?My guest blogger this month is Ed Griffin, who teaches creative writing at Matsqui Prison, a medium-security prison in Canada. Ed has just released his new eboook ? a novel entitled Prisoners of the Williwaw ? on Amazon. Over to you, Ed.
? 
In the 1980s, my wife and I owned a mom and pop commercial greenhouse. Our business was prospering, but something was wrong. My life was planting seeds, growing tiny plants and selling vegetables and garden plants in the spring. I was becoming what I grew ? a cabbage, or maybe a petunia. My mind was dying and I knew it.
????????? I started playing around with writing. After supper every night I would go out to my ?office,? a little added-on room between our house and the garage. It had windows to the front and back and a space heater that was adequate for spring and fall, but not winter. I would sit down at the typewriter and follow my creative muse.
????????? Whole worlds opened to me. I wrote about the area behind my childhood garage where I practiced pitching, and dreamed of reaching the major leagues. I wrote a short story about a group of prisoners on an island. I wrote a poem about getting along with the Russians. Hours passed. Suddenly, as I wrote, an alarm would sometimes ring in the house. The alarm meant I hadn?t turned the heat on in the greenhouses. I had to shut the door on the vibrant world that grew on the paper in front of me and hurry to the greenhouses to start the furnaces.
????????? An hour later I?d be back at the typewriter. Type a sentence, stop, look at it, realize it wasn?t quite true and then search deeper. Layers of middle-aged half-truths disappeared, the comfortable maxims I had surrounded myself with ? ?Business is good. Don?t make any changes,? and ?Relax. You?re getting older.? The fires of my youth burned again ? civil rights, world peace, a place in the sun for every person. The idealism that had lain dormant for eight years sparked back into life.
????????? Isaiah was on the scene again, reminding me of the words I read in the seminary and tried to live when I was a priest:
????????? I have appointed you to open the eyes of the blind, to free captives from prison and those who live in darkness from the dungeon. [Chapter 42-6]
????????? As I wrote I dug, I searched always deeper, trying to reach the truth. It might be easy to speak a lie, but it wasn?t easy to write one. I started to unravel the tangled skein that was me. These revelations came, not from writing philosophy or self-help dictums, but from writing fiction. Put a man and a woman in a fictional situation. What does the woman really think? What does the man think? Is this real? Is this how people are? Where do I get my ideas? What is human nature all about? Who am I?
????????? For example, as I wrote about the prisoners on the island, I got to know each one of them. How did they get into crime? Why were they different than me? Did they have a religious education as I did? What did they think about God? Was God a mean father for them or a gentle parent? What did I think about God?
???????? Amazing. The seminary had tried for twelve years to teach me how to meditate, and here I was doing it while I wrote.
http://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-of-the-Williwaw-ebook/dp/B005S33Q7S/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1342834442&sr=1-1&keywords=prisoners+of+the+williwaw
Source: http://danielledevalera.wordpress.com/2012/07/28/another-writers-journey-ed-griffin/
bonjovi bonjovi antonio brown martial law is jon bon jovi dead jon bon jovi jon bon jovi
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.