#writetoread

[annettedwiloveus-blog]

Books are the window to escape, out from all our problems. 

Reading takes our soul to the land of peace and wisdom away from pain.

[claymcleodchapman]

I got to be the keynote speaker at this year’s Write to Read Day. Thanks to Cypress Hills Community School/PS 89 for bringing me out to hoot and holler all morning @bklynlibrary #writetoread #homeroomheadhunters (at Ps 89 Cypress Hills)

[youngwritersonlineworkshop-blog]

Writing Exercise

A quick warm-up

This is quick exercise - only spend a few minutes on each. Below are listed objects/things of an abstract or intangible nature. Without spending time in preperation, write a short paragraph on each. This is simply to work on your power of description - a very helpful asset for any writer.

Describe:

1. a circle                                                     16. being nauseous

2. a spiral staircase                                      17. spilling a liquid

3. classical music                                         18. kissing

4. the colour red                                           19. a pencil

5. hot soup                                                   20. a tornado

6. rain                                                           21. white wine

7. the smell of a barbecue                            22. wet tears on your face

8. cold weather                                             23. a brick

9. a pillow                                                      24. warm socks

10. a hot cup of coffee                                  25. perfume

11. the welcoming bark of a dog                    26. fire

12. wood/plastic/velvet/cotton                        27. the grunt of a pig

13. a bench                                                   28. rock’n’roll  

14. television                                                 29. silk  

15. seedless grapes                                     30. iron

Please have a go, and post your paragraphs in the comment box :)

- Jenny

[youngwritersonlineworkshop-blog]

Fraudulent Song

I want you to inhale my adoration as if you will never respire again.  I want you to consume my love as it were a delicious hamper.  I present to you the gift of my compassionate spirit and I will penetrate your mind and body and I will take over your soul. I will encase your pounding heart in my cupped extremities and I will squeeze.  I will squeeze until I feel your existence slowly empowering me, for I am weak.  My weakness was not visible to you for it was shadowed by the gloom of a cunning plan. You sat me high and mighty on a magnificent pedestal. By choosing to look sky-high at my presence, you never needed to look before it, through it, past it or even below it.  In reality, I should have been your puppet but I made damn sure that those tables were turned.  Now, on my potent pedestal I shall pull these strings and you, my marionette, will dance to my fraudulent song. 

[youngwritersonlineworkshop-blog]

"Heartland" part one

She believed that the precarious, beautiful moments in life were what defined us. She was swimming in a reverie of such moments, diving deeper into her memories, exploring the many sinews of her brain, letting the glorious feeling of reliving her past envelop and drench her. She imagined a giant pair of hands gathering up the fragments of her mind, and scattering them about  like glitter. She felt strong, resolute. Gazing upwards through the trembling voile, she smiled at the sun.Her once meandering thoughts had now rounded and thickened to form one singular, magnificent idea. Yes, everything is falling into place now. She picked her way delicately through her memories. She passed by her old friends, her first kiss, her first love, linking the distant past and recent together seamlessly, flicking through every season of her life, until she reached that one particular night ...

            She placed the receiver down gently, and turned to face her mother; her eyes fixed and filled with tears. The room quivered as she stepped forward, her mother's face slowly easing into focus.

“Beth?”

            She shivered slightly, met her mother's eyes and reached for her hands, tears running down her cheeks. She opened her mouth to speak, but immediately surrendered to a wordless silence. The women held their position, the silence pressing hard and heavy against their ears. It could be explained in two words, one quick utterance would give the grief form, weight; but neither could speak, to either clarify or question.

            Beth's eyes fluttered open and her brow furrowed; the light in her living room had changed. She walked to the window, placed her fingers on the glass and looked outside. Day had become night whilst she slept. She firmly secured a blanket around her shivering body, retreated into her armchair, and surveyed the room. It was curiously ornamented and entirely cluttered; there were lilies in a vase on the mantelpiece, candles, and a photograph of her mother. The small table in the centre was home to her books; mainly poetry collections, Plath and Yeats, and a badly worn copy of Memento Mori. Another shiver shook her bones, a draft creeping in through the cracks in the French doors.

