Write about what you remember doing the day before and then write about what you remember seeing.  Here’s a couple of entries about what I saw:

Thursday 9/15/16

What I remember seeing the day before, (Wednesday), is my turquoise, thick notebook/binder sitting on my desk.  The clear pocket on its’ cover holds the businesscard for my blog and a postcard of an oil painting of children on the beach by Charles-Garabed Atamian.  I sit still, and, like the soft strokes of the artist’s paintbrush, I flow back to my childhood.  The painting of the two young girls who collect shells at a beach could easily be me and my younger sister, Barbara.  I bend down, eyes scrutinize the wet sand, pick up a pink shell.  Barbara watches me, wears a red summer sweater because Mom said she looked cold, holds a small, blue plastic watering can, then runs off, seawater splish-splashes in my face as she goes.

Sunday 9/18/16

What I remember seeing the day before, (Saturday), is a wash of autumn in the antique of faded-pink rosebushes that line the grocery store’s parking lot.  The roses remind me of Cape Cod, so common there because salt sprays in the wind and cold weather don’t hurt them.  This year, especially, they remind me of the fact that I didn’t get to my beloved Cape Cod this past summer.  All for a good reason – daughter’s wedding in Colorado.  Yet, the wild roses take me to sea breezes, the loneliness of long beaches, the memories of my kids in summers spent and gone.  The wild rosebushes – tough, thorny shrubs, soft pink-petaled flowers with apple-shaped hips, amid the metal shopping carts and harried mothers in the parking lot, are just like me.

Choose three random phrases from a stack of cards and rank them in a 1, 2, 3 order.  The first phrase goes in the first sentence, the second in the middle, and the third in the last sentence of a paragraph.  Timed write for 15 minutes.  PHRASES:  A foul odor, a repetitive noise, a stuffed grizzly bear.

The smiling waitress sets a steaming bowl on the table in front of my eager husband at the Longhorn Restaurant.  The elk meat in brown gravy releases a foul odor and the steam sets off my loud sneeze.  Our dark, leather-curved booth is in a corner, back-to-back to the kitchen wall, where I hear and feel the repercussions of a repetitive noise – a whack-whack-whack, which I imagine is a chef hitting a cleaver on meats that I don’t eat, such as bison, elk, and alligator.  It’s hard to eat in this place as every square inch of wall space is decorated with man’s trophies from hunts around the world – a brown-striped zebra, an honorable eagle, a wild boar, and one stuffed grizzly bear with smoky eyes who offers his out-stretched paws in a “why me?” way.

I consider Art – in any form – a painting, embroidery, poem, book, to mean the same thing, a way to express or recieve emotions.  This pre-class exercise involved writing about a randomly chosen painting.  Write a scene that takes place inside a painting for 15 minutes. No research.  Here’s my take, where a painting and words express feelings.

Maaloula by Louay Kayyali (1964).  Style: Expressionism.  Genre: Cityscape.

A steady stream of soft gray smoke flows out of the opening in the wood-timbered roof.  I watch our spiritual leader climb down a strapped branch ladder which leans into another roof opening.  The room, where I sit upon a neatly swept dirt floor, is made of the soft red and gray clays found in our land and from which we make our Maaloula cliff dwellings.  Father tends to a small fire at the center of the room, making sure the smoke flows out to the gray sky.  The spiritual leader kneels near a small, rectangular opening in the floor near the fire.  This is where our ancestors’ spirits race into the room and into our souls.  His presence takes over the room and stills my family into statues.  He readies for the religious ceremony, whispers prayers to himself, closes his eyes, and fingers a buffalo horn hanging on a leather strap around his strong neck.  A belt made of eagle feathers, colorful beads, and rings of gold, wrap his waist.  The belt was made by Mother, along with the shimmery gold band clinging to his upper arm.  Father gives me a harsh look which means that I should take my spellbound eyes off of the spiritual leader.  Ashamedly, I bow my head and wait for grandparents and great-grandparents to meet me.

Dear Readers,

I’m taking a writing class with Kirsten Bakis and will post some of the exercises:  Here’s the first –

Here’s my answer to the question, “How does your identity shape your writing?”  Identity is formed by experiences.  Simple and complex experiences, such as the learned craft of embroidery and belief in a religion, form my identity which shapes my writing.  In the following passage, I compare myself to experiences with familiar objects and mention people who are important to me.  The reader knows details of my identity:  how I dress, that I embroider, have relationships with “Mom” and “Uncle Pippi,” and that I’m religious, along with other characteristics, such as consistency and honesty:

“I am dependable, like the tight, gold button that never loosens on a lush, red-hooded jacket.  I am constant, like the yellow, embroidered French knot on blue jeans that never frays, no matter how many times cycled in Mom’s washing machine.  I am reliable, like Uncle Pippi’s hoe, a metal and wooden tool that hangs on his garage wall, ready for a hand to use in the spring garden.  I am honest, like Dear, Sweet, Jesus’s Father taught me, and cannot lie, steal, or deceive.”