Kindle Notes & Highlights
My grandma has a quilt at home with a piece on it from every place she’s ever lived or visited. She’s still adding to it, and every time I visit her, she loves to tell me stories about each piece and where it came from.”
something about that article and stories clings to the back of my mind and threatens to take up residence there.
Her stories are usually pretty interesting. “But instead of telling it to you, I’m going to show you how I’d start writing it. I’ll tell you one thing, though. It involves a graveyard. And maybe even a ghost!” From the “oooooh”s and “wow”s, I can tell that everyone’s really into this. “Wait, wait, wait,” Erin speaks up. “A ghost? Aren’t these supposed to be real, true stories? Ghosts aren’t real!” Mrs. Parkman winks at her. “Or are they?” Okay, now I’m hooked. Dangit. Mrs. Parkman says she hasn’t decided on a great beginning yet, but that’s okay because she says you can always go back and add
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it’s your job as the writer to give away these hints to your readers without actually telling them. You show them instead.”
“It’s hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”
Oh yeah, the FiestaLand story. By now, I’m supposed to have a plan for writing it, but I don’t. Just blank page after blank page, staring at me with their judgmental red and blue lines and an emptiness to be filled. I look up at the screen at Mrs. Parkman’s story. I guess I wasn’t paying much attention before, but now I see that she’s crossed out lots of words and replaced them with better ones. She even scribbled out a whole sentence. I like how she doesn’t care that it’s all sloppy. It reminds me of my secret poetry notebook.
“Poetry is just so special,” she says, “it needs to be read aloud to be felt and experienced.”
I don’t know how to write about this without my anger or bitterness leaking out onto the page.
I explain about the project and watch while his eyes close, searching for the perfect memory to share with me.
My voice is calm, but inside I’m panicking about all the change.
