An idyllic afternoon . . . Prompt #588

  • An idyllic afternoon . . . Prompt #588

    Photo by Angeline Revitt

    I have the good fortune of belonging to a Facebook Group called Hygge Life. A group that posts phenomenal photos and all positive comments.

    Recently, someone posted photos of her inspirational garden in Essex Coast, UK, with this invitation:

    “Hygge friends! Come take a little stroll with me to my favourite corner of the garden! We can sit a while and sip on our tea/coffee/tissane and gaze at the craziness of our raised veggie beds, the beginnings of the sweet pea pyramid, the formal and wild flowers and listen and watch as the busy white bottomed bees gather pollen! We can stay a while and chit chat about all things Hygge or . . . just listen, smell, and look at the wonder of Mother Nature. Come join me!”

    Writing Prompt: Imagine being in this garden, sitting at the blue table, across from a friend. What would you chat about? Or, what would your fictional characters talk about?

    Maybe you are alone in this luxurious spot. If you could take the time to sit by yourself, what would you contemplate?

    Me? I’m imagining a new friend on the Essex Coast. We’ve just met and have so many things in common that we talk for hours. Lunch leads to afternoon tea which leads to an evening meal, watching the sun pass over her garden. I breathe in the luxurious scent of her garden and listen to the cadence of her voice, enjoying the lilt of her speech. A blissful afternoon.

    Another writing prompt: If you had all the time in the world, what would you like to do?

    Be bold! Be brave! Go deep with your writing. Be honest! Be authentic! Just like this Hygge Life FB post . . . be open to a Hygge daydreaming moment.

    Other prompts about Hygge:

    Hygge. Prompt #569

    I’ll say a little prayer for you . . . Prompt #574

    Photo by Angeline Revitt

    Marlene C

  • Chance Encounters . . . Prompt #586

    Writing Prompt:

    Chance encounters . . . what are the chances?

    Marlene C

  • If you could . . . Prompt #585

    Photo by Ginger Hamilton, Florence, Italy

    If you could be anywhere in the world, where would you like to be right now?

    What would you be doing?

    Marlene C

  • Belong. Prompt #584

    The characters in the Broadway show and the movie, In The Heights, chase their dreams and ask: “Where do I belong?”

    West Side Story is also about finding one’s place, illustrated in the song “Somewhere:”

    Someday, somewhere
    We’ll find a new way of living
    We’ll find a way of forgiving
    Somewhere

    There’s a place for us
    Somewhere a place for us
    Peace and quiet and open air
    Wait for us somewhere

    Prompt:

    Write about a time you felt out of place.

    A place where you didn’t belong, but there you were.

    What did you do? What did you feel?

    Have you found Your Place?

    Marlene C

  • Baba Yetu . . . Prompt #583

    “Baba Yetu” sung in Swahili by the Stellenbosch University Choir.

    The Prompt: Listen to this amazing choir. Then write whatever comes up for you.

    Or: Write about a musical experience.

    Or: Write about connections.

    Marlene C

  • Post-Pandemic Songs and Second Chances

    By Deb Fenwick

    After fifteen months, it’s time to soar. A hundred, a thousand, millions of voices are calling, inviting us to share in a common song. There’s a brilliant bright light and an invitation to hope after all the darkness—to hope and to imagine possibilities. It’s a resonant call to lift off and soar. And it originates from that other place. 

    It’s a place of community where we remember our interconnectedness. It’s a place where there’s an agreement to work together to make something that transcends what one individual, no matter how magnificent, can do on their own. It’s a place where you work toward something with others, and it takes on its own magic. You can see it in a choir’s chorus or a road crew building a bridge. It’s there as an emergency room team saves a life, and as food pantry volunteers pack boxes. It’s that place where energy is transferred and transmuted as it moves from one heart to another. It’s a place where there’s enough joy to lift a spirit, raise a roof, and change the vibration of the planet, all at once. 

    This new phase can be our song. It’s a second chance. After all the darkness of a global pandemic we squint, almost in disbelief, as we lift our faces toward the light. Yes, we’ve made it. Even if we stumbled through losses no one could predict. Even if, some days, we felt like giving up as we struggled with shades drawn. Now, we can choose to work together to lift ourselves and others higher. Because we’ve traveled through dark times, we reflect and remember. We honor those who didn’t make it by vowing to love more, forgive fully and listen deeply. All we have to do is look and listen because there’s harmony present when we look to the light and listen to the music. Thank goodness for every second chance and every song that makes a heart soar. We’ve made it.

    Writing inspired after listening to “Baba Yetu” sung in Swahili by the Stellenbosch University Choir.

    Deb Fenwick is a Chicago-born writer who currently lives in Oak Park, Illinois. After spending nearly thirty years working as an arts educator, school program specialist, youth advocate, and public school administrator, she now finds herself with ample time to read books by her heroes and write every story that was patiently waiting to be told. When she’s not traveling with her heartthrob of a husband or dreaming up wildly impractical adventures with her intrepid, college-age daughter, you’ll find her out in the garden getting muddy with two little pups.   

