Call for Storytime

So it's almost December, and I have come up with my December blogging idea.  This year I'd like to explore a different memory every day and share a short narrative.  Since I've been delving into the past recently, it sounds to me (at least right now) that I shouldn't find it too difficult.  However, I would like to ask for your assistance.  I've got a few that I want to stat with, but I need you to help me think of ideas--times in my life that might be worth writing about--small little slices of life.  So please chime in with what you would like to hear/read.  Whether it's a general suggestion like an age, a grade in school, or a place I lived, or even if you have a particular situation or story you'd like me to tackle, I'd love your input.

Check out my other posts throughout joeaveragewriter.blogspot.com if you need to see what subjects I've tackled recently.

I'm excited to see which stories reveal themselves over the next thirty-one days.

So Many River Metaphors...but I Refuse to Use One in the Title

The first half of last week I was chillin’ up in Spokane, Washington, with two of my friends/colleagues from the Central Utah WritingProject (CUWP) to present at the Northwest Inland Writing Project (NIWP) spring conference.  Sarah and Janae presented on revision strategies—a topic I have dabbled in, and I revamped my shtick about wordplay in the classroom.  And although it wasn’t everything I expected, or hoped for, since I had a few technology glitches, it was a great venture for my first out-of-state presentation.

Jeff Wilhelm did an amazing job discussing the new common core and some strategies for implementing it in a language arts classroom.  It wasn’t anything new, but it validated what we, as a team at SFJHS, have been striving toward.  However, I didn’t receive my biggest a-ha moment until after the conference had finished and the three of us were killing time, passing time until our flight (full of Zag fans, by the way) departed.

The morning started out gray and a bit drizzly, not much in the way of vacation weather, but by the time we had breakfasted, the rain stopped and the sun played peek-a-boo haphazardly through gray patchy clouds.  We strolled through Riverside Park between our hotel and the conference center, crossing bridges, inhaling clean air and inspiring landscapes.  The ladies would pause and take pictures, but I didn’t have my camera; I had to capture the picturesque downtown area in my mind.

At one of our final panoramic bridge photo ops, I glanced across the water at a handful of tourists sneaking down a bank to get a better view of the lower falls.  That’s when it hit me.  I had been here before.  When I was seven, Dad was stationed at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas.  That summer we took a family vacation: a few days in Yosemite—awesome, but it did nothing to assuage my acrophobia—then across the Golden Gate Bridge and up the Pacific Cost Highway.  Once we hit the Columbia River, we crisscrossed the states of Oregon and Washington until we hit Spokane.  For some reason, my dad thought he would retire up there, so he decided to buy a few acres close to Mount Spokane.

I remember a few scattered details about the Spokane part of the trip.  My dad had a new Betamax video camera.  Marc or David, I don’t recall which, busted his flip-flop traipsing through the underbrush of those ten acres of pine trees.  We stopped at a gas station on the return and I had a pineapple Crush soda.  (Never had one since.)

But standing on the bridge last Thursday, the raging of the falls came back, the red brick buildings, the dilapidated wood and chain-link fences.  I knew these sights…and not from postcards or distant stories.  Even though the I-Max theater was new, I had been on Canada Island before.  I had crossed the bridges as a boy, walked the trails, chased the squirrels, thrown rocks and sticks into the rapids.  The familiarity, which had been absent the previous three days, was rekindled in a small spark of memory.  And that familiarity brought contentment.  The power of memory and connection across 29 years made the entire trip worth it.

I’ve addressed the importance of mining for memories and the power that it holds in earlier posts, and I’m sticking to that claim.  Stories have power, and working to uncover what was once hidden in our lives, be they pleasant or horrific, is a process well worth the blood, sweat, and embarrassment of yesteryear.

I move that the human population would do well to set aside time, every so often, to reflect, to remember, and to contemplate the past and present so as to create a fuller, more meaningful future.  Writing, or journaling, or blogging, or sketching, or anything (really) physical and mechanical helps to solidify our life’s experiences and assists in the meaning-making we all seek in life.  Actually organizing our thoughts on paper helps shape the marble, shade the coloration, or dry the cement.  And at times, we can completely reconstruct our experiences from a new perspective—one that only years and seasoning can give birth to.  It’s all in the details and how we relish them, how we revel in them, and how we retain them.

As a teacher, I suggest that we provide students with opportunities to explore different moment sin their own lives.  Depending on the age of the students, they may not have very many eye-openers that they can recall.  However, and this is where I want to drive my point home, it is up to us to help them realize how special each minute detail may be.  Teach them to capture a snapshot of life; sagas are not necessary (really, they aren’t).  Nobody truthfully cares about what happened every minute of the day that led up to the food fight at lunch.  They just want to feel the past-prime peas pelted against their pock-marked faces.  They want to hear the squelching of mashed potatoes sloshed across someone’s unsuspecting mug.  They want to witness the spray of the chocolate milk carton exploding against the brick wall.

