Memoirous

In My post Baby Games http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/2022/05/baby-games.html I realized later after writing about playing with my grandson—how much this approach is similar to my writing process. 1)       Starting with a kind of structure or form, such as standard hide n’ seek 2)       A plot twist, baby changes games by putting on a hat 3)       Story spins off into make believe, pretends to hide in plain sight In fact upon rereading some notes I’d made a couple years ago about activist/artist nun Corita Kent I happened upon this: Learning By Heart. “Try looking the way the child looks—as if always for the first time—and you will, I promise, feel wider awake.” In her book Learning by Heart: teachings to free the creative spirit, was published in 1992, six years after her death. The first chapter is devoted—simply but significantly—to “LOOKING.” She starts by conjuring the lofty ghost of her f...

I’m not a fan, it simply came on after I’d watched another program on PBS from my computer and I was too lazy to get up and shut it off. Real-life, I guess. Anyway, this has happened twice and both times two sets of women songwriters were featured. This last time it was Sharon Van Etten and Lucy Dacus. Now to be fair they were not new to me. I’d actually downloaded from the Apple store their songs. I just didn’t know it was them. I was simply responding to “hey, I like what I’m hearing” and downloaded. So it was nice to hear these singer/songwriters in context. After the Sharon Van Etten set she did an into the camera 2-minute response about her music and process. She said she riffs. Ends up with 10-minute long “songs” which she afterwards begins to shape, pulling out lines, turning them into lyrics. It’s only after the riffing or vomiting on paper that she begins to see a story, or understand the point she wants to make. I get this because it happens to me all the time. I’ll wir...

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NPR Morning Edition has been doing a series on anthems.Songs they consider American anthems, and today they took a look at Springsteen’s“Born in the USA” —which by all accounts is a protest song. Yeah, says Chris Christie former Republican governor of New Jersey: it's a defiant song about , 'I was born in the U.S.A. and I deserve better than what I'm getting.' I think plenty of people didn't get what it was about, including the president of the United States."   That would be Ronald Reagan. And later conservative George Will would praise the song. But it was a song begging for hope, pleading for justice. “I'm ten years burning down the road Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go Born in the U.S.A., I was born in the U.S.A. …. End up like a dog that's been beat too much Till you spend half your life just covering up” Not too celebratory. The song went through many iterations. Upbeat, dark, a prayer. Springsteen k...