Recently I attended a workshop sponsored by the Galena (Illinois) LitFest, entitled, “That’s Your Story, You’re Stuck With It.” This workshop, instructed by Katherine Fischer, Emerita Clark College (that means she was previously a professor at Clark College, and still holds her title— kinda like US presidents do after their term in office; but I digress…) went fast. Super fast. Too fast. I had a lot of fun getting the creative writing juices flowing. Here’s how it went:
Since our stories begin at home, that’s where we started too. Our first prompt was to write about our childhood/hometown/neighborhood, also any people or events that stuck out in our minds. We were instructed to write non-stop for 20 minutes. We were given the freedom to either make lists, free write in fragments of memories, or draft a complete story. I did all three in that 20 minute period because I couldn’t seem to stick with one style for that length of time when I had so many memories flying through my head!
My memoir writing started like this:
“Good ol’ East Lawn Acres. East L.A. in Fort Dodge, Iowa. Blacktop and gravel. Yards consisting of various weeds, more plentiful than actual grasses, were mowed weekly to resemble an expanse of green lawn…” – This is a rough draft. Very first thoughts. Not organized, no firm goal or ending point in mind. This is how most writing begins. It’s messy work.
After the 20 minute writing period,we were instructed to circle anything we’d written that surprised us. This would be the kick-off to our second prompt. With that we were instructed to take a circled item and turn it into a written work using complete sentences. I circled, among other things, the coming of K-Mart to my community.
This is what I wrote based off that idea.
Cornfields and K-Mart
A cornfield grew at the end of the dead-end road just to the south of our house. In fact, our little neighborhood, on the very eastern edge of town, was surrounded on three sides by cornfield. Beyond the cornfields to the east and south were gypsum mines. Four-ish blocks to the north, across Highway 20, you guessed; more cornfields! To the west, our neighborhood was separated from the rest of the town by railroad yards. We were an island.
Then one day, an incredible change began. The cornfield across Highway 20 was scraped away. A stoplight was installed at the T- intersection of our blacktop road and Highway 20. A large cement parking lot was paved and Kmart, in all its early 1970’s glory sprung up from the black earth.
My sister and I were delighted, elated, enchanted even. Lights and action and people and products were so close to our boring ‘ol neighborhood. Why, we could almost see the neon red K from our front step! We, at twelve and thirteen years old had found our freedom, our style, and our consumer savvy at the Kmart just a short walk up the road!
We shopped for albums, like Elvis’s Blue Hawaii, which was brilliantly blue, not black like all other albums. And single records, forty-fives they were called, like Chakka Khan’s Tell Me Something Good. We bought robin’s egg blue eye shadow and black mascara and listened for announcements of Blue Light Specials. (I could write so much more about being a teeny-bopper at Kmart, but this story is about cornfields, too.)
Fast forward thirteen years. I’m a young wife and mother of a newborn, moving from my hometown in northwest Iowa to the exotic Quad Cities in southeast Iowa. I drove my car with our newborn son asleep in his infant seat, following my husband in his pick-up with our dog. After four and a half hours of driving, we took the Davenport exit from I-80. I was happy to finally be off the road and in our new town, the place we raise our children and make our home.
Then, still following my husband, in one left turn we were suddenly out in the country again flying down a blacktop road, between rows and rows of cornfield. I was not happy. What was my husband thinking? I’d always said that I needed to live within the glow of the Kmart sign. It was my way of saying I needed to live in a town with easy access to amenities. The rural life was not for me. He knew this.
After ten miles of me fretting and fuming about living outside the city I spied a water tower in the distance. Civilization! Hurray!
Lots of time has passed since then, and if you’ve been to the Iowa Quad Cities, 53rd Street and Elmore Avenue in particular, you know that it is a mecca of commerce for the whole region. Target, Walmart, Staples, Steak & Shake, Village Inn, gas stations, banks, and all the rest take up that ten-mile stretch that was once green and gold.
Kmart is gone. So are the cornfields. The irony of it all is this: Kmart succumbed to brand failure and cornfields to urban sprawl. Both spawn of Consumerism.
Suddenly, the lights, action, people and products don’t seem so important to me anymore.
~
Well, that definitely is a piece of my story. I bet you have a similar one. We all have stories, we just have to embrace who we are and where we came from in order to find them. Time waits for no man. Change is inevitable. For me, that’s all the more reason to get my story on paper.
Until next time,
Be good to yourself.
~Nadine
Nadine M. Roth 