Non-Sequitur Exquisite Corpse Pot Luck (July 18)

On July 18th, underneath Anita's apple tree, eight of us got together for a potluck, sights in the garden and some exquisite corpse. We went three rounds. The first round had us write, one after the other, with the ability to see what had been written before. The second round had us write a line on the same piece of paper without being able to see the line that came before. The third round, had us each write on a scratch piece of paper, pile the papers together, and then read them randomly. The results follow:

Round 1:

shady seven, city sounds softly

chatting, asking suggestions for

words, but when silence says

everything. Everything, and what's seen

without words; the mini-bee turning in its flower,

part of the cycle. Or the dream.

While the Beats smile knowingly,

having done it all half a century ago,

when turtles went underground

under two inch thick cement slabs,

under lead pipes and earth packed hard

beneath years of traffic and chaos.

An ancient tool shop operator

gave dinosaurs several pieces

of shrapnel steak. Dinosaurs

ate pipes and lumber.

Cracking underneath the stone weight

each dinosaur's breath shimmering

in the plant's growth.

Round 2:

Summer hums around, circling the

salon. Tomatoes progress, onions double,

pumpkins travel down the path.

Just enough cloud cover, and just enough sky,

under the apple tree, next to plush clover--

myriad forms of cover....

Down South. South of the border.

Musical language, languid music.

It's not like here, ya know.

And to string a sentence

together you need pumpkin butter,

blackberries, half ripe, and Anitatea.

It was like ink bleeding through a piece

of paper. Or blood through butcher paper.

A sickening smell, like rotten meat wafted from

somewhere.

Over the rainbow there were

pieces of light.

The stillness of the wind

speaks to the leaves.

Round 3:

1) We were born after the war.

Then we were in the war.

Now our children and grandchildren

are gone to the war.

2) All of the rocks strewn along the path

and the constant chatter of the

passing cars, cans thrown.

3) The music was tangible. I felt almost as heavy as a mist,

but not quite. More like a tingle at the tips of your

toes when they fell asleep.

4) In exquisite corpse land

we never decided to leave

Point Pleasant beach.

Instead we launched

a hand-made book.

5) Died in the check out line

with a crab, he did.

Seafood is dependable.

Trees give us amnesia

good for the onion fields.

It's shell gave way

to red lobster.

6) Shadow and light spackled paper--

the pen courses over the pattern

another level of black and white.

7) Laughing, sharing notes & souls plot

a course in the garden, under the apple

tree, next door the door opens.

Participants:

(in no particular order, since Frank's suggestion that naming who wrote what would kill the whole idea of the exquisite corpse, as it's the product that matters, and not who wrote what).

Anita Lonergan

Michael Lonergan

Frank Bessinger

Kat Willow

Tom Gerlick

Sandra Maresh

Max Rommerdahl

Tameca L Coleman

Originally posted on the Exquisite (!) Corpse Pomes (!) Blog at http://exquisitecorpsepomes.blogspot.com/. I hope to have more such shindigs in the not so far future.

Story Collecting

During the last portion of my undergraduate degree in writing, I decided to take an interpersonal communications class. Among all the things I learned, familial story telling intrigued me the most. I learned that families could become close-knit by telling each other their stories. A close-knit family is something I have craved since I was a kid. Both sides of my family are spread across the country, literally, and none of us keep in regular, open contact, let alone tell stories about our lives to each other. We know little about each other over our impressions of who we are. The impressions are something, certainly, but without experience of another, there is no or little rapport.

I want a rapport with my family members. Because of this want and this knowledge that stories can build family closeness, I decided to take another class about writing biographies. I had an urge to become a story collector, to compile the stories into a volume for my family members to share. I wanted to contact my aunties and uncles, what grandparents were left, and have conversations with their great-great grandchildren. This became overwhelming to me, not only because of the long lists that began accumulating in my mind of persons with whom I wanted to contact, but because those I contacted were hesitant, closed, almost unwilling to share the stories that I asked for. I related that we could just remember the good things, the happy times, fun quirks and tall tales if there were any, but the hesitancy remained. I was even told to just "make stuff up."

I almost gave up then. Of course, I needed to complete my assignments for the class, else fail, so I inserted some fiction.

