I sat at the head of the long wooden table with a butter lettuce salad, my notebook, and a pen.
A dozen other women wrote with me in two long rows, with Molly in the middle. The scent of bread baking wafted in from the bakery next door. The sounds of ice into glasses clinked while the assistants prepared lunch from the larder. Like eager school girls, we were there to learn.
Among the first writing workshops I attended was one at The Pantry in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood several years ago. The Pantry is a lovely community kitchen with a communal table and an interior lit golden by the angled light of the Pacific Northwest. Molly Wizenberg was teaching and I loved her work: Orangette, A Homemade Life, and her family’s restaurant, Delancey – so I signed up. It was only two half days, but I learned a lot.
Don‘t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
― Anton Chekhov
One of the most useful lessons imparted was how to show with words, not just tell. Here are the steps Molly shared:
Recount your story at a high level, in the same way you might tell it to a friend over the phone. First, I did this. Then this happened. Then that happened. And so on.
List all the things you experienced via your five senses during this experience: what did you see, feel, taste, smell, hear? Be descriptive. This is a place where you can easily expand your vocabulary. A thesaurus is your friend!
Go back to your original story and rewrite, amend and enhance with the sensory descriptions you just listed.
I’ve done this for shorter pieces and decided to try it with this book, my longest piece ever. I’m still working through step one, but…so far, so good. I will go to Uwajimaya this weekend to get more Travelers’ Notebooks: I’m filling them up! I also had a wonderful interview on Sunday with a man who worked with my father from 1979-1987 at KSNO radio in Aspen. He, my father, did indeed host a jazz show. He was – by all accounts in the 100+ comments to my Facebook post – a wonderful human. But here is my struggle: can a human be truly wonderful while abandoning a child? How can someone so good do something so bad? Was maintaining the image of the “mountain beatnik”, per Hunter S. Thompson’s description of him in The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time so important that it superseded his responsibility to me? Or did something happen to him in his childhood that made him vow never to become a parent, causing him to conclude I’d be better off without him altogether? Better an absent dad than a present but bad one?
He was a train-loving, bike-riding great guy! – David, my father’s former boss.
This also begs the question about father’s rights. If a man gets a woman pregnant accidentally – as I’m sure was much more likely to happen in the 60s than today due to birth control efficacy and availability – and he wants an abortion but the woman does not, then what’s a man to do?
Abandon and forget, I guess. An option men have that women don’t. Men can exist without ever knowing any children they may have fathered. Women, outside of drastic medical procedures to donate their eggs and have them implanted in another woman’s uterus, do not have this convenience. It is nearly impossible for a woman to not know her child.
But how do I ensure that this book does not end up being more about him than about my mother? No matter how loved he was in Aspen, he abandoned her. He abandoned me. He does not deserve himpathy.
Indignant. Angry. Showing.
Things That Nourished My Writing: April 1-7.
FILM
Freak Power: The Ballot or the Bomb (a documentary about Hunter S. Thompson’s bid for Pitkin County sheriff in Aspen, the same year my father ran for county commissioner).
FOOD
Rasai, modern Indian cuisine in Fremont.
LITERARY
Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Davis
MUSIC
I have always loved Lila Downs.
PLACES
Le Reve’s new outdoor gazebo. Finally. I can work from a coffee shop again.