9. First Sentences – Erin Khar
You’d think that as a memoirist, I’d always have plenty of stories to draw upon—after all, it’s my life. But as I was writing Strung Out, I dealt with my fair share of writer’s block.
You’d think that as a memoirist, I’d always have plenty of stories to draw upon—after all, it’s my life. But as I was writing Strung Out, I dealt with my fair share of writer’s block. I’ve had to develop different ways of getting creatively unstuck. Sometimes it’s zooming in on a specific sense—noticing the air around you, the temperature, what your arm or shoulder or hair smells like.
Other times, to get myself going when I feel blocked, I start by pulling one sentence from a favorite book or essay and using that as a starting point. A few of my favorites lines:
From Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
“Let me tell you about the women who ran away.”
“Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t.”
“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that change when it comes cracks everything open.”
From John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire
“Keep passing the open windows.”
“Sorrow floats.”
“I thought he had rather delicate hands for a revolutionary.”
From Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water
“Little tragedies are hard to keep straight.”
“When morning came, even the sun looked wrong.”
“I am learning to live on land.”
“We raged by and through one another.”
– Erin Khar
Prompt:
Choose a line from a book—you can grab the nearest one and flip it open to a random page, or pick an old favorite you’ve memorized by heart. Whatever grabs your attention; whatever intrigues. Use it as the opening sentence for today’s journal entry, and let the words flow from there.
Anonymous
“More tea. More stories. There is nothing illusory in this tiny heaven. I am silent with gratitude. I will go and bake a honey cake and that’s all.”
From Maira Kalman’s Principles of Uncertainty, p. 66
Uncharted, unprecedented, still living in my body all these 67 years. The moment has arrived we have all been preparing for or not. “This crisis is too good to waste” – heard recently during an Ecological Civilization online seminar.
How will I advance? What am I learning? Slowing down. No complaints. Patience. No arguing. No fretting over little things. Haven’t talked to my sister in in 17 days. Wow! That seems like a long time or not. Always OK once we get talking but takes a lot of energy because there is not much back and forth. Why is that? Why am I even worried about it? My focus is on the people here with me at home, working. First-born applied to three teaching positions in the last week. Second-born finished an online course for work on sound and physics.
Each day challenging to chant/prayer from deeper reaches/realms/depths of my life/being/heart to move us forward. So we can become a society that CARES, PROTECTS, NURTURES life, human life, all life.
Remember gratitude. So much to appreciate, as always, as before. I came forth from the universe, I am of the universe. And so, what will I bake today? Tomorrow? What will I cook today? Tomorrow? There is still chocolate cake, with chocolate frosting, to eat. So much to do. How did I get so on in years?
Anne Francey
Location: Saratoga Springs, NY
About: I am an artist and like to use chance in my work. It often reveals something that was there all along but had not taken shape. This prompt about picking a random sentence from a book did just that.
Age: 64
Yesterday, the first person that I personally knew died from the coronavirus. He was an architect and the first grown man I ever saw cry. His name was Jean-Paul.
9 am. So much has happened already.
A friend sent me a message with a video of elephants taking baths and playing pranks.
Another message, from a smart young woman I know in Tunisia ” I am am in need. Can you please help me”. Hawa , Eve in Arabic, grew up in the Ivory Coast. She is illiterate because her father did not want her to go to school. She went to Tunisia to find work. She has not seen her daughters for five years, and she has now lost her job, like many.
News headlines: “ Devastating job losses”. “A tragedy is unfolding in New York”. “Scientists warn virus might not fade in summer”.
A yoga video pops up when I search for an online class that says ” Vulnerability”. I will take that.
I grab “Femme Chamane”, by Lynn V. Andrews a not so good book with an interesting topic, open it at random and read:
“Aide-moi à rassembler le bétail pour le conduire à l’autre bout du pâturage, me cria-t-elle en partant au galop”.
“Help me gather the herd and take it to the other side of the pasture, she hollered, and galloped away”.
I make a roaring fire in the small stove with wood brought back yesterday from a walk.
The rain is very dense outside. I am looking forward to painting.
