A Nugget of Reality Wrapped in Silver Foil.

First week at school with the kids in session. Nothing to say but exhaustion. 

It's more fun to talk about the eclipse. We saw it here in Finland, not total, not the whole event, but my kids and I saw it between rolling banks of clouds. We doubled up on sunglasses, ran in and out of the house in our socks, with bowls of half-eaten dinner when the clouds parted. We even managed some pictures with two people juggling the phone and sunglasses and zooming in. Fingers tangled as we giggled. The pink is because of the glasses filter. A bit of fun after a long day of starting back at school.

So of course, it's found its way into my writing. I'm back to squeezing my writing into the weekends; scribbling, shaping, editing between the dibs and drabs of laundry, cleaning and doing coursework while the kids are away. I have very few breaks in my new role, so I doubt I'll get much journaling done at school, so this time feels precious and reserved as much as possible for writing and chilling. 

I do it more as journaling rather than necessarily working towards writing a poem. The notes I write are more an extension to my journals than focussed on working towards a poem for publication or a collection: what I've been thinking about over the past few days, what I've experienced. This weekend's writing has had chunks of lines about the eclipse and they are now maybe sliding into a rough poem. 

Strangely enough, the poem is pretty disconnected from what actually happened. My poems are usually autobiographical these days, but this one, while based in reality, wasn't what I was thinking about when I was out in the street, waiting for the clouds to clear. It was exaggerated or enhanced like the retelling of a good anecdote: a nugget of reality wrapped in silver foil. 

That's one of the writing exercises I used to give my students: take a true event, but write it like a tall tale or myth. They could use it for fiction, poetry or even autobiography. We all have those stories we tell at dinner with friends, when everyone needs to one-up on the craziness of their lives to keep the fun going. We take an event that really happened and make it more dramatic, more miserable or joyous, more crazy, just MORE. 

Exaggerate, make it impossible, but compelling, lie, shape it to explain something about you, your life or the world. That basis in truth makes the fiction so much more believable and enjoyable. So I didn't have these big thoughts, the person I'm speaking to wasn't there, wasn't on my mind, is possibly not even real. But the eclipse happened, the details and setting hold it together and sell it. 

Maybe, I'm still working on it.