WordSisters

Category: The Writing Life

  • Don’t Ever Give Up!

    I was a Loft Mentor Series finalist four times.

    Antonio and Crystel, May 2003 Graduation Party
    Antonio and Crystel, May 2003 Graduation Party

    This doesn’t count the many times that I submitted to the Loft Mentor Series and wasn’t a finalist.

    Because I had been in the finalist circle I knew that I had ‘something’ readers liked. And, that gave me the gumption to keep submitting. I also believed in the Loft Mentor Series and the possibilities that came with winning. (The Loft Mentor Series in Poetry and Creative Prose offers twelve emerging Minnesota writers the opportunity to work intensively with six nationally acclaimed writers of prose and poetry.)

    I graduated from Hamline University with an MFA in 2003, the same year that Antonio and Crystel came home. To have the infants at my graduation was important to me. I was birthing an MFA and a created family.

    In 2003, I was a Loft Mentor Series finalist in poetry and nonfiction. Ten years later, I’ve become a winner.

    Nephew Dan and I cutting our joint Graduation cake
    Nephew Dan and I cutting our joint Graduation cake

    In those ten years I honed my submission over and over finally landing on “The Trip.” The trip is an essay that speaks of my relationship with Jody, our trip to Guatemala to see Crystel and to bring Antonio home, and our challenges as a same-sex couple who were creating a family. This past year for the mentor series, I added a 4-page chapter, “Fire,” that I revised after taking a workshop with Mary Carroll Moore. The story illustrated family dynamics after I burned my back and required hospitalization when I was fifteen-years-old. In essence, I had scourge and rebirth side by side.

    You can have the finest essay and never be a winner in the Loft Mentor Series because you have to be chosen by two mentors, who are stating by choosing you that they want to work with your material.

    Jerald Walker
    Jerald Walker

    Each year that I submitted, I’d research who the mentors were and I’d always wonder if I would be chosen. Jerald Walker and Mark Anthony Rolo  are the non-fiction mentors for 2013. Part way through reading Jerald Walker’s memoir, I thought maybe, just maybe he might pick me. Something resonated with me in his words and though our histories are different, there are also similarities in the odds that we faced in climbing out of our circumstances and that our past didn’t determine our life. Mark Anthony Rolo’s first

    Mark Anthony Rolo
    Mark Anthony Rolo

    chapter describes his mother entering a burning house to save her children (who were not in the house), and how she was badly burned in the process. Fierce love and deprivation was being described in the same sentence. Whoa, I thought. Maybe, just maybe.

    Thankfully, my mentors never gave up.

    And they chose me.

  • Because You Need a Good Laugh

    The following list originally appeared in 1999 in the Washington Post as winners of a “Funniest Analogies Ever Written in a High School Essay Contest”

     My favorites are #2, 9, and 25.  What are yours?

    1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

    2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

    3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

    4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli, and he was room temperature Canadian beef.

    5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

    6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

    7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

    8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

    9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

    10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

    11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

    12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

    13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

    14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

    15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

    16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

    17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

    18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

    19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

    20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

    21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

    22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

    23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

    24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

    25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

  • 5 Things I’ve Learned About Writing Blogs (Reflections at the One-year Anniversary of WordSisters)

    May 31st marks the one-year anniversary of WordSisters. Yippee! We’re still going strong. All two of us. 

    MP900341653Here are some discoveries I’ve made –

    1. Total strangers follow WordSisters. This still amazes and delights me. I figured 20 or so of our friends and family members might read the blog out of curiosity and loyalty. But we now have dozens of followers, many of whom came to us through the magic of the Interwebs and social media. How cool is that?!? Thanks for reading!
    2. Writing a blog is good discipline. Every other week when it’s my turn to blog, I have to write something. Sometimes I’m excited about it. Sometimes I’m lukewarm. But either way, I’m committed to doing this (and I can’t let Beth down), so I write. That’s a lot of blank screens. That’s a lot of words, thoughts, and stories. That’s 26 times per year that I have shared something I hoped would make you smile or think. Your comments and Likes tell us we’re succeeding.
    3. Writing a blog is different from writing a personal essay (beyond the obvious differences such as links, tags, and visuals). With the personal essays I hope to publish, I may revise 8-10 times during the course of a year or two as I refine what I’m trying to say. I think hard about meaning and style. But with blog posts, which are often meant to be timely reactions to current events, I don’t have the luxury of being so meticulous. I write more quickly and hope to get down the essence of what I want to say. I have to accept that good enough is good enough. As a former writing teacher who now writes for a living, it’s hard to let go of perfectionism. But I’ve learned that if I’m not completely satisfied with a post, well, better luck next time!
    4. I love the power of self-publishing! I love that if we think a topic or piece is worthy of your attention, we can simply put it out there.
    5. By blogging regularly, I’m creating a body of work. I hadn’t thought of this, but blogger Dan Blank had, and he wrote a guest post on Jane Friedman’s website about publishing. I think he’s right. Our blog style and content is still evolving, but looking back I can see how we each have distinctive voices and certain themes recur.

    Going forward, we hope to invite other writers to post on WordSisters and we want to make it easier to find past posts.

    Thanks for coming along for the ride!Beautiful Fireworks