9 am. My herd is very dispersed. And I don’t even know its name. Painting and a roaring fire that warms body and soul with so much distress in the world? When I actually should not be making a wood fire because it contributes to air pollution? How do I dare talk about it?
I am trying to gather all the animals, Jean-Paul the old gentleman, the elephants, the rain, the world, the fire, Hawa, what I feel, what I know, the good, the hopeful, the scary, the facts of the world, my own facts, my husband Hedi coming back from a walk with a very wet dog, the towel I grab to dry the dog. My herd. Maybe today I will be able to finish a small painting started a week ago which never seems to come together, made of many parts, small and big. Maybe one day there will be another side of the pasture, un autre côté du pâturage, where our communal herd will gather again.
Anne McGrath
Location: Hudson Valley, New York
About: Brain Pickings excerpt of Mary Ruefle's My Private Property
Age: 61
The Color Spectrum of Fear
To my usual list of fears—change, rejection, loneliness, failure, uncertainty, and loss of freedom—I have added fear of hugs, handshakes, public surfaces, bodily fluids, breathing tubes, lack of available breathing tubes, and, oh yeah, murder hornets. I almost forgot about murder hornets. Like a color wheel these fears radiate an overlapping palette of hues, each separate yet connected to a center of gravity. Color schemes, containing different shades or values, ranging from very light, almost white, to very dark.
Dostoyevsky said that the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by its prisons. Police injustice, gunmetal gray, holds a mirror to who we are. It is Zoom funerals without hugs or flowers. A lack of closure. The bad cop who carries a gun, leaving a metallic taste on the tongue. It is being asked to look the other way, get over it. It is the sudden frequency with which I repeat phrases like: social distance, you are on mute, and choke hold. How many times can we bear to hear the phrase: I can’t breathe.
Tight lipped and piercing, garnet fear is a glass shard to the eye, a clot to the brain. It is streets bleeding fire. A president’s plump thumbs tweeting vitriol from an ivory bunker under the White House. White knee pressed on black throat. It is my beautiful artist friend with a fever of 103, hallucinating, unable to catch his breath in some pale blue liminal space beyond fear. It is the ruby-throated hummingbird whose heart beats 1200 times per minute with the will to live a lifetime in a moment. It is fear tinged with righteous simmering anger at the sight of an unmasked woman in the cereal aisle.
Crumpling like paper, amethyst fear is the unformed worry over things that haven’t yet happened. My eldest son, the one who broke his femur bone at 18 months, now lives in Brooklyn, a blister of pandemic germs. From a place of privilege, I lose sleep over, what ifs. I pray for the gods to put the load on me.
The loss of currency—power, privilege, freedom— is dull green. Unmanageable. Toxic. It is the caged bird trapped in a block of ice and kept from flying. It is loathing the self that is out of work. It is being replaced, obscured, vanished. Tackled to the ground. It is urine leaks, hearing loss, and tooth decay.
Swirling clouds of dusty sunrays slant through a window to prematurely age a peach. Orange fear is a room with a low ceiling, the feeling of being watched, the clairvoyant auntie in a rocker. It is eerily quiet. It is tired. It is the rusty stones in Virginia Woolf’s pockets as she enters the muddy Ouse River.
The remorseless blue wall of silence has been challenged while the speckled eggshells hatch in a nest on our porch. This makes me nervous. Uncomfortable. Colors take on new meaning depending on their context and how they are mixed. Here, they bring solace. There, they bring fear.
Luminescent opal fear is the screen on which to project the dream of a life of silver leaves and full moons. The hope for a reboot. It is the thermometer, rubbing alcohol, and hand sanitizer. It is marching in protests, taking a knee, and admitting our fear of the other. It is feeling tender towards the lived-in t-shirt. It is the mic, unmuted.
Rose-pink fear is civilized, like the repair of a bone. Margaret Mead said that an ancient healed femur bone offers insight into how humans have helped each other through difficulty. No other creature survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. If helping each other is where civilization starts, then haven’t we at least started? Soft pink is the creation of things that no one has asked for, like tiny zines, poems, and action figures frozen into blocks of ice, like little prayers. A hand smoothing a crumpled paper so that its light might radiate.
