Literary Safari

This is part of my ongoing series, Flex Your Writing Muscles here and here.

Every year, either on New Year’s Eve, or New Year’s Day, I sit down to write my year in review. The exercise gives me a chance to contemplate the events of the past 12 months, to look at the passage of time—my time—from a big picture point of view. Today, I thought I’d try a different approach and write one using each of the 26 letters of our alphabet.

This particular exercise was inspired by my friend Eleanor of Creative Times whose annual holiday letter was hand-written and illustrated. I will (obviously) be doing a separate one that focuses on my personal, intimate, inner life, but this particular one is you could say, focused more on my “literary professional safari of 2008.”

If you have time today or this week or this month – I’m all about extending the New Year’s spirit for all of January—maybe you’ll want to give this a whirl and then, come back here and share your experience with us. Happy New Year! Bonne Annee! Saal Mubarak!

The A to Z’s of 2008

Allowed myself to make more time to read than I’ve done in a very long time! Here’s a list of some of the the books I most enjoyed reading (and writing about in 2008 at Literary Safari, Sepia Mutiny, Kahani, and Yoga + for Joyful Living) – Animal’s People, Child of Dandelions, Climbing the Stairs, Eat, Pray, Love, Evening is the Whole Day, Home of the Brave, In Defense of Food, India in Word and Image, Love Marriage, Marrying Anita, No Onions Nor Garlic, The Aunt Also Rises, The Lost Island of Tamarind, The Toss of a Lemon, Thoreau at Walden, Unaccustomed Earth, Yoga Calm for Children.

Bid farewell to Scholastic at the end of May, and started , Literary Safari Inc., my own editorial services company.

Commissioned original fiction for a middle school reading program at Scholastic, from authors including Walter Dean Myers, Paul Fleischman, Joseph Bruchac, Gary Soto, and Mitali Perkins.

Despite my initial reluctance, grew to appreciate social networking sites like Facebook which allowed me to connect with old friends and make new ones. Twitter is still in the “out zone” however.

Entered the wordy world of wordsmith Anu Garg and wasted way too much time with Wordle, Photofunia, VSL, morgueFile, and of course, Facebook.

Got a gig writing for the New York Times Learning Network and churned out lesson plans about Twitter , digital innovations in news delivery (aka Contents and its Discontents); American Consumerism and Black Friday; Google Earth’s Rome 3D; the 2008 election results, negative campaigning in presidential politics; multitasking; Paul Krugman’s Nobel Prize, and recent research on our “approximate number sense.”

Had little time to comment on one of my favorite blogs Sepia Mutiny, BUT was stoked to start writing for it in March. I’ve been off the grid lately, but hope to do more in the spring.

Interviewed authors including Indra Sinha, Padma Viswanathan, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Nadia Aguiar, Katia Saint-Novet Lot, Cynthia Kadohata, and An Na, and learned much from them about discipline, inspiration, and craft. Now, if only, I could discipline myself!

Judged the 4th annual Kahani Young Writers & Illustrators contest where the task was to write a story with the words peacock, fever, and mountain. (more…)

This is part of an ongoing series that I recently started here, “Flex Your Writing Muscles,” (installment 1) where I take a writing prompt and work it, knead it, pound it … and see what emerges out of it.

In this case, my prompt was to begin with the words “When I was [insert age]” and to write about a memory of that age. I actually started this prompt a year ago, around Diwali, at my desk at work in between tasks. I’ve been playing with it for a while and finally made a small breakthrough today.

The Times of Diwali

Diwali in Bombay

When I was seven
We drove along Marine Drive
My face pressed
Against the grimy glass
Of the bumpy taxi
In my lap a gift-wrapped box
Of store bought jalebis
Sticky orange
Sugary sweet
Circles of delight
Topped with edible aluminum foil

(more…)

I’m re-reading Natalie Goldberg’s “Writing Down the Bones” and am going to start doing more freewrites, in addition to my morning journals. Along the way, I’ll share writing exercises and books that I especially felt strengthened my writing muscles.

In my writing group a few months ago, we did a timed writing exercise (10 minutes) that I really enjoyed: Write a story where each sentence begins with a subsequent letter of the alphabet. So, that means the first sentence starts with “A,” the second with “B,” and so on … I thought it would be impossible, but turned out that wee bit of the structure was tremendously freeing. Here’s the piece of flash fiction that I came up with. (I’ve since edited it a bit and added a few sentences so a couple of letters might be off, but you’ll get the gist of the exercise.)

“All I ever wanted was a house with a yard,” she said. “But your father bought me this monstrous mansion. Ceilings 12 feet high, eight bedrooms, and a forest in the back. Do you really think two people should be living like this? Every day is a trial–so much work, so much space, nobody here. Far, far away from everyone I know. Give me a break. Help me convince him to sell this place, no? If anyone can, it would have to be you.”

I listened to my mother pour her wishes out to me over the phone, jasmine tea in a cup next to me, a wet cloth on my forehead.

“Kumarasami Raghavan is not an easy man to talk to,” I said. “Lest you have forgotten, let me remind you of the time he bought you a Mercedes convertible just after you had given birth to me.” My lips curved into a smile as I imagined my mother, a first-time mom, trying to bundle me into a car seat in a breezy car, her sari flying.  Now here I was, a grown woman swallowing the words I didn’t have the courage to say: “Ma, he has to give you a big house to live in. There’s someone else in the chinnaveedu.” (Of course, Ma would understand what I meant right away if I used the words “small house.” The other woman.)

“Please don’t remind me of that impractical car,” Ma interrupted. “Quietly, in your own way, can’t you do something? Really, you don’t know the weight of your words, you, his only pet daughter.”

Silence streamed through the receiver. I was not going to say anything, I had sworn myself to secrecy.

“Tarini, are you there? Can you hear me?” Ma said. “Signal lost?”

True, I was his daughter. But only daughter? That was a lie. Until last year, I had believed this to be true, but I cannot pretend anymore. Vidya, my father’s other daughter, will not allow me to. Whenever I look in the mirror nowadays, I see her—my height, the same eyes—spread apart, the identical liking for evening ragas and oreo cookies.

“X marks the spot,” Dad used to say when he taught me how to play miniature golf the summer of my ninth birthday. Years later, Vidya sat next to me on an airplane and asked me to exchange seats with her. “That’s my seat,” she said, showing me her boarding card. “X marks the spot.”

Zebras do not have identical stripes. A mother zebra knows her child, a sister zebra recognizes her sibling, just as I knew then that Vidya was my little sister.

So … now, it’s your turn. Feel free to post your Alphabet Flash Fiction here or link back to it at your blog.