October 28, 2006

Prompt: I actually wrote this exercise wearing a mask. This was all in the spirit of Halloween!

It was a time when chaps were the hippest accessory, when we zig-zagged the Shanendoah highways without tourists slowing us down. Bonnie rode behind me, her acrylic nails scratching my leather chest excitedly. Her smoky voice would whisper, “Keep it rolling, baby!” and we’d catch a 70 mile-an-hour wind! Sometimes she’d wrap her finger around a strand of my curly hair. Around us a landscape of green, yellow and orange would emerge. We’d be up and out!

On nights we’d set up basic camp along the Skyline Ridge Highway with a blanket for two and a mandolin that I’d strum until midnight by a ravenous fire. Bonnie would bend her neck backwards to take in the stars, braids of blond would unravel like Rapunzel and we’d listen to bluegrass tunes dance off my strings. Yes, we were outlaws by nature. She was a wild child who ran away from home at 16. I, long ago, abandoned my hometown in Campton, Tennessee. I bought a motorbike at age 19 after two summers hustling in an auto garage through humid summer heat.

Bonnie and I lived like nomads that summer. That was before the money ran out. That was before reality set in. We learned whole stretches of National Parks – from the Grand Canyon to Assateague. But that much on the run runs you down.

October 28, 2006

Prompt: From an excerpt written by Terry Tempest Williams

Dear Laura,

Thank you for thinking of me and taking the time to chart out your family history. My fire had no longer burned, but you re-ignited it. No one has thought of me for 50 years. My life ended 70 years before you were born. Yet now, spontaneously, you reach out to my spirit and I’m thankful for that. I know you often imagine my life as one of hardship. You imagine me, the daughter of German immigrants, widowed with a three-year old child. Yes, I was widowed at 26 in 1867, and I lived with four siblings and my parents. Dad was a mason and I worked in a factory making sewing bags. But remember to look beyond what you read in the Census. I’m sure my sense of humor, my manner of being, the identity of my best friends, aren’t in the Census records. I was a little like you, as strands of my nature passed through me to you through my son. I too stayed up at night wondering about my own German ancestors and the land my parents left behind. And someday, I promise, one of your descendents 100 years from now will study you and remember you. Your spirit too will twitch from a deep slumber. Your energy will already be spread back into the cosmos, but you will reawaken. Keep honoring the past, Laura.

Sincerely, Johanna Ziller

Johanna,

Thank you for connecting with me. I know if it wasn’t for time and space, our beings – along with every other being - would collapse into one. We would not be separated by time. I spent evenings imagining your life and your little son. I wonder about his father, who died so young. I know if it wasn’t for your short marriage, I wouldn’t be here, so thank you for raising him and working so hard to give him and his descendents a good life. I will no longer assume too much from what I read in the Census. You were human and so much more than that. Keep your spirit with me, so I can live with your perserverance.

Love,

Laura

October 28, 2006

Prompt: “There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls” (Quickie Exercise)

That night, she broke her silence. From somewhere in her battered core, her frigid heart, she found a word, which for the first time her lips allowed her to fashion in an assertive manner: “No.” Two letters, one syllable, simple yet direct. She had always cowered, always drowning beneath the strain of untapped vocal chords. But tonight there was music from her lips: “NO!”

October 28, 2006

Prompt “Things that go bump in the night” (Quickie exercise)

Insomiacs pacing their bedroom floors as their lovers snore; palm fronds whistling in the wind; cicada and cricket sounds colliding like jazz music; soft footsteps of a shadowy cat; a 5am engine hum marking a truck driver’s departure on his first shift, sobs from a window of a widow as the sun rises: another day without him.

October 26, 2006

Prompt: “Subject to Change”

Right now, honestly, everything is subject to change. It makes sense (and dollars!). A stranger could bet on it, regarding a woman with a soccer-ball size uterus passing him on the street. “Yep,” he would think. “She’s got it coming.”

Nothing is more subject to change than a seven-month pregnant, first-time mother.

First, one body will diverge into two, which she has heard is painful thanks to Genesis. Her arms will reshape themselves under the weight of a seven-pound bundle of baby. The bags under her eyes won’t make it past airport security. Her hair will be a disheveled pile quickly styled into a braid. And maybe her eyes will be different, imbued with a protector instinct, of a lioness protecting a cub.

Oh boy, is she subject to change.

Time itself will feel different, punctuated with crying and cooing. Days will be measured by feedings, not timecards. Will she even have hormones left? Will a whole new suspense accompany every act, like simply putting a glass on the edge of a coffee table?

And how will her friend react with two in the place of one? Her grandmother? Soon she will be a mother in a long lineage. Yes, she epitomizes change, but she wouldn’t want it any other way.

October 19, 2006

Prompt: “The Burden of Memory”

What compels impulsive behavior? – he was afraid to ask. As the desert landscape crunched under his Nissan wheels, he felt exposed, naked as a man with apple breath on the eighth day of creation, naked under a vast and uncompromising sky. Around him: brown land with thorny cacti and thirsty plants. His own demeanor: a porcupine with a hungry soul, ravenous and ready to pounce on life.

Jacob lived among the Tucson mountains with suaro companions and no wife. Why did he do it? His breath skipped and bumped like the car on the dirt road. He was escaping himself in his beat-up sedan.

As Tucson receded further away, the lonely forms and shapes of dry rocks that emerged from all directions struck him with an odd eeriness of being alive. He felt like he was in Salvador Dali painting faced with the structures of his unconscious. There they were: childhood failures, repressed sexuality manifesting shamlessly on the phalic-shaped rocks and ugly landscapes.

The shapes, indeed, seemed to expose to all desert life why he had committed the crime.