WRITING THE EMBARRASSING CONFESSION

A WRITING BLOG About Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres and Categories

Writing Leap #31

Writing the Embarrassing Confession

Hi Writers and Readers,

Embarrassment.  It can flush you red.  It can sit inside, an uncomfortable secret.  It can make you feel foolish or ashamed.

Getting it out onto the page can be great writing practice for saying what you mean.  So edit and edit your journal outpourings or your memory sketches of  shameful moments until your words evoke your embarrassment in your readers themselves.  Even if you are the only reader.

What has made you cringe at yourself?  Or secretive about your thoughts?  Personal embarrassment is a rich garden for writers to dig around in.  You can try it as a sentence, a personal essay, a prose poem.

My embarrassing wish deepens around Halloween when we are surrounded by a lot of toothless witches and ink black cats.  Wiccan witches call this holiday Samhain, a time when the veil between the living and the dead is lacy thin.

My Embarrassing Halloween Wish

Wiccan High Priestesses, sometimes referred to as Witches, have evolved into their role through study, levels of training, much time and much heart.  They have absorbed the soul of Wicca, a pagan, nature-centered religion, legally recognized in our country since the early 1970’s.

While I too look to nature as one source of my spiritual life and while I revere the Wiccan moral code, “An ye harm none, do what ye will,” it’s pretty certain I will never become a Wiccan High Priestess.

No, my wish is much more ethereal.  And unrealistic.

I want to create magic, the kind that happens in dreams.

I would like to be able to close my eyes and alter certain moments as they occur.  Assure that someone I love knocks that interview out of the park, another closes a well-deserved business deal, another has a thumbs-up result after a doctor’s appointment.

On Halloween night I would love to hear a beloved relative who has passed away whisper in my ear from the red leaf clusters of my big maple tree.

My magical self and I would open a Witchy Café.  The menu?

Banshee Mulled Wine with Brandy and Witchy Spices

Honey Pumpkin Mead for kindness

Barmbrack Bread with secret star-charged herbs

Witches Brew Coffee with my other-worldly nutmeg and robust vanilla bean

Each bite would heal, or sooth, or inspire my guests in some small way.

Go ahead readers.  Laugh.  Raise your eyebrows at me and say, “Right.  Nutsy.  Come back to earth.”  I say, “OK, but not all the time.”

Happy Samhain/Halloween Everybody and Happy Writing.

LINKING THE ARTS

A Great Word for October:  BOO!  As in startle yourself with your writing.

Recipe for Barmbrack Bread or Soul Cake.  A traditional Celtic bread served during Samhain with tea.  Or whiskey.  It is Halloween after all.

A Delicious Quote:

“The fire was nice and bright and on one side of the side-tables were four very big barmbracks.  These barmbracks seemed uncut; but if you went closer you would see that they had been cut into long thick even slices and were ready to be handed round at tea.” James Joyce, Dubliners