Write By Number: January 10
and a little something from WWKC
Hi and welcome to the first installment of Write By Number. This little series, which I guarantee will be infrequent and unpredictable, is my way of keeping tabs on what I’ve been up to lately. It’s also a chance to share what one person’s writing life looks like, including word counts, rejections, acceptances, and the non-writing work of writing.
Knowing just how much I value the comfort of routine and ritual, my kids have upheld the long standing tradition of catching whatever new and novel viruses is making the rounds during the holidays. So, this year is off to a slow start. Still, I have some stats to share, and wanted to get some baseline numbers now that we’re getting well and I’m hoping to get back into a habit of daily writing.
First, I wanted to share something I wrote at the first WWKC meet-up of the year. The prompt was based on Pat Schneider’s The Patience of Ordinary Things. You can listen to the poem read by the poet here. The format of Writing Workshop KC is particularly special, with the time constraints (10 minutes) and the encouragement to free write, I rarely know quite where I’m going once I’ve started writing. This response started in on my grandmother’s coffee pot and found its way as a little something about adolescence and starting my period. I’ll leave it here, unedited, poorly punctuated and formatted as something between a poem and a list.
PROMPT 2: Craft an ode to an ordinary thing (or things) in your own life.
Folgers was still putting coffee in a red tin can And I could smell it Hear the hiss and giggle of it From the bed we shared the night before Liking me the best Or, perhaps, Tolerating me the most Grandma Nana, With purple hair and Smoke-saturated Polyester house dress Was my bedmate By default But she made it watery Drank if with half-and-half On the back porch With the mosquitoes A Marlboro cigarette An entire week of this And that morning Red in my underwear For the first time My mother had said, On the phone, I’ll come get you But there were plans to see Cara-Beth Elder cousin, idol, chains on her Cargo-jeans And black lipstick So I said no and rifled through The bookshelves And wondered How I had found myself in Eldon Missouri without So much as a decent book Wondered how Someone could be grandmother To six young kids without so Much as a copy of Treasure Island Or a board game Flipped through The Secret And The South Beach Diet Before giving up Sprawling across The sectional, Olive green, Hot pad-jelly roll held to my waist And watching again: Orson Welles And Joan Fountaine The original Enemy-to-lovers In black-and-white Running the pad of my finger Down one long strip of hair I’d missed with the razor, Could use a little more practice There’s still so much time
Writing by the number: January 1 - 10
Words written: 2,685
Literary Journal Submissions: 1
Rejections: 1
Freelance Pitches: 1
Acceptances: 1
Residency/Grad School/Fellowship Application Deadlines Met: 0 (I have 5 days to change this.)
Published: 1 (My first Washington Post byline. A killer way to kick off the year, you can read it online here or in print tomorrow.)
Books read: 1 (Andrew Krivak’s Like The Appearance of Horses)
I love this. ❤️