Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Rabbit Hole of Writing: Looking for Pen Pals

My Dear Readers,

For the past year my blogging journey has submerged into that wascally wabbit hole of cyberspace, and this morning I'm trying to figure out just where in Wonderland all my "stuff" resides. Perhaps no archives exist here. Perhaps all of my early readers have fallen away because truly they were friends with my niece, Dorothy, anyway. (No she does not wear red slippers, although she is just as magical as that other well-known one is. See Picket at Pinterest.) 

WELD for Birmingham has tried to educate me to some degree about posting blogs for them, but I could never figure out just how to connect my friends to the blog. It was like sending out an email announcement to a group, and asking anyone who doesn't have email to pick up a hard copy of the announcement. HOW will they know? 

Ah, but occasionally there have been connections. (And isn't that the most a writer hopes for?) My aquatics class at One Nineteen found the Lane Cake essay and we talked that one to death. And just last week Hal told me that he had read the essay about my miracle in Paris which had to do with the Musee D'orsay. He said he would very much like to visit that museum someday. 

Ah, but this morning I'm returning to this blogspot for my personal blog--much of what I write here will be unedited and unorganized, but isn't that what a blog was to be originally? I have to admit even I liked looking back at the personal essays I concocted for WELD. We'll see where this path leads..."the time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things..."

One of those things is that I'll be speaking about: one story a month for WELD that will reflect something exciting to me that is going on around Birmingham. Those who know me best know that the stories I love best and tend to re-tell are those involving people. I am a people person as they say. In writing we call that characterization. So in my poetry there are persona poems (a whole group about a woman named Libby); in my fiction there are numerous characters--the latest one is Clyde, a reformed drug addict and he is at the center of a linked series of short stories; and finally there is the memoir I'm working on which have actually been inspired by the pieces I've been writing for WELD. Suddenly, I was in love with my first love--writing letters. For isn't the essay a letter of sorts? 

Anyway, let's be pen pals. If you know any characters around Birmingham that you think I would like to hear about as potential writing material, I'd love to hear from you.

All the best,

wordspinningbykathleen
P.S. Enclosed a few pics of the Aquatics Class at lunch.

Turnip Green Soup by Jo-Ann
Veggie-Beef Soup by Teresa


Nancy, Susan, Joan

Happy Bday to Sherry and Jo-Ann

Message in a Blog

  About twenty Birmingham language arts teachers endured my holding forth yesterday in my current gig as a Road Scholar ...