Mining the Three Freewrites:

Whether you have done these freewrites ( see Part 1 and Part 2) ?in the course of one writing session or over several days, find out what the freewrites have to tell you about an essay you might write by combing through them and jotting down images and phrases that interest you.

When I looked over what I had written for the freewrites in?Part 1 and Part 2, I was grabbed by:? ?overwhelmed,? ?dangerously close to the white line,? ?shoulder to shoulder,? ?heavenly bamboo,? ?thorned bougainvillea,? ?the plants survive? and ?like me.? I didn?t know why exactly, but these words and phrases jumped out.?

Next, I challenged myself to write a paragraph that involves them all:

When I lived in Los Angeles shoulder-to-shoulder with millions, I was never far from others in our cars and apartments, on the busy beaches and walking and biking paths along them.? I was overwhelmed the first year I lived there with the sheer numbers of people, power poles strung with cable that buzzed audibly night and day, billboards and clogged freeway lanes. Slowly I came to see what was planted, first the heavenly bamboo shrubs and of course the palm trees, draping bougainvillea along the banks up from the roads and the ficus trees lining the sidewalks.? I began to see the Morton Bay Figs, trumpet vines, stag horn ferns and exotic fruit trees, the kumquats and pomegranate trees.

It is perhaps not a surprise that distinguishing the plants coincided with making good friends and finding good work, that lonely, I saw only roads and cars and masses of people, and then?more connected, I saw flowers and trees, the way the people of LA cultivate what grows in this watered desert. I struggled with my own container garden.? Against pests and fog, my diverse plants survived.? As I watered them and watched people of diverse ethnic groups and cultural backgrounds drive and walk by my balcony, I realized I had come once again to value the American melting pot spirit that is alive and thriving in this city of angels and progress. I let the American Dream touch me once again.

From there, I could shape an essay that evoked the newly awakened American dream inside me.? I saw that I might be talking about a process of growing numb to the dream for awhile before it reawakened in me. I could talk about becoming jaded while coming of age in the 60?s when the country was engaged in an unpopular war and then again when raising children in the seventies and eighties and trying to teach environmentalism during a time of abundance and spoils. Now, watching and listening to people from all over the world raising families and seeking education, I was revived. I believed that I could write this view of Los Angeles and of myself.

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The way of writing that I am suggesting is aimed at opening writers to a state of not knowing exactly what will happen on their pages.? When we are in this not-knowing state of being, words come through, and we start to figure out the terms of our explorations.? Teasing topics to the page in this way reminds us that every essay is written in response to the question, ?What do I really know?? Finding out how we can put experience together into new knowing, we are on a treasure hunt; we search our way out of the not knowing. This is the spirit that makes our writing come alive. Please leave a comment and let us know how this exercise worked for you and perhaps let us know what you realized you would write about.