Alicia Di Scipio
Location: Santa Monica, California
About: I read The Alchemist at the very beginning of quarantine and without exaggerating, it changed my life. It changed my outlook on everything. This line has stuck with me everyday since I read it, this piece is inspired by that.
Age: 25
“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.” - The Alchemist
Tell your heart that it’s fearing breaking before it even has the opportunity to burst with joy. The opportunity to love greatly and learn a new part of yourself. To meet someone new. Experience new things. Your life is made up of experiences. Your life isn’t just that one time you got laid off. Or the one time your heart was broken. Or the one, or many times, you didn’t sleep with someone who could’ve been a good guy or a good one night stand or a good story when you’re 90. Life is all of the things, major and miniscule decisions baked together, sewn together. You of all people. You watch movies and read books and listen to music by artists who continually open themselves up to rejection. They willingly put themselves in a position to either be let down or take flight. You live through their love. Their loss. Their drama. Their tension. Their tears. Their sex. Their “I’m sorry’s.” You take the emotions on as your own rather than living the life right in front of you. You have your life mapped out in your head. But what are you doing right now to get to that point? You don’t need to have it all figured out. But you cannot live in fear. To be rejected. To be embarrassed. To be left. Because in doing so you don’t allow yourself to be liked. Or known. Or loved. Or cared for. By closing yourself off to pain, you close yourself off to all of it. You cannot have light without dark. Good without bad. Love without loss, it doesn’t exist. So tell your heart. Scream to the mountain tops. The fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.
Remember this. And don’t let yourself fall in. “We may be raising a generation of young people who will grow up afraid to love, afraid to give themselves completely to another person, because they will have seen how much it hurts to take the risk of loving and having it not work out. I am afraid they will grow up looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment. So fearful of the pain of disappointment they will forget the possibilities of love and joy. Cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.”
– bell hooks, All About Love
Danielle Leventhal
Location: Rye, NY
About: I'm an artist who procrastinates my painting practice by writing. I'm quarantining with my family while undergoing treatment for stage 4 cancer.
Age: 26
“I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything.”- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Having something wrong with my body usually meant I could go to the hospital, be admitted and stay under the covers while the nurses cared for me, watching dumb movies. It usually meant I’d be off the hook from regular life for a little bit—work, roommates, friends, plans. I could get away with no one being angry with me for taking a break in a safe space that most people are afraid to step foot in. But these days it’s the opposite; I must stay far from the hospital to stay safe. Far from crowds and restaurants, grocery stores, waiting rooms. Going on a walk on my narrow street is a risk. I remember what if feels like to think there was only something wrong with my head, nothing wrong with my body. And boy, was that exhausting. But they’re connected, aren’t they? The healthier your body is, the more clear-minded you may be. Breathing techniques calm the body and release pain. Meditation lowers your blood pressure. The list of popular facts is endless. And yet, they don’t make it easier to have something wrong with your body or your head.
I know painting helps me feel better about myself, but I am so scared. Of failure, of hating my own work, of leaving something embarrassing behind when I die. I think I’ve gotten to the point where I have so much to say in my art that I have nothing to say, nowhere to start. As Sylvia said—the idea seems so involved and wearisome that I don’t do anything. I stay on the couch for hours, stay in bed for hours. Stay put at home. Everything I need is in the palm of my hand if I could get over the hump of fear. What does the word wearisome really mean? It sounds exhausted. It evokes being worn down to a shredded, stained, unraveling piece of fabric.
A necessary Google search gave me this dictionary definition of wearisome: adjective Causing one to feel tired or bored.
Wow. That sums up quarantining in one word. Although I don’t feel bored really; I never have. My head is swimming with exciting prospects for my body to carry out. There’s so much to do in my head but my body feels stuck. Body, am I doing enough? Yes. Why can’t I allow my head to recognize that?
Genelle Faulkner
Location: Boston, MA
About: I'm a 30 year old science teacher who lives in Boston, MA. I've been isolating in my apartment with no other souls. This entry was inspired by the line from 'Kidnapped', a book that has been lying around in my house for a while. It reminded me of the way my flame in high school used to look at me and a hug we had that was similar to the one I described.
