By Nan Lundeen

The power’s in the details whether you’re writing poetry or prose.

Carolyn Miller describes women who wore white wool sorority blazers and “white bucks with white crew socks rolled down once” in her essay, “Arts and Science,” published in The Missouri Review.

Miller gives us one enormously telling detail—that the sock was rolled down once. She manages to paint an entire milieu with that one detail. Woe to the sorority girl who rolled down her socks twice at the University of Missouri in 1959.

In her poem “Eggs,” Sharon Olds describes her daughter cracking shells, sliding three yolks into the bowl, “slit them with the whisk, beat them till they hissed.”

The power of Olds’s “Eggs” lies in the sound, hissed. The reader understands that those eggs were being thoroughly beaten!

Charles Dickens regales us with his usual brilliance as he describes a moment during Scrooge’s tour of London with the Ghost of Christmas Present. Here are food descriptions: “great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts,” and “ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions.”

Reading Dickens is like smelling and tasting Victorian London.

Eudora Welty begins her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, with a memory of the house in Jackson, Mississippi, where she was born in 1909. “We grew up to the striking of clocks,” she wrote. She describes a “mission-style oak grandfather clock” that stood in the hall and “sent its gong-like strokes” throughout the house even to the sleeping porch where “midnight could wake us up.”

Welty’s striking clocks place you in her childhood home.

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk juxtaposes details of the mundane with a dramatic moment in his novel, Snow. An exiled poet traveling as a journalist visits the town of Kars, Turkey. He is researching suicides of girls forbidden to wear head scarves and describes how a sixteen-year-old girl had eaten an evening meal with her family. She cleared the table with her sisters, “giggling and tussling,” and went to get dessert. She then went into her parent’s bedroom and “shot herself with a hunting rifle.”

Pamuk’s matter-of-fact details contrasting with the suicide not only places the reader in the scene, but feeds our curiosity just as it feeds the exiled poet’s. The scene is powerful.

Sandra Redding describes the death of a husband in her story, “Tin of Tube Rose.” A couple are sitting in their living room watching “Charlie’s Angels” when “an empty can of Budweiser came rolling right over to my foot.” When the narrator looks over at her husband Ed in his recliner, she sees him “slumped down just like all the air had been let out.”

I’m not sure what to make of Redding’s rolling beer can, perhaps like Pamuk’s writing, the juxtaposition of the mundane with the dramatic creates a memorable image. Her simile “like all the air gone out of it,” is so apt it hurts.

Have fun choosing potent details for your writing!

Nan Lundeen

The author is grateful to the SCWW’s Quill for first publishing this column.

Tap, tap, tap.

That’s the sound I associate with my mother.

Her fingers flew over the typewriter, clicking the keys with authority.

She typed letters, short and long.

This typing professor handled manuscripts and reports and minutes, always minutes.

Concentrating, with her tongue caught between her teeth,

She set the margins just right.

While she could wield an eraser with vigor, it seldom was necessary.

She typed fast, but she also typed accurately.

Those clicking keys lulled me to sleep, made me curious, inspired me to work.

Yes – my mother could click those keys.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

– Jenny Munro

by Nan Lundeen

Whether writers of poetry or prose, one challenge grins at us like the Cheshire Cat—now you see it now you don’t—the arresting first line.

What makes a line that’s memorable in the best of times and the worst of times?

Jane Austen launches Pride and Prejudice with a summary sort of line that also hints to the reader of her acerbic wit to come: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Sometimes the quirky suffices. For instance, “Bird-watching can be dog-eat-dog.” Who could resist reading that? The profile of a bird watcher extraordinaire by Karen Uhlenhuth was published in the Kansas City Star Magazine and compiled in an anthology of the best American sports writing of 1992.

I’m a huge fan of the late Robert B. Parker. Here’s his first line from Small Vices: “The last time I saw Rita Fiore she’d been an assistant DA with red hair, first-rate hips, and more attitude than an armadillo.”

A scene can entice you as in the first phrase of Maxine Kumin’s poem “Cross-Country Skiing.”

I love to be lured under the outstretched wings

of hemlocks heavily snowed upon, . . .

And what of a simple, rhythmic line demanding attention such as Longfellow’s, “Listen, my children, and you shall hear…”

On a dark and stormy night particularly, a spot of humor can reel a reader in, as in Amy Tan’s memoir that begins, “Soon after my first book was published, I found myself often confronted with the subject of my mortality.”

OK, I guess that qualifies toward a curiosity quotient, which I confess is my favorite lead into anything. Another example that rings my curiosity bell—George Orwell’s ” It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

In the Amy Tan example, humor enters with her next sentences: “I remember being asked by a young woman what I did for a living. ‘I’m an author,’ I said with proud new authority.