During that time, I consulted my mother a lot. Out of all the people I interviewed, she was the most open to share. In fact, she gushed. I couldn't keep up, and I had to call back many times with questions to fill in the gaps.

I know that my Mom wants to write a book sometime about her life, and I think she should do so. I am not sure if she has put word to pages, yet. I do know that she is eager every time I call to ask her about her memories. Because of my mother's eagerness, I decided to start a series of interviews and poems related to her stories. It's a way for both of us to satisfy something. I can deepen the relationship between my mother and I through story telling, and we together can begin putting her life to pages.

Sometimes I feel as if I am doing something wrong, that she should begin her book, and I should leave her stories untouched until she is ready to write them. The trouble with someone else writing your stories, is that there will always be another filter through which the story is being told.

One example is the first poem of the collection I am writing for my Mom from her stories, called "Mermaid," which documents some images from her time in Okinawa during the Vietnam war. My mother commented to me that her time in Okinawa was one of the happiest times in her life. It wasn't enough for me to document the images she related as just that. I applied my own irony, my own filter, and then published the work.

The poem was published last year in the online poetry magazine called Pirene's Fountain, and follows:

Mermaid

When Mom wasn’t making cakes
or practicing her off island dialect
of Japanese to the scowling market ladies,
when she wasn’t taking classes on ikebana,
when my sister and I were not at school
on the Kadena air force base,
she drove us across Okinawa.
We’d hang out of the windows,
hair plastered to our necks, enthralled
by green on green, terraces and vineyards and jungles
green, women with baskets on their heads
traveling down the road in their bare feet.
We passed cart-driven men, their ox carrying
bundles of sugarcane. We left them in dust,
giggled as we passed, waved and smiled,
pointed until Mom made us stop.

These were the best times for me:
When the car arrived at the reef,
after we’d seen the oranges, yellows,
and the reds of the sun setting over the water,
after fried chicken and Nehi soda,
after the first sighting of stars,
we hunted cowries with our flashlights,
the drying starfish and conk shells there.
We found shells nicked by seagull beaks,
with something inside of them, still living.
We found sea glass, coins, trinkets, sand
dollars and oyster shells.

One night there was a woman
balanced on a rock over the water.
She was just sitting there, running
a comb through her impossible length
of hair. At first I thought
her a mermaid, but her feet
folded to her side like arms
hugging in close. Her tattered
skirt and ill-fitted blouse
waved in the cooling night.
Her hair, greyed-black, whipped
at the rock, just as the air force jets
sped across the sky on their courses
to and from Vietnam.

She became a silhouette against the sunset,
etched behind my eyes, forever.

Why I Write

They called me the gentle giant.

I waited the whole season, warmed the bench, and wore navy and gold sports socks pulled all the way up to my knees like a dork so I could match my teammates' socks and those polyester gold shorts and tops we had to wear. I cheered the girls and shouted at the referee for his idiocy and I looked intermittently at Coach, to see if she would let me onto the court.

I played well enough during scrimmages. The ball plunged into the basket, or rolled around the rim to score. I passed over up-stretched arms, blocked and dribbled. I ran fast. But in the game, when the ball finally came to me, I held it to my chest with both damp palms gripping the sphere. I gawked about bewildered at the crowd, at the coach, at my teammates open for a pass, and I froze. If someone bumped me trying to get to the ball, I would say, "Oh, excuse me...Oh, sorry, excuse me."

I wasn't great at sports, despite what an athletic build and some height might say. I was prone to social awkwardness too. The inevitable wrong thing would pop out of my mouth and apparently I gave looks that seemed painfully slighting. I didn't know what to talk about with my peers at practice between plays. I couldn't give compliments, let alone take them well and most of my jokes were duds or puns that evoked blank blinks and quick intakes of air. At the pizza parties, not knowing what to say, I listened to all the girls chitchat about this or that and I choked down slices, and gulped down Dr. Pepper to dislodge the cheese and crust from my throat.

My mother wouldn't ever let me play sports again after that year, anyway. She attended one game and decided that was all she needed to see. My friend Camille with the braces tripped and knocked faces with another girl from the opposite team, and that girl's lip caught onto Camille's metal braced teeth. Blood puddled on the court and both girls were helped to their respective benches. The blood and braces put the fear of broken limbs and torn skin into Mom's imagination.

