On a cool, partly sunny Port Townsend summer day, I met with a writer’s group whose members have continued to gather and respond to each other’s writing years after meeting each other in a five-week essay writing course. After a lunch of soup, salad and strawberries that we dipped into chocolate (a favorite writing food because in digesting chocolate the body manufactures endorphins that make one feel infatuated—a good state for writing!), we watched a road service crew overzealously saw down a tree. Some rather slender branches partially covered the street now that high winds had split the tree. The amount of heavy equipment the men brought along and the numbers of them involved in the project amused us—and provided a metaphor for the state that keeps us from writing our best. When we bring in too much mental apparatus and don’t let our images and associations fly, the group acknowledged, our writing can become over worked. But when we come more casually to our writing task, with less apparatus in mind, we often find ourselves making the most remarkable connections and discoveries very quickly. 

At the group, I shared Ron Carlson’s very short story “I Am Bigfoot.” In the story, Bigfoot narrates an explanation of why he has stolen wives, and he leaves the reader with his thoughts about women and relationships. This had gotten me thinking that one way to start an effective essay would be to conjure mythical characters and put words in their mouths. What would the boogieman say for instance? How might his message allow the writer to understand something? What would the tooth fairy have to say and what would a meditation on being paid for losing something that is no longer necessary yield?

Writers could set up their essays by explaining why the mythical characters were in their thoughts to begin with. Perhaps a parent would write after a child’s restless night for fear that monsters are under the bed or after placing tooth money under a child’s pillow. Certainly, I thought, essayists would get off to a great start by writing what they imagined mythical characters might have to say.

I suggested the group members start such an essay by conjuring characters. Jan Halliday wrote:

The Indian on horseback at the rim of the canyon, head bowed.
Hula girl in the car
Pink flamingo in a grassy front yard
Cross lit up with blue light bulbs at the Star of the Sea Catholic Church
The “Tidal Clock” sculpture on the waterfront that everyone calls “Tidy Bowl.”

And why not change the exercise, Jan seemed to think, from putting words in the mouths of mythical characters to putting them in the mouths of inanimate characters? It’s certainly always fun to see how writers convert an assignment!

Next, I asked each person to choose one character on her list. Jan felt the most urgency to write about hula girl in the car, noting on her page:

You’ve been contacted by hula girl in the car. Her head is set on a neck that swivels and bobs so it’s very hard to meet my eyes, yet she struggles to maintain eye contact and does, even though all parts of her, except her feet, are in motion.

Clearly, this figure’s message is not in words, but in pantomime!

Next I asked the group to write about the character they selected for ten or fifteen minutes. Jan wrote the following:

I’m in the back seat of my dad’s 1956 lime-green Ford Station Wagon bumping along on a dirt road that parallels the railroad tracks when I notice the hula girl on the front dashboard craning to make eye contact with me. She’s up on her tiptoes which makes her hips gyrate even more than usual and the lei on her chest rolls from side to side. She’s rooted to the dash though, so she doesn’t fly off and she stands there looking at me, full hips going around and around and around and the lei barely covering her naked brown breasts. She’s smiling perpetually, showing a row of snow-white teeth in her brown face. Her black hair is cut in a long bob that sometimes sways counterpoint to her hips. She’s always moving whenever the car moves and she’s so sensitive she’s set in motion with every bump of the tires. Her head is set on a neck that swivels and bobs so it’s very hard to meet my eyes, yet she struggles to maintain eye contact and does, even though all parts of her except her feet are in motion. The road is rutted and my dad has his foot on the gas flooring it through enormous soft mud puddles sending mud flying in arcs on both sides of the car or hitting potholes at such a speed we all, my two brothers and me in the back and my mom in the front seat, all fly up and knock our heads on the roof. You can feel the hard metal frame of the roof hit your skull under the fabric stretched tight, and we all say OW!! at once and rub the tops of our heads. The hula girl who is usually gyrating softly and is almost beautiful on the smooth highway is jiggling madly now in all directions at once, but her eyes are locked on mine and her head never falls off.

Jan’s figure has locked her gaze on the essayist because there is something the unconscious would like to explore, it seemed to me, concerning her father, his sexuality and his disregard for the effects of his actions on the rest of his family.