“‘A contemporary author?’ she wanted to know.”

Perusing first lines, I came upon one that tops my list. Holden Caulfield begins straight off with, “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

It’s the voice. And that may be the bottom line for me in exploring what makes a great first line. Whether it’s exposition or first-person or whatever, it’s voice that hooks me. I realize that here’s a writer I’d like to sit with awhile.

What’s your favorite first line?

The author is grateful to the SCWW Quill that first published this column.

She is just a little barefoot girl

Standing in the dirt.

But, oh, that cap and the flower she  clutches.

They show how much she’s loved.

This dark-haired child is growing on a tiny farm

Learning to work  the seasons through.

She helps her mother feed family and hands,

She sweeps the yard and slops the hogs and tries,

Not very successfully, to milk the cows.

Despite the farm life and the work

That little girl with the pretty dress and cap

And the mysterious gleam in her eyes

Grows up to love learning

And spends  her life teaching others to love it, too  –

Her own children and those of others.

– Jenny Munro

by Nan Lundeen

Inspiration or perspiration? Perfection or wild and free?

Thomas Edison’s quote that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration is good news for those of us who slog away day after day hoping to unearth gems of inspiration. I’d venture to guess that most poetry and prose writers know that if you want to be a writer you can’t wait for lightning to strike. No, you have to sit down and actually write.

We also know that once we’ve ridden the waves of creative juices and produced a manuscript, even more perspiration is required to edit, rewrite, and polish. But how much to edit, rewrite, and polish? When is it done? I’ve heard writers say when their books were published, they felt relieved because they could stop rewriting.

The other day, my husband I and went to a flower show. There we saw the most perfect white rose in the entire universe! No, really! It was a Mozart symphony all by itself, every petal harmonious with the others. Homogenous perfection, it stood in a glass vase bedecked by a blue ribbon.

Later that day as I remembered the perfect white rose, a wild rose memory washed over me, a childhood memory of pink wild roses tumbling down the shoulders of Iowa gravel roads, perfect in their disarray. A few details, a metaphor, and a simile gave me a poem. Then the pruning began. But not a whole lot. As much as the perfect rose stirs my heart, the wild roses stir my soul. I can breathe near them; the perfect rose makes me nearly hold my breath.

How much do you strive for perfection as you write? As you edit, rewrite, and polish?

At a writing workshop I heard this advice: there’s a time to expand your work and a time to tighten. Sort of like a bellows. Can you visualize them—those contraptions with handles that breathe air onto a fire? Sometimes writing may need a breath of air. Even during editing, rewriting, and polishing, it isn’t always good to tighten, tighten, tighten. A manuscript might need more elucidation, more flights of fancy.

Robert Frost describes beautifully his Faraway Meadow’s anticipated return to wildness after it has been mowed for the last time ever in his poem “The Last Mowing.” He opens the poem by telling us “the talk at the farmhouse” is that “the meadow is finished with men.” He continues to say, “Then now is the chance for the flowers/That can’t stand mowers and plowers.”

 What do you prefer—perfection or wild and free? There is a time, I think, to let our words tumble wantonly down the shoulders of roadsides.

The author is grateful to the South Carolina Writers Workshop for first publishing this column in the Quill October 2012.

by Traci Barr

What is life like when you have mental illness?

Now, there’s a question.

What is life like when you’ve had mental illness longer than most of the people around you have even been alive?

What is life like when you are teased as a teenager for being crazy? Is there anything possibly worse when you are a desperately confused, 16-year-old girl who is scared she’s losing her mind? I’m not sure.

Can you picture reaching levels of depression so deep you don’t have the energy to even cry? Can you imagine achieving a state of mania so high you don’t sleep for days and end up having hallucinations and seizures as a result?

I started my struggle with my bipolar diagnosis 36 years ago – when I was 14 years old. So, I can most definitely imagine these things, because I have experienced all of them.

I always have so many questions, like:

How do I think about a life that has been filled with dozens, maybe hundreds, of different medications, doctors, therapists, nurses, hospitalizations, shock treatments, meltdowns and breakdowns?

How do I try, every day, to not be terrified by the certainty that I will die alone? What do I do with the unbearable grief I feel for never having a child? How do I, at the same time, reconcile my grief with the outright gratitude I have for never actually becoming someone’s crazy mom?

Why do I sometimes behave in ways I truly cannot understand? Why do I sometimes have anxiety that is so paralyzing my own breathing feels like a threat to me?

How do I even begin to explain the feeling of extreme worthlessness I have for myself? It is very difficult to describe such a feeling. It’s as if we should all get a new word for worthlessness – and for extreme.

What is life like when you feel no one understands you for even one single second?

