What memories do the following images call up for you?

• A favorite pair of shoes
• Seeing a place for the first time
• Re-visiting a familiar place
• Someone’s hand
• Toes
• Dinner table
• Something you weren’t supposed to see

Choose one of these memories to write about. Then, consider the following uses of memoir writing:

• Create a memoir poem, repeating the opening phrase: “I remember . . . “
• Use your memory in a piece of fiction writing. How does it change when given to a character?
• Write a series of non-fiction memory pieces around a theme such as, “Letting go.”

Incident by Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December:
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.

Books of the day: Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary Schmidt
In Print! 40 Cool Publishing Projects for Kids by Joe RhatiganIncludes a great resource on places to publish your writing.

Website of the day:
http://www.potluckmagazine.org/

Potluck receives nearly 600 submissions each issue and our editors read and respond to each one. Those writers or artists not published, receive a personal letter along with a critique of their work that is constructive, instructive, and positive!

“Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.”
Barbara Kingsolver

Writing into the Day

Our word for warm up writing today at camp was “window.” Here’s what I wrote.

“The view from Bula Mae’s porch was Jes’s window to the world of Sweet Hollow. She thought back to those first days sitting on the edge of the porch, dangling her legs off the side thinking how quiet Sweet Hollow was. Now, half way through the summer, longer than she ever imagined she’d be here, Jes had learned that Sweet Hollow was as vibrant as any place she’d been—it just took listening in a different way.”

Writing with Each Other’s Words

Today we all wrote 3 nouns and 3 phrases down on paper and put them into 2 piles. Then we each chose 3 from each pile and used these to inspire our writing.

Revision Strategy: Drawing Out Our Stories

Draw out your story in picture frames as if a comic strip. Then add dialogue or thought bubbles as a way to imagine more in your story. See what main pieces of your plot you choose to represent in pictures. What new details do you discover when you draw your story? Are there symbols or images that emerge?

Poem of the Day

Child on Top of a Greenhouse by Theodore Roethke

The wind billowing out the seat of my britches,
My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty,
The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers,
Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight,
A few white clouds all rushing eastward,
A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses,
And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!

Book Suggestion of the Day:
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

Blog Suggestion of the Day:
For book suggestions and reviews visit Esme Raji Codell’s (Sahara Special) blog at http://planetesme.blogspot.com/

Writing Camp of the Day:
Looking for another place to write this summer? Interested in turning your writing into movies with Clay Animation, check out this camp by the Western Mass. Writing Project
http://www.umass.edu/wmwp/programs/final_clay_camp_flier.pdf

In the slender shoulders of the myrtle tree outside my kitchen window, a
hummingbird built her nest. It was in April, the sexiest month, season of
bud-burst and courtship displays, though I was at the sink washing breakfast
dishes and missing the party, or so you might think. Then my eye caught a
flicker of motion outside, and there she was, hovering uncertainly. She held
in the tip of her beak a wisp of wadded spiderweb so tiny I wasn’t even sure
it was there, until she carefully smoodged it onto the branch. She vanished
then, but in less than a minute she was back with another tiny white tuft
that she stuck on top of the first. For more than an hour she returned again
and again, increasingly confident of her mission, building up by
infinitesimal degrees a whitish lump on the branch – and leaving me plumb in
awe of the supply of spiderwebbing on the face of the land.

I stayed at my post, washing everything I could find, while my friend did
her own housework out there. When the lump had grown big enough – when some
genetic trigger in her small brain said, “Now, that will do” – she stopped
gathering and sat down on her little tuffet, waggling her wings and tiny
rounded underbelly to shape the blob into a cup that would easily have fit
inside my cupped hand. Then she hovered up to inspect it from this side and
that, settled and waddled with greater fervor, hovered and appraised some
more, and dashed off again. She began now to return with fine filaments of
shredded bark, which she wove into the webbing along with some dry leaflets
and a slap-dab or two of lichen pressed onto the outside for curb appeal.
When she had made of all this a perfect, symmetrical cup, she did the most
surprising thing of all: She sat on it, stretched herself forward, extended
the unbelievable length of her tongue, and licked her new nest in a long
upward stroke from bottom to rim. Then she rotated herself a minute degree,
leaned forward, and licked again. I watched her go all the way around,
licking the entire nest in a slow rotation that took ten minutes to complete
and ended precisely back at her starting point. Passed down from hummingbird
great-grandmothers immemorial, a spectacular genetic map in her mind had
instructed her at every step, from snipping out with her beak the first
spiderweb tuft to laying down whatever salivary secretion was needed to
accrete and finalize her essential creation. Then, suddenly, that was that.
Her busy urgency vanished, and she settled in for the long stillness of
laying and incubation.