Age: 30
Heather Viviano
Location: Seattle, WA
About: This was 2 days after John Prine passed. A fellow journaler suggested John could've written a song about my day 8 accordion story, so I decided to write a song based on the day 9 prompt, and include elements of my accordion story. Weeks down the road, a fellow journaler put his original music to my lyrics to "Accordion Song."
Age: 51
This one was HARD for me. Yesterday someone suggested that John Prine could have written a song about my little accordion story, so I promised myself that I would write a song using bits of my story and the new prompt, whatever it was. When I saw the prompt I told myself I had to use the first sentence I read in the book I flipped open, no matter what. That was dumb. I flip open the book, which is The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and the sentence I get is "it was beginning to look a little grim". Ugh, so hard, plus, do we really need more "grim"?? Then I went kind of dark and spent most of the day blank. But I promised myself I would write every day, so I did it. The sentence isn't the opening line of my song, but close. One interesting thing happened. When I wrote the line "head on his shoulder, sun on my face", I suddenly recalled a picture that was taken with my head on dad's shoulder and the sun on my face, and I found the picture! That was worth it all, I miss him terribly, even after 23 years. I wish I had more time to work on it before posting, but it's getting late.
Accordion Song
My heart sunk low at the news today
The death count rising, so they say
It was beginning to look a little grim
So I closed my eyes and I talked to him
Daddy I miss you, I wish you were here
To ease my mind, to calm my fears
He'd say, sit with me a little while
Let's find your joy, let's find your smile
Side by side in the evening sun
I'd say, Daddy, this world, what have we done?
He'd say hush now child, just play along
Try to recall the accordion song
When they were laughing, laughing, just because
And life was simple as it ever was
Barefoot dancing across the lawn
Sharing stories 'til the break of dawn
Where'd the time go, it moves so fast
He'd say times like that are built to last
Tuck it away in your heart for keeps
The stuff in the soul of a life runs deep
Head on his shoulder, sun on my face
He'd help me find a brighter place
I'd say Daddy if only I had my way
I'd live inside that song today
And we'd be laughing, laughing, just because
Life still simple as it ever was
Barefoot dancing across the lawn
Sharing stories 'til the break of dawn
'Til the break of dawn
The break of dawn
Break of dawn
Accordion song
Laurie Connelly
Location: Spokane, WA
About: I love Tom Hennen's view of ordinary events from a different perspective. Our ability to shift that perspective is especially valuable during this pandemic and our dislocation from everyday life.
Age: 68
“In the house people wake up and come back to themselves in the way animals out all night return to their dens.” – Tom Hennen
As we first wake up we have a moment where time is suspended and we have to remember where we are so we return. Sometimes it’s a gift , especially in days when you’re dealing with hardship.
The sun also returns, without the need to call. We return to the kitchen finding the makings for a morning coffee. Things are just as we left them but look well rested this morning. It is a reflection of our own image.
We try to reclaim our routine in the hope that it will set us on the right course for the day. It brings back a fragment of a prayer, it is a day like any other day, it is an extraordinary day. After all these days, you think you’re prepared by already experiencing days when everything changed. The days marked before and after. The telephone call that Dad is dying. The call with a job offer for a new start. The news that you’re pregnant. But somehow we return to each new day thinking it will be the same as yesterday. So savor the moments of returning to yourself maybe even suspend time and not rush to join the day.
Leya Van Doren
Location: New York, New York
About: Leya Van Doren is a multi-passionate creative, writer, singer, poet, yoga teacher, and creativity mentor. Her biggest inspirations and muses include: the ocean, nature, memoirs, mermaids, meditation, and responding to life in the moment. This poem captures all of these inspirations and speaks to the journey of remembering who we are.
Age: 25
I am learning to live on land
I am learning to live on land. I come from a long lineage of women who dove underwater to get to the great depths of being. Like the Korean women - who still practice the art of diving to gather pearls and crustaceans. Except my diving from life to life has become more metaphysical than physical. Nowadays, I dive deep daily in my meditation practice, my writing, my being. Thousands of years ago, I dove deep underneath the great oceans of earth to commune with dolphins and whales and my mersisters. We learned how to swim in non-linear paths. We learned how to jump and sing and live freely with our souls outside of our skins.