To create an essay from here, I suggested that Jan start by continuing to write memories of her dad and she did:

When my dad is 58 years old and bald, he drives his bright red Alfa Romeo convertible like the car Dustin Hoffman drives in “The Graduate,” dragging Broadway in Portland in 1967 with the teenagers on Saturday night. Pulling up next to them, looking straight ahead, he puts the car in neutral and guns the accelerator, the vroom vroom rumbling through silver dual exhaust pipes and echoing off the buildings. His sunglasses reflect the street lamps and Broadway’s movie marquee lights. He rests a black-gloved hand, like a professional hit man, on the gearshift knob, which fits perfectly into his curved palm. The yellow light on Park Street comes on and he’s off the line, tires squealing, before his light goes to green on Broadway. The kid next to him is far younger, faster and has a car full of girls, everyone joyously screaming. What they don’t know is that my dad keeps a loaded black 22-lugar in the glove box and at the next light he’ll pull it on them, just to watch their faces freeze, and then he’ll believe he is the victor and all the girls his.

“Okay, where next?” Jan asked emailed me a week after the group had met.

“Keep going with more scenes of your dad,” I wrote, “but take them out of the car. Ultimately your description of your dad and his doings will reveal something important about what his sexuality and emphasis on being admired meant to you and how it affected your family.”

Before long, Jan sent many emails, each with another memory not involving a car and each written in present tense with the same immediacy as the first freewrites.

Additional Freewrite #1:

When I am eight years old, I ask for a white bible and a nurse doll for Christmas and I get them both. The nurse doll has blond hair with blue eyes that close when she lies on her back. She wears a blue cape over a white uniform and has a white cap and white shoes and socks. She has black doctor’s bag, and there’s a stethoscope with black wires and a cold metal disk that you can hear your brother’s heartbeat through, and a fake plastic needle that doesn’t make him scream when you give him a shot. The bible is white leather, with gold capital letters on the front that says “Holy Bible.” You can see the backs of words through the white paper and have to turn the pages with a wet finger they’re so thin. When you close the book the edge looks like solid gold but you can’t see the gold on edges of the separate pages, only when the book is closed. The Bible has a white zipper that zips the covers together and the zipper pull is a little gold cross, but the other end of the zipper hangs out and you have to stuff it back up into the spine or it looks shabby, like a boy with his shirt tail hanging out.

The neighbor girl takes me to church with her family. She has red sores and scabs all over her legs that she scratches and picks at under the skirt of her dress. I have scabs on my inside anklebones because my ankles knock together when I walk, but I can’t pick at them because they are too far down. We have to leave the grownups and we go in a little room that is all beige inside. The teacher gives us a coloring page with Jesus on it. She says Jesus always wears a purple robe. He is not on the cross in this picture because this is after the cross. She gives each of us a purple crayon. I know just how Jesus feels because he suffered the pain of everyone all around him and then they nailed him to a cross where he suffered some more but he was nice and never said a word about being thirsty. He didn’t even say a single word or cry when they put nails through his palms and his feet. I start calling myself a secret name: Janice Christ. The next week we dress up especially fancy because there’s a baptism where people will have their sins washed away. Up in front there are big vases of flowers sitting on the floor not in the middle of the dining room table where flowers belong. There’s a big white screen with lights behind it. Pretty soon you can see shadows through the screen, and a sound of splashing water. They are all naked, except for the minister, who is in a black suit and he is making them lie down in the bathtub while he does secret things to them that he thinks no one can see. I never see the minister, but I think he probably looked like my dad. Everyone around us is crying.

Additional Freewrite #2:

My dad and I are going out on the boat and leaving my brothers and my mother behind. Only this time Jean Ainsworth goes with us. Jean lives down the road in a house that overlooks the river with her husband Donald and her daughter Mimi. She has curly dark brown hair and red sharp cheekbones and a straight nose and pretty clothes. She is wearing a white nylon windbreaker and a white chiffon scarf around her neck, a pale pink tight sweater that matches her lipstick, and white pedal pushers and soft white shoes and perfume. The boat is moored in the Duwamish River next to a sand and gravel lot in an industrial park. I like the neat piles of sand and the piles of different sizes of gravel and rocks and how it is all covered with white dust. My dad hoses off the boat before we get on it. “Jesus Christ! He says.” He gets Jean a boat cushion so her white pants won’t get wet. She is very gay and laughs with her mouth open. Her teeth are white. The river banks are bare and the water is dark and cloudy–you can’t see through the water here like you can at home. The river smells sour with little whiffs of gasoline. The boat is an old Bristol Bay fishing fleet boat. The mast was cut off so it doesn’t sail anymore. It is called the Jeri-Lor after the last owners Jerry and Lorraine. My dad’s nickname is Jerry, but who is this Lorraine. I don’t like her name or Lor for short. It should say Jeri-Marion after my mom’s name. My dad says it’s bad luck to change a boat’s name. The boat is painted white with aqua trim and gray decks. It’s a double-ender, and each end comes to a point. It is 24-feet long with a fish hold in the stern big enough for me and my brothers to sleep in on an air mattress, and it has a little cabin with a steering wheel and two stools and a hot plate on a little countertop. There are two bunks up forward that are also aqua. There’s an aqua bucket, with a rope tied to the handle, between the bunks to pee in. My dad steers the boat out into the fresh salt waves of Puget Sound. He has a cup of coffee in his hand. I go up on the forward deck and lie down, hanging onto the railing and leaning into the splash created by the bow, looking at the rainbows in the droplets and the sparkles of sun on the water. When I get too cold I come back and put on my car coat and sit across from Jean. My dad stops the boat and puts out a fishing pole. He puts the boat in the slow “troll” gear, and sits down next to Jean and hands her a drink of whiskey with ice, and lights a cigarette and hands it to her. Then he lights one for himself. Jean takes the matches from him and shows me the “draw me girl” on the matchbook cover and says the draw me girl has very feminine nostrils. She looks at me discerningly and says, “You have very masculine nostrils. They go straight across.” My dad laughs a deep resonant chuckle and the ice tinkles in his glass. Every time I remember, I put my hand over my nose so no one will see my gigantic masculine nostrils.