What words should I use to describe the relentless sadness I have that never really seems to leave me? Isn’t it logical to think that suicide would eventually feel to me like a twisted, final, ironic act of profound self-love?

Can you understand wanting to be euthanized like a dog?

How do I consider my own serious, but obviously failed, suicide attempt? What do I do with the knowledge that my suicide attempt landed me in jail, but left me with absolutely no memory of it?

Can you appreciate the fact that most mental health problems, while sometimes manageable, are not preventable…and not curable? Haven’t we all finally realized that it’s possible to help prevent so many other chronic diseases, simply by eating healthy foods?

Can you imagine my confusion over why most health insurance companies pay the costs associated with those preventable diseases, but why many of them won’t cover one thin dime of the costs associated with mental health care?

Can you feel my anger about the countless people who are desperate for help but cannot get it? Can you believe that in 2011, according to the Coroner’s Office, 75 people died in Greenville County as a result of suicide? How does that number compare to the 34 homicides or the 57 traffic fatalities in that same year? Do the math.

Do you know that one in four people has a diagnosable mental disorder and that mental illness is the number one cause of disability in the world, resulting in trillions of dollars of lost worker productivity around the globe?

Don’t you think that if businesses and other institutions showed leadership regarding the mental health concerns of their employees, many workplace tragedies would absolutely be avoided?

Don’t you think that it would simply be stone-cold good business for companies to start getting really real on the issue of the mental health of their employees and other stakeholders?

I sure do.

So, what is it like to have all these questions about life with mental illness?

Well, it can just about drive a person…crazy.

And, when you are bipolar like me, it can be quite beautiful, all at the same time.

(An edited (for length) version of this essay was previously published in the July 12, 2013 edition of the Greenville Journal.)

They’re there – in black and white.

Where?

I found my parents on the 1940 Census. Somehow that makes them a part of history in a way I seldom see them.

My mother was right there with her parents and her younger siblings in Marlboro County, South Carolina.

The Census was taken in April of that year. Grace Jackson, my mother, graduated from Winthrop College in about June of that same year. So she probably was concerned about final exams and where she would work after she graduated.

“Being able to go to college was the fulfillment of a dream,” Grace said. “Not only was I able to go to college, but I was accepted and given a full scholarship to Winthrop College, Rock Hill, South Carolina.

“I have no idea when I decided that I wanted to be a teacher, nor do I know how I thought Papa could afford to send me to college,” she said. “I never thought about the money; I just knew I was going.”

The year Grace graduated, her yearbook summed her up: “Chronic worrier … infectious laugh … proud of being a good cook … musical snore … conscientious.”

Then came the next step.

“Graduation from Winthrop was a big day for me. It would have been better if all of my family could have been there. Only Papa and Leola were in attendance. Mama, as usual, was at home ‘keeping the home fires burning,’ and the boys, Dubert, Larue, and Carroll, were with her.

I also discovered my mother in the 1930 Census and the 1920 Census, when she was a mere four years old.

However, when I looked for my father in the 1940 Census, he was not where I expected him to be. He wasn’t listed with his parents  in Columbus, Georgia. He wasn’t at college in Brevard, North Carolina. I didn’t know how to find him if he were already in the military.

So I took a chance. There he was – in Statesboro, Georgia, listed right along with his brother and sister-in-law, John and Doris Munro, and his sister, Carolyn Munro.

What were four young people doing there?

John and Doris opened a photographic studio and were first joined by Carolyn and them my father, who had left Brevard College.

“Tom and John did the pictures,” Doris said.

Carolyn, also a photographer, helped with those and probably was a better-trained photographer at the time than Tommy was, Doris said. In fact, Carolyn and John had worked together although not professionally.

“I sat in the front at the desk and pretended like I was a businesswoman,” Doris said.

“We lived in the back of the studio. John and I slept in the posing room (moving the bed in and out}. Carolyn slept in the entry to the darkroom. Tom slept upstairs over the dark room between the roof and the ceiling. He didn’t have to move his bed every day. Tom had to climb a ladder to where he  slept.

“On Fridays we all went to the picture show. You could get in for 15 cents. They were mostly Westerns, and that was OK with me,” Doris said.

Remembering those days, she said, “The stove was in the bathroom. I scrubbed the commode every day. One day we were having spaghetti. There wasn’t any place to drain it, so I set it on the commode to drain.

“John came in and said, ‘Sweetheart, I didn’t know that you’d do that.’

“I said, ‘Well, it’s clean.”

What can you do when you have no kitchen?

I also found Daddy in the 1930 Census, but he was not counted in 1920 although he was born in February of that year.

Sometimes it’s hard to realize that family members are a part of history just as we are. History is not just the wars and generals, the politics and presidents. It also includes the farm wives fixing meals, the young people starting out, the families being created.

History, when all is said and done, is the story of people.