Now our souls live buried deep within, a jewel to be discovered. a daily digging that takes excavating and peeling of layers. an unbecoming and a becoming. We live on the surfaces of our being, because it feels like the safest thing to do, when the truth is, we are safest deep below there, where the roots meet the skin that holds together the endless depths of ocean and sky and sea and stars. I am learning to live on land, for on this land, we create the new earth. on this land, we create endless sky.
Lori Tucker-Sullivan
Location: Detroit, MI
About: I am a writer and writing instructor living in Detroit. This piece was inspired by a first line from a book of poetry by Adrienne Rich.
Age: 56
“When I ate and drank liberation once I walked arm-in-arm with someone who said she had something to teach me.”
I have two piles of books next to my bed. One is the TBR pile of books I plan to read. I’ll read one and add two more to the bottom. Turnover has been slower these days of pandemic as my bandwidth for fiction and memoir seems to have grown narrow. But I will get through them.
The other pile is the pile that will always be next to me when I wake up each morning. Essential books for my life. A book of Patti Smith’s poetry, Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train (one of the best books on the history of rock music ever), Haruki Murakami’s memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Kevin was reading it just before his diagnosis and I hope someday by reading and re-reading I will come to understand his love of the solitary pursuit of long-distance running), Dubliners, by James Joyce, the shortest book I’ve never been able to get through (but will someday), Joyce Carol Oates’ Widow for a Year, and Later Poems of Adrienne Rich, from which this line is culled.
When I ate and drank liberation once I walked arm-in-arm with someone who said she had something to teach me. I have been connected and I have been liberated. I have been coupled and I have been solo. I have had everything (or at least wanted for nothing) and I have felt it all stripped away. No, that’s not right; rather, I have felt it all to be with me but worthless.
As a girl, I feasted on the idea of liberation. It was bandied about by my middle-school heroes—Steinem, Abzug, Chisolm. I remember leafing through the Spiegel catalog planning my New York apartment—just mine, no man would be the reason for my happiness. Writing, career, friends, they would liberate me from the home of overbearing, older parents, and carry me through a life that would be full. With or without a relationship (or even a bra), I would make my path, free, unencumbered to someone who would have equal needs and whose pursuits could easily come to overshadow mine. I would walk, like Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards, into the middle of a bustling street and toss my beret in the air!
We are individuals but we are not, by nature, soloists. Once those connections are made, you see that green grass on the other side; you taste its comfort. And once you have felt its cool, welcoming lushness, you know there is a cost to marching off alone. Standing unaccompanied, the grass beneath you more easily takes on a dry brown tinge, feeling as though it needs a good raking, or that the tectonic plates below it are somehow loose, unsteady. I know now what it is to walk shoulder-to-shoulder with someone. But at 22? Then I felt the need to defer, to compromise, to placate. We could taste the liberation, but the value was still in the homemaking.
Now that I have had both of those lives—the coupled life of hearth and home and family, and the single life of the liberated (though not my choice, it is still my fate), I still wonder what it was that the woman I walked with had to teach me. Maybe the most basic lesson first taught by Jagger and Richards: that we can’t always get what we want. Or that we often want what we don’t have. Or to be thankful for what we do have and take for granted every single day. Maybe she is asking me, “if you knew the outcome back then, would you do it all over again?” The answer to that question is a lesson itself, one I am still learning. Though it is yes, it is a qualified yes.
The line I began with comes from the poem Midnight Salvage. And yes, I randomly opened the book to the middle of that poem, most likely because I have turned to it many times. “And all I wanted was to find an old/friend an old figure an old trigonometry/still true to our story in orbits flaming or cold” Or this: “but I have driven that road in madness and driving rain/thirty years in love and pleasure and grief-blind/on ice I have driven it and in the vague haze of summer.” Rich writes about love and grief, patience and longing. What is it to truly earn those heartbreaks in one’s life? To stack them up so we can climb upon them in order to see in the distance where happiness might wait for us again should we chose to bravely step forward? Is it cheating to want to know ahead of time that the happiness is there? And how do we find that value from within, without needing that other mirror, that reflection of value and worth? Can we live a life of poetry, connection and simultaneously, liberation?
