On July 8, 2004, I posted an instructional exercise article, “Put Summer on the Page,” encouraging writers to use the opening of Ray Bradbury’s novel Dandelion Wine for inspiration in writing their own memories. Recently, I worked with Michelle Vanstrom on the writing she created from the exercise, which yielded a moving eulogy to her father.

You might want to review the exercise based on Bradbury’s writing before looking at Michelle’s drafts: Dandelion Wine opens with twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding, allowed to sleep in his grandparents’ cupola one night a week during summer vacation, performing a “ritual magic”—the waking up of a whole town by the pointing of his finger and the articulating of commands to those of his town to do what they normally do.

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When Michelle wrote her material from the exercise, her father had recently died after suffering a stroke that put him in a nursing home. In her essay draft, the speaker was at her father’s bedside:

The Sleeping Prophet

C’mon, Dad. Get Up. Unlock the shed’s door. Mount the Mercury outboard on the green, square-front dory, and let’s go fishing on Lake Chautauqua. Hand me two yellowed oars and say make two trips if they’re heavy. Tell me to leave them next to the broken weeping willow. Caution: watch out for that patch of poison ivy. Don’t run down the dock. And, wear shoes. You’ll get splinters.

Send me after the musty orange life jacket we forgot in the shed, the one hanging on the spike nailed in the corner. Reassure me that spiders are afraid of me, even large black ones. Warn the sunfish and blue gill may soon stop biting. Call out, “Leave that oil can alone. You’ll get grease on your shorts.” Insist I “put it back” on the dusty window ledge where I found it. Shake your head when I say, listen to the hollow frog-popping sound it makes when I push and release the tiny can’s bottom. Urge me to hurry. Mutter in Italian, switch to English, and ask why didn’t I go before we left? Shoo me inside the shed to squat and pee into a rusty bucket. Yell, then sit on the ground and go, but don’t tell your mother, because there’s no place to else once we’re out on the water.

Tug my life jacket straps and laugh when my lips curve in a pumpkin’s gap-toothed grin. Hand me the pole with its red and white bobber and a dirt-covered earthworm. Growl like Blackie when I won’t bait the hook because it hurts the worm. Console me with a lie, that it’s dancing on the hook, not wriggling in pain.

 At Tanglewood Manor, a nurse enters your room wearing squelching white rubber shoes. The pills contain compressed lucid dreams, the feeling of free falling, leaves caught in a breeze, whirled up, and sent spinning or cast line’s singing whistle from a bent rod reeling in a lake muskie making its final splash-leap run and swimming for freedom.

She sets the pink plastic tray on the narrow rolling table, slides it out of the way, and chirps, “How are we today, Mr. Frederick?” You open your eyes and I am struck by a vivid blue-gray storm. It is the only color left in you. Our identically colored eyes speak, but your lips remain silent. Your once laughing face is lined weary, gaunt, and stroked gray. Most of your curly black hair is gone. The remaining tufts form a wild halo that has faded from gray to dingy white. A fog colored shadow covers your face. I ask the nurse, “Why are his wrists tied to the bedrails? And why hasn’t he been shaved?” After I untie your hands, you rub the crust from your eyes, but your mouth remains stern and unyielding.

Dad believed in life after death and reincarnation. When I was ten, and quarantined with chicken pox, he went to the Jamestown Prendergast Library and brought home books by Edgar Cayce, the sleeping prophet, and Morey Bernstein’s Searching for Bridey Murphy. The shared reading fostered our deep convictions in the use of hypnotic regression to reveal hidden memories, past lives, reincarnation, and life after death.

After he died, I waited for some sign or sigh to show existence on a higher plane. The closest answer came through a Technicolor dream. I watched him struggle to climb a rocky mountain, his breathing labored from emphysema and decades of cigarettes. At the summit, his profile gazed backward in silence.

C’mon Dad. What do you say? Unlock the door to the shed. Get out the old outboard, the oars, and our life jackets. Ignore the spiders and grab that bucket of worms. Let’s go fishing. It’s time to reveal some stories.

I was struck with how the exercise helped Michelle evoke important memories and feelings about time spent with her dad, so much so that I did not feel like going between the speaker’s inner (italicized) memories and the outer world. I wanted everything to be one world, the world as it seems when you are about to lose one of the most important people in your life, when you must succumb to their need to pass rather than your own need that they hold on.

I felt “The Sleeping Prophet” title and the references at the essay’s end to Michelle’s father’s beliefs took me out of the emotional moment the speaker was speaking from.

