Humainologie creative dialogue and story writing workshop Tuesday September 13

"This is the practice school of writing. Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it. Some days you don’t want to run and you resist every step of the three miles, but you do it anyway.  You practice whether you want to or not.  You don’t wait around for inspiration and a deep desire to run.  It’ll never happen, especially if you are out of shape and have been avoiding it.  But if you run regularly, you train your mind to cut through or ignore your resistance.  You just do it.  And in the middle of the run, you love it.  When you come to the end, you never want to stop.  And you stop, hungry for the next time.  That’s how writing is, too. “  - Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones:  Freeing the Writer Within   Zoe will facilitate our next story-writing workshop on TUESDAY September 13.  I’ll send details of time and place a little closer to the event. The Humainologie Story Writing Festival has been announced.  The word limit is 1,500 words, and the deadline for submitting your story is October 2.  http://www.humainologie.com/short-story-festival/  In addition to the festival itself, we’ll have a poetry and story reading night at Folk Tree Lodge on Saturday November 19.  You can read a story or a poem you have written or one by a favorite author. A good strategy for improving your ability to write stories is to write a lot of stories and not worry about whether they are good or not.  I have recently embarked on a new quest: to write 52 short stories in the next 52 weeks.  I’ll append one I finished today, just to give you an idea.  It’s less than 1,200 words, so it’s well within the word limit for the Humainologie Story Writing Festival. By writing stories, you empower your imagination, and imagination is essential to everything in life.   "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."--Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing    Just imagine! Arthur                         Table of Missing Persons   After 23 years of a remarkably happy marriage, Gregory Dukeshire apologized to his wife for taking a leave of absence. He asked a colleague at Dukeshire Real Estate to tell his associates he’d gone missing.  Then he went in search of a lost time in his life.  Perhaps he felt a depression coming on and… Greg:  I wouldn’t call it a depression.   I’d call it a midlife crisis.  I felt stuck.  I had to move.  And yes, I did remember that year in Paris when I was 22.  But I wouldn’t say I was trying to find that.  I was just trying to find myself again.  I was trying to find freedom.  When he walked into the High Five and Dine on this particular Friday, it was already well into the evening and most of the tables were taken.  The original owner of the High Five and Dine Café had been a lapsed Catholic who’d become fascinated with the circle dance.  The tables had been arranged like donuts, so you were dining in circles, and there was a large open space where there would be a circle dance every Friday night, and he had called it the Circle Dance Café.  That was a long time ago.  The new owner, Roman, had re-named it the High Five and Dine.  The open space had been filled with tables of a more conventional shape and arrangement.  There were still some of the older tables around the periphery and, truth to tell, they were the tables that to this day would always fill up first.  The history of the circle dancing was forgotten, but somehow the minds of the customers called it back.  Hours before Greg walked in, Dillon had taken a seat at one of the original tables. Roman had said “Hello,” but Dillon, lost in thought about the book he was reading and a little hard of hearing, had not answered.  Roman knew Dillon well and took no offense.  He brought tableware and a glass of water to the table.  Dillon was already reading his book. Dillon:  It was a book about rebuilding democracy.  We’re supposed to have a democracy, but there’s nobody paying attention.  How do we get people to pay attention?  Hello!  We’re doing democracy here.  Would anyone like to join us? Roman:  Dillon is one of my best customers. Whenever Annie walked into a place where a few young men had been sitting deep in conversation for a while, they would stop talking and just watch her walk, their imaginations running off in as many directions as there were young men at the table.  It was predictable.  By the time she walked into the premises on this particular Friday evening, they had, and they did. Annie did not notice them, or if she did, she just smiled and waved.  She went to the counter and asked for an iced tea to stay.   She would look at the menu, she said.  As she was waiting for the iced tea, she happened to notice a middle-aged man sitting at one of the circular tables, apparently lost in reading a book.  Carrying the iced tea and the menu, she walked toward Dillon.  “Can I sit here?” she asked.  Dillon did not immediately respond, so she spoke louder, and he looked up and smiled and said, “Yes, of course,” and returned to his book. She looked at the menu.  She decided on the prawns, and the waiter, Dakota, took her order. “That must be a good book,” she said to Dillon, making sure she spoke loudly enough for him to hear.  She was wearing a low-cut dress, and she leaned forward enough that he might notice if he looked up, and he did, and he did notice; but he seemed more interested in her question than in her breasts.  Dakota brought the prawns.  Annie took a sip of her iced tea.  Dillon said, “Yes, it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.” “Is it a novel?” Annie asked. “No, it’s about how we can re-invent democracy,” Dillon said.  “Oh.”  Annie suddenly wished she were somewhere else. Annie:  I was just looking for a man who is interesting by himself but interested in me when he’s with me.  Middle age is where I should be able to find him.  Is that too much to ask? Dakota:  I think we need to start the circle dancing again as soon as possible.  I’ll talk with Roman.  We could try it out next Friday.  Most of the tables were taken, but Greg noticed one in the corner, in a donut-shaped table arrangement, with just a man reading a book and the waiter standing beside the table, talking with a young woman who was wearing a low-cut dress.   Greg scanned the Five and Dine once more, but this really was the only place where he could sit more or less quietly and just watch people for a while.  He’d already eaten but asked for a menu anyway when he’d taken a seat.  Dakota immediately went for the menu. Annie looked at Greg. “Hi,” she smiled. “Hi,” Greg said, and Annie noticed right away his self-sufficiency.  “What’s your friend reading?” “I think it’s a novel, but it’s not my genre,” Annie said.  “How’s the book?” Greg asked Dillon. Greg’s voice had its own stentorian quality, and Dillon looked up and smiled and said “Great” and went back to reading.  Annie went to the washroom.  Dakota brought a menu and handed it to Greg and asked if he could bring him anything and Greg said he’d like a glass of white wine and a bit of their best bread.  He looked at the wine list.  “This one,” he said, pointing to an Australian chardonnay.  “We have a very nice baguette, made fresh today,” Dakota suggested, and Greg was happy with that. “Wonderful.  And a bowl of this soup too, yes, just a small bowl please.” “Good choice,” Dakota said, and left Greg sitting with Dillon, who seemed interested in his book, so Greg began watching what was happening at the tables near him. Annie never returned to the table.  Greg had his soup and his chardonnay and a six-inch piece of baguette and watched people and sometimes thought about his year in Paris when he was 22.  Roman said he was willing to give the circle dancing a try.  Dakota brought twenty of his friends from the nearby reserve the following Friday.  They did a magnificent circle dance, and it became a popular entertainment, but the non-Indigenous customers only wanted to watch.  Roman found it a little harder to balance the books after the circle dancing was re-introduced.  He had to reconsider.  The last circle dance at the Five and Dine took place just a year after the first one that Dakota had arranged.  Four months earlier, Greg had returned home to his wife.    The week after that last circle dance, Dillon began reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Annie married a wealthy middle-aged man.