From the notebook

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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Just some bits and pieces from the weekend notebook I carried with me at the writing conference I attended:

Senses
I didn’t notice the fall of the leaf
or the crush of autumn on the globe.
amazing that I didn’t notice the feel of it all,
the fall, the color, the light.
there’s more out there in the not noticing than the noticing.
so how to take it all in?
i can stand and stop and watch
or i can gather and harvest and reap.
What’s the best way?

Zen writer
Sean Murphy
wwww.murphyzen.com

Your ideal reader
… a willing hitchhiker, trusting me to take them on a ride. when it’s over, maybe they can say they learned something.

Writing exercise
Start a 10-minute free write with the prompt: “My grandmother always used to…” It doesn’t have to be your grandmother. It can be a character in a story or someone in your memoir. Write with pen and paper and keep your hand moving. If you get stuck, write “I’m stuck” until you get unstuck.

After five minutes, switch to, “My grandmother never…” Again, keep writing.

Once finished, go back and see what you’ve got. Where’s the good stuff? What’s more telling – what your grandmother always did, or what she never did?

Your worst critic
So we’re in the class, going around the room after writing one paragraph describing our worst critic, the idea being that you need to know your audience, I suppose.

So we get around to this gray-haired woman with the sweetest Southern drawl, and her puffy diabetic ankles peek out from beneath the length of her gray sweat suit. And she launches into this story of how she started writing when she was in the hospital with a heart problem that nearly killed her. She almost died. And she lay there, asking God to give her humor so she could write about her experience about almost dying. And what an amazing experience. And aren’t hospitals amazing. And the procedure they did on me was somewhat experimental, but I knew that a Higher Power would get me through. And law, I didn’t die. And so I wrote. And God did give me humor, because sometimes you have to laugh about these things, and I talked to the hospital workers and don’t you know…

She goes on like this for 15 interminable minutes. People twitch. One guy makes a big show of looking at his watch. Whispers. Finally, I look down at my notebook, realizing I had been pressing my pen to paper much too hard. “I am your worst critic. I wish you had died.”

Subminiature compact
hit. glass. ride. meld.
moving together, paper over glass.
all worn down,
melancholy in the moment.
rip. squeeze. tip, tap down.
pens on the paper horizon,
they moved together.
Don’t move the dial
of a life tuned in.