Tag: stories

Extended Metaphor

When I write the first draft of a story, I feel like I’m in the middle of a budding romance. I fall in love with the characters and I want to see what happens to them. The revelation of the story surprises and delights me.  


And then there’s editing. I re-read and find all my characters’ flaws showing in the unfiltered morning light. I find holes in their stories, having heard them so many times.

But like any good relationship, my job is to look into the flaws and the errors and the mess and find the truth, the uniqueness of their story. But to do this well, I have to remember that theirs is the same story I fell in love with.

Vacation in Horicon

I haven’t written because I am having good family time in Wisconsin, celebrating the Fourth the way I like to: bratwurst and sauerkraut, good cheese and beer.

During summer, my dad lives in a camp trailer at The Playful Goose just outside of Horicon, on the Rock River and not far from Horicon Marsh. It’s a cozy place cluttered with hobbies: woodworking tools, winemaking, a ham and bean soup in the crock pot.  

It’s a great time for family stories, with my dad and my Uncle Ron telling their adventures from childhood (and the time Uncle Ron set off illegal fireworks years ago on the lawn of the house on Beloit Avenue). Storytelling is an important part of relating in my family.

It’s much easier to be around my family since I’ve been on my mood management medications. I used to feel so much pressure to talk that it was hard for me to be there. Now I’m relaxed, and I enjoy it a lot more.

I’ll leave on Sunday with more stories and more appreciation for my family.

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I’m in Camp Nano right now, and I’m trying to maintain two hours per day to keep up. My family’s accustomed to me ducking out to write. I’ll keep you posted.

A writing prompt

I woke up early (4:45 AM) and sat at my computer waiting for inspiration to strike.

It hasn’t.

What’s a writer to do? Write, of course! Here lies the value of writing prompts. These exercises limber up your mind by providing a no-pressure idea for you to write about. By no-pressure, I mean that you’re not writing on your manuscript, you’re not going to screw up your manuscript if you do poorly — it’s pure writing without motive.

So, my prompt for this morning: talk about a missed opportunity:

This is a true story. I learned this story when I was growing up. Children being what they are, my classmates started calling me “garbage truck” because my last name — Leach — was emblazoned on the front of the hopper of all the garbage trucks in town. I lamented to Dad, “I’m not related to the garbage trucks, am I?” He laughed and told me this story:

My grandfather, when he was fifteen, was sent off to work that summer. His father gave him two choices: work with his one uncle on the farm, or work with his other uncle, a bachelor who owned a factory. Grandpa chose the farm.

Had he chosen the factory, he may well have been taken in by the bachelor uncle to succeed him in the firm. As it was, the bachelor uncle died with no successor. However, you can find his name on garbage trucks everywhere — the factory now makes hoppers for garbage trucks. This, my father said, is why we’re not rich.

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I already had this story, sure, but it popped up because of the prompt and not vice versa, Prompts might provoke an old story to tell, or might lead you to the kind of impromptu writing that becomes a story.

Happy writing!

Memorials

My cousin Francis died
in the river he walked into;
he left behind a family
who had only wondered when.

My mother, on her deathbed,
demanded from a priest
that the Church apologize to her;
she gave it absolution.

When my grandfather died,
the children didn’t mourn him;
they laid one unspoken secret
with the casseroles at dinner

These stories are their testimony;
these stories are the flowers
I’ve laid upon their graves.

And we will tell stories …

Richard and I will be visiting my dad this weekend at his summer cabin. Dad’s cabin, actually a park RV, sits at an RV park in Horicon, Wisconsin, near the famed Horicon Marsh. The place is, much like the rest of Wisconsin, a place to get away, to fish and grill bratwurst and drink.

Dad was born in Wisconsin, and to hear him tell it, he spent his childhood hunting, fishing, and skipping school.This would seem like a poor role model to me, but he grew up to be a stand-up man by taking lifelong learning seriously, taking care of my sister and me when my mom couldn’t, and taking care of stray cats. He did, however, retain a wicked sense of humor which both my sister and I have inherited.

