(written 12/17/21 to 5/27/22)
There’s an old film with Tom Hanks called Castaway.
In the film, he is a lost sole survivor from a plane crash who finds himself alone for a lengthy time on an uninhabited island. Since this film only has a few actors other than Tom Hanks himself, I wonder whether the budget was as significant as other films in which he starred as the main character.
In this story, to keep himself engaged, he is resourceful using whatever items were available from the shipwreck. One item he has is a volleyball that he names Wilson. He has both internal and external conversations with Wilson throughout his seclusion.
The film is both funny and thought-provoking. Many people live alone and it is impossible for the mind to not ruminate in solitude.
I’m sure there are degrees of this and those that live alone find ways and outlets for expression.
My former neighbor Hellen is an elderly woman that lives alone and she and I converse almost nightly and I listen to her stories. I love her life stories and hope that I can recall them for years to come because she is funny, poignant and tells them so well.
She often reminds me that on most days I am the only human voice she hears.
On the other hand, I enjoy being immersed in this time of boundless creative exploration through solitude of sorts even though I do hear other human voices on most days! – in phone calls with clients or touching base with different friends or going out to the store and sometimes to social excursions.
But, most of my days are now filled with plenty of time for imagination and thought while I work with my hands.
I have always enjoyed writing in a variety of forms and communications over the years and now I am being more intentional and disciplined in this pursuit. It is helpful, and often fun when it is a particularly creative piece, these days to be able to walk around doing other tasks while dictating segments of writings to myself into an email!
This tool allows thoughts to come out in raw form and later be edited.
It adds fun and is also therapeutic to me in different ways, and I would encourage those who like to write to make time for this valuable gift.
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Today (December 17, 2021) I saw an article in my news feed that was probably prompted by a draft I was working on yesterday in WordPress that used the word “literary” a few times.
The article contained the title literary and was about how one of the most famous short stories ever written, called The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, was literally written in one day.
This stood out to me as I recalled over the summer of 2021, a college friend and I talking, and her mention of this particular short story. I had intended to follow up and listen to it, which I was able to do this morning (12/17/21) on Audible.
In the article, it said this short story was accomplished pretty much in its final form within a few hours. The writer said she was at the grocery store and imagined the story and went home, put her kids down for a nap and wrote it at one sitting. She said it later only required a few edits.
I found this fascinating, and sometimes I look back at those high school and college writing assignments that seemed like drudgery, and now think of writing challenges and being given a topic as excitement in my day and mental sharpening and creative weight-lifting of sorts on many levels. With many benefits.
This article outlining this author’s experience resonated with me since I had a similar experience many years ago in 2005 writing a personal short story called The Mirror, in basically one evening. This is a deeply personal short story that I have only shared with a handful of close friends over the years. I have only shared this short story with a handful of close friends when topics came up relating to some of the content.
This story was written after a friend had given me a key to her beach house for the weekend and I went alone, with just a thick package of divorce papers that I had to fill out back in 2005, and make difficult and painful decisions about, including such details as whether or not I would take back my maiden name.
It was a difficult time and I remember that night going out and walking the boardwalk alone and thinking about various things from my life and returning to the condo and beginning to write out this story by hand on a tablet of paper. It flowed so well.
Essentially I wrote it in a style replicating the way most people think and ruminate. There was no real outline, just a flow of different paragraphs that went in and out of different life stories and much of this (but not all of it) was centered around the story of my mother’s last month of life: her decline, death and my responses to it all.
It seemed inextricably connected, in my mind, to the situation I found myself in during 2005.
Because divorce is also a death, of sorts.
It’s all so…complicated!
The story was written in snippets of sentences and paragraphs that were broken by one lengthy repeated lowercase run-on phrase. That phrase was: amicrazyamiguiltyamibaddoilovedoihatewillthisend.
I came back from that beach trip and typed it on the computer, only making a small amount of edits.
I remember reading it aloud to my therapist at the time and he was seemingly spellbound and said that it was good, and suggested I should submit this to a psychological journal or something!
I remember in Alabama reading it aloud to my therapist there (a woman) and it took nearly the whole hour to read it with the right inflections. I remember glancing up at her a few times and she was seemingly captivated, listening intently, and I thought perhaps at some moments her eyes were a little wet but I am not sure what I was seeing.
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Anyway today (12/17/21) I’ve been working on various things and decided to challenge myself with whether I could write a short story in completion in two or three hours.
The story itself is based in part (but changed up and embellished) on a true event that happened to me in college. I had shared this story with another friend who suggested I should call The Moth: Live Story-Telling to see if they might take it on to help me work it into a creative short story told aloud!
I really don’t think I could do that, nor want to, in that venue…but…I did take up the challenge of making it a creative, illustrated short story.
I spent an hour-and-a-half cutting heads off my Mexican sunflowers outside today while dictating the short story in pieces, into my phone!
I changed up names and some of the details just to make it interesting, flow and protect the identity of the people! Haha but for the most part this is a true story of sorts… um…maybe somewhere between 1% and 75% of it…or 42% of it…or….99% of it…ha ha…true story.
This happened to “Jane Jones and Friends,” it really did!!!
I did submit it, out of curiosity, to The New Yorker the end of January, again, at the suggestion of another friend. But, after the 90 days with no reply from them (they get thousands of submissions and I wasn’t holding my breath! or…needing that affirmation to keep writing…) I have decided to share it here.
Enjoy!
AWKWARD SMALLTALK WITH THOMAS, RICHARD, HAROLD, AND HIS BROTHER, FRANK, AND HER MARRIAGES TO GEORGE, AND JOHN
Thank You For Reading
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