the old it was a dark and stormy night line

at the newspaper meeting last friday (before halloween), dressed in costumes, i had the kids use their stormy creativity on the old "it was a dark and stormy night..." line, taking it places it had never been... 


DO something with it, i told them, like, something, different, from a noise scratching at the window etc... i knew they were capable (and frankly, they knew it too.)


the next hour and a half that followed was full of poems, dark 'n stormy stories, haiku, photo shoots, and an abundance of pleading moments: can i pleeeeaaaase read you what i just wrote?? can i read this out loud? can i share just one more?!!! 


... somehow, a few quiet gems were left unseen, tucked in the stack of pages to photocopy. it wasn't until later when i was making copies that i found this one amongst the others in the stack, written by my dearest abby. and standing there in the bright and empty copy room... i read abby's dark 'n stormy adaptation.

It was a dark and Stormy night .........

a young couple danced 

under the dim light of the moon as 

it was snowing. 

The Christmas Spirit 

was just around the corner, 

but not one Christmas tree was up.

10/29/10 by abby

all alone with a huge grin, i shook my head at the page saying, ABBY! abby abby abby you got it-- this is-- that's it abby, i knew, you knew... exactly. abby!! this is why, this is exactly, kind of-- the thing i'd-- 

dark 'n stormy barbie 

(writing talent sold separately) 

•••

photos and content by chantal (and abby) 

from the cover of the big BURSTING issue....

just another comic from the 12-page newspaper the kids and i published yesterday... wow this one took a long time to put together by hand, i was up for days, but totally worth it. more on this later... as we're now in the midst of a special edition for this thursday..... let's just say it's a hilarious work of pure newspaper fiction, and we wrote the entire thing in three hours yesterday, i've never seen anything like it, it was the most hard-working, entertaining and dedicated group of 9, 10, 11 year old newspaperists (and abby of course) that i could have ever asked for. now it's up to me to get the madness in order for thursday. 

comical stuff to come. x c

[photo by me, of course, of the front cover]

BAM! x 5

yesterday one of my beloved writing students abby brought poetry homework (oooh, a struggle for us) to our session. her assignment was to write cinquain poems, so we persuaded her 4th-grade sister pyper that if she learned this poetic art form now, then she could easily pass 7th grade, and we started counting syllables into a new and different (for us haiku natives) formation. according to abby cinquain poems are 5 lines (cinq) built with: 2 syllables, then 4, 6, 8, then 2. i didn't get a chance to copy her poems down before she ran off to music lessons.

pyper, hesitant at first about counting so many syllables, ended up staying with me an extra hour and we had a fantastic time breaking the nature rules (oh ya, also according to abby these poems are supposed to be about nature... **unless you're an action-packed little girl named pyper) so pyper and i broke the rules of nature creating action haiku, uh, sorry i'm so accustomed to typing that word, i mean, action cinquain, which included such elements as a sequance of the word BAM! "exactly 5 times" and even an extra syllable at the end, breaking the rules one BAM! at a time.

BAM!
  

BAM!BAM!

   
BAM!    BAM!
her action cinquain will be featured in our 3rd issue of the newspaper that i've created for the school. issue 3 is based around FLASH! stories, poetry and comics. and somewhere in there, in the middle of pyper's whether report (yes, spelled whether) she will suddenly break into it with, "--FLASH!-- insert poem here" and there you will find the action cinquain. i will consider posting it here before we get the next newspaper issue out. because, well, i do realize that this blog and that newspaper have entirely different audiences... ;)

now that i've totally made it impossible for anyone, especially myself, to follow with a cinquain even half as exciting as miss pyper's action-packed-5-BAM!er, here's one i wrote at breakfast today.... and now that abby's taught us about this new pile-up of syllables i think we'll be seeing more of them in the future, though i can't promise we'll be sticking to the rules, naturally, so i'll throw in a BAM! at the end just to wake you up.


window
closed to outside
garden only think we
know what breeze trapped in metal screens
whispers



BAM! (as promised)

 

x c

more photos on my flickr

[photos : by c]

any time you need a smile just look at this photograph : and have a good weekend

then—
her laughter
shattered my silence—
a faint light
flickered in darkness
as pieces of her laughter
fell—
sparkled
--reflected
danced—
touched me
--gently
let them fall
laughter
and her eyes big
–gleamed with
something else to
tell me on another day
as her nose scrunched
and the corners of her mouth
could no longer contain
her laughter

(for abby)


 photos : by c
(for more visit my ever-growing fickr)

bon week-end x c

ashes and wine

been a bit ailleurs this week {ie somewhere else} was literally supposed to be in santa barbara visiting my sister... and then the jesusita fire started, and everything got...smokey, so to speak. so i didn't go to santa barbara and instead kept my eye on the fire, the evacuations, the devastatingly captivating images of the fire in the mountains and streets of a place i'd once known as home. beautiful and nostalgic images in my mind of my years spent in the gorgeous town of santa barbara were dominated, more than anything, by my constant concern for my sister's safety. and i twittered a lot. and i don't mean anxious chatter or jittery fidgeting {though restlessness abounded} but i mean literally twittered about the fire, read constant updates on twitter, and got way too much information for my overly active imagination that proceeded to run away from me.

