Quote

"A statement is not true because it is enunciated in an unpolished idiom, nor false because the words are splendid."

Week Three, Theme 1

 1)  Style involves a way of doing or saying things that ends up expressing aspects of the self.  There are all sorts of styles, and anything we do or say is likely to convey a specific sense of style.  Write a theme about a style you admire or, at least, find interesting and worthy of description and reflection.  It could be a way of talking or dressing, of singing or cooking, of dancing or painting.  Focus on one person’s way of doing that thing.  Be aware of the style your own theme conveys.  In other words, write in a way that resonates with the style you are describing.  It can be a version of the style you choose as your subject, or it may be very different and contrast with your subject (possibly for ironic effect).

Dervilla enters a room like a spring breeze. First, you hear the hum of a classic Simon and Garfunkel tune growing louder and louder as she nears, the click-clacking of heels conducting each verse, her honey-rich voice a delicious score for conversation. Then, the smell, reminiscent of dewy four-leaf clovers in the sunrise. You cannot help but be reminded of dizzy days of youth spent rolling down grassy knolls, returning home touting grass stains with pride. You might not even notice her when she slinks in, hips swaying to the beat of her song, lids drawn lazily low. The flow of her raggedy peach dress reminds you of a documentary on the 60’s you watched with your friends while high the other night. The curvature of her lithe limbs disappear and reappear with every billowing movement. You realize you’re staring and make an effort to study your cocktail.

She picks and chooses her company with care, but you wouldn’t know it. She lands before you as if by accident. When she talks to you, the discussion rambles without aim. This scares you. She doesn’t seem to notice your nervous laugh. She’s too busy thinking about the beautiful lilt of your voice, the particular shape of your pupils, the way you wag your eyebrows to punctuate every sentence. She tells you this. You don’t know what to say. She smiles, all teeth, and turns, her loose waves soaring gloriously behind her. She wanders on to the next unsuspecting partygoer, and you stare, wondering blandly what has just happened.

Lee's Room

5. Find a way to be invited into the room of someone you don’t know well (or really much at all). Note some small keepsake (a stone, a poster, a playing card, a ribbon, a Star Wars action figure) and ask them where they got it, but don’t ask anything more.  Then write a theme about what you might extrapolate from that object, just as a detective might.

Whenever I see a gourd, I think of her, the 11-year-old cousin of an acquaintance whose floor I happened to sleep on in between states. The team was traveling from race to race every weekend, and would take any semblance of a living situation it could get after hours on the road. When we arrived at Alice's place, we burst through the door and sprinted to claim the available beds. Resigned to the floor - I did not want to fight over a mattress - I staked my claim in the upstairs game room. I shoveled errant Lego's out of the way before setting up my sleeping bag. Ratatouille was playing on the television.

I could hear the shrieks and screams of the other girls quarreling, and wanted to avoid the combat. I ducked into the next room over. LEE'S ROOM. KEEP OUT. Lee was Alice's little sister. I'd met her in passing at a meet last year. Rather than heed the warning, I explored the small space. Neon pinks and purples hurt my weary eyes. Typical girl's room, I thought. And then I saw the gourd on the nightstand.

It was April, far after that time in fall when gourds are in vogue. Strange. I picked it up, shook it, and something rattled inside. A maraca? No, she would have two of them if that were the case. What kind of eleven-year-old uses maracas anyway? 

Lee and Alice's parents had divorced in December. The gourd in my right hand, I suddenly realized. They had gone to a pumpkin patch, selected the perfect orange specimen, and carved together. It was the last time they were all together, a functional family. Lee lingered behind and picked up the gourd, intrigued by its strange shape. She shoved it in her pocket and caught up with her family. She slips her hand in her father's, and the happy foursome walk to the car, all smiles, together.

I gingerly place the gourd back on the nightstand, and slip out of Lee's room.

Chirimoya

The chirimoya. You should try it. Mark Twain claimed it his favorite fruit. “Deliciousness itself,” he called it. White and creamy flesh melts on your tongue. Sweeter than bubblegum, so long as you don’t bite into the seeds. Dark and bitter daggers embedded in custard-like clouds. They will turn your stomach inside-out. Stay away from the seeds.

You can find them in abundance in the markets of Ecuador. It grows in the Andean highlands, toppling off of trees. This divine fruit, composed of 75% water and rich with Vitamins A and C, is great for the nervous system. The vendors will tell you how buena the chirimoya is, and you should listen. Buy three of them, share with your friends.

It can be as small as a fist or, if you’re lucky, as big as a human head. When perfectly ripe, the juicy flesh glistens. But first, you have to break through the skin. You need a knife to penetrate the scaly green exterior. The skin is green and tough with little raised points. Rough to the touch, you would never anticipate the prize that lies within. It will turn your stomach inside-out. Do not eat the skin.

