Maker Space: Invitation to Write a Personal Essay
From Crystal Wilkinson's "Sweet Breath of Another"
After I ran a lesson using A Christmas Memory as an invitation to write, a colleague of mine with the Kentucky Writing Project (KWP) reached out and asked if I could do a similar set of writing invitations for other genres. She was interested in providing a maker space session at a mini conference hosted by KWP on January 2 inviting participants to choose a prompt and write for about an hour in that space. I was delighted by the idea. If conferences started offering this as a session, I would take it every single time. Here’s one of the sessions using personal essay as an invitation
In the personal essay originally published in Emergence Magazine, Kentucky poet, author, and teacher Crystal Wilkinson offers a beautiful rumination on life, love, and memory during the time of COVID-19 in her essay, “Sweet Breath of Another.” Weaving memories of her mother’s death with worries about her partner’s health, Wilkinson crafts small scenes, moving between interior thought, action and dialogue as well as layering single sentence paragraphs that pull us along the narrative about a time marked by boredom and fear. As she uses “breath” as the binding metaphor between relationships to health to family to love, Wilkinson creates a luminous stillness on the page, reflecting on a time in our nation’s consciousness that many of us would rather forget.
Instructions:
Read Wilkinson’s “Sweet Breath of Another”
On a clean sheet of paper, make a list of twenty things you did during the pandemic. Write the actions in the present tense. Use some of Wilkinson’s habits to get you started: I order groceries from the delivery app. I wash the groceries in bleach and water. I make homemade enchiladas. I teach my classes via Zoom.
Brainstorm five significant scenes from your COVID-life that you remember, such as the day schools shut down or the first time you returned to the classroom or standing outside in the yard celebrating a grandchild's birthday.
Brainstorm one or two significant relationships that have changed, deepened, or disappeared in the last three years. How did the pandemic impact these relationships?
Write out one or two scenes from that time in your life, including dialogue, characters, setting. Include one or two sentences of musing and reflection to frame the scenes.
Write 2 or 3 paragraphs about what you learned from the pandemic or what you miss about the time you spent during the pandemic lock-down or what you feel was taken from you during this time.
Now that you have a whole page of raw material or a “zero” draft, shape this material into a first draft of a personal essay about any aspect of your life during the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent social, cultural, and political fall-out from that time. Have some fun with the formatting, borrowing from Wilkinson’s style of layering single sentence paragraphs to create momentum as she reflects monotony at the same time.