            * * *

[youngwritersonlineworkshop-blog]

"Cape Costume"

It’s always Halloween in Cape Costume. Whether you dress up or not, each word is a carefully woven fable — each leaf a fickle orange or brown. The seasons come and go in the form of layers, costumes on top of costumes. White Winter Christmas Mocca Snowfall, bundle up your busy costume — baby blue in the spring time. Whatever the weather, us kids are out pretending. Pretending and lying.     It’s a ghost town in the daylight, literally. Six out of ten kids will go their entire costume career in an off white bed sheet. Some try and get creative, but you can’t dress up the dead. The younger ones shuffle and glide down the streets, you can hear a high pitched Boo on just about any corner. Black coal for eyes, old chains for dreams — the standard poltergeist. But littered in-between the blanket ofCaspers and kid kind ghosts, the pros wait in the shadows, licking their lips for tonight’s monologue. These spirits have back stories, ex-lovers. Excuses.     If you ever want to forget about your little lie and focus on someone else’s, go talk to the ghost man on the corner of First and Forever. He has more stories of past lives and gruesome deaths than drops of water in some way off ocean that none of us have seen before. In his most recent rendition, he was an unfortunate miner inside of a nightmarish cave-in. You can tell by the number of chains that he carries by his side, it wasn’t a quick passing.     “Stuck between jagged rocks for days” he says, “drank the blood of my best friend crushed not inches away from me.” Like any of us have friends.          In the same way that all good things must end, this ghoul won’t be here much longer. Even though he’s dead, he’s getting too old. You see, only kids live here in Cape Costume. The years start to wear down your many disguises, you start to fit into the suede shoes your brothers before you left by your door, and it’s time to pack your bags. That means it’s time to start telling different lies somewhere else, different kinds of costumes. Wedding gowns and black ties, lies like laughter and love. After this spirit on the corner passes on, it’ll be my turn to stand guard. Leaving behind Suzy, the Wicked Green Witch, along with all of the other girls in costumes whose names I can’t seem to recall. Too many, too similar. Who knows, who cares. But I intend to give these next months of night one hell of a haunting. With the moon as my searchlight, up in the attic of my abandoned lighthouse, I have to find the perfect costume.     After a while you start to forget what you really look like. One costume to another, puberty just means more blood. Girls don’t wear lipstick, it’s a fake gash above her something coloured eyes. Our dates don’t involve those movies that nobody ever watched anyways, some scary flick just to hold your lover you didn’t have to love after the credits begin to roll. No; we are the monsters. But that’s just the problem, it’s all been done before. Nothing is ever new, and that’s why we all forget names and real faces. So maybe that one day out in the outside world, wearing our home grown costumes of skin and matted hair — some girl’s ears or fingertips will catch our eyes. The un-coverables. It’s a shot in hell, but it’s the only way to ever feel scared again.     Having a sense of creativity and originality is somewhat ironic here, but it burdens me so. Why do I find it so offensive, that some kid living on the block next to the block next to mine is wearing the same Night of the Living Dead mummy costume. There’s no way that I’m the first shithead to wrap myself in toilet paper. We’re all carbon copies of other peoples ideas. Recycled. Modern day Bram Stoker and Marry Shelly monsters. It’s all already real. Short from writing my own story, dreaming up the next creature fear or monstrosity to lurk under beds and inside the heads of scared children who don’t know any better — I’m fucked. Nowthat’s scary. But for those few days when I’m the only dragon for miles since that kid got his tail stuck in a passing vehicles’ door handle twelve years ago, my lie breathes its first real breaths. Firery ones at that. It’s an absolute must that everybody sees you though, otherwise you could just be lying about your lie. After a night or two the whole town is raided by mythical winged beasts, colour me a jealous scaley green. And as I wander and wonder inside of my everyone’s doing itdress up, some kid on the horizon catches my eyes. Both of them. I think that they’re blue. Something about him just screams excitement, screams romance in the wildlife — brand new. It fills me with hate. Some costume that no one else is wearing, and it’s not mine. He watches me watch him for days.      