anyway, during the worst night of the fire, sometime well after midnight as they were still evacuating people, i needed distraction but couldn't look away long enough to find one. and my dad, lost for any way to really help me calm down, said in a serious-bordering-on-exasperated tone "why don't you, just, write some poems or something." alas it's not easy for an engineer integrated circuit designer dad to have an overly creative, imaginative, emotional, sensitive {etc..} daughter, but he tried. and in fact, about a half an hour later i found myself absorbed in turning the verbose, redundant thoughts that were overwhelming my mind at a furious rate, into simple, sleek, perfectly shaped haiku poems.

if you haven't noticed, i've been a bit obsessed with haiku lately. it all started just with me attempting to find a fun form of poetry to work on with one of the girls i tutor {hi olivia ;)} and then i got kind of hooked.... because the challenge of streamlining my thoughts into seventeen syllables became fascinating, and rewarding. and helped to clarify, and speak louder than i'd anticipated, and set these thoughts to a new rhythm. then i worked on haiku with another one of my students {hi abby :)} and we were all hooked. at times the rhythm lulls me into..something...somewhere else...

and especially on this fiery night, it soothed my fears a bit. and took me away. i posted the haiku on twitter each time i wrote a new one, one after another, hoping that anyone else who was worried about the fire, might too, find some element {other than fire :)} of comfort in the brief words. and how gratifying to hear from readers that in fact, they did.

here are some of the poems i wrote during those tense days in the beginning of the jesusita fire in santa barbara, and a few of the spectacularly calamitous images of the fire. the flames were all along and above the 101 freeway, and my sister said that while driving on the freeway beside the fire, it was hard to look away {though dangerous, as she was driving} from the dramatic view.

and all along, the song ashes and wine by a fine frenzy has been playing in my head... {santa barbara is known for its vineyards} and in fact, funnily enough, it's playing on my sterio as i type this. 'don't know if our fate's already sealed. this day's a spinning circus on a wheel ... there is nothing left to say but is there a chance, a fragment of light at the end of the tunnel, a reason to fight? is there a chance you may change your mind? or are we ashes and wine. the day's still ashes and wine, or are we ashes..'

it's the not knowing
and knowing what you know won't
stop fire from burning

a sky so dark, thick
air, smoke hard to remember
yesterday's calm blues

we sit and wait, i'm
here on twitter while she's there,
watching fire and news

it's the little things
you want to hold on to when
it's time to let go





she sees fire light the
mountains, sky, smoke in her eyes
close mine, i see her





ash falls from the sky
gentle like snow nothing's as
it seemed anymore




you don't feel until
it touches you, don't see 'til
you look in their eyes



images via latimes and noozhawk

write now..

i'm sitting in the cafe where i meet the girls who i tutor in writing. both of the girls i worked with today never fail to inspire me in numerous yet different ways. first i worked with olivia who i somehow managed to persuade into agreeing with me that haiku was not boring "but i hate haiku" but actually fun..or at least it is when you sit on a couch in a cafe and write it with me... {will post some of our haiku next.} *O* as we call her by pen name, literally gets bursts of instantaneous inspiration. today she blurts out in the middle of our haiku fest "hang on i have an idea for a poem i need a piece of paper quick!" waits impatiently as i tear out a piece of paper for her and search for a pen, and within 2 minutes, had scribbled down a poem. she's done this in the past, written impulse poems of revelation, but this one blew me away:

the one you love

the one you love
could be right
around the corner

the one you love
could be right
across the street

the one you love
could be right
at your feet

when you find them
you may feel
complete

by,
*O*

{written in approximately 2.5 minutes}

i quickly and curiously looked around the room and finally ask her who.. i mean.. what inspired this?! she said it was something going on at school, and i was relieved as i hadn't spotted anyone in the cafe deserving of such a tribute..and ya, and she's in 5th grade. see more of olivia's writing here.

then there's abby, i see reflections of myself in her quietly persistent imagination. among many other things, abby is writing a series called pink princess {see here} this girl (abby) is so clever, her story is not simply about a princess who likes the color pink. in fact, she calls it a tale of sadness, because it's about a princess whose mother had an allergic reaction to pink lemonade when she was pregnant with her, and the unfortunate baby is born with pink skin. abby was sitting in the corner table of the café, writing away as i was working with olivia. she told me later that she doesn't know what's going to happen next in the story, it's the characters who live it out in her mind for her. i told her many brilliant fiction writers would say the same thing. abby's in 6th grade.

anyway, got interrupted with this post when my fav mexican bff sergio walked in the cafe {aka my office} to save the day and say hi, but i will have a haiku post soon!!!