Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Ten Sentences












Another morning in my memoir class at MECA, Claude assigned this free write:

In one minute, write the story of your life in ten sentences. Begin.



1. I am in my crib hugging my pale yellow blanket.


2. I think that it is the skirt of a beautiful woman

3. My whole body is yearning for my mother.


4. My grandmother gives me a piece of bacon which I tie to a string to take down to the mussel bed to go crabbing.


5. I go to sleep in my bunk bed listening to the foghorn - there are 12 seconds between each blow.


6. When I kiss my boyfriend Tony and he kisses me, I feel the same yearning that I had in my crib for my mother.

7. I become so obsessed with this yearning that I have 5 babies in 9 years.


8. I have a couple of breakdowns and rediscover that I love to draw.


9. My daughter becomes very ill and it becomes difficult to do my art for 14 years.

10. My barn burns down and I lose 30 years of art, so I decide to go back to school.



Surrendering Self I, 1991
charcoal on Rives BFK, 22" x 30"
collection Duane Paluska, ICON Gallery, Brunswick, ME
Surrendering Self I (in progress)


Double One, 1997
charcoal On Rives BFK, 22" x 30"
collection the artist
Catalpa, 1990
charcoal on Rives BFK, 22" x 30"
collection Pat Hardy
Catalpa, detail
Catalpa, detail

2 comments:

Susan Beauchemin said...

Yes--I'm right there with the bacon on the hot summer morning--wearing our very old sneakers with holes, saved just for walking on rocks while crabbing. I never did muster up the courage though to pick up the crabs by their backs, so to catch one they had to hold on to that raw bacon pretty tightly so I could air lift it to the pail.

martha miller said...

you didn't? i remember picking them up by their backs - they always managed to reach underneath their bodies with their front claws and pinch a little bit! picking them up - sort that same feeling as getting the nerve to strike a match for the first time...