Smokey Mountain Breakdown

It strikes me today how much I rely on experience and conversation for my writing. This is how I was trained, and perhaps ties into my background in theater. The writers coming out of MFA programs seem to rely on what they read. It is not that I don’t read—I’m constantly reading. I’m sure that all of that leaks through to my writing on a subconscious level, but it is life that compels me and informs me. It’s where my ideas come from, not from some other headspace.

I suppose writing is like learning and like art. I’m a visual learner and so it makes sense that I’m also a visual writer. It is the images spoken by everyday people that inform me—that move me.

And, that ties in with my interest in folklore. An image was given to me today that I just can’t get out of my head. Cats eating the faces of the dead. They start with the ears first. I can’t get inspiration like that from books—though it is surely the books I’ve read that make the image so compelling.

I have another drabble for you today. Happy Sunday.

She didn’t make it to Omaha Beach, the purpose of the trip being more about eating apricot flans and cheeses so pungent they made eyes water.

Children cried, “Regardez la voiture,” when she drove a Morris Minor through villages, stopping only to drink calvados-laced au lait with grizzled fishermen in early morning.

On the beach at Arromanches, she broke down, weeping into the wind. Her father, one of that greatest generation, had a part in this history.

Ghost blood stained the sand stretching from Mulberry ruins to cliffs thrusting from the Channel. Boys bleeding long ago still sang the requiem.