This is not a workshop. I am not going to tell you how to be happy, how to lose weight, how to make your first (or forty-first) million, how to sell your house, or how to find love. I am going to simply tell you a story and the story about how the story happens. I am going to tell it to you slowly, just as it unfolds and decides to be told, as it whispers and reveals itself to me. It’s a slow story, being written with the muse of slow cloth in the context of a not-so-slow life. Though there’ll be a book at the end (and if you join, you will receive a copy of it – more even, depending on which level you select), this blog is a living book unto itself. And like any living thing in its infancy, I don’t know how long it will live or how it will look when it grows up or what outside forces will shape it into what it becomes. I only know that creativity is pure magic, and there comes a time when a woman has to live by the seat of her intuition, trust her process, and grab her some of that magic. It may be an unusual way to tell a story – to sell the book at the seed stage and to show your work, but that is how this story (currently unfolding via a series of letters penned by a woman named Ever to her deceased husband, undated because I can’t decide on the time of year and out of order because I capture them as they come) begs to be told: a story of a woman wrapped in the story of cloth wrapped in the story of journey.
Feel free to peruse the free section by clicking on the “free” category and the about page and the TAQ’s (the Thoughtfully Asked Questions) then top it off with pulling up a chair via the join page. And don’t fret that we’ve already started. Once you join, you have access to everything, right from the beginning, so there’s no such thing as being late here. You’re always welcome, and there’s always enough fun to go around.
I’ve been carrying the idea for this book around for going on 8 or 9 years. It just rolls and tumbles and knocks around . . . but that’s the big rocks. Now I’ve come to the point where it’s time to toss in the pebbles. The details. To be even more specific: the names of the male characters. I’ve long known that there would be three male characters. I know what they do, and I know what kind of men they are – how they behave around town, what motivates them, what they do for a living. The males are all lifelong friends of Slide’s, and || Read more
Wow.
I just finished writing about how Slide died, and I found myself getting madder and madder and madder . . . but for some reason I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) turn myself loose to let ‘er rip. I really did want to pound something or somebody. I wanted to make this fella hurt. That kinda’ surprised me, and I wonder if I’ll go back and write with even more fury – either in a rewrite or in another segment. I guess we’ll see.
Do I need a name for this murderer? || Read more
Well, Slide, I had my glass of wine (and another, to be exact), and instead of feeling even more relaxed and satisfied, I found myself agitated again.
Oh shoot, Slide, let’s call it what it is: angry. Mad. I was mad as a hornet, mad as a wet hen, mad as anything else you can think of that describes mad by way of adjective or analogy. So before I could talk myself out of it, I got up, put my empty wine glass in the sink to be dealt with tomorrow, found a big, fat black permanent marker, and took the stool over so I could wrestle that big platter down off the top shelf in the dishes closet. The oblong platter festooned with little pink and yellow flowers. Remember those two gravy wells on either side of that platter? Well, I drew a ring around the outside edge of each well then I put a heavy-handed X in each one. In the center of the platter – where for the entire time we were married you put the slices of Thanksgiving turkey – I wrote “MURDERER” in call caps.
Then in what sure seemed like slow motion, I put the cap back on the marker, lifted that platter way up over my head as high as I could reach, and I || Read more
it was a lovely day, this past saturday. friends came up to spend the weekend with us. good friends. true friends. you know the kind i’m talking about. friends with whom you can be yourself in all your kind of glory that doesn’t require makeup.
we kicked the day off by taking them to a hardwood floor mill where i met a pirate. i noticed his ring – it was a small adornment on a large (i mean, LARGE) man. as we waited for the friends to make their selection, he bounded into the room and into a chair across from me in one seamless motion. “i’m a pirate,” he said, taking off his ring and handing it to me. “that took 3 silver dollars to make because || Read more
Dear Slide,
Well that didn’t last long, that feeling of goodness, of – dare I say it – happiness. Somewhere along the way of finding something to mend, anger descended upon me again, and, well, let me just say it this way: now I won’t have to look far to find something to fix.
You remember that odd assortment of old (and I do mean OLD) plates I had in the closet? Those were during my nostalgic phase when I was trying to find comfort in something familiar like these plates that looked like the ones I ate off of as a child at Grandmother’s house. Well, || Read more
can it really be a month since i last posted? of course it can. of course it is. how does that happen? i ask myself that a gazillion times a week, and this morning as i was brushing my teeth, i answered it: it happens when you don’t sit down and write every day.
i’ve been on the road a lot lately, || Read more
Hey Slide,
Well, I fixed the delicate little glass piece, and you know what? It felt good. Felt good to fix something, to mend something, to make something whole again. I smiled for the first time in I don’t know how long. And you know what? I didn’t glue my fingers together! Who could ever forget the time you glued yourself to everything – including your self. Super glue, they call it, and with good reason.
Oh sure, you can see the break lines, and there’s the occasional blob where the glue squirted out ’cause it’s awfully hard to use just enough blue and not a smidgeon more on something that’s about 1/8-inch in diameter. And clear, to boot. But still. I felt productive, like I had some traction and could, quite possibly, propel myself forward now.
I tell you what I wish – || Read more
Dear Slide,
I wrote you that last letter less than an hour ago. I can’t sleep. I feel like I’m at the brink of insanity. I can’t read, so there’s no escape that way, even if there was something I was remotely interested in. It makes me tired to think about finding a movie, getting dressed, and taking myself to the theater. There’s nobody I want to see besides you. I am not hungry, and there’s no food in the house even if I was. I imagine me losing weight and having enough extra skin to cover a family of four, having to get ginormous size clothes just to have room to tuck the skin in somewhere.
Do you remember when Ross died? I don’t know why I think of him now. I don’t know why I do or don’t do anything any more. Remember how || Read more
SLIDE,
Sometimes I wake up screaming your name – at least on the inside – and oh the energy it takes to hold it is such a drain on me. I suppose I hope that with enough volume you’ll hear me and find your way back to me. That you’ll just walk into the room and seem surprised that I would think you gone, tell me you were just puttering around on something in the shop, then sit with me a while. It’s in that not-asleep-but-not-awake time that I don’t just hope || Read more
i want to be the kind of dedicated writer who shows up as the postman once did: through rain and slow and sleet and hail and holidays and illness and the thickest to do list. and though i know there will come the occasional day when i am not here – if for no other reason than i have a tendency to burn out with no breaks – i have decided to || Read more
