On, In, and Around Mondays: Writing with Luci Shaw

I open my computer today and notice Friday’s red umbrella. It belongs to Luci Shaw.

I have Luci's umbrella, because I have her picture. I have her picture because I used it to create a background for her new Twitter account. She has a new Twitter account, because on Thursday she will be coming to a Twitter poetry party.

Just yesterday I listened to someone deride Twitter. There are those, I suppose, who make it something to deride. But even with talk of heavy rain or indigestion or lost keys, I believe that Twitter is a red umbrella— a tiny space in which to work, to express oneself on the way, to move through crowds in the crimson shadow of words.

Once I took a writing seminar with Kay Marshall Strom. The thing I remember most was her assertion that the good writer benefits from writing small. "Limit yourself to a few sentences," she said. That feels to me like red-umbrella talk.

If you are going to say something of worth in a few words, you will be forced to concentrate more carefully on details. If you don't concentrate on details, it will seem you have said nothing at all, except perhaps heavy rain, or indigestion, or lost keys. Details make the rain like needles or like a sky of white nectar. Details make the indigestion burn the esophagus, like an old woman with a kerosene lamp, winding her way back to the sea. Details remember that the keys were on the counter at the bakery, just when you were choosing to splurge on a chocolate-filled croissant.

On Friday, over the phone and online, a friend and I helped Luci open her red umbrella on Twitter. We wrote about fishermen and red bobbers, casting lines and car hats. She laughed and played and saw the possibilities. She found her keys.


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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

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This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...