Category Archives: Writing

Ivan Negru
Weekend Write-Off, Writing

The Watermelon Seed

When I was pregnant with my second child and teaching English/Language Arts to twelve and thirteen year-olds, my belly grew in line with the progression of the kids’ knowledge and the school year. If they hadn’t figured it out at the start of the year, it soon became apparent.

One morning, a co-teacher came to me with a story about a shared student, very intelligent and matter-of-fact. She said that Paul had asked her in homeroom whether I was pregnant.

“I hope so, Paul. Either that or she swallowed a watermelon.”

With no hesitation whatsoever, he responded, “Well, I vote for the watermelon. Babies make a lot of noise.”

She turned what seemed to be an obvious question into a playful response; he turned it into a truthful commentary on raising kids.

Each summer when my young children would happily devour sweet cool watermelon, inevitably a black shiny seed would be ingested. Usually, they’d complain if they even spied one in their slice, but one always seemed to slip through. After repeated ignored attempts to explain their harmless nature, how they’ll only provide some fiber … I finally just responded with, “Uh oh, looks like a watermelon is going to grow in your belly.” After the shocked look of disbelief, I’d follow up with, “Yup, it’s going to sprout right out of your belly button.”

And that’s just what happens to the crocodile in Greg Pizzoli’s picture book, The Watermelon Seed!

On the first several pages, he pontificates on his love for the fruit:

I like it for breakfast.

I like it for lunch.

I like a big salty slab for dinner . . .

and I LOVE it for dessert!

But then the unthinkable happens – with a page as dark as the seed itself.

Crocodile is worried the vines will come out his ears rather than his belly button, but the look on his face is the same as my girls’ always was.

It ends up being only a close call for Crocodile and he is not scared straight from his obsession with watermelon. Neither have seeds kept my girls away from watermelon in the long run.

The Watermelon Seed is a funny, playful, relatable book for kids. Emergent and early readers will be able to access the language on their own, but toddlers, preschoolers, and early elementary will love the hilarity of it in a read-aloud. Even older children and students will be able to appreciate Crocodile’s conundrum and it can offer a bridge to childhood memories for discussion or narrative writing. Pizzoli’s illustration adds to the comedy with some pretty epic facial expressions from Crocodile. The graphic shapes and block letters as well as use of color give the entire story an accessible and universal feel.

Just as it did for me, The Watermelon Seed may conjure funny and happy stories – at the very least, sweet summer memories of chomping watermelon.

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Weekend Write-Off

Lost in NYC

I have a shirt with a bright red circle surrounding a big number one on the front.

Whenever I wear it, people (very often my dad) ask what I’m number one in.

I joke that I got it that summer I lived in New York so I would remember which subway line to take home.

But the truth is that I loved the MTA system so much. It, like the grid New York’s streets are laid out on, was so logistical and straightforward. It didn’t hurt that my lines, the 1 and the 9, were a straight shot up to the Bronx where I was staying.

I also fell for its graphic design. Bold primary colors, crisp black lines, and solid shapes.

Not only did I buy the shirt, but when I discovered that the transit authority holds a surplus sale each year, I signed up for the newsletter to be apprised of all events. I have yet to acquire a slab of subway station or signage, but there is the dream.

So when I accompanied my ten year-old to the graphic novel section of our library, Lost in NYC: A Subway Adventure leapt right off the shelf.

With story by Nadja Spiegelman and art by Sergio Garcia Sanchez (colored by Lola Moral), Lost in NYC details a beginner’s day on the MTA through the eyes of a child. Pablo, and his new friend Alicia, do some quick thinking on their feet when they are separated from their class field trip. Soon, they are even separated from each other, leaving Alicia, while a native New Yorker, to navigate independently for the first time.

Before the class leaves the school, their teacher gives a brief history of the city’s subway system, using the bedrock the Empire State Building (and their destination) is anchored in as a segue to its underground workings. The readers learn about express and local trains when Alicia and Pablo mistakenly hop the one opposite the class. We learn about different routes and exchanges as they separately make their way back to rendesvous with the class.

The subway adventure, while exciting on its own, is also a frame for another story within. While Pablo learns the transportation system of his new city, with Alicia’s help, he is learning how to trust and accept friendship and belonging in a new place. A seemingly small interaction with his parents on the sidewalk in front of the school in the morning, where he brushes off their hugs and help, sets the stage for his own acclimation to his new home, even if he was brought there by his parents. He relies on himself, bringing in help from Alicia and an adult he asks for assistance.

This graphic novel would be a fabulous read for someone visiting the city for the first time or readers who love big cities, transportation, trains, and/or maps. I would make it required reading before taking my own kids into the city – even the big ones. Several pages at the back of the book offer historical photos and facts about the creation of the subway system and the inner workings of the Empire State Building. I learned things after already visiting both. Setting and cities aside, this graphic novel is also a good read for children facing or acclimating to a move and making new friends.