My dad quits his job and starts his own business building bomb shelters. He hires Jean Ainsworth to be his secretary. He hires Don, her husband, to put an addition on our house, a “master suite,” for my parents. On the other side there is a “den” for my dad. Don hammers away night and day. My mom puts pepto-bismol pink wallpaper in the bedroom. She buys a brass bed frame from a junk store. It looks like lined up giant lipstick tubes with their caps on. When you bang on it with the end of a pencil it makes a ringing hollow sound but you need a ruler to play the bed like the xylophone on the Lawrence Welk Show. My mom doesn’t want to polish it all the time to keep it shiny so she paints it with clear finger nail polish that comes in a big can. She didn’t get it all the way polished so after the nail polish dries there are black tarnished streaks on it.

The new pink bedroom and brass bed are on the second floor with a deck that you can see through hanging over the cold river. To save money, Don used less 2x4s so there are big spaces between them. You can see the water rushing by under your feet and it’s dizzying. There’s no railing and the deck sticks on the house like a door on its side and trembles with every footstep.

Additional Freewrite #3:

When my dad comes home from the bomb shelter building office, he always has green label double-mint gum and blue label peppermint lifesavers in his pocket and there’s always one clicking against his teeth. When we have dinnertime company he tells the same story about when he was checking into a motel in Coeur d-Alene, Idaho with my mother, and the motel owner said, “Jesus, Jerry, I hope you didn’t pay much for that one.” He laughs when he says the punch line and the guests laugh, and I look at my mom before I laugh, too. If she looks embarrassed I only do a nod and smile, but if she looks sarcastic, I laugh louder. If I don’t laugh at all my dad says “Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you,” in a loud voice and go in my bedroom and cry.

Additional Freewrite #4:

My dad brings home a dress in a big box for mom to wear to a party. She said she couldn’t go because she had nothing to wear. She takes it out of the box while I dance around her. The dress is long. It is white with silver sparkles in it and real sparkly from one shoulder to the other. It is sleeveless, it blouses at the waist and it is slit up both sides above the knee. It is very elegant. It is beautiful. The party is in Seattle, 20 miles from our house. My mom works in her garden all day, fixes us an early dinner and eats it with us, then goes into the bathroom for a long time. When she comes out she is like a queen, she is so beautiful. Her dark hair is soft and curly. Her fingernails are painted red and so are her lips. She is as shiny as a new car and as sparkly as the sun on the water. But her eyes look worried and sad. I tell her you look so beautiful mom. I want to look at her forever. She doesn’t respond. My dad sees her and says, “that’s more like it.” They come home from the party while we are sleeping. The next morning, I rush to the closet to look at the dress one more time. Halfway up the back of the dress it’s shredded and the edges of the shred are scorched. Some of the silver threads are melted. My dad catches me looking at the dress. “Jeeesus Christ!” he says and slams the door. My mom says they had put candles on the hearth and she didn’t notice them and stood too close and her dress had caught on fire.

