Brenda Sutton Rose's Blog, page 7
November 1, 2016
October 6, 2016
Giving Life to Stories
I grew up among farmers and factory workers and mechanics. I grew up in vegetable gardens and tobacco fields and classrooms and kitchens. I grew up with pianos, guitars, and songs. The places I write about bulge with secrets, and the landscape is as true as it can be. But perhaps my reader has never seen a tobacco field, never picked okra from a garden, never shelled a mess of peas.
It is my responsibility to ground my reader in a place that can be seen, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted, a...
September 3, 2016
Memoir Writing at Chattahoochee Valley Writers Conference
I am thrilled to be leading a seminar in Memoir Writing at Chattahoochee Valley Writers Conference this year. And we all know that memoir has become the craze! Memoir doesn’t have to be the size of a book. Have you ever heard of six-word memoirs? What about memoir poems? Memoir essays? Memoir collages?
The photo seen here is of my memoir table. It includes old photos, buttons, rocks, a crocheted piece, a quilt, a necklace, a ring, a poem, handmade dolls, a memoir poem, an old letter from a f...
August 30, 2016
One More Special Place
Richard and I enjoy our trips to Charleston.
Early in our marriage, the old city became one of our special places. We stay in a charming placedowntown, so we can tour the town on foot without parking worries.
Some years ago, before I married my present husband, and before I moved back to Georgia, I spent a few years working for an accounting firm on Church Street. Once a day, five days a week, passing the sweetgrass basket weavers, I would walk to the bank and the post office. Many of the weav...
August 1, 2016
Addition and Subtraction, Death and Birth
It is a Tuesday in July.
In two days my mother will be dead.
As a writer I know to stretch the tension, heighten the stakes, build the pressure one scene at a time; yet as I write today, I follow the urge to break the rules, reveal the ending to the reader, open myself up, and make way for the words to fall as they may.
Years ago I studied business and accounting, racing back and forth to classes while my children were at school, yet business and accounting didn’t add up to the sum of my hea...
July 24, 2016
Memories From A Mother’s Kitchen
A sensory joy related to specific meals passes from our lives after the loss of a father, a brother, but especially a mother.
My mother thought I could make miracles happen in the kitchen. I can’t. I’m an average cook, and I suspect my mother’s misplaced admiration grew from watching me experiment with new recipes, watching me prepare meals that were strange and foreign to her simple way of cooking. When I made chicken breasts stuffed with cheese, tomato, and basil, Mama raved about the meal...
June 10, 2016
Brody Rose: A Beloved Dog’s Obituary
Brody Rose
February 14, 2008 – June 8, 2016
Brody Rose, a loyal and loving dog, moved to Tifton when he was approximately 9 months old. He died at home on Wednesday, June 8, 2016, at the age of eight.
Over the course of his last day, Brody’s human sister, Alyson Ireland, called several times from Gainesville, Georgia, and spoke in Brody’s ear, whispering her deep love for him, telling him what a good dog and wonderful friend he had been. After lunch, during the last day of his life, a friend...
May 8, 2016
All Things Local: Food & Art
We’ll paint Spring Birds.
Tifton, Georgia is thriving. Yes, it is.
The Local Kitchen and Bar showcases southern abundance by serving nothing but the freshest foods, fruits and vegetables harvested locally, meat raised on southern land, seafood caught off the Georgia coast, and regional dairy. Every meal is made fresh to order with the finest ingredients. At The Local, staying true to their southern roots, the chefs focus on quality and incorporate seasonal and sustainable ingredients in...
April 23, 2016
Memoir Poetry: Stains
Although I enjoy writing memoir essays, I am also drawn to the beauty and music of narrative poems. Rooted in memory, the magic of memoir poetry is influenced by the use of image, metaphor, internal rhyme, and meter.
After learning my mother was about to die, I dreamed of her and wrote about it. The result was something akin to magical realism in poetry.
I read “Stains” at her funeral.
Stains
With red clay between my toes,
and the sun setting over my head,
the ghost of my mother blows...
April 22, 2016
Tobacco and Honeysuckle
(I wrote this piece a couple years ago. As I prepare to teach a workshop on memoir writing, I am revisiting some of my personal essays.)
The scent of cured tobacco has the power to pull me back in time, back to my youth, back to my early teenage years, and leave me in the tall grass and weeds not far from a barn, stately and weathered, a place where I string tobacco gathered fresh from the fields, a place where honeysuckle grows wild and hangs over barbed-wire fences.
In this memory, I...
