If you’ve done any writing workshops with me, you’ll remember the X page, which is a Lynda Barry staple, a page in your notebook on which you draw a big X — you “wreck the page,” as she says — and on this page, you pour out your sensory memories that emerge from whatever image you’re exploring. In the photo below, you can see that blank X mark amidst the text that surrounds it on the board, behind the writer, Tasneem Jamal. This photo was taken yesterday evening, when Tasneem was leading the writing session of The X Page, a writing and theatre workshop for immigrant and refugee women, which I’m coordinating with the help of many wonderful local partners. Last night was our first workshop session!
While the women were writing their stories in their notebooks, I modelled Tasneem’s instructions on the board (those are my X page scribbles). I got to write two new X page stories, which are brief 7-minute recollections based around an image anchored in memory. Our prompt for the evening was “suitcase,” or bag or backpack or purse.
“Backpack stuffed with my life”
I am sitting on the floor in the Detroit Airport, leaning against my backpack, a hiking backpack, that is stuffed with my life, or the life I expect to be leading in this place I’m going, somewhere I lived as a child and have not returned to for a decade. I’m 19 years old. I grin into the camera my dad is holding, already sunburned. My jeans are hot, as the day is warm. I just want to say goodbye and go — get on the plane and fly away, mostly because I am scared, though I would admit that to no one, certainly not myself. I feel as though I am fulfilling a calling that I am meant to return to this place that in my memory was a kind of paradise — Managua, Nicaragua. It was not a paradise in any way that is easy to explain. I was a child when I lived there, and I felt free.
“Grandma King’s purse”
I am inside a memory I didn’t know I’d kept. I can see my grandma’s purse held open, and I am being permitted to dig through it to look for candy, but I see all kinds of treasure here — tissues, lipsticks, keys, a wallet I want to open, gum in stick form, pens, an address books, yes, candy, wrapped; mints. Peppermints striped red and white in crackling plastic. I sit on Grandma’s lap and smell her scent, nothing fancy, her hair spray. She gets her hair set at a salon, but I wouldn’t know that, not yet, it’s a detail that will fascinate me when I’m seven or eight. She does not touch her hair in between appointments. She is not a snuggly grandma. Yet here I sit on her lap in the front seat of a car on a hot day, windows down, in the parking lot of — maybe — a grocery store. We are waiting for someone to return. I did not know I’d kept this memory. Yet here it is.
Walking home from campus this afternoon, I kept formulating and reformulating my “artist’s statement”; writing an artist statement is something I’ve asked my Creativity Unplugged students to think about doing for our end of term launch party. What would mine be? What would yours be?
Maybe this is my statement:
Life is about seeking beauty: go and find it, record it, and share it.
But I think my statement would also have to include this:
Life is about seeking beauty: go and find it, record it, and share it. We can go together.
xo, Carrie
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