Moira Griffith
Location: Ashburton, New Zealand
About: It was fun to randomly page through a book on my shelf and let my finger fall to a random page and line. It just so happened that Anne Frank's words really resonated with my apparently angry self that day.
Age: 23
“This tedious existence is starting to make us all disagreeable” – Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl
I find myself filling up with rage more quickly than before. I can feel a small thermometer rise up suddenly with mercury until it’s pulsing and cracking and moments later…explodes, and this irrational, ugly fury spills out of the cracked glass. Just a simple annoyance can provoke this mercurial spillage, which makes me wonder “who is this angry person?”
I’ve been feeling relatively calm during this quarantine period, so these random heated outbursts surprise me. Why can I not weather them with patience and gentle words. My mom assures me that the stress of this whole situation is likely taking a toll on my body without me even realizing it. I’ve had many canker sores, my stomach has been causing riots, and I’ve had mysterious knots and kinks in my back. Perhaps the inner gauge that manages my spews of anger is a little off too.
I suppose the coronavirus pandemic has made me a bit disagreeable.
Nicki Judson
Location: Ashburton, New Zealand
About: I love to be creative, whether it be quilting, art or writing.I wrote my prompts from the deepest part of my heart and wasn't afraid to express my true feelings.
Age: 54
“Despite the grave nature of the charges against me, I had…”
… still loved him. I lifted my head and solemnly looked over to his mother who was sitting in the public gallery. She, of all people would surely understand my predicament. I stared her straight in the eye, with not an accusing look, but one of knowing. She stared back at me and whether it was her guilt or her shame, but she was the first to look away. Over time she would always sit and watch as he lay his fists into me until I crumbled on to the ground. I always wondered why she never intervened. Was it because she too was fearful of what he was capable of doing, or was it simply because he was her son and he could never do no wrong in the eyes of his mother?
I had loved this man from the moment I met him. He was sweet and loving, a gentle giant. It wasn’t until we were married that things began to change. It could have been simply that I didn’t smile the right way for him to touch my face. The first time he smiled at me before placing his warm hand on my cheek I felt like butter was melting inside of me. His smile was deceiving as was his hand. He wiped his smile from his mouth and his touch struck at my face with such force I stumbled and had to steady myself at the kitchen table. I never looked at his smile again the same.
The last time he felled me to the floor, his mother was present in the kitchen, sitting on one of the bar stools with a wine in her hand. She looked down at me, still on the kitchen floor. She leapt down from the bar stool to tend to my broken body, but her son stood between her and I and held up his hand to her. He had never struck his mother before. He then turned to me again and pulled back his leg and swifty kicked me around my ribs. I was motionless. It took seven seconds before he too joined me on the kitchen floor. His mother had reached for the wine bottle and smashed it over his head. She then grabbed the end of the broken bottle and thrust it into his neck. He grabbed at his neck making gurgling sounds looking up pleading to his mother whilst he took his last breaths.
A mother should never have to suffer such a great loss. She reached down to me and held me in her arms whilst I came around. We both looked into each other’s eyes. Over and over again she cried, “What have I done?”. I knew in that moment what I needed to do.
Line taken from page 301, The Lifeboat
Polly Kemmeries
Location: Denver, CO
About: I am married with two children (22 &17). My brother shared the Isolation Journals with me and I have thoroughly enjoyed participating while adjusting to quarantine. Thank you!
Age: 42
“The nature of life makes it inevitable for people’s paths and journeys to cross.”
– Mind Platter “Dreams Unfinished” by Najwa Zebian
I’m a believer in this. There may be someone good, or bad, but they were meant to come your way and you theirs. It is part of our journey. The choices and connections you make with people help meld your path. From these experiences, you create yourself. With the assistance of others, you learn. Sometimes hard lessons, others, good. I continue to enjoy connecting and creating these new journeys in life. Ever thankful for my path.
Peace,
Polly