SunWinks! May 18, 2014

It’s impossible to overstate the inspiration Gather has been to my writing. The kind comments, the eager responses, the enthusiasm for writing in general, makes me want to write more and more, and better and better. When Gather crashed, so did I. I didn’t have another writer community and haven’t found one. And the writing just stopped happening.

I wrote this in July, in one of my last columns for Gather. The following month, I buried my father after a long decline. A couple months later, my mother broke her shoulder. Since hanging out my shingle as a freelance writer, I’ve participated in a variety of projects, a lot of them involving churning out scads of Internet content. So without an active community, an actual audience waiting for it on a regular basis, you can see it was all too easy for SunWinks! to go by the boards.

Then Greg Schiller launched the Writing Essential Group the other day, and already, many old friends are coming together. I jumped at the chance to participate, and here I am, amusingly, a “Sunday Editor” again. And SunWinks! looks poised to emerge from its medically induced coma.

Now there’s an odd image.

My muse did return, and I’ve written quite a lot of poetry in recent months. The latest describes an experience I had working in the yard. I managed to find some pretty startling connections and unique images, and the result was a poem that, I think it safe to say, could only have come from the bent mind of yours truly.

New Poem: The Incision

Going through old columns, I ran across this wonderful observation by Ariel Gore:

 EMBRACE YOUR GENIUS

You have a unique and delicious genius to share. You see this vibrant and vulnerable planet in your own strange way. You draw connections that make you wonder if you’ve lost your mind. Your fears are specific, and alien to me. We’re human kin, you and me and [author Haruki] Murakami—when we dig deep enough into our own individual wells, we reach the same universal stream—but the places we’re digging from, they’re different.

Genius: In ancient mythology, a supernatural being appointed to guide a person through life.

What does your genius look like? What does it sound like? Do you know? Or is she sitting there in the corner neglected because you’ve been busy chasing Murakami’s or Whitman’s or Doris Lessing’s genius?…

Ariel Gore, How To Become A Famous Writer Before You’re Dead [NY: Three Rivers Press, 2007].

 

What does your genius look like? When have you written something that no one else could possibly have written? What do you bring to your writing-table that nobody else has?

The Prompt

Write a short poem or short short story that nobody else could have written. Start with a thought or image or insight or small-scale experience. Ask yourself, “How do I connect with this in a way that’s unique to me? What insight do I have about this that no one else could because they’re not me? What image can I come up with that nobody else would dare think of?”

Sit with that thought for awhile before you start writing.

Reply to this post with a link to your response at your blog or social site.

Love,

Doug