I want to thank everyone for sharing their stories about how their childhood ambitions took them down the road they're now on. The reason I asked is that I am taking an online scrapping class with Shimelle Laine. Rosemary, who is a guest artist for this class, always had such cool books that she had made after a class with Shimelle, I thought I should try it. This class is called "When I Grow Up," and we're doing a book about what we wanted to be when we grew up. And I wanted to be all sorts of things: a princess (my real parents were going to rescue me--although I had a very nice home life), a baseball player (MLB), art teacher, pilot, doctor, mother (of eight, which now I think is fucking insane, but I also planned to marry rich which I didn't manage), marine biologist, international economist (in Russia!), geologist, literary agent, lawyer, book editor, and English professor. Now I'm a writer, although I did get pretty far on the last three. Anyway, hearing what others had to say was supposed to jar some memories. And it did--in another forum someone mentioned wanting to be Miss America. I used to imagine the speech I would give when I won--usually an Oscar, but also the Miss America crown...And now, I write speeches as part of my job, but not for anything very glamorous.It's funny because really these projects just start with writing prompts. And, hell, I was a writing teacher for 8 years, I know my way around a writing prompt. But I never make prompts for scrapbooks. Instead I look at the pile of pictures I have to scrap, quiver a bit, and walk past them without picking them up. (Please, let's not even mention the book I started for best pal and haven't finished because I'm confused about dates.) What's a little funnier is that I don't even have photos for this book, so it's really going to be a journal. But in the end, I'll be one step closer to having pictures in albums--psychologically if not in any sense of the word "really."
3 comments:
Isn't it funny how prompts (writing prompts or even memories of others) can bring this stuff back so easily. Rosemary thoroughly inspires me too! Glad to see you taking part in this workshop.
Anna-I do a lot of writing practice-thanks to Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind. It's amazing what triggers memories and how a word can bring up one kind of memory for one person and a totally different one for another person. I had so many dreams when I was a kid, I wanted to write songs with Jackson Browne and save the world from itself, I wanted to be a singer(can't carry a tune), I wanted to go to Paris and marry a poet and spend all my time in cafes like Hemingway writing the great American novel and I wanted to be Zelda Fitzgerald and know deep true love like Elizabeth Barret Browning.
Oh I forgot to mention that yesterday was spent helping the youngest son with his writing/social studies project which was the Journey of His Life, we went through my Rubbermaid tote full of pictures and he wrote world events for every year of his life and two things he did during each year. Lots of fun. I hope we get it back. It's kind of his first scrapbook even if it was for a grade.
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