There were a few years when Dad and I didn’t talk. It was the time when I had gone through two incidents of sexual abuse and harassment, followed by a rape I didn’t remember — as a result, I developed a fear of men that lasted three years. My father was included in that number even though he had done nothing to me. My dad handled it by being there for me from a distance, till eventually it thawed, and eventually he tried to teach me how to drive. Even to this day, however, talking on the phone with my dad is awkward, with long pauses and awkward small talk.

In person, though, I get his stories. My dad is 82 years old, and he has years of stories and an engaging storytelling style that runs in his family. I believe in words even in (especially in) the storytelling tradition, where stories become refined in the passage from generation to generation.

So Friday, Richard and I will drive 7 hours to Wisconsin to visit my aging, somewhat ailing dad. We’ll borrow Dad’s golf cart and go fishing in the river and catch baby bullhead and eat at a local restaurant with him and a couple of his friends.

And we will tell stories.

Potential

More than anything, I think the thing that inspires me when it comes to writing is the potential a story has. The potential to be read or heard, the potential to speak to someone’s condition, the potential to make someone laugh.

This is more important to me that simply writing for the joy of it. For me, the joy is from a human interacting with the humanity of my stories. My love of stories predates my love of writing, coming from a family where both sides excelled in their kind of stories. My dad’s family told hunting stories with a sense of slapstick and absurdity, except for the Native American tale about sacred white deer disguised as something my Grandfather had witnessed. My mother’s family loved wordplay, and very often my grandmother served as the “straight guy” a la vaudeville who would set up the play on words.

When I write characters, I want to bring them home for dinner and have a dinner party. When I write themes, I ask myself if they will entwine into my readers’ lives and change them. When I write plots, I think of my family stories and how they walked me into surprising places.

It’s good for me to think about why I write.

The situation is that I don’t have much patience. Much perseverance, but not much patience. Oh, well, I forgot to get that when I grew up. I’m trying new things now, like maybe small press even though I will be lucky to get 100 readers, and Wattpad, which is the massive marketplace of ideas with no curator.

Find me on Wattpad — you have to subscribe, but it’s free. Read my story collection as it develops. Say hi. Feel moved to interact with me.

Wattpad

And if you want to write me? lleachie AT gmail.com

A Geeky Love Story

Have I explained how Richard and I met 13 years ago?

We met on Match.com, which was a thing back then. The full story is much quirkier. Let me explain:

I was a 41-year-old tenured professor who found the pickings in Maryville, MO very, very slim. I had only had two dates in the first seven years of living there, and both of them were men who hadn’t quite grown up (and both denied that they’d gone on a date with me. No idea why.)

I had shied away from online dating, because I was very skeptical. However, at a professional conference, I sat in on a session featuring Life Coaches, who are very talented people who help clients get out of their comfort zones and set new goals. One of the presenters said, “We can work with any problem. Does anyone have a problem they wish to explore?” Me, being the risk taker I am, announced in a room full of 400 people, “I’d like to find a husband.”

After a demonstration of how life coaches help break preconceived notions, I walked out of the room to deal with the bathroom lines. On my way out, an adorable plump woman tugged on my sleeve and whispered, “Try Match.com. That’s how I found my husband.”

When I arrived back home from the conference, I decided to experiment with three online dating sites: The want ads on Craig’s List, Match.com, and eHarmony. Craig’s List was a cesspool of married men whose wives didn’t understand them. I finally got forcibly removed from there because a man I jilted who wrote execrable poetry alleged that I had posted pornographic content. eHarmony would have been a good place if I were conservatively Christian and wanted to be a stepmom to someone’s kids. Match.com was intriguing — I got a lot of “I think I’d date you if you didn’t live so far away.”

And then there was Richard. A bit funny looking, very geeky and quirky, a lot like the people I hung out with in college. He wrote to me weekly, but he came off as — well, oblivious. Even so, I didn’t immediately click with him, and I had two other men in the periphery —  one comically inept, the other a bad boy — that I might have been dating but wasn’t sure.