There were probably two essays in this one draft, I thought, and the ending paragraphs might better be used in a second essay that describes Michelle’s father in different ways than she thinks of him in this moment when he is dying.

To see if I could make the writing cohere around the emotional moment I was responding to, I started with line editing, tightening to highlight the images Michelle provides. I also re-arranged some of the lines and images to provide more emotional resonance, and I changed the paragraphing to emphasize the wonderful remembered dialog. Moreover, I felt that if the essay ended on one of Michelle’s images from the remembered times rather than with a plea to her father, the essay would become even more moving.

Here is what I proposed for the first of the two essays I thought were in the draft she sent:

Untitled

C’mon, Dad. Get up. Unlock the shed door. Mount the Mercury outboard on the green, square-front dory. Let’s go fishing on Lake Chautauqua. Hand me two yellowed oars and say, “Make two trips if they’re heavy.” Tell me to leave them next to the broken weeping willow, to watch out for that patch of poison ivy and not run down the dock, say “Wear shoes. You’ll get splinters.”

Send me after the musty orange life jacket we forgot in the shed, the one hanging on the spike nailed in the corner. Reassure me that spiders are afraid of me, even large black ones. Warn that the sunfish and blue gill may soon stop biting.

Call out, “Leave that oil can alone. You’ll get grease on your shorts.” Insist I put it back on the dusty window ledge where I found it.

Shake your head when I say, “Listen to the hollow frog-popping sound it makes” when I push and release the tiny can’s bottom. Urge me to hurry. Mutter in Italian, switch to English, and ask why I didn’t go before we left.

Shoo me inside the shed to squat and pee into a rusty bucket or yell, “Sit on the ground and go, but don’t tell your mother.”

Tug my life jacket straps and laugh when my lips curve in a pumpkin’s gap-toothed grin. Hand me the pole with its red and white bobber and a dirt-covered earthworm.

Growl like Blackie when I won’t bait the hook because it hurts the worm. Console me with your lie that the fish you catch is dancing on the hook, not wriggling in pain. I am struck by the blue-gray of the storm left in you. The pills the nurses bring must make dreams caught in a breeze, whirled up, sent spinning. In your breathing, I hear the sound of a cast line’s whistle.

Let me see your bent rod reeling in a lake muskie whose final splash-leap allows it to swim free.

In addition to these changes, I also suggested that Michelle re-title this essay to help focus readers on the moment from which she is writing. The title could inform the reader about where the speaker is physically in the moment of the essay, or it could come from a line inside the piece that seems emotionally appropriate or it might be a phrase that uses the name of the site where the father and daughter went fishing.

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Michelle wrote:

I agree. The edits do make the piece stronger. What I am wondering is do the changes make the piece less of an essay because my thoughts are not included, thus turning it into a prose poem, crystallizing a moment? I admit to being attached to “The Sleeping Prophet” as what generated the writing was the fact that my dad and I shared this unusual bond. Many dads will take their daughters fishing, but don’t discuss life after death, reincarnation, and Edgar Cayce books on a regular basis.

Michelle is right. The edited version is something different than a typical personal essay because of its intensity and short duration. It could be called either a prose poem or a lyric essay–these days the lines are blurring between writing categories. This piece of writing moves in “meditative expectancy” as poet Carolyn Forche describes the writer’s stance, from pleading for a father to regain health to accepting his death and freedom from this life that he shared intensely with his daughter. The writer does this by reaching through words to find out what she is experiencing. By commanding her father to do what he had done in the good times of her youth, the speaker is able to honor his memory and doing that, accept his death by using metaphors of the unique times they shared.

Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola say in their creative nonfiction text Tell It Slant that “the signature of the prose poem is the unexpected surprise at the end… .” Comparing her father to the fish let go is just such a surprise and allows the speaker to accept what is going on in one of the most beautiful ways possible–with life-filled memories and by drawing analogies from those memories.

Michelle’s two paragraphs about her father’s belief in life after death are less intensely lyric than her heart’s commands that he become again who he was in an earlier time. They provide a solid set up for examining his beliefs. I can envision an essay opening this way:

Dad believed in life after death and reincarnation. When I was ten, and quarantined with chicken pox, he went to the Jamestown Prendergast Library and brought home books by Edgar Cayce, the sleeping prophet, and Morey Bernstein’s Searching for Bridey Murphy. The shared reading fostered our deep convictions in the use of hypnotic regression to reveal hidden memories, past lives, reincarnation, and life after death.

After he died, I waited for some sign or sigh to show existence on a higher plane. The closest answer came through a Technicolor dream. I watched him struggle to climb a rocky mountain, his breathing labored from emphysema and decades of cigarettes. At the summit, his profile gazed backward in silence.

