As I was organizing my office this week to prepare for the new workshop season, I came across a little spiral notebook full of gems. In any AWA workshop, the practice is to write together in response to a particular prompt, read our work aloud if we wish, and then respond to each writer with positive feedback. I like to keep a little notebook to jot down the words or phrases I especially like as each writer reads her (or his) work aloud, and it was this notebook I found in my office excavation—every page full of evocative words, with slashes to mark the work of each new writer.
The notebook is full now, with no more room for this year’s words. But I couldn’t release it until I had captured for you, and for myself, some of the phrases that have stayed with me over the past year or so. Perhaps you’ll find something here that evokes some writing of your own, which would honor the writers, and the Muse, in a most delightful way.
silken heads
boats like tombstones
slivers of glass
black unfillable holes
splash of vanilla
cocoon of elementary school
fathomless freedom
loon’s lone cry
thousand fur-lined rubber boots
tiny mouths seeking sustenance
God came tapping
internal vacancy
caboose unloosed
sheets bleached and pressed
impossibly small feet
searching our way into the hidden and holy
fluid nature of belief
hula hoop champion
ephemera from a long life
blue pressed glass
stinky spoiled fruit
siren of morning
strings of childhood
skinny, bony man-child
word salad
camelback sofa and velvet chairs
hot wax on a pie plate
two-tone station wagon
angry, stinging people
oceans of turquoise, rivers of clay
unsensible shoes
dirty secret mirror
cool Chardonnay under a canopy
soft petals folded into center
star-headed drill bits
business of secrets
white sulphur springs
rotting from the inside
brown envelopes full of mail
pumpkins on porches
crumbling rock stars
leaving takes practice
wild thyme, salvia, geraniums
storms came at night
accordion of my past
savor the City of Light
strummed my fingers through placid water
white cotton slip
friends with bad memories
chowchow, pickles, strawberry jam
all manner of tools
mother’s heart
expired cottage cheese
skullduggery
books like soldiers
one foot frozen by indecision
ripe for writing