Richard and I had a meetup in Des Moines as I was on my way to visit my parents in Illinois. My mom called me while I was on the trip and I told her I was meeting up with a guy named Richard at the Barnes and Noble. She asked me his last name and I honestly didn’t know it, so I called Richard and asked him his last name so my mom wouldn’t think he was an axe murderer.

Then Richard invited me up to Des Moines for a Mannheim Steamroller concert. I can get into that family-friendly electronica stuff (although I prefer Dream Theater) so I said yes, and we ended up with our first date. Except that Richard discovered that I was going to eat Thanksgiving Dinner at the local Hy-Vee cafeteria. He invited me up to Thanksgiving dinner, which was an eclectic affair held by one of his friends. That ended up being our first date.

The next day, I introduced Richard to one of my favorite rituals — watching people shop on Black Friday. We said hi to a woman who talked with us briefly, and he later pointed out that she was his supervisor when he used to work at a bookstore —

Then I remembered stopping into a bookstore, where a spectacled man with black hair and Asian eyes recommended a book by an author his fiance loved.

Which is how Richard and I met, more than thirteen years ago.

A poem about a hard truth

Attention is the Currency in the Marketplace of Ideas

Young white girls’ stories get told
When they disappear from the jogging path;
Young black girls just disappear.
Massacred teens’ stories get told
Until shouted down by rich white men.
The mentally ill are known only by their rampages,
and black men only by their records.
Black women are not heard, even in numbers.

Attention is the currency in the marketplace of ideas,
But its distribution is skewed.

A story of resilience

This afternoon and tomorrow, I have the privilege of participating in the Dear World college tour. Apparently, it’s a chance to tell one’s story, followed by a portrait with a pertinent phrase from one’s story written on one’s face and body (don’t worry, it’s not a nude portrait).

I’ve been thinking about what my story is. I thought at first it was about my bipolar and my fear of stigma about that. But I realized that the true story is bigger, the worries about it are bigger, the payoff is bigger.

My story is not about survival, and it’s not about recovery.

My story is about resilience. Resilience is defined as the ability to recover quickly from adversity.

As a child, I faced a lot of adversity — by the time I was sixteen, I had been raped once by acquaintances, sexually abused a handful of times, and endlessly bullied at school. I had grown up in an atmosphere of unpredictability, threats of abandonment, and broken promises. (If I have any relatives reading this, I am sorry if you struggle with this account of my childhood. But it did happen.)

But there were also some of the things in place that helped me not just survive, but flourish. My father was a pillar of stability. There were teachers at school who recognized my intelligence and encouraged me to use it. My speech therapist, Miss Gimberling, who I met with from kindergarten to fifth grade, encouraged me to draw and talk. I later learned she stood in for a school psychologist. My intelligence may have helped. Since then, I’ve survived a marriage failure that hooked into my trauma, bounced back from my department at the college being disbanded and being thrown into a department I didn’t think I had a lot in common with, and gotten through the negative experience of inpatient behavioral health ward.

But with all this and bipolar disorder going on, I earned a Ph.D in 1993. I’ve taught as a professor for almost 25 years. I’ve learned a lot, using knowledge instead of defensiveness in meeting the world. I still have to use all those strategies I’ve learned to cope, and sometimes I struggle when the medication fails. I still have bad days. But I’m willing to take those two steps forward before one step drags me back.

And I’ve always enjoyed life. I’ve always collected people’s stories, told stories, laughed at random moments nobody else laughs at, communed with nature, indulged my alter-egos, worn obnoxious lipstick that matches my outfits, followed the exploits of famous internet cats, taught classes outrageously, sworn egregiously, worn cat outfits for Halloween, set Big Audacious Goals and accomplished them, fallen in love, fallen in limerance, fallen in limerance AGAIN, and gotten kissed by more people than you might think, in usually ludicrous circumstances. And to look at me, you wouldn’t believe I’m anything but an older woman with obnoxious lipstick.

I wonder if I should be writing this. Introspection doesn’t necessarily fit into a blog about writing. Except it does, because it explains where stories come from.