Go here. Akira Kurosawa’s teaching is for any writer. Consider how you feel as you tell yourself your have to write. Consider the few seconds before you put pen to paper or hands to keys. There is no right way to feel.
Use the fishes as your prompt. deliberately write two dull paragraphs – hard to do with such an evocative image. Put what you have written away for a day, then read it and work with it. When you are bored, write colors, textures, sounds, irritation, delight….
Please send your writing to us. Let me know if I may publish it.
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From my new novel: Chow: a novel of hungers and mercies Janet Logan speaks:
My husband Ray and I have never gone physically hungry. We each come from a good family, and consequently were able to make “good” choices. Our life is full. Our life is comfortable. Still, our life has not been without sorrow. Perhaps no one’s has.
Tonight, I have coq au vin simmering in the crockpot. I slice heirloom tomatoes for our salad. Earlier, Ray baked his Aunt Ellen’s dutch apple pie. He will fill our glasses with a delicate Chablis. I’ll dish out the chicken and we will raise our glasses in a toast to the Divine. We will eat and drink our fill – and as we clear the table, we will be hungry. Hungry for justice, hungry for fairness, hungry because we know that somewhere beyond the soft glow of these kitchen windows, there are those starving simply for food. And, we will both know that the other hungers for the sound of our dead son’s voice, the quick flash of his smile, the adolescent yelp of his laughter.
We have learned how it is to contain a space that cannot be filled, a hunger which one must carry to one’s death – and perhaps beyond – but we will not, as on every other night, speak of our son Will.
For now, Ray uncorks the wine. I spoon the chicken onto the two plates left from my mother’s bequeathal. The other ten didn’t survive twenty years of meals with our sons. Will dropped the tenth plate as he was washing it, because he was racing to head out the door for a bar crawl with his best friend.
“To What carries us,” Ray says. He raises his glass. I raise mine, “And to what we can only guess at.”
Ray laughs. “My dear mystic,” he says.
I raise my glass again. “To whatever it takes.”
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