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Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres

Here’s Writing Leap #2. Writing in MAGICAL REALISM

Magical Realism is a literary mode where everyday fictional reality flows together seamlessly with magical happenings.

It’s the magic I love the best. The wildly creative take on the mundane brings me to deeper truths, like dreams.

Are you tempted to try writing something in magical realism?

Remember, as we all know deep down, it’s the mystery and joy of the writing process and the deep self-validation of “having written” that really counts, not a perfect result. Don’t obsess. Allow yourself to be terrible. It might be wonderful. Just play around with it—and leap!

Story Line: My Grandmother Always Wore a Babushka

OR if you like this better

Families

Come on. Sit down and go into your creative space. Use the story line (very loosely or otherwise) and write something in magical realism. Of course, you can start off by saying that your grandmother, or somebody else’s grandmother, never wore a babushka and go from there.

Here’s my take on My Grandmother Always Wore a Babushka.

My Ukrainian grandmother, Eva, leaned her bulky figure over her big black stove to feed it more wood. She wore her dark flowered babushka on her head indoors and out. I was six and wondered if she slept in it.

Her pirozhki were almost done baking and a yeasty, dill fragrance wafted around me and my doll. The kitchen was a melancholy, severe gray just like Nanny herself. She had lived fifty years in this country with an ache in her heart, never allowing herself to learn English, always yearning to return home to her brothers and sisters on the farm in Ukraine, where my god the real apples grew and the cherries ripened so sweet you wouldn’t believe.

Nanny wasn’t a hugger.

She pulled out two trays of pirozhki from her small oven and let them cool for a few minutes. Her tired smile flickered at me through her sternness. Her teeth were probably sitting in a glass of water on the kitchen table.

She handed me a perfect, warm, golden-crusted morsel stuffed with meat. I gobbled it down in a gulp and that made her laugh briefly.

I’ve been longing for her pirozhki all these years later.

So off to the Russian neighborhood in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn with my family in search of the perfect pirozhki stuffed with beef and dill.

The open window of a busy grocers offered stacks of feathery blini pancakes soaked in butter alongside potato and onion pies. Perozhkis? Without looking at us the large woman in a wraparound apron who tended the window jabbed her finger towards a tray of big, fried dumplings. Did she have smaller ones that were baked in yeast dough? She continued to point an impatient finger at the large fried things.

A ghostly shape emerged from the midst of the strollers and bustlers on Brighton Beach Avenue. She floated high in front of me, her flowered babushka tied over her granite gray hair which I knew she pulled back tightly into a bun.

“Ach! No, those are terrible,” Nanny scoffed in Ukrainian. I understood her. I don’t speak Ukrainian. Nobody else seemed to notice her.

My son tried a fried pirozhki despite my protests. “Delicious,” he said. But then he wasn’t obsessed like I was.

Nanny hovered above.

A shot of vodka with cucumber slices sounded good. The dark bar was decorated with gold-leafed icon paintings. A quick “down it goes” and we filed back outside where the sun glared. I was caught up in everything Russian and had almost shouted, “Na Zdorovie!” Cheers! And smashed my glass on the barroom floor. I should have.

“Café Stupki!” Nanny hummed. She swooshed above us leading the way. I was ever so slightly tipsy. It was only noon after all. I kept step with the strains of balalaika music in a minor key that spilled out the open door of a CD shop.

“Sit here,” Nanny said. “I’ll tell you what to eat. Forget the pirozhkis. No good here.”

The walls in this Ukranian café were covered with embroidered peasant blouses and paintings of silver samovars with spigots. I felt my roots. And kind of close to Nanny.

“Start with the pickled herring with onions and boiled potatoes. You won’t like it—it’s fishy. But it’s Ukrainian,” Nanny’s ghost said, always in her language. I still understood her perfectly.

“The hot borsch isn’t bad,” she added. “Although I add beet kvass and soured apples in mine. Much better.”

Nobody else was aware of Nanny and nobody talked. We just put noses to the bowl, inhaled the sharp/sweet fragrance of beets and spooned up the purple soup. The sour cream on top melted pink.

Personally I would have liked roasted garlic to spread on the thick black bread. Nanny thought so too and floated back to the kitchen to chastise the chef.

“The pirozhkis are here in Brighton Beach somewhere,” Nanny said, floating back out to the dining room ceiling. Her arms were folded across her ample bust. “But you’ll never find them like mine.”

Linking the Arts

Books & Stories I Love

Practical Magic
by Alice Hoffman is written
as magical realism

Words I Love

whimsy

(in the sense of playfulness, something fanciful and endearing and not quite real)

Magical Realism is often filled with whimsy.

