Writing – The Craft of

An Occasional Story of Snow

/ Lisa / 6 Comments

A friend was recently talking to me about taking their child sledding and it brought back a memory I want to share.

We have the coolest sledding spot around. We drag sleds partway up a gated logging road, to a place where it’s steep enough for speed, has some corners, and shallow ditches for crashing into brush. There’s no traffic and few people because most don’t want to go to the effort of hauling everything way up there.

But the trade-off is a spot in winter woods where you can shout and slush through snow and fly fast under the trees.

One winter my friend and I were up there with a bunch of kids. Her husband waited at the bottom of the road. He had a fire going, with hot dogs and snacks. When it started getting dark and all the hot chocolate was gone, most of the kids quit sledding and headed down to the fire.

My friend and I weren’t ready to go yet, and neither were her daughter and my son. We put the two on our sleds and hauled them up the logging road, hiking into the winter twilight. It was that deep quiet that falls under trees in snow. Just the sounds of the sleds, our breathing (some huffing and puffing as the road gets steep), cracking of branches off in the woods, and the sounds of sluggish cold water in the stream.

We hiked high in the woods until it was dark and then my friend and I sat on the sleds with the two kids, and sledded our way back out to the fire and laughter, taking our time. We wanted to prolong the magic of the winter forest as long as possible.

Those moments when we were pulling the kids behind us were beautiful. The still woods, the sense of life hibernating, the deepness of winter, and that shadowy light under the trees when it’s near dark, all made me feel as if I’d stepped into sanctuary.

I treasure that memory.

I tried to post a video of sledding in that area, but couldn’t get it to work. Instead I’ll just pop in a photo.

For a good winter book, try The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey.

Kids and the wolfhound

Kids and the wolfhound

The Ghost of a Story

/ Lisa / 10 Comments

A friend of mine is a songwriter and in a band. We’ve talked a lot about the craft of writing, comparing lyrics to novels. He was a bit startled at the similarities; the inner demand of a story that won’t leave you alone until you release it to paper. Or, in his case, to music. He hadn’t thought about how the story doesn’t care if you share it in a poem, an essay, a novel, or a small piece of bluegrass.

There is an old abandoned hotel from the 1800s that is supposedly haunted by a young woman whose husband was killed in a mine explosion. When she learned of his death, the story says she hung herself. People swear they have heard her, have seen doors open and shut, and so forth. But this isn’t about the hotel or a scary ghost.

My friend was a bit haunted by this story. He wrote a song about the young woman, and what haunted him was not her death (real or apocryphal) but the need to release the song. When I say ‘release’ I don’t mean ‘publish’. He felt an overwhelming urge to sing the song in the old hotel. He wanted her to hear the lyrics.

We talked a lot about the reasons why we feel the urge to capture lives and emotions and all the myriad details that float around and coalesce into stories. We talked about how some things resonate so strongly that you just know there’s a reason you have to create that piece and bring it to life.

Yet this hotel was falling in, sagging with years of standing alone in mountain weather. It wasn’t exactly a safe place to enter. My friend also didn’t think it was a place this young woman’s spirit should be. He wanted to sing her to release, to tell her it was okay to move on, that there were better places out there. So he braved the creaky old building, braved his nervousness, and braved that spirit of the past. He went into the building with his mandolin and sang to a young woman who may never have existed, but who needed to hear a story.

Today he told me that he wasn’t sure he could do it alone. He obviously was able to, but he said that he thought about all the local people he knew and decided if he couldn’t make it, I was the one person he felt he could call, who would go into the building with him.

Not because I believe in ghosts, but because I believe in stories and understand the need to share them.

I think that’s one of the best compliments I’ve received in a very long time.

It doesn’t matter how we tell our stories, whether to an audience, a publisher, a multitude of readers, or a solitary ghost. Or even just to ourselves. What matters is that we listen when something inside urges us to speak. Or sing. Or write. Or paint. You never know who is nearby that needs to hear.