Once again I find myself catching up on posts (I’m writing this on December 3). I’ve been working hard on polishing some of these shorties to submit to a chapbook contest—yeehaw! Wish me luck. In the meantime, my third postcard, which inspired my November 29 shortie, is one showing two pages from a scrapbook Isabella Gardner made to document a trip to Japan. Pictured here is one of the pages shown on the postcard (photo credit below). I’m slightly embarrassed to say that my plodding brain produced a story about… a scrapbooker. But what can you do. Next!
Working Title: Saving Memory
1st Sentence: In her hands she cradles the wrapper from the Snicker’s bar she just bolted.
Favorite Sentence: At night sometimes she lies in bed rigid with failure as frail mental-memory cycles through all the things she should have scrapbooked.
Word Length: 1,116
Photo of a page from Isabella Stewart Gardner’s scrapbook of her visit to Japan in 1883.
It is my humble opinion that the world needs more stories about scrapbookers. It is a quite amazing hobby that allows women (mostly, men are allowed and encouraged but they seem to like to make more noise and have bigger tools for their hobbies, craft, and art) to reflect on their lives and rewrite history if need be. Fascinating hobby, wide variety of people, and the scrapbooks vary from the mundane and pedestrian to works of art.
I love your insight about rewriting history. I tried to work something like that into the story but it didn’t really work. When I revise I’ll see if I can’t bring that across better. I have a friend in Raleigh is a scrapbook Artiste for sure.