This is my life. I thought, "I could wait to find a traditional box, or I can use the Goldfish box left after I put together writer bags for the over-night Saugatuck guests.
It's on its way.
So are the writers. They are not arriving in boxes, but by auto, plains and trains. I cannot wait.
In the meantime, I had a late night graduate class last evening and there were two prompts that caught my attention, offered by two of the students assigned to give us seeds for our notebooks.
The first was an activity where a dialogue from a movie was brought in. We read it, and then were asked to take one line from the script and to create an entirely new dialogue based on that one line. The passage she chose was from Harry Potter, and I ended up rifting on two men discussing middle age in a deli. Total stretch, but words best words.
The 2nd activity, at the end of the night, came from a teacher who asked us to do a cell phone scroll. Pick a picture and simply write. I told him I needed more direction, so we did the Augusten Burroughs activity of bible-dipping...where you ask a question and randomly pick a page, then a line to read as the solution to be interpreted. I asked the class to say stop, until I was at a series of 20 pictures, and then stop again so I could select one. I landed on move-in day to Mt. Pleasant. It wasn't a photo of anyone, but all the boxes and materials unloaded from the U-Haul truck to the garage.
Well, I wrote two pages on that one photo: new house bringing in Louisville and Syracuse into a new life in Stratford, Ct. The house was empty, but soon became inhabited by Chitunga and me.
I was amazed at how much story one photo of a junked-up garage could trigger. That's the beauty of photographs. There are stories everywhere and images capture snapshots of them.
Here we go, Thursday. Much to accomplish today.
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