    Marlene C

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  • If you could … Prompt #581

    If you could change some things in your history, what would you change?

    Marlene C

  • Shopping at the A & P

    By Jonah Raskin

    My mother always shopped at the A & P in the small town where I grew up. Going there with her was almost as wonderful as going to the Planetarium with its stars and planets in its make-believe night sky, and the Museum of Natural History with its reconstructed dinosaurs. At the A & P I liked the rows and rows of canned goods, and packaged cereals, the smell of the wood floor and the man in the green apron who always helped my mother. I thought of him and the A & P the other day when I went shopping in my own local food market.

    Like the A & P of my boyhood, my local market is small, clean, and tidy. Some of the smells are nearly the same. Walking the aisles, I’m reminded of the smells in the A & P. Before I know it, my boyhood has come back to me, and I’m back in my boyhood on an afternoon shopping adventure with my mother. Indeed, I can remember what she and I bought together: the cans of tuna fish; the half gallon containers of vanilla and chocolate ice cream; and the many products with labels that read “Ann Page” and “Jane Parker”—names as familiar to me as the names of my own aunts.

    The manager of the local market where I shop today reminds me of the man who helped my mother. He smiles, he’s soft-spoken, and he seems like a relic from another age. There isn’t ever a product that he pushes at me, or tells me I have to buy. I like him because he’s never trying to sell me anything at all, whether it’s discounted or not.

    Maybe, too, I like him because he shopped at the A & P with his grandmother when he grew up back East. We weren’t raised in the same town, but we have the A & P in common and we can each describe the stores we knew—which is like describing the same place. Almost every &A & was identical, which was why we liked it. If we went to another town or city, we could walk into the A & P and find what we wanted without having to ask questions, or roam about. Everything about the place was imprinted on our young minds.

    We both have memories of boyhood foods—both store-bought and homemade. We’re both partial to the kinds of foods our grandmothers and our old, old aunts made for us. We both remember the smells in their kitchens, and that we liked to roll out the dough for a pie, peel and slice apples and add brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg that we’d bought at the A & P.

    Just the other day in my local market we were talking about the A & P, and how it was once a strange and mysterious place. We both remembered how we’d learned a long time ago that A & P was the abbreviation for “The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.” We’d both also learned a long time ago that the symbol between the “A” and the “P”—the “&” was called an ampersand.

    The manager of my neighborhood market uses ampersands a lot and draws them the way they were drawn in the A & Ps of our boyhood. No one else seems to recognize that particular lettering. It’s something that means a lot to us, something that binds us together, along with our food past and our food present. Then, too, there’s something about knowing the A & P stands for “The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company” that connects us as though we belong to a secret tribe or clan.

    Of course, the market where I shop today has things that the A & P never had— organic fruits and vegetables, whole grains in bulk, and local produce. It’s a much better store with healthier food, and with much more health and nutrition-savvy employees. Still, I can’t help but feel loyal to the A & P of old and sentimental about it. Not long ago I read that the once “Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company” had shrunk from the thousands of stores when I was a boy to just a few hundred today. Maybe like the dinosaur, the A & P will go out of existence. Then all I’ll have will be the memoires of that long-ago time, and the never-to-be-forgotten smells of A & P; nutmeg, cinnamon, and brown sugar, too.

    As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to appreciate my own memories and to enjoy sharing them with friends and family. Once mighty enterprises seem to come and go; memories remain. My friend, the manager of the local market, has moved on to another, bigger store, and while I’m sad to see him go, I remember the stories he told me about food and his childhood. In autumn, he and his grandmother would pick unripe, green tomatoes just before the frost, wrap them in newspaper and put them away in a drawer. At Thanksgiving, they’d remove them, unwrap them and they’d be ripe and red and ready to eat.

    Memories are like those tomatoes. You pick them, store them away, then take them out months and even years later and enjoy them. So, there’s something I think of now as the taste of memory, and I know it can be as nourishing as ripe tomatoes at the height of summer, or in the cold dark days of November. Stores & stories; there’s not much that separates them, and just an ampersand brings them together as it brings together two great oceans in The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.

    Originally published in Susan Bono’s Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative, Flashpoints 2008.

    Jonah Raskin was born in New York and raised on Long Island. He attended Columbia College and the University of Manchester, England where he received his Ph.D.

    He has taught at Winston-Salem State College, The State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Sonoma State University (SSU).

    He moved to California in 1975 and began to teach in the English department at SSU in 1981. From 1988 to 2012 he was the chair of the communication studies department at SSU, where he taught media law, reporting, and media marketing. He is now a professor emeritus.

    As a Fulbright Professor, he taught American literature at the University of Antwerp and the University of Ghent. From 1985-2005 he was the book critic for The Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

    He writes for Valley of the Moon magazine, CounterPunch, The Bohemian and The Anderson Valley Advertiser.