Michelle will, I believe, be able to write on from here describing more about her father’s beliefs, how they talked about them during her growing up and what she’s come to wonder and to know since then. This essay might be entitled, “The Sleeping Prophet,” but then again, it is impossible to know a title until a piece is finished. Sometimes what triggers writing doesn’t make it into the final wording; however, it is always important to honor the trigger and notice the emotional occasions that prompt the writing.

Michelle emailed back:

I’m very open to revision suggestions, and as I stated before, I liked the ones you offered. The revised piece, (prose poem? lyric essay?) needed a new title, but I wasn’t sure what to rename it. So, I reread your exercise, my original essay, and your suggested changes. Then I free wrote to music for about twenty minutes (Steven Halpern’s “Gifts of the Angels,” it was a blind choice. I usually use his Creativity CD).

A title still eluded me. Hoping for inspiration, gazing around my office, my glance fell on a book, The Secret Language of Symbols, A Visual Key to Symbols and Their Meanings by David Fontana. Curious, I started looking up the images in my essay and this is what I discovered in my writing: unconscious symbols. (I also looked in The Encyclopedia of Symbolism by Kevin J. Todeschi.)

A fish is a symbol of prophecy and inspiration. It’s masculine. It represents life in the depths. In Buddhism, it symbolizes freedom from restraints of desire and attachment. It is a symbol of faith and spirituality, a secret sign used by early Christians to denote their belief in Jesus.

A boat is the soul’s journey, a spiritual voyage or experience, the journey into afterlife. Water is symbolic of understanding or wisdom, embodiment of spirituality or spiritual wisdom. Life journeys. A lake is associated with peace and tranquility, a spiritual reservoir or source.

Blue is associated with spiritual truth or insight. Gray is associated with the mysterious or the emotional. Pink is higher love. A pill is that which is unpleasant but must be swallowed. Oars take part in a spiritual experience.
A spider stands for the great mother or death. A door can symbolize an opportunity or transition to a new state of being such as sleep or death. A fishing pole is associated with desire to increase one’s faith.

Now will anyone else read all that into my writing? I don’t know. It just happened. But, isn’t it funny how intuition works, the symbols we instinctively arrive at—answers found in pictures (images) pictures found through words? I wouldn’t classify myself as religious, but doesn’t the topic I was exploring, life after death, seem to be addressed in some emotionally satisfying way?

I still am not sure what to do. If I keep the piece intact, I would keep the original title, “The Sleeping Prophet,” based on what I discovered. If I bring it down to that one moment as you suggested, then I thought maybe the title “Memory Reel” might work. It would play with the word real and reel. It would also reflect a kind of cinematic looking back. Or is that too clever? (My last creative writing professor abhorred clever.) How does a writer decide? I’d like your thoughts.

“No ideas but in things,” the poet William Carlos Williams quipped to sum up his poetic method. Michelle’s research on the symbolic level of her images seems to demonstrate this notion. It is not at all surprising that when she wrote about her father’s death, the images that spoke best were ones that also carry particular emotional and spiritual meaning. That’s what the lyric in writing does; as writers we can count on it, and when we are writing and revising well, we will intuitively feel this aspect of writing at work and allow it to help us sing. Michelle’s research on symbols is reassuring. It tells us that if we allow ourselves to flow with our subject, the unconscious will help us bring to the page exactly what we need to learn more deeply about our experience.

After reading what Michelle wrote about her images, I re-read my edits. Suddenly, informed by her words, I had an idea for a phrase she could use for a title. I felt that I’d found that one line from inside the piece that encompasses the emotions and what the essay’s meditation leads to. As much as I could do with a title like, “At My Father’s Bedside After His Stroke,” or “At Tanglewood Nursing Home,” my heart felt close to this: “When You Open Your Eyes, I See the Blue-Grey Storm in You.” That line immediately puts me close to both the speaker and her subject. It makes me want to move on into the speaker’s experience to find the rest of what her words provide.

When I suggested this title, Michelle wrote back to me:
I really like your suggestions, especially the line, “In your breathing, I hear the sound of a cast line’s whistle.” I agree that the new title, “When You Open Your Eyes, I See the Blue-Gray Storm in You,” works very well. These suggestions make the piece.

 I, too, am excited and pleased with how it turned out and I’d like to submit this to a print journal. I’ll let you know if I have any success.

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I think Michelle will definitely find a print home for her wonderful piece of writing.

If we pay attention to the work our images do, we can shape writing to gain insight and communicate what we have learned.