A quintessential part of any New York experience, the New York City MTA is the perfect setting to paint a picture of life there. Given that it is presented in a graphic format is all the more fitting.

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Clement Proust Pexels
Weekend Write-Off, Writing

Independence as a Young Mother

“Discovering that you craved independence when you were a young mother was about as convenient and feasible as shooting a man in cold blood and then deciding you didn’t feel like being a murderer after all.”

MAINE, J. Courtney Sullivan
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Alfredo Marco Pradil Pexels
Weekend Write-Off

Guest for a Lifetime

"You have to understand," she said.  "Grief lasts forever."

     "Like death," I said.

     "Like death.  Except death is someone else's condition, and grief is all yours."

     "I feel worse now than I did shortly after she died."

     "And you'll feel even worse next year.  And worse the year after that, unless you find a way to
transform your grief."

     "We're back to that."

     "We've never left it," she said.  "Grief comes to you all at once, so you think it will be over all at 
once.  But it is your guest for a lifetime."

     "How should I treat this gift?  This unwelcome, uninvited guest."

     "Think of the one who sent it to you," she said.

The above excerpt is from a conversation Roger Rosenblatt shared in Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats. See my post, Beside Myself, for my thoughts inspired by reading this memoir.

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How to Say Babylon A Memoir Safiya Sinclair
Weekend Write-Off, Writing

A Word That Leapt Aflame in My Mind

“I sounded the lines out aloud, feeling the rhymes growing delicious on my tongue.  Later I went to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and looked up William Blake. I couldn’t believe it.  He died nearly 170 years before me, but his words grew a thriving forest in my head. A thought, I understood it then, and its incendiary mind, could outlive itself. A well-made word could outspan carbon, and bone, and halved uranium.  Until now, I imagined the world divided in two halves: the world of the spiritual, of my parents: Jah and levity, vibrations, energies, and chakras.  And then, there was a world of things I could measure and understand, visible and knowable.  Now, I felt there was another world just out of reach.  A gossamer wing flashed against the bedroom window.  I took out my journal and wrote my first lines of poetry in vines of cursive.  Wings in the sunlight, wings against my dress.  I pulled wing after luminous wing from my mouth. Watching them flutter alive with each word, my hands a vibrant garden. The poem was called ‘The Butterfly,’ the first to pull itself from the soft veil between all worlds, a seam to slip through to any place, any time. I knew then that as long as I had a word that leapt aflame in my mind, I would always be living in an age of wonder.”
from How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair

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church window Job 6:37
Weekend Write-Off

To Again Become

When she can’t sleep at night, she tries to remember the details of all the rooms where she has slept: the one she shared with her parents until the age of thirteen, the ones at the university residence and the Annecy apartment facing the cemetery. She starts at the door and makes her way around the walls. The objects that appear are always linked to gestures and singular facts: in her room at the summer camp where she’d worked as a counselor, the mirror over the sink where some boy counselors had written in her red Diamond Enamel toothpaste, ‘Long live whores’; the blue lamp in her room in Rome that gave her an electrical shock each time she turned it on. In those rooms, she never sees herself with the clarity of photos, but blurred as in a film on an encrypted TV channel. Or she sees a silhouette, a hairstyle, movements – leaning out of a window, washing her hair – and positions – sitting at a desk or lying on a bed. Sometimes she manages to feel she is back inside her former body, not the way one is in dreams, but more as if she were inside the ‘glorious body’ of the Catholic religion, which was supposed to resurrect after death with no sensation of pain or pleasure, heat, cold, or the urge to urinate. She doesn’t know what she wants from these inventories, except maybe through the accumulation of memories of objects, to again become the person she was at such and such a time.

The Years, Annie Ernaux

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Hand writing on a notebook
Writing

Am Writing

When one is task oriented and working to deadlines,
the work becomes scripted and static.

Sure there are moments that shine,

but they're in the initial spark of the idea
or reserved for the intro or concluding paragraph.

Never in the middle, in the meat of the piece.

When one is free to write for writing sake, 
the work becomes invisible
         or even ceases to exist.

When creativity has no bounds

it often flies away.
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Mother vs. Self
Writing

An Ocean State Story of My Own

My grandmother was a connoisseur of the written word.

She devoured it voraciously.

Oftentimes, seeing her car in the library parking lot, I would find her among the stacks or bump into her in the lobby, fist full of the next adventure to be had.

As my own love of writing deepened in high school, she began to share what she deemed stellar examples of its use. A clipping of newspaper, a strong Op Ed, a well-executed essay.

She’d come of age in the glory days of the Providence Journal, her own brother disappearing into its whole block of a building for work each day. It was a stalwart of journalism and professional writing.

