The Class

I thought of this book as I was driving home the other night. I started a writing class, so for the next three weeks I am meeting with a group of people who are also struggling to find a way to express themselves. I mentioned in a previous post that my grandmother kept a scrapbook filled with everything I ever wrote. I mean everything. I used to write stories when I was a child. I am an only child, so I developed very extensive characters, perhaps in hope that they would become real to me. I took a creative writing class in high school. I think I may have been going through a dark period at that point...lots of depressing poetry and a first-person account of dying in a car accident (on which I received an A, thank you very much). She also kept all of these papers I wrote in college. And then I didn't really write in a creative fashion until I started this blog, even though my mother and grandmother would say "You should write again." Anyway, I received this giant book as a Christmas gift from my mother. And there were many things in that book about which I had forgotten. I actually wrote a children's book once. About a cat and a pie. I read it to Anja a few times, but she is too busy with crawling and standing to mess with any books right now.

So receiving this giant book was perhaps the motivation for signing up for this class. I've never viewed myself as a writer, although I have been a person who writes for years. Our assignment for this week is to write about a photograph from our childhood. We wrote about the photo for a few minutes in class, but, as usual, my mind got way in front of my hand and the result is a bit like what happens when you rear-end someone - everything stops without much warning. But I have a week or so to finish it up. And maybe I'll turn it into a poem - I actually have lots of ideas but I need to stick with the assignment before I get all carried away.

I hope maybe I'll start writing more in the near future. And more beyond this blog, although this is a good testing ground. I have found a struggle in being something more than a mom. Maybe this is something I can call my own.