What’s Your Story?

[On March 17, 2021, I got my first Covid vaccination. I cried like a baby—not from pain but from relief and gratitude.]

Top of the Morning to Y’all! Happy St. Patty’s Day!

I’m going to do a little cross-pollinating here and share with y’all a writing prompt I use in my in-person workshops and which you can also find over at my other substack, the one all about writing.

Understanding that some folks, especially beginners, can feel overwhelmed by a blank page, I invite them to think of a story they have told a million times. So many times that anytime they are about to tell it again to some new listener, anyone who has already heard the story makes a move to exit the room. I tell them to grab that story from inside their head and write it down, more like taking dictation than creating something from scratch. Less intimidating. This exercise demonstrates how we all have the ability to craft story, create an arc, deliver a beginning, middle and end.

I recently undertook this assignment myself, when it occurred to me that a story I tell very often could neatly fit into a poem. And, bonus meta points, the story I wanted to put down on the page is about the stories my son apparently has told repeatedly about me. Defensively, I swear—while surely he has reported some doozies about some very poor choices I made—surely not all of his tales were bad. Some of our adventures were just unbelievable fun. Good crazy. Like that time, twenty-something years ago, when the newly minted Polyphonic Spree (twenty-six members as I recall) came over to our house for brunch on the last day of SXSW that year, which as I also recall, was St. Patrick’s Day, too

I had fun with the poem and so here it is—a little number that I think would work nicely as part of a poetry chapbook about the hilarity of intergenerational trauma. (I probably won’t ever do the chapbook, but at least I captured the one poem.)

Here you go:

L’esprit D’escalier¹

Perhaps

the cruelest

funniest

wittiest

most horrifying

thing

My (now

six-foot something

all grown up)

baby boy

ever said to me

was

You do know, Mom,

that I win

all the

childhood-stories-

told-in-bars

contests?

It took me years

to craft the comeback

ever elusive until

suddenly

it was just

right

there:

You do know, Son,

there is a reason

for that—

It’s because

you never

went drinking

with your mom

(Touché mon petit chou

Je t’aime)

JOY AND BEAUTY DEPARTMENT

When I was growing up, long before Martha Stewart was a thing, my mother was like South Jersey’s Blue Collar Martha Stewart prototype. Only she had zero budget to work with, which hardly stopped her. I swear, more than once, she enhanced the aesthetic of our massive deep freezer (the one filled with loaves of 10c date expired white bread and tubes of fatty ground beef). There was a time she gave it a sort of antique distressed look using red paint and black stain. And, I think, another time when she covered the whole thing in textured orange contact paper. She was also fond of filling old liquor bottles (odd—my parents weren’t big drinkers—where did these bottles come from?) with plastic flowers and water that she dyed with food coloring. These sat on windowsills and offered a bit of cheer.

But of all her interior design flourishes, my favorite was The Old Sweet Potato Trick. She’d stick a potato in a jar full of water and before long green tentacles would begin to sprout and work their way up walls. So much green, so fast and so cheap. I still bust out The Old Sweet Potato Trick. And every single morning, like an excited kindergartner, I delight in seeing how much it has grown literally overnight. I look at all the amazing new tiny leaves— my friend Colleen calls sweet potato leaves baby dragon wings and that is what they are, taking flight up the unfurling tendrils.

I’ve been enjoying the birds a lot. I have this one chicken who insists on laying her eggs in a trash can. She does not like to be disturbed when she is doing her thing.

And I’ve performed several weddings recently. Busy season is upon me. I really do love my job.

Lisa and Sinead are doing great. Barton Springs has reopened after a two-week cleaning closure—Hallelujah! And I saw this cloud the other day. No, the photo doesn’t do it justice. But dang. What an amazing cloud.

I hope you are all as well as can be expected in these trying times. Do you celebrate St. Patrick’s Day? What’s a story you have told a million times?

NOTES:

Thanks for reading y’all. If you can swing a paid subscription, I hope you’ll consider that. For the next week or two I am offering an annual subscription rate of $30 —that’s a whopping $20 off the regular annual rate. Such a bargain! And your support helps me so much—to castrate my goats, clean out the septic tank, repair the ancient plumbing. Seriously, if you subscribe it’s like YOU ARE A RANCH HAND. From here on out all you paid subscribers can add that to your CVs.

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I have SO MANY WRITING WORKSHOPS coming right up. All are either free or donation based. A handy list:

MONDAYS through May I will be offering a FREE WRITING WORKSHOP at the San Marcos Public Library from 10 am til noon. REGISTER HERE.

My FREE WRITING WORKSHOPS at Hampton Branch Library happen on the first and third Tuesdays of every month from 5:30-7:30 pm. These always fill up so please REGISTER.

FREE WRITING WORKSHOP AT THE RANCH! On March 29th I’m hosting a workshop at the ranch. It is donation based. 10 am - 1 pm. Space is limited. REGISTER HERE.

Mondays in April I will be offering DONATION BASED Writing Workshops in South Austin from 1:30-3:30 This is an experiment. If it works, I’m going to keep these workshops going. Space is limited. You can REGISTER HERE.

1. The title is a French idiom, one of my favorite idioms in any language. Here’s the Wikipedia entry.