It’s several weeks ago, close to midnight on a Thursday evening and I should have been asleep an hour ago, but as I reach to finally click my lamp off, my phone lights up with a text. Then another, and another.
I grin, and open them with all the excitement of unwrapping a gift. A dear friend and fellow writer is traipsing all over the UK on a bucket-list holiday, and she’s been sending me snippets of all the details only a writer would care about: the weathered texture of the bricks that make up so many of the buildings, the incomprehensible light switches, how many coffee shop floors are actually crypts.
Her deft weaving of details makes me feel as though I’m there too, trying futilely to work the appliances, brushing my palm along ancient stones and listening to the most terrifying Scotsman ever lead a walking tour. The best writing allows us to experience the world as someone else, and getting these intimate glimpses into my friend’s holiday is such a privilege.
We all need like-minded creative people in our lives. Who else is going to understand us if we say we’re reading a book that feels like cobblestone in October fog? Or vent about a disruptive and unruly character totally ruining our outline with their stubborn free will? Or thrill when we find the exact word to describe the red of the leaves slowly imprinting onto the sidewalk?
(Whenever I try to explain how my brain works to a non-writer, I always feel like I’m paraphrasing Fozzie Bear’s mom from A Muppet Family Christmas: we’re weirdos, but we’re nice weirdos.)
It’s a particular treat to get in the same room with a gaggle of writers, and I’ve so enjoyed the first two meetings of our Sunday Monthly Writing Group, held at the McTavish Academy of Art in North Saanich. (Click here for more info and registration.) It’s been incredible to hear how everyone approaches the same prompts in such unique ways, and I’ve been so moved by so much of what’s come out of people at that table, and how we’ve influenced each other.
Our third prompt in October’s meeting was “Lost Again,” and I found an entire world waiting for me in those ten minutes:
“It doesn’t matter where you set your feet. It could be the echo of cobblestone down a side alley, or the sheen of a rain-slicked pavement in a midnight city, or you might walk barefoot through ankle-deep grass, each thud of your footsteps swallowed by the clay-heavy earth. Ten, twenty, thirty steps, and that ground shifts and bleeds into something new, something strange. Time doesn’t seem to be a factor; once you made each step last a half hour, slowing down each muscle contraction, each breath, so that you spent an entire morning on a small main street in some small, nameless town.
You’d been walking past a hardware store, and you’d watched as the rising sun sheared up the wall and onto the window where it caught the metal of a bucket of galvanized nails, and the glitter of them was so beautiful you had to close your eyes and pretend you didn’t feel the tears slipping down to your chin.
Those five hours were the closest you’ve ever come to believing in a heaven, or that you’d ever be allowed in. But those five hours demanded so much of your body that it took you months to recover, months where the world and the ground shifted every three steps, or every five, as if to make you pay for what you’d stolen. And by the time you’d fallen back into your old pattern, the sting, the knife-ache in your belly from that beauty had honed itself so sharp that you couldn’t bring yourself to try again.
But knowing it was there, knowing you could claw onto any one of these mornings and make them stretch, knowing that kept your feet on the path.”
I’m not sure where it belongs, whether it’s part of something larger or it needs to hibernate through the winter and ferment under the cold. But it’s something I never would have written were I not in that room and with those people. And in two weeks, we get to do it again! We still have some spots available, so please feel welcome to come check it out. All writers, all levels, all genres welcome.
We all need people in our lives who look sideways and slantways at the world with us, people who notice the patterns in layered dust, or the way a person leans away when they smile, or any of the other infinite details that make our existences so interesting. People who will nod enthusiastically with understanding when we dive into the depths of the stories that excite us. And whether you join me in this space or at the writing group, or you build your own pocket of writerly kindred spirits, I hope you all find the community you’re looking for.
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