Hello, fellow writers. Welcome back to your virtual writing workshop.
This week, it’s all about the heart.
I know, I know: Valentine’s Day is behind us. But here in Northern California, spring is inching its way up through the soggy earth, making us fall in love with wildflowers again: bright orange poppies, pastel yellow oxalis, sticky sweet alyssum.
Even so, we’ve got a prompt for you this week that leaves the heart out of the equation (on purpose, but you’ll probably find that your heart gets involved anyway).
But first, as always, we begin with a quote. This week it’s from my mentor and friend, the late Pat Schneider, who introduced me to the method I have used for 20+ years now. This is a quote from The Peregrine Literary Journal, Summer 1989.
The love of the poem, the love of the story … survives between us. What sustains us is the miracle of the connection made; you have spoken and I have heard you—I have spoken and you have heard me.
The prompt: Fill in the blankety blanks.
Inspired by the song, "I Left my Heart in San Francisco," this exercise asks us to make new phrases out of the same structure:
I left my __________ in ______________. (And feel free to play with the preposition too: on/at/inside.)
The possibility of surprise and playfulness feels built into this one, but the prompt may also surprise us with more serious results. Consider the difference between, "I left my keys in the front door," and "I left my virginity on the top bunk of that dorm room in Colorado."
Write as many of these as you can for five minutes, then choose one (or more) that will help you tell a story. Here are the three I ended up with:
I left my hope in that last relationship.
He left his scent on my pillow.
I left my slutty ways in my 40's.
What I wrote is below.
Trying now to move forward, to stop looking back, not for fear of becoming a pillar of salt, but because that's where the pain always is: in the past or in the future. What's right here? That's what matters. That's what I thought about today on my walk, the sun in the sky finally winking at spring, the air warm enough to walk in the shade without stuffing my hands in my pockets. Sometimes I'm lost in thought, but today I was just there on the tidy sidewalks, watching the ravens take to the sky above the schoolyard, noticing a sleeping Orange Tabby in a window. Even the loud painters two doors down didn't bother me when I passed them, wishing they'd turn down their music. They'll be gone soon enough, I thought. And isn't that just the truth for all of us? We all have an expiration date: nobody gets out of here alive.
I thought about this in the operating room two weeks ago, when the IV in my left hand carried me away into a deep, blank sleep. And the next day too, when the email reminded me that it would take five days to get the biopsy results. You could have cancer, I told myself. Brace yourself, just in case. But eventually, the results came back negative. Still, I thought of a dear friend, and the way her cancer surprised her. It could happen to any of us really: a glimpse of the Grim Reaper in the distance.
Even so, I'm trying to move forward with this one wild and precious life, Ms. Oliver, I truly am. Because if you had told me ten years ago that I'd still be single, that I'd be living in a 1960's bachelor pad on top of a tiny mountain, making my own mushroom stock and tofu alfredo sauce, having occasional romps with men who are still married or were recently Mormon, I would have laughed right in your pretty face. Back then, I had a hunky boyfriend with a penthouse apartment and a roly-poly bulldog puppy. I was making plans to manage his Air B & B in the wine country, and hoping for a vegetable garden in the summertime. I had a plan that went up in smoke, as they say. But there was no great fire: just a car wreck that I miraculously walked away from, not exactly unscathed.
Moving forward now means thinking seriously about what's best for my body, be it vegan cheese or a new weekly workout schedule. It means renting a car in southern Spain and checking out an expat community to see if anyone there is queer, doing research on future writing retreat locations, paying off credit cards, and putting my writing out into the world in a way I never thought possible. It means seeing myself as free, not trapped, independent, not lonely, aging, old. Growing, not fading. Sure, it takes more work, but I've learned to tint my lashes more often, paint my toenails occasionally, flirt in real time, and get off the dating apps for good (mostly).
I do not have all the answers, but that's liberating in some ways. I'm off the hook. I get to just be human for a few more decades, or whatever time I have left (as my Dad used to say so poetically, "You could get hit by a bus tomorrow").
I still don't know what to do with all this desire and all these dreams, but I'm okay working on this project called "My life" (what's left of it). I get lonely sometimes, and I still feel the gnaw of that old longing occasionally. But like a good little animal, I just shake it off. I guess I've figured out that I'm pretty good company after all.
Monet Refuses The Operation
by Lisel Mueller
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
Love all of this - a meditation complete with beauty, loss, and contentment. (Also, a dose of humor.) I love the vivid descriptions and tenderness of this one.