provided we could provide intelligent support for our interpretation.

Once the class was over, I still wasn’t a poetry fan, but I wasn’t an eye roller anymore either. That’s definite progress.

Good thing too. Although our first writing assignment lent itself easily to prose, that’s the last time we have seen that style in class. Poetry is first, then fiction, then creative nonfiction. This means, as one would expect, I have read more poetry than I would have opted for myself, and I have to write it. And by “write it” I mean I have to turn it in with the knowledge that it may very well end up projected to the whiteboard in the front of the class.

Great.

Fortunately, Dr. Morris is a poet. This has been immeasurably helpful for a few reasons:

• He is super passionate – I mean like really passionate – about it and that makes it far more interesting than it typically would have been.
• Remember the “freedom to play, to suck, to expand, to nurture one small idea into something readable”? He employs that belief in poetry too.
• And probably most importantly (to me at least) is that he taught me how to read poetry.

Ok, that last one may seem like a silly no brainer. I have a pretty extensive vocabulary. I know how to read. It is one of my favorite things to do. Reading poetry is easy – it’s the understanding that is hard.

Except when you are reading it wrong. I thought for my whole reading life that you just read it. Start at the front of the line, go to the end of the line, stop, go to the next line, rinse, and repeat. I had NO IDEA what a caesura or an enjambment was. I didn’t know that you read to punctuation not necessarily to the line’s end. I did not know that poetry readings weren’t just some weird beatnik thing, that it actually did need to be heard out loud, that sound is inseparable from the meaning. It all kind of came together and created an epiphany when I read W.H. Auden’s quote, “Poetry is memorable speech.”

I am not ready to create “memorable speech” yet. But I am far more open to reading it now. I am creating assignment speech. I offer my first assignment to you just the way I turned it in.

Write a poem (minimum fourteen lines) about your surroundings. You can write in first person (“I am sitting at my desk, which is littered with papers and old coffee cups.”), or write in third person, simply describing what you see (“The room is bleak and empty except for one old wooden chair.”). Challenge yourself to use descriptive language to set the scene. Rather than saying, “The light is shining through the window,” you might say, “The morning sun is streaming through the window, spotlighting a million dancing dust particles and creating mottled shadows on my desk.”

You want to write intriguing descriptions that invite the reader into the setting so they can “see, hear, smell, taste, feel” what you observe.

 Black Barrel
  
 Oaky smoke
 Cherry chill
 In my chest
 Burns it still
  
 Honey warm 
 Invites me in
 Fills my cup
 Described as sin
  
 Buttery smooth
 Leaves lips wet
 Entwined like strangers
 Or lovers just met
  
 Dew drips
 Sweat slides
 Whispered secrets
 To glass confides
  
 Fingerprints
 Destructive heat
 Tucked away
 Till next we meet 

Ok, so here is the first of the school stuff we talked about yesterday. This was the very first assignment in my Creative Writing class. Assigned on our first day of class (a Tuesday), the finished product was due before the following class (Thursday).

I point that out because I think it speaks to the tempo of the class and why it has (so far) been both uncomfortable and beneficial. There is no “learn-until-you-are-competent-enough.” There are no weeks of time allotted to work and rework and (honestly) procrastinate. There is no get up into your head and freak yourself out. This class took care of all that when on the 12^th we introduced ourselves and on the 14^th we had both turned something in, and had it read out loud. Not the way I would have done it. I would have been wrong.

Anywho, here’s the assignment.

Yup, that’s it. There were no other instructions provided. No word count, no focus, no expectation. This was it. My student brain exploded. How in the hell was I supposed to complete an assignment with no expectations, no rubric, no “right” answer?

I can literally HEAR you rolling your eyes. Judge. I don’t care. This college thing has created a whole new beast inside of me. If not created, at least unleashed. The sacrifices I and my family offer to make this happen are not small. The opportunity, for me, is a lifetime dream. The experience has been more than I have ever hoped for. And now that I am getting into major/minor specific classes, it is all that and exponentially more.

