Lights On, No One Home
Hello all,
Welcome back to our chaotic, beautiful, and messy shores. Thank you so much for taking your time and energy to sail these violent seas back here, to me. I hope you’re feeling healthy, happy, peaceful, and everything good this week. I, personally, have been a bit busy with school (as always) and writing… poetry and other forms of literature. Within the last month or two, I have hit a wall when it comes to crafting new ideas, if I am being honest. I’ve jumped through several emotions, moved myself from location to location, and even forced myself to stay in one place (physically, mentally, and emotionally) for days on end waiting for a new idea to be born…nothing was seeming to help. Recently, I decided to try diving back into the self-help and writing workshop book, “Healing Through Words” by Rupi Kaur, to further push myself into developing brand new ideas so that I may craft them into brand new writing material. As I flipped through each page, with my third cup of coffee in my hand, there was one exercise that stuck out to me more than ever, which is exercise five, “Peach Pits”. We’ve covered this specific exercise before, I actually believe it was the topic of the third journal I penned out at the start of launching this home for us. Because I’ve covered the description and overall objective of this exercise before, I’m going to jump into the section that I read that truly peaked my interest entirely. (If you’d personally like to dive deeper into this exercise, please surf over to the third journal within this section titled “Peach Pits”).
At the very beginning of Rupi Kaur explaining this exercise, she mentions a form of literature that is known as “micro-fiction”. When I first covered this section, I truly didn’t look too much into what micro-fiction is, but, from what I’ve learned, it differs from other forms of poetry as it is more of a short story that focuses on the narrative and plot, even if it is shortened. She further gives an example of micro-fiction from a famous “6-word story” that was written by Ernest Hemingway, and it reads: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn”. I personally found this so interesting because in my own writing, and in most of the literature of American culture, there are so many words, metaphors, similes, etc… that are used to explain and express emotions that Ernest Hemingway powerful portrays in such a few short words.
However, when I skim through the pages of my paper mind, I find that a lot of my poems start off like this. I usually try to pen out the concept/story/emotions of my writings in only a few words. Here is an example of my own take of micro-fiction that I just came up with while writing this journal out: Each morning, I awaken only to die again in the shadows of yesterdays dreams.
Reading this micro-fiction story that I penned out, I can see what Rupi Kaur means in saying that power can be held in a sentence woven together by only a few words. In my micro-fiction story, I am clearly expressing the pain of awakening each day, but what is causing this pain in me? I believe that by focusing on the plot with no context given in a writing such as this, a strong sense of power, emotion, and thought is being held and expressed…
Thank you so much for taking your time and energy to read this week’s journal. I appreciate it more than I can honestly express and I appreciate you more than you could ever imagine… Make sure to sail these beautiful, chaotic, messy shores back here next week for more.
With great love always,
M.H. John