Please do this Mad-Lib exercise - we'll keep working on it Wednesday too.

MAD LIBS

http://leemartinauthor.com/ blog/2012/09/mad-libs-for- creative-nonfiction-writers-a- new-exercise/

Mad Libs for Creative Nonfiction Writers: A New Exercise

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Lee Martin

I designed a new writing exercise for my MFA creative nonfiction workshop last week, and contrary to what a good teacher should have done (stating the objective of the exercise before leading the students through it) I purposely eliminated that step and jumped right in. I didn’t want the students to write toward an objective, thereby thinking too much about the purpose of their responses to my cues. Instead, I wanted them to be open to leaps  and associations and surprises and the texture such things can lend to a piece of creative nonfiction.

As promised, I’m now sharing this exercise with you:

1.  Make a list of three adjectives. Any three. Don’t think too hard. Just do it.

2.  Make a list of three objects that have recently become “unforgettable” to you in some way. Three objects from the current time or the recent past that you can’t get out of your head.

3.  Make a list of three abstractions, but try to avoid nouns that could also be transitive verbs. Nothing that could be turned into a statement such as “I love x,” or “I hate y.” Stick with things like”limbo” or “harmony.”

4.  Choose an adjective from your list, an object, and an abstraction.  Do it in that order. Add a preposition or an article as necessary. Write the title of your essay (e.g. “Pretty Dog Leash in Limbo”). Note: now that you know you’re creating a title, feel free to switch out any of the words for others on your lists.

5.  Write a few lines about the object you’re chosen. Why have you been thinking about it lately? Give us a context for why this object is important to you.

6.  Write a few lines that evoke the abstraction you’ve chosen without naming it. How does the abstraction convey your emotional response to the object? In what way does thinking about the object leave you unsettled, uncertain, or whatever your emotional response turns out to be?

7.  Write a few lines that evoke the adjective you’ve chosen without naming it. Give us a sense of its relationship to the object. Is it ironic, for example, or genuine?

8.  Write a few lines about another object, story,  or memory that comes to you right now. We’re working with free association here. Look for words or phrases or images that subtly connect to what you’ve already written. If you need a prompt, here’s one: “When I think of that dog leash, I remember (fill in the blank with another object, a story, a memory).”

9.  Make a direct statement about where the second object, story, or memory takes you in your thinking. Here’s a prompt: “I begin (or began) to think about (fill in the blank however you’d like).” The emphasis with this last step is to let the texture of the writing invite an abstract thought, conclusion, question, speculation, etc., thereby allowing the central line of inquiry of the essay to grow organically from what precedes it.

Since this is a new exercise, I’m particularly interested in what you think. My students, in our post-writing debriefing, talked about how the exercise led them to unexpected connections, became a process of discovery, forced them to “push through” material that was a bit uncomfortable for them, and in general led them to things they wouldn’t have gotten to otherwise. I’m hoping this exercise will be helpful for those writers who want to write in forms that aren’t predominantly driven by narrative and who are more interested in dealing with recent material rather than the distant past.

Here is mine in its messiness...

"CHUBBY OLIVE'S PURPLE HARNESS AS GRACE" 

a mad-lib nonfiction exercise that might turn into something. 

ADJECTIVES

chubby

whimsical

genuine

OBJECTS

Gee's Bend Quilt

Norah's Fairy Book

Olive's purple harness

ABSTRACTIONS

grace 

hope

freedom

TITLES combing adjectives, objects, abstractions

"Fat Olive's Purple Harness as Grace"

"Whimsical Norah's Fairy Notebook in Hope"

"Genuine Gee's Bend Quilt for Freedom"

"FAT OLIVE'S PURPLE HARNESS AS GRACE"

I can't find the purple harness again (or the car keys for that matter). I take the purple harness off Olive, the uncomplicated wiener dog each night, and I put it somewhere where I'll be sure to remember the next morning. 