Naturally, then, I came to appreciate those writers and articles she’d send. With my parents referencing Ken Weber’s hiking guide nearly every weekend, I became interested in the sparse yet beautifully evocative language of his nature columns. I fancied myself ‘the next Ken Weber’ as I detailed my own rambles. And as an adult, I discovered more of my own writers.

G. Wayne Miller was a name I was accustomed to seeing in the by-lines of the Journal. When he did an ongoing series about mental health in 2014, I followed closely. How encouraging to see a close-up view of the many facets of mental illness and its treatment in our state. When he retired from the Journal in 2022, I was glad for his accomplishment; sad for the loss of such thoughtful coverage.

Through the wonders of LinkedIn, I stayed abreast of his work with Ocean State Stories (housed within Salve Regina University’s Pell Center). Imagine my surprise and delight when he reached out to me recently to be the subject of one of the Q&A features on their site.

Q & A with Jennifer Butler Basile

When your writing comes of age with a steady diet of talented writers, fed to you by loved ones, part of the literary fabric of Rhode Island – and then one reaches out to you . . . it’s as if fairy dust has burst from the folds of clipped newsprint.

Thank you, Wayne, for taking the time to read my work and offering the space for me to share it. Your care and attention to mental health already impressed me. Your encouragement of fellow writers means perhaps even more.

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Writing

Bonding through Bodkin

I started watching Bodkin because I love a good mystery. 

I sound like the little old ladies who used to check Agatha Christie out of the library, but I’ve been a fan since my Nancy Drew days.  Read my first Agatha in junior high.  Wrote the book report.  Went on a Criminal Minds bender when my youngest was an infant.  Nothing like a sleep deprived foray into psychologically deviant minds. 

Now my cup of tea is usually accompanied by a procedural.  As long as the sun shines, I can deal with initial gore or grit for the sake of a suspenseful solution. 

I needed a new binge and there was my recently added Irish series to fill the bill.

Sure Gilbert was goofy (buffoon actually is how Dove refers to him) and the archetypal turns of phrase were expected, but my ancestral funny bone appreciated the familiar.  Both Dove and Seamus’ stand-offish yet authentically honest wit was a salve to my Celtic soul.  And the series itself has a self-deprecating manner.  When minutes after the trio of protagonists steps foot in the local pub Teddy staggers up from his barstool and sings a lyrical ballad, Dove mutters behind her pint, “That does not usually happen.” 

But the frame of Gilbert’s incessant search for the ‘story’ is what truly makes this series sing. Eventually we learn that the silly American came to Ireland for a story better than the one he was living, but everything starts with the fatal effects of Dove’s insatiable search for spilling the truth. As mysterious details come about, we learn it is the story of Dove’s past that haunts her. Emmy is only just realizing that she has a story.

Stories and folklore are integral to Irish culture.  Within the larger frame of Gilbert’s podcast, there is Samhain.  Nestled within that is the historical tradition and tragedy unique to the town of Bodkin.  From that comes the many layers and intertwined threads of the daily interactions of the townspeople. 

But around episode six, Gaelic becomes global.  It opens with Gilbert describing folktales as not only stories, but warnings, saying that “in Ireland they tell the story of the fetch.  The fetch is your supernatural doppelganger.  And if you happen to see yourself, to see your fetch, it means you’re going to die.”

I’ve been reading Timothy White’s Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley, wherein he goes into great detail of the Rastafarian and Afro-Caribbean traditions that influenced Bob Marley’s life and lyrical philosophies.  Around 1964,

“He [Bob Marley] believed he was possibly under siege by obeah-directed demonic forces and might soon need a ‘shedda-catcher’ (shadow-catcher, a myalman).  Omeriah [Marley’s grandfather] . . . had performed such services for others . . . in the country, when someone believed he had lost his shadow, meaning his temporal soul force.”

Timothy White

And a few years later as Marley learned the tenets of Rastafarianism, Mortimo Planno explained that “before we are born, we have a name, and when we enter this world, we get a new name.  In each man is a separate genesis joined to that name, and most men learn their name only at the hour of their death.  A very few, however, learn it beforehand, along with the knowledge of their own end.”

Ireland and Jamaica are very different places, but the parallel story of knowing or seeing, naming oneself brought these two together like connective threads spun across the sea.  Every culture, every individual yearns to distill its story and yet stretch it in relationship with others.  Story, for every one of us, is crucial to existence.   

In the final scenes of the series, as we hear Gilbert’s closing words and transition into Dove’s epilogue, we hear that it’s not so much what has happened in the past as what story we choose to tell about it. Which is such a powerful reminder.  Not of fabrication, but of which details we choose to focus. 

How frequently do we cause ourselves pain with a negative monologue?  By frontloading our failures?  By refusing to showcase the successes? 

If we can’t change the things that have happened, maybe we can change the story we tell.

Dubheasa Maloney

Just as a narrative shifts with a new point of view so does our outlook with a different lens.  There are times, however, when the lens is a prism reflecting many of us in its image.

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