I have begun an 8-week(?) autumn writing workshop sponsored by the National Writing Project’s Write Now Teacher Studio and the New York City Creative Writing Lab.  We meet to write together and discuss once a week and we submit writing that we workshop  with each other.  Last night we began and the prompt was simple:  tell me about a pretend vacation.

Here was my jaggedy response.

I marked it up with a pink gel highlighter.  The marks are attempts to save what Tiago Forte calls in his new book, Building a Second Brain, “finding the essence–distilling”.  My usual path to creating is simple: gather and capture, make sense of, and share.  Forte puts it a bit better: keep what resonates, save for acting upon, find the essence, and show your work.

Here is what happened when I took the prompt and ran it through this mill.

And here is a text version if by some happy chance you want comment in the margins using Hypothes.is. By the way this is all part of the injunction to show your work. If you are in a workshop, then you must show your work. Unfortunately, you can’t show how the editor shark that lives in your brain ocean does its thing. Too blood and silly dangerous.

 

 

Where Did Spend Your Pretend Summer Vacation?

READY?
ACTION.

I spent one summer as a river guide hustling folk down the Green River. Many of those I led were quadraplegic. One guide per folk. It was a couple of days of water and sun and sweet riffles and chutes, landing on gravel bars and camping overnight with driftwood fires and….

CUT…
I am not pretending, am I?
I am just telling you a story
of what happened to me…
a husk of memory,
a “flat hull”,
something unsleekend.

READY?
ACTION.

My summer vacation was spent
trolling the world
a poet casting into the stream,
I am the half-witted demiurge,
silly dangerous…

CUT…

My vacation was spent
making ensoes,
perfect circles with hand ground ink and brush,
effing Zen as eff, y’all.
Writing…

CUT…

No, this is just a ditzy retread
of the cliched prompt that is
the writing teacher’s racket
as the school year commences,
“What did you do on your pretend summer vacation?”

CUT..

What did I do? I don’t take vacations,
not even staycations.
I write.
I farm.
I teach the present how to be the future
by turning over one rock after another.

CUT…

READY?
ACTION.

I had a pretend vacation this week,
writing poems and making zines.
No.
I won’t make you read or listen to them.
I will just pretend to read them to you
and you will just pretend
to listen
to them
on your pretend vacation
where the ocean is vast
and full of screams.