because I was an arrow

Because I was an arrow

I keep remembering how Kati and I sat on the damp brown earth outside the storytelling tents in Jonesborough, Tennessee, back at the storytelling festival. I want to write about the restored buildings and the town and how I feel about the Smithsonian satellite museum program, but for some reason these words are stuck deep down inside me and won't quite come out. Lots of other stuff happened just before and after the storytelling festival that somehow seems to have jumped line in front of that account - other stories want to be written, other things want to be said. I've posted several times now since my birthday, and the Jonesborough story still won't come out at all. It doesn't seem fair that I'm slighting one of the most beautiful parts of the mountains I've ever seen - the hills around it were so green, the people there seemed so happy to be part of the oral tradition. And yet the story of storytelling won't work itself out to me.

Other things want to be written.

I've been writing a lot the past two weeks, which is good after a long drought of words. I'm working on a scary story for Halloween, and some personal stuff I won't be sad if I don't finish. My romantic life, dormant so long in New England, has exploded here again in the South, and along with a healthy interest in romance comes all the problems associated with the oldest of conflicts.

But these problems at least give me enough internal pressure to write fiction again. Pressure in this way is at least productive, which is good, because of course my job searching has been anything but productive lately. I spend most of my days here in Atlanta of late simply lounging around the house and occasionally watching the toddlers that I'm glad are part of my life. I wait for the phone to ring with a job offer or with an invitation to another interview that just won't come.

There are plenty of things I could write about this week - for instance, how autumn is here at last, in Atlanta, reminding me of the New England Summer. I could write about how Laura and Audrey and I all dyed our hair last weekend for fun, or about how half my Uncle Doug's neighborhood is getting laid off by Delta airlines. The kids are an endless source of cute little kid stories, but I'm not going to write about any of that today. I've got phrases for fiction that are rolling around my head begging to be let out, and I have to go and let them run.

I can't write descriptive stories this week. This week I'm all kinds of fragments of fiction. That's not always such a bad thing, and in fact I welcome the onslaught of original prose again. Because I was an arrow - little things like that phrase tumble through my mind, and I finally am comfortable enough again to let these thoughts out onto paper.