I dreamt for the first time in what felt like forever. The dream came in more shades of grey than I could even begin to explain or lie about. Cold sweat and colourblind. I fell asleep in my Revenge of the Vengeful Vegetables costume, the poor choice could have been to blame. But within all of the grey haze and unknown pallets, my body was being burned alive by that stare. That damn kid and his originality. Still mocking me. Two weeks left until my exile, sent off to grow up and die alone in my own flesh and blood. How will I even maintain my composure, this fitted plastic is like a pulse to me. I need to be hidden, to lie and be lied to. That boy on the horizon reflects everything that our town is really doing, and we hate it. I hate it. I need that new feeling, a costume to die for — to die in.           Just get to the ending. That’s all any of us are thinking, no matter how good the grammar Goblin by the schoolyard spins his faux eulogy. Sorry, well. We’re all just thirsting for a better lie than the last, the kids dressed up as Skeletons especially. We’ve all forgotten who we are underneath, the tall tales are all we have to relate to.     “I live under a bridge and wait for kids to wander off from their parents, grab them from behind when they aren’t looking, and pick my teeth with the bones of their feet.     I’m a science experiment gone horribly wrong. A convicted killer sent off for lobotomy, sent to the wrong floor by mistake, spliced genes with a Grizzly bear. Thirsty for blood, cold victims blood.     You wouldn’t believe how many kids I’ve scared dressing up as their unfinished homework.”     The ending is what matters, not how you got there. Just what you are, or in our case, what you aren’t. I am unhappy, I am bound for exile, I am not original. I amnot that other boy.     On the night that you are sent out of town, everyone gathers around and cheers. Howling screams and screeches, siren songs and monster growls. Voices big and small, one of them next up in line. You stand at the corner of First andWherever and just stare. The black sky almost a costume on it’s own, and it’s terrifying to think that you’re about to get lost in it. Slip into those suede shoes left by your brothers before last, tie the tie that some other kid used to hang himself with. The only thing that anyone is allowed to take out of Cape Costume is a single mask, a mask of your choice. You know you’ve made it to the outside world when you stumble upon a rustic building, a child’s graveyard — a costume shop. It’s there that you trade in your last piece of childhood, the first lie that ever left your tongue. This gets you some start up money, if you can even make it that far. I’ll leave the details out, you ghouls and ghosts don’t care much anyways. I turned my back to start to walk, and felt a quick, tight tug at my leg. One last hope that it was some Troll coming to drag me underneath his bridge to clean his smile. But instead, it was the young boy from the horizon. From underneath his mask, tears were running down the side of his face. The first time I ever saw tears. I couldn’t understand why, but I would bet that it hurt me more than seeing any best friend crushed under a boulder not inches from you. For the first time in all of this entire towns existence, a truthful request was spoken.     “Promise me that you’ll stop hating me when you figure out what I’ve done here. Promise me that once you figure out who I am, you’ll really start to live your life.”                                                                 ***     I’m sitting behind a computer screen at a desk on the twenty something floor of an eyesore of a building. It’s days after the one day a year Halloween we have here. There’s even less detail, no exciting endings. Oddly enough, I feel as though I’ve heard more lies spoken to me in this place than all those years in dress to impress Cape Costume. That’s when I start to think of horizon boy. Why he was crying, and why it made me feel the way I did. The way I still do. My skin began to crawl like the eleven kids a night that would dress up as spiders. It made me feel dirty. Old. I quickly ran to the bathroom to wash and rinse them clean. Half truth. At the end of it all, I looked up into the mirror above the sink, there’s something I haven’t done since God knows when. I made eye contact with my own eyes. They’re green — not blue. And then, during that long, self aggrandizing stare, the last words I ever heard from that place, spoken by the boy in the brand new costume, they finally rang true. What he had done for me, why I had hated him so.

He was dressed up as me.