Lime and mini with navy piping. For the junior-high dance, I set it off with gold fishnet tights, chunky heel shoes. I felt eighth-grade in even though I had skipped seventh and lived in England for sixth. My cool was more 1970 Brit than New Hampshire, but not tonight. I floated into the school auditorium, the big disco ball tossing its confetti colors, and eyes found me, me. All the girls, Jimmy MacDougall, Danny Cole, Nate Edgcomb. Peter Warren, who never looked at me, slid over, top dog, interested, and whispered, “Great dress. Too bad Polly Peasley isn’t wearing it.”

Prompt: “We are supposed to _want_ to see the great places of the world. But what if, in fact, we would much, much rather get home and for once get on top and _stay_ on top of the dandelion situation in the lawn?… Describe some place where great or infamous history was made that means very, very little to you”
–Carol Bly, Beyond the Writer’s Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction, p284

The Tower of London, where all those queens lost their heads, where all those traitors were thrown, meant nothing to me, just more lines, people, waiting. Silly men in silly costumes. Then my brother enumerated for me all the castle crooks who threw people to the rats, the stocks, the rope , and all the crooks who crossed the Irish Sea to kill and pillage and plunder there. By the time I donned my school uniform with its silk crest that next week, I was determined to do my bit of resisting. After all, these girls represented the aristocracy. Prince Charles was a student at the university. And so I stomped loudly up the Prefects’ staircase, and got caught in the act, pulled along by my collar. No stocks for me, but no lunch, either.

I have gauzy memories of my very young mother smoking out on our back patio, with college friends, drinking wine, waxing on, I imagine, about literature and philosophy and love as colored candles dripped like hippie hair down the sides of a cheap chianti bottle. Twenty four with three children. College-after-kids. As we grew to adolescence, she gave up those languid evenings, and cigarettes bit by bit, pretending to quit so we wouldn’t start, backing into her bathroom finally to throw open the small, clouded window and perch on the windowsill, leaning out into the pale winter sky, sighing smoke.

That year my mother collected awkward things as we crisscrossed Europe, kids in the back, father lodged at the wheel next to her and her romantic notions. From Amsterdam she lugged a wrought-iron candlebra, stuffed into the trunk in case my father, unnerved by German or Italian drivers, braked without warning. In Normandy it was cheese so appalling that we forced her to tie it to the side mirror to flap safely outside. In Siena it was a yellow pottery ewer for wine or flowers, a treasure she swaddled, cushioned from mishap by the soft stuff of a family adventure.

Driving across the flat bones of Saskatchewan, you knew you could make the Manitoba border before dark. The road was straight, the air clear, your energy in that soft limbo of cross-country travel. Easy with one another, ready to throw yourselves into the forge of marriage, yes–you thought you might even drive through the night, through several nights.

When the gaping sky suddenly shape-shifted, swiveled, exposing its insides, though, you, you lost your bearings. Yellow-green salting a purple rash, deepening, infecting the plains. And no sound at all except for the tires, the engine. Just freaked-out sky hunkering over the flat flat land.

He glinted. “A good summer storm! About freakin’ time!” You withdrew into a New Englander’s silent shelter. But the sky responded, shattering around you into slicing rain, lightning, thunder–a cacophony of sensation, chasing you onward onward, he, soon-to-be-husband leaning into the windshield, strange, a stranger.

–

1. Use a second-person narrator

2. Use 150 words.
3. Use the following words: bones, glint, forge, salt
4. Title it “On Storms”
5. Make it creative nonfiction
6. Go…

Growing up, I envied country kids, faces to the window, exploring the mysteries of school-bus culture. The year we lived in England, my brother and I took the bus to the city center; from there I walked through Cambridge’s ancient streets to my girls’ school. Claiming the front seat atop the double-decker, my brother banned me from the action. Or so he thought, for before me unfolded the real show starring conductors playing marvelous ticket machines strapped to their uniformed chests, spewing the language in hard-edged accents, hopping off and back onto the open landing as nimble as circus acrobats.

Grapefruit, kumquat, orange, calamondin, lemon: I could mark my life in marmalades– my mother’s thick-cut magic mixed at the stove from fat Mamade cans; sticky ginger and lemon and coarse-cut varieties from the English year, their thick scents rolling in from the nearby Chivers factory as we headed to school; mild marmalade toasts my French mother served with tea Friday afternoons in some sad pantomime of aristocracy; undecipherable varieties more chutney than marmalade spread across my Asian and South American travels; and now the blood-orange jars that fill my cupboard, morning toast taking my tongue, my nose into bittersweet memory.

I’m okay about stethoscopes. Really. Our childhood doctor arrived with his breadbox of a black leather bag, fishing out concoctions at our bedsides: cherries gone strange or bubblegum fizz. Always, around his neck his stethoscope necklace. He was a kind but serious man. Tall. Old.

Thirty years later, when I’d rush one young daughter or the other to Doc Pete for a broken wrist or earache, he, wily magician, would nod a pursed “HmmMMMmmmm….” as he touched stethoscope to elbow, to nose, to pinkie toe. No matter how bad the pain, the sick one would giggle, fear effaced, healing begun.

2/27 Again, our tutors came up with a great exercise, this one meant to push us towards some of the considerations of writing creative nonfiction.

Prompt: The glass voted on word as topic chosen from a list of five. They chose GLASS. List:
1. Memories associated with glass
2. Facts about glass
3. Feelings you have about glass
4. Questions having to do with glass.

In five minutes, write a piece (whatever form whatever genre) entitled “A History of Glass”
using one from each column.
My result–

“A History of Glass”

How many layers of history are contained within a glass bottle? Why didn’t they break when they were first heaved into what then was the edge of the forest but now is deep scraggle? We found them in early spring before the new leaves sheltered their traces and the loamy needles sank them deeper into their blanket. When my father and I hunted around between the shallow roots of pine trees, we were like farmers searching for truffles, I suppose, though our treasure was sighted not sniffed: bottles over a century old, clouded and thick, the color of watery sky. Some had slender, sloping shoulders and elegant necks as though modeled after a lovely woman and containing water, elixirs, potions, snake oil remedies but mostly, probably, whiskey, as the house up the field was a tavern from the Revolutionary War until mid 19th century and a trading post before that for trappers from way up the Penobscot, which we could see sparkling through the leafless branches as we worked, hunters, my father for traces of history and me for the scent of stories.

2/24 New York School of Poets Exercise (inspired by former 170-er and now faculty and poet, Stacie Cassarino) This exercise was dreamed up by our course tutors.

Prompt:

1. Write a question.

2. Write down the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the following:
Day of the week
Time of day
Painter
Color
Fruit
Body part
Room
Means of transportation
Shape
Article of clothing
Plant
Country
Song lyrics
Street name
Emotion
Animal
Children’s toy
Historical event
Rock group
City
Saying
Landmark
Element
Metal
Smell
Thing you find in a hardware store
Musical instrument

3. Another question.

In five minutes, write a poem opening with the first question, closing with the second question and including as many of the responses to the words as possible. Think about how to get from the first question to the second.
My result:

Camus to Sisyphus

Why does the owl sit in our tree
on Tuesday at 3:00
of all things, in the day

Why does Klimt
throw teal grapefruits against the window
in Prague
while he rides the train to visit
his mother?

Why does the street sign
hit your shoes with sadness as you push
your burden up Elm Street?
Hey, don’t walk on the grass,
it’s cheating.
Rather, play the viola with burning tires.

Why does Canada’s arm
slap down across the border
as though it holds some kind of rosy oval
yardstick?

Does it know something we don’t?