Then, I sent them out to the yard to observe and write about nature.  We talked briefly about looking closely and seeing the things we may never have noticed before.  We talked about how we can apply this to characters that we are writing about by bringing the reader in close to details about the character that might be easy to miss or how we can slow our action down to have our character look closely at something or how our close observation of things can inform the setting that we create in our writing.

Here’s the poem we read today: Water Snake by Mary Oliver

Water Snake

I saw him

in a dry place

on a hot day,

a traveler

making his way

from one pond

to another,

and he lifted up

his chary face

and looked at me

with his gravel eyes,

and the feather of his tongue

shot in and out

of his otherwise clamped mouth,

and I stopped on the path

to give him room,

and he went past me

with his head high,

loathing me, I think,

for my long legs,

my poor body, like a post,

my many fingers,

for he didn’t linger

but, toughing the other side of the path,

he headed, in long lunges and quick heaves,

straight to the nearest basin

of sweet black water and weeds,

and solitude—

like an old sword

that suddenly picked itself up and went off,

swinging, swinging

through the green leaves.

The kids talked about how the narrator’s perspective changed about the snake from feeling like it “loathed” her for her body to seeing the snake as a powerful, graceful sword once in its preferred environment.

Crick Hollow is the name of the street that Jes lives on in my middle grade novel, Sweet Blueberry Pie! which is currently off being considered by an agent!  Woohoo!  Crick Hollow is also a place found in JR Tolkien’s novels.  It also aptly describes this magical space on which my house sits–tucked in its own little hollow with the constant rhythm and power of its own little creek that runs deep within the earth below us.

Yesterday, we focused on character development using an activity my 12 year old daughter created.  She is CIT for camp this year, and quite honestly, I’d be lost without her!

Here’s the activity. 

1. Reach into a bag of objects and choose one.  Without pulling it out of the bag, try to guess what it is.  Take a few minutes to write about it.  Then, take the objects out of the bag and see if you can identify your object.
2. Choose one of the objects and answer the following questions:  Who owns this object and why?  What is it used for and how?  How does this character feel about this object?  Where will the character keep the object and why?  What will happen to the object:  Will the character keep the object, give it away, lose it?
3. Write!  Think about how often in novels we meet a character and then learn something new about the character or begin to see the character in a new way. 

We ended the day with a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye (not sure why the poem keeps insisting on double spacing itself).

The Song

From somewhere

a calm musical note arrives.

You balance it on your tongue,

a simple ripe grape,

till your whole body glistens.

In the space between breaths

you apply it to any would

and the wound heals.

Soon the nights will lengthen,

you will lean into the year

humming like a saw.

You will fill the lamps with kerosene,

knowing somewhere a line breaks,

a city goes black,

people dig for candles in the bottom drawer.

You will be ready.  You will use the song like a match.

It will fill your rooms

opening rooms of its own

so you sing, I did not know

my house was this large.

We picked out words we liked: balance, single, glistens, breaths, kerosene.  Then we marveled at the sounds they made—all those “s” sounds creating the sense of song themselves.  Then one young girl said, “I really like the phrase, “You will use the song like a match.”  And another said, “I like, ‘opening rooms of its own.’”

Then, I asked, “What do you make of those last two lines, ‘so you sing, I did not know

My house was this large.’”  In my own adult writing group, Bear Mountain Writers, we talked about those last lines.  Folks wondered about the comma between sing and I.  Is the poet saying she sings “I did not know my house was this large”?  Then why no quotation marks?  Or does she sing and think—I did not know my house was this large.  Then, why a comma? 

The girls at my writing retreat didn’t have a problem with this.  Instead, one of them simply said, “The song, like the match, opens rooms of its own.  Without the song the house does not seem so large.”  Wow!  I understood the poem in a way among these young writers that I couldn’t understand it among the adult writers.  What do we women have to learn from these young girls?  Writing with these young voices opens up new rooms in my own writing.