I never do. Okay, sometimes I do. But when I forget, if I let her outside, exuberant pup, without her harness, which has her tags, and she goes missing, what will I do? Race through the streets of screaming OLIVE OLIVE OLIVE COME HOME? (Of course, this was before she lost the use of her legs, which are slowly coming back - a drunken gait, a scissory walk, and a lot of mermaiding around these days. She was a jumper but no more. The jumping did her spine in. I should have known. She is five.)

We found her at the Birmingham Humane Society by the airport where a large, tattooed man, Phil, who worked there, cradled her in his arms for an introduction on Valentine's Day 2011.

I don't want to lose my dog. My dog (and this statement will make sound like my mother a little) keeps me sane. But maybe that's okay. Emmylou Harris brings her dogs on stage. They travel with her. (I digress.)

But unlike my mother, I will never give a dog the same name as any future granddaughters or grandsons, because of the handy excuse of alliteration.

Lucy and Little Bit just sound right together. You don't mind, do you? (I do, but what am I supposed to say?) 

I let that one go - even when I hear stories of her Lucy jumping up and eating a block of cheese off the counter and digging up the roses. That is not my Lucy, who lives in New York and is a recent college graduate. That's my mother's Lucy, a crazy yellow lab mix. But Lucy, the lab, keeps her sane, along with her other dog, Little Bit, who is not little. 

My mother used to say, "I tell dog stories. I don't tell kid stories. I tell dog stories. You won't hear me boring people with stories of my remarkable children, but ask me about my dogs. Then I'll tell you some stories."

But I'm all for dogs and sanity living so far away from the life I created once upon time that had two dogs, two cats, three finches, a hermit crab, three kids, and a husband. And so Olive, who is not really chubby, maybe pleasingly plump (I used to read novels that had "pleasingly plump" characters when I was a teenager). Anyway, this dog eases my head and heart and makes our temporary-but-not-so-temporary Alabama home a kinder and more loving place to be. 

Olive howls on cue and greets everyone with joy. She adores Norah, our fifteen-year-old, and cuddles on her bed during hours of homework.

Olive is also often hungry, which reminds me that I am often hungry. I hate being hungry for no reason. Still, I go rustling into the kitchen for something to eat, and Olive shows up hungry too - panting, wagging, dragging herself along, mermaiding. 

Whatcha doing? 

When I think of Olive's purple harness I think of holding onto things - holding onto the life I created that morphed into another life, cleaved between Alabama and California. And for a while we said we could do it. We said we could handle it to get the kids through college. We got two through college in the last four years. We'll be in debt forever with their college loans, but they graduated from good schools and they are both working now. 

But for a while in 2013, things got crazy. There was no purple harness in 2013 to harness us. That year, my husband, Kiffen, lived with our adult son and an adult nephew and a crazy boarder, a middle-aged actress, who churned up the juicer in the kitchen with greens and vitamins but devoured bags of donuts and cookies in her room downstairs. She wore a lot of purple. She had a dog with a scowl that did not wag its tail. The dog, in my opinion, was judging us all. That dog was called Sadie. Sadie judged us.

My mother called it, "Mr. Kiffen's Boarding House." It sounded like a British sitcom.  

How is life at Mr. Kiffen's Boarding House?

And daily in 2013, during this temporary living arrangement in Los Angeles, while Norah and I were in Alabama, Mr. Kiffen returned home each day from teaching to often find his adult son (our boy, our firstborn) playing music or tearing through the house like a gremlin searching for spare change or food. He also came upon a sleepy adult nephew and the actress-boarder juicing and/or praying or watching "The Big Bang Theory" with her judgmental dog. (Sadie) 

How did Mr. Kiffen face the chaos after teaching second graders all day in the West Adams District of Los Angeles at a Title One School...He soon realized he was living with three adult children, trying to soothe, encourage, and nurture them all and their sensitive souls. They were not kind to each other much of the time. They took their bags of complaints to Mr. Kiffen. The actress-boarder snapped pictures of dirty dishes in the sink to state her case.

