Friday, March 1, 2013

 
 
Soon I will be going back to Door County ,Wisconsin
for a writing workshop. My writing buddy and I love the instructor.
She is a Buddhist, a poet, an environmentalist,
 involved with a group that provides bicycles to poor people 
around the world, providing them a means to get to school or market
and a way to work.
She is quietly powerful
nudging us to see
listen
observe
ask
 
Most times when I get back from workshop
I am exhausted and don't write for weeks afterwards
I have notebooks going back a decade
with writing prompts that I have never looked at again.
 
Well in the process of cleaning things out this week,
I opened a few notebooks and took a look.
Sometimes I found things that I wondered.... who wrote that?
 
Like the prompt below
....Use the words
grain
hopeless
rubbed
slick
Popsicle
river of slime
alien
blindly
......in 500 words or less 
and in class
 
I guess I wrote this story below
..it's my handwriting...
 
  
 
The old grain silo was converted into a silo of prayer. One could go there to be alone
with  God. People were encouraged to step inside and unburden themselves of their sin.
The silo was hollow inside with stark, curved, brick walls. At the top a domed skylight had been installed allowing sunlight to pour down onto the sinner, relieving some from feeling hopeless.
A gravel floor gave a sense of penance if you dropped to your knees and knelt in prayer as the gravel rubbed into your skin.
 
Last week, slick Jake Trumbull sucked on a Popsicle while driving in his pickup truck. He was returning home from a hunting trip,a deer carcass in the truck bed, when he spotted a large silver cylinder that had crashed into a farm field near the silo of prayer. With gun in hand he cautiously approached the downed craft,almost stepping into  a river of lime green slime oozing from under the craft's bent open door. Jake gingerly poked his gun at the door and it popped open and a tiny alien body slipped out of the ship and onto the ground in front of him causing Jake to blindly react and shoot the helpless creature. It looked up at him, and Jake trembled as he saw a tear roll down its clammy cheek.
 
Jake lifted the gray skinned being into his arms, placed it beside the deer carcass  and drove to the silo. He hurriedly carried it inside, knelt down cradling it close to his body and looked up into the light. But it was too late, and even the gravel cutting into his knees was not enough.
 
 
Smokers, where did that come from? Ha ha...green slime and God all in one story.
I love going through my old notebooks.
Somehow those workshop leaders get you to dig into your unconscious
scrap the dark matter and find a story
No matter what the prompt is...somehow the brain goes to work.
Sometimes good stuff comes out, (not sure about the above story)
But whether it's
horror, comedy,mystery,
or a love story
 
 always
 something
pours forth out of my pen.
 
Oh I can't wait.

note:....and in Bailey's Harbor, Wisconsin ..there really is a silo of prayer.

11 comments:

  1. ha you did well with the exercise...like hte rocks in his knees at the end...and dang...hope he was not coming before the armada you know...smiles...have fun at your workshop

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  2. Have fun!

    One must submit to the cadence, the challenge, the rhythm of a workshop, test oneself under fire, find something to say that is not of your creation, but an exercise in letting go, let the magic happen.

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    Replies
    1. submit to the cadence, the challenge....one of life's secrets of success...I think

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  3. Oh, where the imagination takes us.
    Have a wonderful time!

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  4. Shades of ‘ET’?

    A strange collection of words and a strange story, of two parts - you came up with.

    Have a wonderful time.

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  5. Love the idea of the silo of prayer. But I want to know what you girls are smoking up there in Door County?

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  6. Sounds like a great workshop...enjoy.

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  7. Great story Suz, very thought provoking too!

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  8. I have always been enamored of silos. I do love the idea of a silo of prayer.

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  9. Perhaps its my meandering melancholy, but I found that story moving actually, I am a softie, even for dying aliens.

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