Today’s exercise in the writing retreat I am attending was using a technique called a “sprint”. What this meant was that for 7 minutes - and yes, we were timed - we were to write continuously, not allowing our hand to stop moving, and not making any corrections - basically free-thought/association writing. We were to start from either a “sweet memory” or the phrase “I want to write about…”
At first I thought this would be just about impossible, but I discovered just the opposite. And I discovered, much to my surprise, that the exercise took my words in a totally different direction than expected given where I started. From a place of half humor to a really dark place.
So, in the vein of posting my classroom work, here is “My Grandmother’s Girdle”
“I want to write about Grandmother Lucia’s bra and girdle. Of course, it’s not really about her bra and girdle, it’s about why that memory arose in the first place. #1, the visual of watching my grandmother get dressed. For a woman born in the 1800’s she was remarkably open about her body, or maybe because I was a girl, and little, she didn’t need to cover her nakedness in front of me.
I want to write about how shocking her naked body was to me as I watched – with fascination and repulsion – as she stuffed her enormous, flopping breasts into a gargantuan brassiere – and how she squirmed and struggled to pull up a tortuous girdle.
I want to write about how vain my grandmother was;
I want to write about how controlling she was;
I want to write about how she used her money to bribe and threaten me to do her wishes, well into my teens;
I want to write about how my grandmother emasculated my father;
I want to write about the way my grandmother intruded into my parents’ marriage, making it a threesome, emotionally, for the entire three decades she lived while they were married.”