    Jonah Raskin is the author of sixteen books, including most recently  Dark Land, Dark Mirror and  Dark Day, Dark Night.

    His other books are:  James McGrath: in A Class By Himself,  Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War, and  Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California.

    He has published six poetry chapbooks among them  Rock ‘n’ Roll Women: Portraits of a Generation.

    Marlene C

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  • Be more, do less.

    By Camille Sherman

    This advice was first shared in a Master Class-style opera workshop where my classmates and I would sing for each other, beginning the long process of working out the kinks in our presentation. The purpose of the vice was to help organize the inner monologue: the running mental news banner that presses into every young performance or audition. 

    Here’s how it goes: standing in front of a dozen peers, preparing to perform the aria you’ve been overthinking all morning, the mind runs wild. Sound good, remember the words, give a compelling performance, impress everyone or face clumsy embarrassment. The music starts and as you stare at a point on the back wall just above the heads of your classmates, your mental tornado flurrying, a thought freezes you into place: what do I do with my hands? Do I move or gesture? You realize as you sing the first lines thaThis advice t you are just standing there, petrified, giving the most uncomfortable and boring performance of your life, and the best thing you can think of to fix it is to take an awkward shuffle forward and maybe raise your arms in some generic, meaningless “singer” gesture, and try to play it off as if everything you’re doing is intentional. Polite applause follows, and then the professor, a veteran opera director, will graciously take you back to the beginning of the piece for a second shot.

    I remember standing there in the crook of the piano, the surreal scene as my professor approached to begin the work. My mind was still racing: the high note was ok. I had some tension in the passaggio, though, and my base of tongue keeps clamping down on my E vowel. The performance was not a catastrophe but I’m glad there weren’t that many people in the room. All of the criticism and comments flowed forth from my own brain before my professor could open his mouth.

    Then the advice came: be more, do less. Try it again, he encouraged me, but don’t worry about what your body or face are doing and don’t worry about how it sounds. Be more, do less.

    This advice came back around throughout my training. Don’t be a singer doing a performance. Be an artist performing. Do less “delivering” of the art through busy gesturing and instead choose to be something that we don’t just see and hear, but we feel. Try to focus on allowing what is in your heart and body to shine out of your face and voice. Over time and experience, the other aspects of performing strengthen and grow under this authenticity.

    Years after that course, after that degree, I sit here in Portland on top of my wealth of elite training. I consider how curious my life is: no gainful employment, an uncertain future in an uncertain industry, a highly flexible day to day with little structure and no guarantees. Why am I not panicking? Why do I not fret, morning to night, on what to do. What do I do with my time? What do I do with my talent? What do I do with my brain, body, skills? These questions brought me back to my 19-year-old self, worrying every moment about what to do, on stage and off. I sit back now as a professional artist and I answer my own questions: I am being.

    Camille Sherman is a professional opera singer from the Bay Area. She trained at The Boston Conservatory and the San Francisco Conservatory of music, and served as an Artist in Residence at Pensacola Opera and Portland Opera. She currently lives in Portland, where she continues to sing and develop artistic projects with local artists.

    Marlene C

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  • Turtle Regains The Pond

    By Lakin Khan

    Layers of mud kept Turtle warm and secluded all through the winter hibernation. Occasionally a bubble escaped to the top of the pond, but usually, no.

    A spring sun glanced across the serene surface of the pond, riling up the water insects, generating a small current that brought fresh smells to Turtle’s blunt, beaky nose. Cinnamon, he thought, and hot cross buns, he considered, the memories of days kept at a house weaving into his rising consciousness. Time for business, he thought, and scrabbled against the twigs and leaves that the mud held against him, claws working to free him up out of his encasement and into the cold bottom water and then up, up, up into the gradually warming surface, into the feral spring.

    Two months ago, wild horses couldn’t have dragged him out of the bottom of the muck, but now Spring itself was galloping toward the yin-yang tipping point, when equal parts sunlight and shadelight split the hours. His blood surged and expanded, he was greedy for the light, for the bugs, for the feel of marsh grass against his scaly legs. He was greedy to breathe and gulped his way to the surface of the pond.

    Note: “Turtle Regains The Pond” was inspired by two prompts: Five Random Words: glare, serenity, feral, turtle, layer, cinnamon and the prompt wild horses.

    Lakin Khan writes and walks in the North Bay, enjoying the woods and the ocean, the mountains and the marsh-trails of Marin and Sonoma Counties. She leads Jumpstart Workshops online and posts on occasion to her blog, Rhymes with Bacon. 

    Currently, she is working on a collection of nature and animal essays titled Home Turf, A Beastiary of Sonoma State, illustrated by well-known printmaker Shane Weare. Her essays have been published in Tiny Lights, a Journal of Personal Essay, her fiction in the anthology Zebulon Nights, and various poems in online forums. She is always surprised by the stories that arise out of the fermentation of random words or images.

    Marlene C

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