And not only that - yes, there is a "not only that' - besides the immature son, nephew, and actress-boarder, Mr. Kiffen came home often to also find a down-on-their-luck father and son duo who began showing up to do odd jobs around our home in exchange for storing their own temporary life in our garage and to take occasional naps on the couch when the boarder-actress wasn't watching "The Big Bang Theory." This father and son due installed a toilet downstairs and fixed a bike. Our son welcomed the duo. We weren't paying close enough attention at the time. 

Later, much later, I found out that this father and son duo also sold speed. I found this out from the sleepy (musically inclined) nephew who woke up when the demon came. The sleepy nephew did not do drugs unlike his cousin, our son, but he had his struggles.

We don't live in that house anymore. The sleepy nephew moved to his studio in Hollywood to make it in the music business and then back to New York to live with his mother. 

The actress-boarder moved back to Tennessee and broke both ankles mowing the lawn in the home where she was housesitting. Her scowling, judgmental dog (Sadie) got old and died, but this was a good thing because the dog loathed thunderstorms, so would not have adjusted to Tennessee. The actress-boarder sued the people she was housesitting for because of their bumpy lawn that caused her to break her ankles. 

I don't know for sure what became of the father and son who did odd jobs and sold speed. (Did you know speed was meth? I didn't.) Eventually, this father & son took their temporary lives elsewhere, and I heard the father went to jail. I saw the son washing his hair out of his car with a water jug one day in the of summer 2013. But by that time, my husband had warned the son to stay away from us.

KEEP OUT. YOU SHALL NOT CROSS.

I did not nor do I wish the son or father grace. I wish I did. Maybe one I day I will. But my heart is too small for that. There is another drug addict floating around too. I call him "Morning Glory" because he boiled morning glories to get high in seventh grade. He's clean now. I called him "Morning Glory" and still do, sometimes, and Lucy, my daughter recently said, "He has a name. It isn't Morning Glory." 

She is quite right. He has a name.

But grace was in short supply in 2013. What is grace? In Alabama, girls from Norah's classes are named: "Katie-Grace," "Hannah-Grace," "Emma-Grace." 

And if you can stand one more detail, in the middle of all this, we had to put down our own old dog, too, Bascom. My husband named our dog for his great uncle Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the songcatcher of Appalachia. We got him as a puppy when the kids were tiny. They adored him. They made a movie starring Bascom called "The Patient English Dachshund" after seeing "The English Patient." 

During the INTERVENTION of grandparents, aunts, cousins, friends - hail hail the gang's all here, Bascom was eighteen, blind, deaf, and incontinent. We begged our son to get help while the Bascom toddled into furniture, shivering, peeing, lost. The musically inclined nephew sang his letter, which our son improvised on the piano. 

Then our boy said no and fled. It was a terrible day.

Then next day we put Bascom down. He was suffering. It was enough. 

We kept Bascom's ashes, which our son later stole in a rage (he loved his dog). For a long while Bascom's ashes sat on a bar called the Overpass, an illegal after-hours club in Los Angeles. Our girls wanted Bascom's ashes back, and so when their big brother began to get clean - it was touch and go - it will always be touch and go - he brought Bascom's ashes home where they now sit on our mantle.

Here is a link to Bascom's namesake:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkoIKMcFAX8 (Preview)  

My husband lives alone now with one cat in the shadow of Dodger Stadium. He wants his wife and daughter to come home. Maybe enough is enough. 

As for our son he is trying. He is working. He is making Japanese noodles and working as a line cook. He is getting ready to sing some old Hollywood tunes at a fundraiser to honor Jean Harlow and others. He is living his life, reclaiming his life. We love him so much. We wish him well. We cannot do it for him. 

In the meantime, I no longer clip on Olive's purple harness, but instead I follow along behind her and say, "Use those legs. You can do it. That's right."  

And we take very shaky, tentative walks in Alabama and imagine other lives in Los Angeles and try to figure where home is and how to get there from here.