While the principal read the team's successes the next morning over the intercom, I listened to the feats and scores of my teammates, and I wrote in my journal about being nerved out over it all and about how Mom wouldn't let me play anymore and how I was sad about it. I knew that not playing the next year would mean deeper separation from the peers I had played with that year and I wrote about that too.

Writing wasn't a new thing. I had been writing since I knew how. I wrote letters for play-pretend in grade school. I even tried to write a little novel about a family of beavers who never seemed to need to come up for air. When I realized writing could bring recognition, the habit was reinforced. In the third grade, Emily Trunket (name changed so I don't get in big doodoo) read some silly poem she had written in front of the class about a rose. I thought her work piddle. I'm not sure why I thought that. The poem was nice enough, and she presented the poem in a nice way, but I had been writing copy-changed limericks and nursery rhymes for many months already from the books my grandparents had sent from 3000 or so miles away. I decided to write my own sweet poem in turn, and my teacher so loved it, I not only got to read it for the class, but I got to take it to the principal's office with a little waterfall pasted to it (by the teacher). It looked like a page straight from an inspirational calendar.

My eighth grade English teacher had a workshop surrounding one of the poems I had written outside of school and had shared with her. Although I had been writing all that time before, I had never had such an active audience. A group of thirty or more of my peers were held captive in a class over my work, and they were discussing it! This was like a dream come true. I've craved its repetition ever since.

I Am Alarmed

This semester I decided to take a class called "Prejudice and Discrimination in Modern Society." It is a very good class. I highly recommend it. It is eye-opening and impassioning.

For the bulk of my college career, I have shirked such classes. I have shirked such classes because I was not sure that any productivity came from them. I'd envisioned long talks in anger and hatred and continued separation in an "us vs. them" kind of stream. I worried that no healing came from such classes and that they created greater and greater rifts between groups of people.

I also shirked such classes because all of my life I have felt guilty. I have felt guilty for not being "black enough," not white, for being a woman, for being bisexual, for being somewhat intelligent and motivated and for wanting a good life, even. I have received flack for all of these things to the point that I have felt (and have been told that I should feel this way) that I am not entitled to taking part in the conversation because I have become integrated and I do not have the right kind of experience to take part. I did not grow up in the right community. I embraced the "wrong" mentalities. I am not part of "the struggle" and further, I am in between things. Attending such classes for me meant that I would live again through that guilt, and that by simply being there, my presence would offend. I certainly did not want that. I am trying to learn to like myself, you see.

Now I am almost in tears. I have not quite yet processed what I have been learning about this nation and my culture (my training), but I can say this:

* I now understand the meaning and reasoning behind the Sankofa bird. The bird is not daft. Remembering history is of the utmost importance and walking forward in that truth--remembering does not mean that one is wallowing in the past. It means that one is well equipped.
* I now understand why I have felt silenced and unable to express in a manner that is both satisfying and contributive to my society.
* I now realize that there is great need to contribute to the conversation with my particular points of view.
* I now realize how most of us have been silenced in a world that touts "freedom of speech and expression."

I am almost in tears because I wonder how many of us actually realize that we are living in a depoliticized history. Our story is a myth. Further, we have been trained to be acritical (with the near inability or blatant inability to think critically), politically correct (with the near inability to say anything without offending someone unless our terms are so broadened that they mean almost nothing), non-argumentative (with the inability to step forward against those things we disagree with or with those things that do not seem right at all) and therefore quiet!

It's a silent war, and perhaps the most deadly because it is rendering us all inept or at least forgetful. Our world is becoming Disneyfied, watered down and rewritten right under our noses, and has been for hundreds of years. This is extremely alarming to me because most of us are not budging. Most of us are keeping to ourselves, saying nothing and letting the rewriting continue.

My whole entity screams "No!" to that. I just don't know yet what to do about it. Learning and harboring the information is one thing. Taking some sort of action is another. New knowledge always means new responsibility, doesn't it?