Artwork I Love

Photobucket

Chagall, “Angel Bay with Bouquet of Roses,”
evokes magical realism
Happy Writing,

I’d love to hear your thoughts about magical realism and this writing adventure in general. Did you try it?

Writing Leap #3 upcoming: Writing the Anecdotal Recipe using our story line, “My Grandmother Always Wore a Babushka,” or “Families” as a touch-off point. New story lines coming up after that.

To my email subscribers: Please click on the title of the post to see the complete blog with my links. And in color!

Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres

So all you passionate writers and passionate readers who may also be interested in literary genres.

Those of us with our pens flying, sometimes crawling across the page.

Those of us with our noses buried in a thriller or a Victorian novel of great length.

Here’s Writing Leap #1. Writing the SHORT-SHORT STORY. Try this.

Story line: My Grandmother Always Wore A Babushka

Or if this doesn’t resonate try

Families

Play loose with the story line. Let it inspire you vaguely or otherwise.

The short-short story is a style of fictional literature where the narrative is very brief. The word count varies depending on who is establishing the boundaries, often somewhere between 300 and 1000 words.

Some are as short as six words. It’s been said, but not validated, that Ernest Hemingway wrote: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” and that he claimed it was among his best work.

Are you tempted to try it? Yes!

Remember, writers write. When it flows and when it doesn’t.

My short-short is a fictionalized account of something my mother, Mary, told me. Something that happened in real life.

My Short-Short

Mary lifted one worn shoe onto the sagging step of her porch. Then the other. She fought the heaviness in her legs and the pumping fear in her heart. The two-family house, a shadowy gray presence, wailed, “Mama is still so angry with you.”

Mama might swoop down on her again with her big bulk and shake, shake, shake her.

Oh, she would be sure to speak to Mama in Russian, try to tell her about her day in school, her new tenth-grade teacher.

She hesitated before opening the front door with the oval window covered by embroidered curtains that Mama had made. She reached inside her shapeless coat (how she hated the old thing) to the spot under her sweater where her bra was. She touched the outline of the little gold bird on a chain. She had sewed it inside her bra. Mama could never see it again.

Mary closed her eyes and felt how David, her very own kind and wonderful boyfriend, he from the fancy side of town, had fastened it around her neck on the night of her sixteenth birthday. Mama had startled them in the parlor, announcing herself by the rustle of the bead fringe on the drapes that covered the open doorway in heavy velvet. Mama had sauntered right into the somber room heavy with dark horsehair furniture. She was barefoot. Her false teeth were out. Her gummy smile and mocking eyes had dared Mary to react. The bird necklace around Mary’s throat caught her mother’s eye.

“Go home,” she said to David in her heavy accent.

Mama turned and shuffled out. Mary felt the blood rush to her head, her face flush hot, her breathing practically stop. She couldn’t look at David.

Still rooted in front of the door on the front porch Mary smothered the memory of this recent parlor scene. She willed herself to close her eyes and bring up the memory of Papa, a picture that always prepared her for anything inside the house.

She was six. Papa gently caressed her cheek. Then he twirled her round and round and told her she was his gift from the angels in the United States of America who looked down on the small town where they lived. Love rushed through her as the memory slipped away ever so slowly. Papa disappeared back to heaven and she was sixteen.

Mary stepped inside the vestibule and looked at herself in the hall mirror. Her face was soft and her eyes were filled with the feeling of Papa’s tenderness.

“Mama, I’m home.”

Strains of an aria sung by Caruso filled the dining/sitting room. Mary smelled an odd combination of dill and something burnt coming from the kitchen beyond. Did Mama burn the pirozhkis?

“Hello Mama.”

Her mother nodded. The babushka with the roses was tied under her chin as always. She huddled over her cherished mahogany victrola, winding it up on the side. Mary watched the handle go round and round as the opera became louder.

“This music! The voice. So beautiful, so beautiful,” Mama said, always in Russian.

In the plain gray kitchen Mama’s golden brown pirozhkis cooled on a tray at the back of the old black stove. Mary sniffed. Then again. Ugh. Black, acrid-smelling smoke seeped around the edges of the round stovetop lid that kept the wood fire burning and the stove hot. Mary quickly picked up the lid with a potholder. Covering her mouth and nose she stared down through the smoke into the stove. Pieces of charred blue chiffon were squirming and burning, larger clumps of fabric disappearing under licks of orange flames, sequins holding out but still melting as Mary’s stomach lurched. She dropped the hot lid onto the stovetop.

It was her blue party dress her best friend Susie had lent her for the magical night of Mary’s first school dance. She was going with David.

Nausea crept into her heart. She had never been this frightened of Mama before. Her innocence flaked away forever like the burnt bits of her dress.