Additional Freewrite #5:

Charlie Keith is short as me and has big crooked teeth, freckles, blond hair and sparkling blue-green eyes and he blushes and cries easily, and laughs a high giggle and his hands sweat in mine when we have to be a couple in square dancing. In the fourth grade for show and tell he started to tell a dirty joke and the teacher made him sit down. He is in love with me in the sixth grade and the only boy who is, and I wish he was swarthy Larry Dillon, who ignores me. Charlie puts a love letter in my desk every day. Charlie’s letters are long and ardent, written in pencil on his mom’s pink stationery and tell me how beautiful and smart I am. After a week, I show them to my mom and she says he is a moron. We have a big laugh over stupid Charlie and I throw them away. One day after school, after my dad has been gone on a construction job in Oregon, she tells my two younger brothers to go out and play and shows me her letter. It is from Jean Ainsworth and the letter tells my mother that Jean is in love with my dad and my mother is cold hearted and mean. The list of things wrong with my mom is the same as the ones that my dad tells me all the time when we go for drives. How would Jean know anything about my mom? The letter from Jean says that she intends to marry my father and wants my mother to “let him go.” Accompanying the letter is a box that Trojan rubbers come in and inside are the torn-open rubber foils that are proof of their love.

There’s not going to be a railing now and the bathroom stays studs and iron pipes because Don quits after Jean sends my mom the condoms.

My mom tells me when she came home from the hospital with me, there was ice-cube water and whiskey in the bottoms of glasses sitting around and lipstick on cigarette butts in the ashtray and a slow dancing record on the record player. She walked out in the woods with me, and was going to keep on going, but she couldn’t leave my older brother Jerry alone with my dad and because of him, she came back.

In these freewrites, we learn about the father’s emotional rough riding over the sensibilities of his wife. We learn about the mother’s confiding in her young daughter. What an impact this family life must have had on the speaker. I wonder about the dichotomy between the Jesus the young girl is learning about at church and the Jesus whose name her father invokes when he wants things to go his way. What does the speaker make of this?

After I read this freewrite, I thought that Jan might very well use a return to the church with her girlfriend as a hinge to come back to her mindset during this time in her life and the life of her parents. Does her dad go off with Jean? If he does what is home like? If he doesn’t, what is home like? Maybe the unfinished bathroom and the deck with no railing can be used again as a metaphor for growing up in this family.

My advice at this point was for Jan to put in some of the information that I wondered about. Once we knew what happened with Jean and the speaker’s father, it seemed the story of the essay could come to an end and then we would need just a touch more to let us know how the speaker coped.

Here’s what Jan sent next:

After I’ve thrown away Charlie’s letters, my mom asks me to write a letter to my dad and ask him to come home. So I sit down and write the best letter full of we-love-you lies that I can think of. And after two weeks my dad comes home. My dad takes out his wallet and unfolds his letter from me that’s all wrinkled and he shows me where the words ran that are stained with his teardrops. That night, when the phone rings he answers it and says in a stagey voice so that my mom and I can hear him: “No, Jean,” he says and he takes a big breath and looks right at me. “Jan doesn’t like you. It’s all over between us.” I think of Jesus Christ up on the cross and wonder what he’d do now. I think of his pictures in the hymnal and on the posters on the church bulletin board. His palms are nailed to the cross and he can’t get down. All he can do is roll his head with the crown of thorns from side to side. He sees the letter I wrote and says it’s good because we should all love each other, but he sees in my heart and knows I was lying and that disappoints him. “Jeesus Christ,” he says. And then he listens with me and mom to my dad on the phone to Jean. He hears “No, Jean, Jan doesn’t like you. It’s all over between us,” Jesus On The Cross looks at me with the calmest brown eyes you ever saw. And He forgives me my doublecrossing my dad and says its OK to take his name, only don’t tell anybody.

All Jan has to do now, I believe, is to put these parts together consecutively and she’ll have one spellbinding personal essay with a strong voice! It seems that letting hula girl speak put her right back into her memories of childhood and the child she can give voice to now! Writing in separate freewrites allowed Jan access to her information. Not expecting her memories to come all at once, but sitting down to them over days worked for Jan. Her playful beginnings resulted in an essay that proved truly serious.

To try this method for generating an essay, list all the odd inanimate or mythical characters you can think of. Then circle one that you want to hear from. Begin a series of freewrites in which the character starts to tell you something or, as for Jan, offers memories. Whether you are talking from the mouth of the character or from the time the character inhabited your life, you will find something surprising to say.

To link your freewrites, use the diary approach. Give the freewrites dates or label them as if you are writing them from different places: February 1, From the Recliner After Dinner or June 22, Staring at the River from Under a Tree. Jan might put a date on freewrite #2 because that goes backward in time from freewrite #1 and she might continue to give each freewrite a date as she goes forward (or backward) in time.

Here’s hoping you can find characters that allow you to open up and speak!