**originally published on yourhub.com, May 2, 2009: http://denver.yourhub.com/Denver/Blogs/Archive/Politics/Activism/Blog~610679.aspx

The Wabi-Sabi House: The Japanese Art of Imperfect Beauty

I already have a love for rustic bowls, plates and baskets. I also feel that lately there is too much "noise" in my apartment. Clutter abounds. I picked up the book initially because of my want to tame the clutter factor.

What I was not prepared for, and what made me very happy about this book, is the way wabi-sabi is a method of living and not just a home decorating slash de-cluttering motif. 

Wabi-Sabi is what I am already and more. It is an idea that I might have called granola or hippie-dippie in the past. A good friend of mine's old house was made of stone and decorated with branches, pine cones, fruits pricked by cloves in the winter time and dried desert blooms in hand turned vases in the summer. My friend spun wool from her mother's sheep, made knotty wool sweaters and scarves and hats for the cold. The kitchen was full of antique, non-mechanized (and lasting!) utensils. All of these things are quite wabi-sabi, according to the book.

I have an eye for more rustic and earthy things. There is a framed Bodhi leaf on the book shelf, a large half shell to catch the ashes of my incense. One of the quilts my great grandmother made is lying on the bed. Pens and post-its and other household materials are held in chipped earthenware and baskets. My antique desk is unpolished, scuffed, worn and well-used and it is bedecked by three crumbling pine cones I found in the forests of Idaho, a long time ago. 

The book is an inspiration to further this tendency to include the rustic and unpolished in my life. It also links itself to Zen Buddhism. (All things come from nothingness or are on their way to nothingness. All things are imperfect. Observation is a key, as is living the present moment). Because of its inherent ideas, wabi-sabi becomes a way of life in general, an enjoyment of the present, an appreciation of any thing, relationship or idea in whatever state it is in at any given time. The book prompts its readers to shirk the mindset of replacing what is deteriorating (though we do not keep in our houses those things that are dilapidated. Wabi-Sabi is not slobby or ruin) and to instead appreciate the chips, cracks, folds, and wrinkles of time.

crossposted on goodreads

Centering

I have a confession to make. I am not centered. I am so unbalanced that I am unable to simply observe what is going on around me....

Feeling off-kilter, I have taken more on. It’s my tendency. When stressed, I pile on the work, take on more projects and push through them the best I can. It’s an avoidance tactic, so, the body says, “Stop.” I come down with the flu and I have no choice but to heed what the body says.

“Stop!”

I stop.

When I look around me, there is less of the head getting in the way of what can flow in and flow out, if I just let it. This is that quiet place where all things can be planted and grown. This is that quiet place where I can let it all go.

originally published at Grow (http://mecacoleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/centering.html), October 6, 2008.

Starting a Club Equals Your Best Internship

Many students use club membership titles as resume fodder without gleaning valuable experience from those titles. This practice is dually beneficial and self-cheating. The student who utilizes titles will win employers’ attention straight away. The student who gleans experience from such titles will be a more valuable asset in the end, however. Club titles can certainly bulk up a resume. An officer’s appointment will make the resume even stronger. An active participant or officer, however, will gain valuable work experience that may be hard to find in a competitive workplace that demands experience from the beginning. Personal relations, organization, management of time, project management, networking and financial planning are some of the skills obtained as a club member or officer.

In college, students are given license to make mistakes that they would not be able to make in a job situation. Starting a club, or becoming an active member or officer, can be the best internship. The student who does so will learn many of the arms that are inherent in a small business. The student plans events, recruits members, and plans fundraisers and advertising campaigns. In the case that the student comes upon roadblocks, or complete crashes in the road, he or she can seek out advice from the many professors and leaders on campus who have already experienced those roadblocks. From the school’s Dean to the Student Activities administrators, information and advice abound.

Many internships at colleges cost tuition. Some are paid. Many internships use their interns to push paper, or fulfill menial tasks. This type of internship can leave a student disgruntled, since the idea behind such an activity is to glean work experience. The only way to be sure that work experience is gleaned, is to make an opportunity, or utilize the opportunities that are available.

**originally published in the Sigma Tau Delta High Plains Newsletter, Fall 2007: http://www.niu.edu/sigmatd/pdf/regions/hp_fall07.pdf