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

Oh Lord, why has thou forsaken me?

Oh my God, please hear my cry of pain and rescue me.

The talons of the wild beasts tear at my body as the pain grows

And never ceases.

I have not defiled your name or your temples.

I have done good in thy sight.

But you have left me. You do not hear my cries.

Is my pain a punishment for my deeds or my thoughts?

What do I do to reach you?

As I huddle under a blanket, nursing my pain, I hear the song of birds

And see the colors of the trees. I seek cool water to quench my thirst ere I faint.

Oh Lord, I feel thy spirit enfolding me as with a warm blanket.

God, thou has not forsaken me. Thou hast given me strength to endure until I come into your kingdom.

– Jenny Munro

Note: My mother is fighting severe and continuous pain as she ages. This is dedicated to her.

Autumn is a melancholy season

Or so the poets say.

I don’t agree.

It’s not a sad and somber time.

Fall is a gush of vivid color – red, yellow, orange and gold

Along with the differing hues of the evergreens that make their home

In my mountains – the pine, spruce, hemlock and rhododendron.

No, autumn isn’t the season of dying and death.

It’s a time when the trees and earth sink into sleep, their long winter’s nap.

That sleep strengthens the world; the seasons change and the earth awakes.

Rebirth surges with the vibrant new life, the fresh tenderness, of spring.

Autumn isn’t melancholy; it’s part of the dance of life.

– 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.

It curves; it expands; it shrinks. Einstein said it is relative.

What does that mean?

As I looked at time as a little girl, I thought it stretched. Christmas took “forever” to arrive. And Christmas Eve seemed to last twice as long as it should before Santa arrived.

I reached school. Now time seemed pretty elastic. A school day sometimes seemed to be 24 hours long. But summer vacation just galloped past, not giving me time to enjoy it all.

Then I grew up. Exams could last forever. Meetings with bosses had minutes that crawled. Holidays flew past.

But I dreamed then. The speed of light was constant and nothing could go any faster. But I thought, “What would it be like if I traveled at nearly the speed of light.” I could get to the sun in what – maybe eight minutes. Or I go could back millions of light years to the ‘Big Bang’ when the universe was created.

Those were mind tricks. As I grew older, it seemed time passed faster.  It took no time from one Christmas or birthday to another.  Deadlines – a necessity in journalism – seemed to roll around faster as the years went by.

But I think, “How did I reach my 60s. Surely that many years has not passed?” And I look at my mother. She’s seen the arrival of cars, airplanes, rockets, the space shuttle. She was around for men arriving on the moon and for the explosion of the computer and the Internet.

Does her time speed by faster than mine or faster than my nieces or faster than her great-grandchildren’s? Einstein said, “No.”  I’m not sure I agree.  I’ve spent about 34,394,560 minutes on this earth. And I’m sure the ones in the last fourth of that time have sped by faster than the ones when I was a child.

– Jenny Munro

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.