Writing Exercise and Response
I began writing this week thinking about creativity and motherhood. I enjoyed the writing, but absolutely nothing succinct came out, so I’ll have to save those thoughts for a longer format. Instead, you’ll find below a prose-poem of sorts and the writing exercise that inspired it.
Happy Writing!
Writing Exercise
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“Writing is about exposing what is unexposed, otherwise you’re just rearranging the furniture in the castle.” - Anne Lammot
Write about exposure or about trying to expose something. Set a timer for 7 minutes or aim for 500 words, but write without stopping or editing.
Some thoughts: Writing is more than describing what’s in front of us. What is not being said? Or what would it mean to have something exposed? What do the details of an image tell us about what’s going on underneath the surface?
Response
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Exposed, exposé, like if I talk enough that’s another kind of covering. We don’t live in a world with secrets anymore, actually I’d like it if you could learn to be a little more quiet. This is all it takes to be a mystery these days—don’t post everything you think or say.
I realize, over and over again and for the very first time, that I am aging. These are old people ways of thinking. Like when I saw that picture of that girl who is probably actually a woman and is very very famous though I’m not sure what for, and all I could think about were the way her breasts were pushed up and back like she could choke on the fat and silicone of them. I thought, huh we’re bringing back that aspect of corsets, the full half moon top of the breast visible, the bottom emptied out, barely covered. I am a great lover of period dramas and also breasts so I know it well. Then I think, it looks so uncomfortable, are people really supposed to dress like that?
A good reminder to toss the phone away, lose it under the bedsheets. Better yet, sacrifice it to some volcano god and set myself free. I don’t wear bras anymore, haven’t since the car accident, mostly I let the soft weight of my breasts drag me down. I know there are people who see me now and think, “You used to be pretty”.
This is a kind of free.
But what’s all this exposure really hiding? I don’t think each of you with your bird songs online are being honest. Tweet tweet and trill trill but you’re not fooling me. Birds make though sounds in the morning to let others know they have lived through the night. Is that hopeful or is that bleak? Are you announcing how you were not snatched away in the night or are you sending up a warning more dire, the snakes mouth closing slowly, slowly, swallowing you whole.
I take the shopping cart of myself out of the store, the heavy bags of all the things that I am. The cupboards are dark, they are warm and I have seen no signs of war or mice or worse inside of them, so I stack the cans of all my markers and memories and leave behind the lacy things I don’t wear anymore, close the cupboard doors. Inside the house there’s nothing left but my flesh and my bones and all this hair and then, a single birdsong, from my lips into that empty air.