I give a shit – A BIG SHIT – about my performance. And, until I figure out how to gauge it differently, that reflects in my grades. I coddle and protect that GPA harder than my FICO – and I will cut you for that bitch.

Anyway, after I put the pieces of my skull back together with a bit of Johnny Walker, I did what I normally do in situations like this. I said, “Fuck it” and I sat down to write.

Let me tell you, taking a creative writing class in the middle of an academic environment has been the kind of juxtaposition that I don’t think I will be able to accurately explain until it’s over. Until then, it is suffice to say that it is jarring and restorative. That restorative part has been the most interesting. It’s like those days when you have been going 90 to nothing for what feels like forever and you still have a shit ton to do and you really can’t take a day off to just sit in a comfy chair wearing your favorite pjs drinking spiked coffee, but you do it anyway and it makes the following days SO much more productive and efficient. It just makes you better.

And while I can’t yet fully articulate that idea, I did finish the first assignment on time and without a hangover. You’re proud of me, I know. I am posting it here and welcome any ideas, critiques, whatever. Seriously, that’s what these blitz type pieces are for – to play, to suck, to expand, to nurture one small idea into something readable. I’ll take all the help I can get.

(No Title)

I’m tired. The kind of tired that has settled into the bones and you’re pretty sure sleep can’t help you anymore. I think the time has to be close to 5. I only know because the sun hasn’t broke but the coffee is fresh. That’s as good as I got. If you need to know anything else, I will be of no help.

I think the too skinny redhead waitress is trying to get my attention, but I have none. Her name has been given to me, but I haven’t bothered to remember it. I should have. There’s a time when I would have. I would have smiled broadly, said something meaningful about her hair, the color of her eyes, and employed some long-forgotten memory technique to store her name away. The next time I came in, I would call her by it as soon as I cross the threshold, long before the gesture could be explained by a name tag. She would smile. She would feel seen. And that would be my kindness for the day. If I had accomplished nothing else, there would be that.

It occurs to me she is shouting and waving her arms about. It occurs to me that it might be important.

Important. There’s a lost idea. When was the last time I found something important? A person needs a bit of important in their life to keep from becoming whatever this is I am becoming. I’m not so far gone as to not realize that.

She is some kind of excited. And she is definitely looking at me. Saying something to me.

The hope of important stirs something. Maybe it’s just the coffee starting to move in my head. Or maybe, today will stand out as a day when important showed back up. Except I can’t hear her. I mean I can hear her. Hell, she is screeching so loud the folks in the cemetery across the street can hear her. But my brain, the part that acknowledges the speech of another human as decodable into meaningful, important information, is offline. I have to concentrate. This is important.

“Police…goddamn asshole…fired…”

That’s all I get but it’s a start. I force my brain to consider the snatches. It’s like a puzzle in the air swirling around. I feel like I am running out of time, like it is going to be too late, like I am going to fail all over again and this is important. That can’t happen, not now, not again because what if.

Motherfucker. Is this chick serious? All this commotion over the homeless guy taking off with some bullshit diner groceries? He’s hungry and your dumbass just opens the back window instead of going outside to smoke. You think it’s too cold outside to smoke? Then it’s probably too cold outside to be hungry.

My puzzle falls from my brain and there is nothing important. She is standing next to me now, ridiculously close but the volume of her voice hasn’t changed. It’s gone back to non-words. It is easier to tune out. It is not important.

Bitch. I fucking hate her. I don’t say this out loud of course. But I am assuming my face does something because the sound of her voice stops, and she steps away. Maybe my face literally said, “Bitch, I fucking hate you.” But, unless I am further gone than I think, my face doesn’t really do that. It’s not a language it is versed in. Now disappointment. My face knows that entire lexicon. That’s probably what my face said. Folks can’t typically stand too long in the face of disappointment. They can’t handle it. And I am so horribly disappointed.

I am so fucking tired and all the universe can offer me is stolen bacon.