early friendship and sensory detail
From Joanna: As we age, many of us begin to realize the particular vividness and magic of our adolescent friendships. (For an eerie take on the possible intensity of such friendships, watch the 1994 Peter Jackson movie Heavenly Creatures with a very young Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey.) Amy Gerstler’s poem “Poof” captures that enchantment and intensity, within the frame of a narrative about coming to terms with a friend’s death. So here’s the exercise:
Set a timer for ten minutes and jot down three resonant scenes that involve friendship(s) in your youth. Now look at them and circle the one you’re most drawn to return to. Write about that scene until your timer goes off, providing as many sensory details—of as many different kinds—as you can. (How many senses can you get in there?)
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The scene that came to mind for me was about driving around in Jennifer’s parents’ car in Chicago with Anna and Kari and putting on the magic eyeliner. We knew that when we used that specific eyeliner pencil, we’d have an interesting interaction with a boy that evening. And what did we want from those interactions? We wanted to be seen. We wanted to feel like we had some power or agency over our lives— that we were desirable, yes, but also that our desire was reciprocated. I guess we wanted to be witches. The eyeliner was a spell, one that went with listening to “I Need You Tonight” by INXS or whatever industrial music Jennifer was listening to and driving around the same block two or three times to see which boys with mohawks were standing outside the Dunkin’ Donuts. But really the spell came from being together, from the atmosphere in the car and how we delighted in each other and in being outside our usual spheres of home and school. The spell had already come true, in the sense that the people our age who really saw us were each other.
Joanna’s upcoming workshops:
Thirty Days of Flash Memoir through writers.com
When Play Is Resistance, an online generative writing workshop on pleasure, play, and the right to claim our narratives.
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