 Firm and tangy, the chirimoya is dangerously addictive. After your fourth chirimoya, your stomach will be bursting. Your taste buds will fire off into oblivion. The flavor will overwhelm you. Sweet as sin, this round dragon-fruit will ruin you.

Mark Twain himself overindulged. Rumor has it he cursed the chirimoya on his deathbed. The chirimoya is intense. Not for the faint of heart. Grab one, feel the strange fruit in your hands. Beware, and enjoy.

White Glove

3. Following James Tate’s lead, write a description of a famous person’s possession (either real or invented). Show its relevant and how it sheds new or a surprising light on the owner.

Sitting backstage, he could hear the crowd roaring with anticipation. They had been chanting his name for twenty minutes. Let them wait. He wasn’t ready, not yet. There was one thing left to do.

Tonight, he would make one small dance step for mankind. This step would revolutionize performance and consume pop culture. And it was all thanks to one simple accessory.

Whenever he slid it on, he felt transformed. Converted: a wholly new creature, prepared to what no man had done before. He adored how it sparkled in the sun. Sometimes, he imagined that the rhinestones were actually rare jewels, crystals mined from the depths of the earth. These beautiful diamonds had risen from darkness and ascended to the world’s stage, like he had. Together, they glittered with greatness as the people watched, their mouths agape.  He and the white glove would take the world by storm.

Little did the world know of the insecurity, darkness, and disease that the glove concealed.

That night in 1983, he made music history. Thirty years later, the bedazzled white glove is embalmed in pop culture legend. This single glove, worn exclusively on Michael’s left hand, sold for $350,000 at an auction. The glove was more than mere decoration; he used it to cover the blotches on his skin. Today, the solitary glove represents the beginning of the end. 

Theme 2

Theme 2

Ambling through the mall on our first date, we found ourselves drawn to the bookstore. It was your typical Borders, back before they went out of business.  The store was virtually silent, relieving us of the need to fill in conversation gaps with small talk. We wandered through, pointing out notable works to each other (Twilight? Are you kidding me? Who is ever going to read this horseshit?) We found our way to the Religion section. Lacking any witty retorts about St. Augustus’ Confessions, we began exploring what this remote corner had to offer. And that was how we found it.

There, wedged between C.S. Lewis and Oscar W. McConkie, sat sex-addict Russell Brand’s controversial My Booky Wook. After a shared chuckle, we sat in the aisle and began plumbing the book for juicy tidbits. We read choice selections to each other, growing more at ease with each salacious sentence. By the end of chapter six, the anxious stirrings of a first date had ceased. We bought the book and left Borders, hands clasped, inseparable.

 Fast-forward two years.  She is gone, and she has taken the Booky Wook with her. She left school overnight, and nobody seems to know why. After the initial pain and shock of being abandoned, I moved on. It’s been over a year. College is fine, but life lacks that luster that it had when she was there. The days bleed together in a vast grey haze.

And then, walking home from Microeconomics, I decide to check the post office. I haven't checked it for weeks, and it's been at least a week since the new GQ issue came out.

No GQ in my mailbox, but there is an envelope. No return address. I open the envelope with caution. I knew what would be inside.

Chapter 6.

Theme 1

A soft pair of hands wrapped tightly around a coffee cup. Wringing the brown sleeve, they leave behind traces of sweat with every twist. A silver ring rests precariously on the fourth digit. The hands release their chokehold on the coffee cup. The left sits atop the right, absentmindedly sliding the delicate silver on and off, on and off, on and off. Another, larger pair of hands lie facedown on the table. Straining to hold still, the knuckles turn a dangerous shade of white. These hands once had a ring, too – this ring now lies ten and a half feet away, submerged in the Starbucks’ waste bin.

A phone is produced by the smaller hands. Trembling, they pass the phone to its larger, rougher counterpart. They fold together. The coffee cup is forgotten atop the table. The undecorated hands, examining the contents of the phone, begin to shake. The delicate phone, not built for high levels of pressure, nearly snaps. The hands, scrolling through the phone, freeze. Both hands stop. The left hand, rising slowly, arcs back and releases. The phone soars through the air. Baristas and patrons alike gasp and duck. The phone lands with a whip-crack behind the counter, shattering into hundreds of pieces. Fearful silence fills the air. And, with that, the large hands depart. The small hands, abandoned in the booth, decidedly slide the ring off. Drop it on the counter. And slink away.