Teach them pacing.  Teach them to slow down those special EPSN highlight moments that they have had.  I will always marvel at how a close play at the plate, a single blocked shot, or a tackle in the backfield gets stretched into a three-minute segment.  Teach them to explode a scene, to take a 30-second thrill and stretch it over two or three pages that will hold the memory captive behind paper and ink (or digital) bars forever.

What’s that you say?  They still struggle to find ideas, to discover instances of significance in their short lives?  First, remind them that they don’t have to be world travelers to have an exciting life.  Sometimes thoughtful moments come in that landfill of a bedroom while blaring the latest trendy flash-in-the-pan performing artist.  Other times we need to slow down those sad and depressing episodes of our lives in order to analyze or make sense of this crazy, mixed-up world.

Sometimes, we all need a kick in the pants to get us going.  Students seem to need this more often, so one thing I like to do is to provide some kind of inspiration.   At times, it’s a picture—an illustration, meme, or work of art that will hopefully get them thinking.  Every now and again I give them a hypothetical situation or a question to ponder.  My favorite way to get students into a moment, though, is through a text.  I love to use short stories, poems, quotes, picture books—something text-based, to fire up those gerbil wheels and keep them spinning.  Check out my post about Writing Prompts Based on Readings.  It might help you get an example of what I’m talking about.  For those who need a framework, a prompt provides safety.  For those who are ready to explore the recesses of their mental abysses, they are free to wander…as long as they haul proper spelunking attire and accouterments.  See some of my personal rambles (look at the tags on the side bar over on the right) to see how it works for me.

Now, after I’ve babbled, I guess it’s time for me to shut up.  I may not have conveyed my thoughts perfectly here, but just sitting at my computer and physically typing the words has given me an outlet, an opportunity to try and make sense of the flotsam swimming through the clumps of gray matter inside my skull.  This is just a rough draft.  If it’s important enough to me, I’ll revise…yes, even after publication.

Your assignment: revisit the Spokane River.  Find those moments that have meaning.  Make connections between past and present.  Solidify them.  Even if you need some prompting, just do it.  Try one of my prompts. Discover something on your own.  Whatever you do, just write (even if your inner muse is on hiatus), reflect (even when it’s worse than rubbing hand sanitizer over an unidentified paper cut), and enjoy your life (or else).

Hidden Truths (and the Power of Story)

Regarding my last post about farting and embarrassing situations, I came to realize, as I was pondering the profundity of my retelling my situation, that as adults, we have repressed several episodes of our youth that are humiliating, uncouth, or just flat out stupid.  And as I reflected on this, lying in my bed, standing in the shower, driving in to work, I theorized that with all the incidents we have buried deeper than a pirate’s treasure, it’s just as likely that we (yes, all of us) have repressed some of the truly amazing things that we have done as well.

                Face it.  Junior high—puberty in general—is just a mixed-up, difficult, fashion-forgettable, die-if-anyone-really-knew-how-I-was-or-what-I-did time in everyone’s life.  Most of us, if we tried hard enough, could unearth interminable horrific memories and recount crazy stories (and attach morals to them, if needed—depending on how we skew the tales) to our children and grandchildren.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to excavate as many evidences of our own personal awesomeness as we do our epic (and not-so-epic) failures?  I suggest that we try harder to do so.

How many of us, when involved in a reunion of siblings of some type, slip back into spilling anecdotes we hadn’t remembered for eons…or at least decades? We resurrect legends that our mothers never knew.  I know for a fact that my mother doesn’t know every account…and that’s not always a bad thing.  I’m repeatedly amazed that when my wife’s dad gets together with his brothers and sisters, Grandma blushes and asks, “You did what, dear? When?” And the conversation about peeing in the barn and painting tar on the dog’s rear end resumes after she has left the room or gone to bed.  Heroes and villains are recreated and hyperbolized more than ever.  Stories spill and slosh around the room, and I learn more about my dad’s childhood from his brothers in half an hour than he ever told me in thirty-plus years.

Ah, the power of story!  It’s part of the human experience—one we cannot live without.  It’s how we live, how we communicate, how we find understanding and relationships and truth amidst chaos.

Since I’ve started writing this morning, I’ve delved deep into the recesses of my mind and discovered ancient troves of writing material—none of which I will divulge now because they might make excellent blog posts later.  Heh heh heh.

Now what I want to know from you readers of this ramble comes in three parts.  First, if you know any techniques to successfully “mine” for memories, please share them.  I have different ways to dig into my own mind, but I’m looking for new methods (for my madness).

Second, I’d like to know if you have any memories of me that I might have repressed that might make a good story—and I’m looking for both positive and negative stories.  Don’t be afraid to hurt my feelings.  To quote a famous book, “The truth will set you free.”

Finally, I would encourage you to uncover some hidden story from your life.  Play Dr. Frankenstein if you must.  Discover the details.  Relive those glory days.  Reveal something that has been hidden from the public.  Write about it.  Share it.