In honor of those of you who head “home” for the holidays, I’ve been doing some thinking about the intersection of geography, memory, and (of course!) writing.

I spent most of my childhood in a very small town, where the landscape became deeply familiar and where very little changed over the years. I knew the houses around every corner, the best hills for sledding, and the secret, wooded places to hide out in my neighborhood. I navigated by using my friends’ houses or our schools as markers; I navigated by beaches and by parks, by the distance a new location was from one I already knew.

Going home after years spent away is a little like that old French saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” The landscape has definitely changed: trees cut down, portions of the shoreline beaches eroded or changing shape, new developments popping up in what used to be cornfields or wooded space.

The high school has a new edition, although the smaller brick box maze I attended is still in place. The bookstore where I fell in love with reading just celebrated its 25th anniversary. The ice cream shop I visited in childhood has been replaced with another, and my favorite tea house has changed locations three times. There are food trucks that park near the town green now, and next to the green, the elementary school my childhood friends attended, the one whose doors I walked through for our graduation processional, sits empty. But behind that building is the field I played softball on for eight years, and the swings I used to swing on at 10 o’clock at night, after getting ice cream from a shop that no longer exists (because, small town. We got creative with our fun.).

I sat on those swings with a dark haired girl I no longer talk to, who has her Ph.D. now and a family I don’t know, on the night before I left for college. I swung on those swings with a girl who was the soul equivalent of a firecracker, swinging higher and higher, laughing and yelling and crying, the night of our friend’s wake. I stood by those swings for a half a dozen Fourth of July celebrations when the whole town turns out for the Concert on the Green. I stood by those swings when I glimpsed my crush, returned from Europe and looking like all the sharp edges the world has to offer. I stumbled to those swings after I chickened out on my first kiss, pulling away from the soft brush of lips and mumbling something about having to find…my sister? My friend? Somewhere (anywhere) else to be at that moment?

My husband teases me because as we drive through my town now, I tell the same stories over and over: that’s the temple where my sister played Esther for Purim, this is the waterfall we would pass on our way home from church every Sunday, be careful at this intersection because the oncoming traffic doesn’t stop and once my brother was in a really bad accident here, this is the gazebo where I spent an entire summer of humid nights, hanging out with my best friends.

My map of home is memory, even if no one else in the world could plot the same course. In ‘A Moveable Feast’, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “There is never any ending to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed…”

Geography and memory inspire our creative processes. We visit our old favorite places, drive on familiar roads, and it reminds us of people, feelings and experiences we don’t always think about, those that have been eroded or erased from the maps of our lives now. Whether we use these details of place to build something new or simply to try to share our memory maps with others, we’re inspired to create a written landscape.

Happy holidays, and happy writing.

Today’s Prompt: Create a map, in words, from memory. Start at your parents’ home, or your home, or any favorite or least favorite place, and take your reader for a walk.

Your map could be plotted with all the places/things that are no longer there (friends moved away, trees cut down), or by specific memories (the room you first tasted ice cream, the yard where you drank out of the garden house, the driveway where your brother almost got hit by a car).

Welcome, writers! Kristen and I are excited to share that the South County Writers group is growing, and with new people interested, we thought it worthwhile to share additional information about the group.

First, any level of experience is welcome. Right now, we mostly have folks who love to write but don’t always have the time to do it. We have some people who write for a living, and others who are doing something else entirely in their day to day lives. We have have teachers, moms, technicians, students…part of the fun in the group is hearing how people from different backgrounds and levels of experience all respond to the same prompt. (You might be surprised to see how themes develop, even without planning: at our last meeting, three of us wrote about snow even though the prompt had nothing to do with winter and it was almost sixty degrees outside.)

Second, we welcome all kinds of responses to the prompts: fiction, nonfiction, memoir, stream of consciousness, poetry…if you manage to write song lyrics in response to a prompt, we’d be truly impressed. Whatever the prompt inspires in you, we’re interested. It doesn’t have to be neat, and it doesn’t have to be long. Sometimes, even one perfect line or phrase is enough to get you writing again.

The goal, of course, is to beat “writer’s block” in all of its forms. Writer’s block is formally defined as, “the condition of being unable to think of what to write or how to proceed with writing.” (Less formally, some writers will say writer’s block is when their characters stop talking to them.)

What we found at our last meeting is that mostly, we all love to write-even if it’s been years since we last wrote anything creative. But we don’t always have the time, energy, or mental clarity to sit down, start writing, and simply get words on the page.

You may have noticed that our prompts may be short: a few words, or the start of a sentence or idea. The brevity is intentional, in part. If you can train yourself to write without too much direction, almost everything in your life becomes prompt-worthy. (Prompt: dog. Does the word make you think about your first dog? Your child’s first dog? Does it make you think about the dog sleeping at your feet right now, and the way you can hear his nose whistling while he sleeps? Does ‘dog’ make you think of loyalty? Fear? Allergies? Does it make you think about the English language, and how ‘d’ and ‘g’ are kind of weird sounds? You’re getting the idea…)

Happy writing, and we hope we’ll see you at the group.

Final Details:

Can’t make a meeting? Post a prompt response in the comments section, if you’d like your response to be attributed to you. Want to post anonymously? Email us your response at: southcountywriters@gmail.com

We’re currently borrowing our “suggestions of order” from other writing groups like ours: 

1. Newest person to the group chooses a prompt.
2. Timer is set for 20 minutes, and everybody writes. When time is up…
3. …the person who chose the prompt picks the first reader.
4. The first reader can read or pass, and picks the direction we read around the circle.
5. Those who want to read, read. Those who don’t, pass. After each reading, listeners may choose to share their thoughts: what worked? Was there a particular image or phrase that was powerful or memorable?
6. After everyone has read or passed, the second newest person picks the next prompt and we set the timer again.