Week 2

Have the following up above your writing space all week: “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.” --Ezra Pound

In the various themes for this week, you might try a variety of strategies. Try forming a theme from lists of things that build in intensity. Place objects in suprising juxtaposition and see what flows from that.  Try writing one theme that deals with an object, so that the description or meditation you offer builds and builds, accruing details and specificity, all contained within just one long sentence fastened together out of commas and semi-colons, dashes and ellipses, as well as all those conjunctions that bind and hold things together, in such a way that it feels like the whole thought gains energy and intensity and momentum, word tumbling over word, until it is relieved by the final period.

 

Restriction: Do not write any of the following from the point of view of an object.

1.  This theme is a still life: a painting—in words—of a set of objects.  The arrangement can be found or composed.  Bring these things to life with precise description.  Describe rather than analyze (or rather, analyze by describing).  Do not use the first person.  
2. Narrate an incident in which an object stands as a representation for a host of complex emotions.  See Hass’s “Story of the Body” as an example.  
3. Following James Tate’s lead, write a description of a famous person’s possession (either real or invented). Show its relevant and how it sheds new or a surprising light on the owner.
4.  Take an object and describe it in a series of discrete sentences, separating aspects of its essence. For example:  “The orange is round.  It is called an orange but is really yellow,” and so forth. Think of it as a cubist still life. Perhaps let the sentences become more and more metaphoric rather than strictly observational.
5. Find a way to be invited into the room of someone you don’t know well (or really much at all). Note some small keepsake (a stone, a poster, a playing card, a ribbon, a Star Wars action figure) and ask them where they got it, but don’t ask anything more.  Then write a theme about what you might extrapolate from that object, just as a detective might.

2.  Describe an ordinary place as if you are writing about it for someone who has also never seen it and has no reference for it (someone in a distant country, perhaps, or aliens from another planet).

The automatic doors slide open, revealing a sea of blank walls, white coats, and emotionless frowns. Beeps and hushed whispers amongst the bobbing waves of spectacled adults add little flavor to the drab atmosphere. If the feel of a place were a color, Sarah thinks to herself, this building would be beige. She hated beige. The colorful blocks and encouraging coos of Sarah’s second grade classroom seem years, not hours, away. A low growl to her left startles her, and she gasps – it is a man as big, hairy, and frightening as the monsters she had seen in storybook illustrations. He grabs her wrist, pressing against the bruises underneath her striped cotton T-shirt, and pulls her closer. She sees a long, black hair stemming like a beanstalk from a lumpy mole on his ring finger, and she feels sick. Sarah whimpers as he wraps a yellow band around her wrist. The mysterious, beautiful woman who had taken Sarah from class glares at the troll. With every passing moment, Sarah is more and more convinced that this glamorous stranger is her fairy godmother. Together, Sarah and the fair lady glide through the grey, ghostlike men and women. The lighting bleaches everything, warping colors and shadows like Sarah has never seen before. She cannot decide whether she is excited or terrified. Even a beige world would be better than the world of shadows she is leaving behind, she decides. A troll might be scary, but nothing can compare to the witches and dragons that lurk in the shadows back home.

3.  Describe a place/scene as viewed by way of a reflection in a window.  Thus, there is the superimposing of the reflected scene on top of what is seen through the window. How do the two scenes come together?

Two large, unblinking green eyes. Desirous, longing eyes, lusting after the towering trees and rugged wilderness beyond the windowpane. He cannot even fathom the endlessness of the wood. Uncharted, this backyard was in desperate need of conquest. He is just the one to do it, he knows. He sits, flexing his legs and licking his lips in anticipation, on top of a beaten-up, ragged and torn leather couch. The domestic life, one that he had never asked for, but one that was expected of him, was squelching his adventurous soul. His father, his mother, and their father and mother before them, had grown accustomed to this life, perhaps even reveled in it. But he, an adventurous soul, had never asked for a life confined to the home. Peering out the crystal-clear window, he dreams of escape. He could feel the soft, summer grass against his bare feet. He could smell the sweetness of the air, permeated with the smell of honeysuckles and chlorine. He could feel the gentle wind against his face as he ran into the wood, to the trees, and began to climb. He would hide in the branches, making his home there, living the wild life amongst the other cats of the forest. He could hunt for his own game, right underneath the clear, starry Arizona skies. Staring intently through the window, his dreams carry him days and years away. But then a smell – is that tuna? – interrupts his reverie. With a flick of his tail, he bounds gracefully off of the sofa and scampers into the kitchen, where his unsuspecting owners have filled his dinner bowl. One more night, he decides; he will stay for one more night.

4.  Start with a place-name.  It may be a place you know, or one you have never visited.  In either case, it should be a place-name you find evocative. This assignment is about the power of the name: you are writing about the name as much as, or possibly more than, the place.  Think about how you encountered the name, and how it became resonant for you.  You may make the name prominent in your theme, or barely mention it. 

