Workshop? It was More Like a Playshop

Woody Allen was right: 90% of any job really is about just showing up.I feel as though I did little more than show up myself at that workshop I ran yesterday. I mean, I told a few funny stories, sure, but for every story of mine it seemed as if each of those 30 people had three stories. They scribbled in their notebooks like happy schoolchildren, just as I hoped they would and then the brave ones read what they had written and got us all laughing, or thinking, or feeling that certain catch in the throat.The stories came so thick and fast I can only remember a few of them: Like the one about the 92-year-old who, on the lip of that Next Great Adventure, told the undertaker she did NOT want a pillow under her head in her casket because why be seen for the last time with a cascade of double chins?Another told about the two-and-a-half-year-old who fell asleep on one very long road trip, waking only long after, in utter darkness in a region thinly settled and sparsely lit. Her parents in the front seat heard her stir; then, out of the darkness came her little voice.“Who turned out the goddam LIGHTS?”Word is, Dad put his hands up over his face. He knew well where she had heard such language.Kids say so many dear and funny things and we shared a good number of them between our jottings-down.Meanwhile, the library provided lemonade and bakery items, a big old box o’ joe and a platter of Irish soda bread with a list of its every ingredient hand-written in a neat blue hand.I had them write to a 'Six Things I Love' prompt and also one that starts “I knew I shouldn’t be laughing....”That last brought a very touching the tale by a man scattering his father's ashes.At one point a woman spoke of her very earliest memory when, on seeing her papa approaching her crib, out of pure joy and pride she took hold of its rails and executed a perfect acrobat’s tumble just for him.We went on for nearly 90 minutes which to me seemed like ten minutes.At the end, by way of closing, I asked them to write a sentence that started “I used to… but now I…”  in response to which folks wrote some lovely things.The thing that stays most in my mind now that it’s Monday-Monday-can’t-trust-that-day? A sentence one woman wrote that went, “I used to be cynical, but now I have a seven-year-old.” Let’s none of us be cynical, on this or any day since life asks of us Hope, and faith in things unseen..God bless poor Mama Cass, who died so suddenly. God bless lucky Us, who are all still here with our fruit platters and the many stories that connect us. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h81Ojd3d2rY]

Listen to This

It's strange: I write something every day here and I find it easy. Yet when I decided last week I would give myself a break and take 5 days to just mention each of my 5 books it turned out to be... difficult. I feel uneasy going back to all that self-promotion. 'Hi, wanna buy a book?' 'Hiiii! Here's a funny book!' It was such hard work and people are busy. Why should they stop and listen to me with my ambush book signing?They even call those kinds of signings 'ambush signings’ and I hated them. It finally got so if a bookstore said Come do a signing I would say Let me come give a talk instead. ThatI could do. People would hear the laughing and come and sit down and there we'd all be, together, for the next 30 or 40 minutes: Instant community. Some of the people dearest to me now are people I met on the road this way. I’d get in my car and drive 8 hours and do the talk and think nothing of it. I was just happy for the chance to say how great it's been for me all these years to be able to say out loud how the world looks to me each week.So that’s what this fourth book is about: gaining the confidence to write your own stuff.And just for fun I decided to record this book so it’s actually a book and two CDs. In both I just I tell a few of my own stories before offering the prompts designed to get listeners scribbling away themselves.For example in the chapter titled “What Do You Like?” I describe six things I just plain love, then invite folks to do the same. In “Rules to Live By” I tell what my ‘ten commandments’ are, then ask them to set down theirs. ”The Wicked Elsewhere” gets people remembering back to the time they first heard where babies come from. Then, between every chapter, a fresh musical interlude helps people begin traveling down their own long-forgotten paths into the realm of memory, where everything we have ever experienced awaits us still. I picture the memories all resting at the bottom of a deep pool like so many bright leaves, waiting only for the waters to grow still enough to let us peer down and see them. This book simply provides tools both for seeingthose leaves and fetching them up into the light.That person on the front cover is my big sister Nan who made my childhood so much fun. And that’s the old oak table that was my family’s back in the 1920s. There’s my grandmother’s blue and white ‘caddy’ for her pens and nibs and quills when she was a schoolgirl in the 1890s. That’s the old magnolia tree outside the window of the room I’ve spent my days in since we first moved here back when old Jimmy Carter was filling the airways with that strange Deep South accent.He was a good man though and this is a good book and funny in parts because I used to teach and you know how teachers are, always trying to make you glad you came to class.Here are some of the chapters:

• Have Fun Decomposing
• What Do YOU Like?
• Rules to Live By
• Who Is Around You
• Fannytime
• Fun with the Language
• The Wicked Elsewhere (that’s the facts of life one)
• The Little Cat
• Kiss Me Goodbye
• The Summer I Was Ten
• If I Could’ve SEEN Myself!

The whole thing is just me telling a few stories and then giving you the ‘mic’ and offering to listen as you tell yours. Really it's just the same thing all people do when they meet, at the supermarket say, or on Facebook. We can all tell our stories, and, I believe, we can all write.Anyway here’s what it looks like, the back cover first and then the front with the actual graphics in place. Click on them to enlarge them, same as always. .And if you’d like to learn more about it go here, then send a check for $19.95 to Ravenscroft Press at PO Box 270 Winchester MA 01890 and we'll cover shipping. ( Sorry it's more money than this one and this one and this one: it was the larger production costs, with the two media.)