When I was eleven, I wrote a novel about spending a week with the Jackson 5, which sort of tells you how old I am. Kent State University’s English department taught me how to write term papers and legal briefs, but when I took a creative writing workshop, I felt out of my element, and I added a minor in business (my, were those classes easy!) to my education. That’s how I landed in the legal department of IMG, the sports management company, where I drafted contracts and letters to trademark attorneys.
Fifteen years later, and I was bereft. Yes, I’d started a book discussion group and was reading. I’d even made plans to write with all the ideas Writer’s Digest put out there. My days were filled with work and child-rearing, with maintaining a home and being a spouse, and I wasn’t doing any soul work. I wasn’t writing, and that’s the reason I went to Kent in the first place — they had journalism AND art.
In case you haven’t figured it out, writing is soul work. A friend handed me Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way, and I began to write, every day, at the same time, putting all my complaints and inadequacies and disappointments on yellow legal paper. I was transformed from being sad to being excited. Ten years ago this year, I began Word Lovers as a way to get people to do some soul work, maybe even create something rich and publishable, to write poetry and to be free in their hearts to open up. I get excited when I think about our planned retreat weekends this year, in June and November.
But get this: I began writing 100-word stories because Mary the poet was doing it and I already knew the power of 5-7-5 Haiku and how brevity forces us to make each word work as we nip and tuck them together to create a string of words, like beads of water on a long hovering leaf, that make sense together. It felt like incoherent drivel at first, as my first story tells, but we talk too much about things. In this visual world, showing is everything, and though I profess a love of words, I can do better with the color of my beads and letting the reader discover their meaning.
This was my first 100-word story:
Once upon a time, established writer, long-sentence lover, attempted 100-word story, sought thoughts joined by hyphens, produced Haiku-like nouns and verbs, shunned “of,” “to,” and “with,” knifed “darlings,” created newly-discovered lexicon, relied on Thesaurus, crafted odd constructions, shaped emotionless jargon, despised poetry-killers (poets’ creativity license does not excise), desired penetrating feeling to abstraction, longed for adjectives and adverbs, thought how absurd the swift want-less exercise, and, finally, drew on anger as she kept her authentic meandering sentence intact in a yarn of loathing and steadfast yearning conjured by a pointless endeavor by one who loves words too much.
Three years ago, my father was clearly dying. My mother’s family reunion was at Lakeside, at the Idlewyld B&B where I host Word Lovers retreats. We left my father at the nursing home and took my mother, who had dementia, an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. There, with my family and cousins, I continued working on 100-word stories, sitting in a corner with my laptop, putting them down, one after another, most not good at all. I was feeling pretty frenzied about the demise of my parents. This was probably one that I wrote while there:
Mid-May, the irises flourish along Lake Erie’s shore, waves dash against boulders. Further on the path, Sweet William climb between the rocks, a late-Spring surprise. Summers as a girl, flower beds were groomed in early June, the vegetation-deprived soil freshly turned, worms working the hubris. Now, daffodils turned brown, shadows from full-leaved trees cross her face. Frowning, she recalls the 180-day vineyard season in northern Ohio, the seed packet time-planting changes to what was North Carolina’s. The brown-yellow horizon above the sea-blue water makes her afraid for her grandchildren. Passing by a recycling can, she tosses her water bottle, guilty.
Not a good story. I wouldn’t send it anywhere. But I set it down here, for you CoolCleveland writers, so you can see that it’s not about how you write but what you write, what you choose to keep and what you decide to not put on the page. It’s therapy. And then I wrote my last 100-word story, after Dad died. It brings tears to my eyes, and you will see that it’s highly personal, this story about a beloved father who died before it was his time, from stroke-induced dementia and weakness from throat cancer treatment. Here it is:
I shrank from the thought, but yet it was there—I was avoiding my father’s dying by writing stories, some about sex and longing, while defeat shone in his eyes. Dad. Oh, how I wish I could have made things better. You saw how helpless I was. I saw it when you shook your head. I tried, we all tried. You who wanted to live forever should be doing just that, you soldier for humanity who was never quite sure of your methods, never quite hitting the mark of confidence even though they thought you were full of yourself. They didn’t know what was in your heart, but I did.
The beauty of 100 words is that they’re manageable. And you can do what Anne Lamott called “shitty first drafts” anywhere and any time.
Dad is at the center of the memoir I’m writing about being a preacher’s kid. He’s why I marched in the Women’s March and why I’m sending all those emails and making all those phone calls to people in Congress. The book starts with the motorcade in Dallas when John F. Kennedy, Jr. was shot. For my children, the tragedy of 9/11 will be their anchor, for mine it was that killing followed by racial riots and Vietnam war protests and the nightly news showing bloodied heads and teeth-bared dogs.
We all have our methods for dealing with the life we’ve led, with trying to be in the moment, for finding a good way to live going forward. We revise our plans, let go of what isn’t holding us, but sometimes we hold on tight to those moments that moved us profoundly. And sometimes, we just need to write, as therapy.
Claudia Taller created Word Lovers retreats in 2008. In addition to the spring and fall retreats, she also hosts Word Lovers salons every other month. Find her at claudiajtaller.com/.