Seattle. There must be water. After all, it is in the name. Sea. Attle? I think of the quirky, young, hip adults that energize the city with lofty goals and aspirations. The “attle” could also be a kind of obscure bird, which would make sense considering the comically eerie amount of birds flitting around the coast. There’s a peculiar vibrancy to the enunciation, too. You have to smile just the tiniest bit to say the word, at least the beginning. Depending on how you feel, you can round out the name professionally, really enunciating those final t’s, or playfully, switching out those hard consonants for softer, more approachable “d’s.” Both sounds fit Seattle, a city in which inhabitants have the option to choose your own adventure. Business and arts districts are definitively circumscribed on opposite ends of the city, providing widely disparate means of entertainment on either end. Bars, music, and drugs for some, picket fences, cubicles, and three-course meals for others. These two worlds, the lives of the bearded and of the clean-shaven, seldom intersect. When they do, you can see it: a mutual distaste and look of self-affirmed judgment. These two have more in common than they think, however. That is, you can dissect Seattle in another, all-unifying way. Sea-at-tle. Fog, cold, rain. Wherever you turn, there is water, water, everywhere. Sometimes, you can feel it in the air you breath, filling your lungs and dripping down to your toes. It is the bone-chilling liquidity of the city that unites all who live in Seattle. No matter how you slice the word, you will always have the water.

5.   Describe a place moving from something specific to something large—or move from the very large (vast even) to the very specific. Let the movement suggest some form of disclosure or revelation.

Sheer terror fills his seventy-two year-old heart as they begin their descent. He can see his hometown of Portland, Maine as he has never seen it before. It is much more organized, cut into bisecting blocks and ovals, than he would have guessed from the strange driving patterns he had experienced on the roads for thirty years. The plane is filled with a gentle hum. They soar over the ocean, above the rocky beaches that he had spent most of his youth on after school. They look like golden strings scattered through the wild green terrain, washed ashore by the towering waves. The passengers are hushed, quietly watching over Portland, just as he is. He notices his mouth is agape, and closes it quickly, embarrassed. Had the stewardess noticed? He looks down, through the window again. He can see his Church – how small it is, next to the hospital! But how much larger it seems on the ground level. Strange. They near the airport, and veer dangerously near to the ground. Are  they going to make it? The small houses grow larger and larger, and the beetle-sized cars loom closer. He grips the handles of his seat. He closes his eyes, shifting his dentures in his mouth around with his tongue. They touch down, and he can feel his brain jostling in his skull. The earth seems to open below him, and he screams. They are roaring, burning down the tarmac. Slowly, through the screaming, they come to a gentle halt. He opens his tired eyes, and looks around. The other passengers stare at him with a mixture of pity and annoyance. He is shocked, happy, and wholly alive. Home.

Daily Theme 1

1. Set a scene in which something will happen—or in which something has happened (or, just as likely, both): a death or an argument, say, or a revelation. But don’t say what has happened or what will: allow that to be implied as part of the scene you evoke. If you like, choose a scene that entails some deliberate preparation: a meal, a ceremony (official and institutional or improvised and individual), a game, a job. The type of scene, actual or imagined, is up to you. From what point of view is it seen? Who sees it? What are the limits of that point of view? 



The garbage trucks' symphony of ringing, clacking, and bashing resounds through the poster-plastered walls of his modest dorm room. Speeding city buses sing to the tune of police sirens and power drills. At one time, the discordant rattles and shrieks had been the most effective alarm clock he had ever endured. Much to his surprise, however, he had grown accustomed to the chirps of modern technology and cheeps of ambling passersby. Dull winter's light filters through the rather ineffective Ikea curtains, and a chilly January breeze escapes through a crack in his lone window, stirring the papers atop a faux-hazelnut desk. Eyes still closed, he inches his feet off of his stiff twin bed onto the comfortingly familiar polyester, black rug he brought back from his Iowa home. He reaches for the spindly grey lamp, another relic from his Ikea heist back in August, and pulls the chain to illuminate his cloistered space. With reluctance, he cracks a single lid open. Blinded at first by the astonishing amount of light emitted from the sickly-looking lamp, he crouches and searches under his high-set bed for his flip-flops. Grabbing his worn toothbrush and toiletry bag, he reaches for the towel slung upon the back of faux-hazelnut chair. Wrapping the towel around himself, he bashes his elbow into a bedpost. He pauses, snarls in pain, and takes a deep breath of stale air. Recovered, he reaches for the single's closed door, and tugs on the handle. He sets off into the dark common room, ready to embark upon semester.