The Interview Project

The Interview Project is a series of interviews with average everyday Americans in their home space. David Lynch and team took a road trip around America to meet people, to simply talk and get to know new faces.   The next writing project for the club requires you to choose one of the interviews, one of the people, and create a character sketch. Write about who they are, how they came to be there, where they are going. Try to be creative, create a scene, other supporting characters who observe the subject, and interesting objects in the space. I am excited to see which interview draws each of you in.


http://interviewproject.davidlynch.com/www/#/all-episodes

Prince Akim Robert Johnson

Prince Akim: Robert

I have been trying to sleep for several hours now. After a hellish night of waitressing I know that I should be exhausted but I can't seem to shake my thoughts. I got up and started cleaning the house, thus awakening my particularly groggy and cute mother, so I decided I should figure out another way to tire myself out.

For those of you who write extensively during the school year you may feel overwhelmed by the semester and begin the summer holiday feeling that all you have to write with, or about, is vapid. But maybe that lack of writing creeps up on you, and all those things left unexplored, unexpressed throw themselves in a tumult around your mind, like mine did tonight, and scream "It's time!" As soon as I started to write tonight, at 1:00 in the morning, I felt tranquility again in a way that only writing can induce.

If anyone of you would like to write during the summer but are unsure what to write about, I am going to make a weekly summer writing prompt (if not more frequent) and post it to this blog. Tonight's prompt is about Prince Akim Robert Johnson. I have been making a documentary this summer about homelessness in Denver, Colorado. I met Prince Akim outside a coffeehouse called The Network in Denver. It is a place where homeless men and women can come and sit down and have a free cup of coffee. When one is homeless, you are kicked out of the shelters at 7:00 in the morning and cannot return for twelve hours. For many, there are few places to just sit. To be. The network is a place where, if one is not doing drugs, and not disturbing the peace, one can simply sit down and remain undisturbed.

I didn't realize how much our interview with Prince Akim had disturbed me until I began writing tonight.  It was the combination of his insanity and his evident clarity that shook me. He spoke about the law, Moses and geometry in a single sentence leaving his speech disjointed and impossible to understand. However, even though nothing he said was in order, none of his ideas were complete, and he often stopped mid-sentence as if he had forgotten everything he had said before, you could sense his intelligence. I could tell that he had once been a very, very smart man. And as he unfolded several bandanas to reveal court documents and several feathers, tenderly, with the look of a man handling a small and fragile animal, I realized how unsteady life is. Things can change in a day. This man was as lonely and crazy as a person can be, introducing himself as a U.N Crown Dynasty official, but he kept everything he used to be in carefully folded fabric. He carries those pristine handkerchiefs in his backpack every where he goes. I have absolutely no idea how Robert, or Prince as he calls himself, came to be at the Network Tuesday morning, but his person confirmed what I have been thinking for a while. Life is not stagnant. There is no "grown up," or established or finished, no completion. Things can change in a day.

For today, tonight, or this week, I think it would be great if you could write either about the reality of  Prince Akim sitting on the porch of the network on Tuesday morning with coffee in his hands, or the reality of U.N Crown Dynasty official Prince Akim fighting to return the land stolen from the Native Americans. You could simply write a scene at the coffeehouse, or if Prince Akim doesn't inspire you, the  following picture/man named Kent (pictured on his bicycle) might do the trick. Last but not least, you could write a piece that illustrates that "Things can change in a day." (Things can change in a day is a phrase often repeated in the book God of Small Things.)

If you would like to share what you write please send me an email at cliffsm@lakeforest.edu.
If you need some musical inspiration, here is what was working for me tonight:

Meat Eating Furniture

Last week our group journeyed into the land of the surreal, the science fiction, the absurd, and oddly enough, possibly the future. We wrote F.E's to the following video. Lets see where this video of watching a clocks devouring flies takes you.

Meat Eating Furniture: NPR


Lana's Piece:


My pet dog, Rob, is my best friend.  He always has my back and is usually at my feet.  We like to play catch. He's faster than the speed of light and never misses the ball.  We go wandering in the woods and find little nooks that we declare as our home for the afternoon.  He's the best hiking buddy because he has a built in GPS.  We never get lost.  Another great thing about Rob is he is not picky, he'll eat just about anything, so I only have to pack a snack for myself.  He runs on bugs, wood, tree bark, but his favorite food is plastic water bottles.  Rob is better than any other dog breed because his waste is compact, doesn't smell, and can be either composted or recycled.  Since he is made out of quality materials, he will outlast my life.  He will be my children's companion one day, snuggling under the blankets with them at night while they read.  He will hike in these woods with my grandchildren.

Writing to Music

In Writing Club we have been working on how our senses can stimulate our writing. For example, when one closes their eyes and immerses themselves in music many things can be illuminated, memories, images, vivid and visceral settings, moments in time. So, for this past week in Writing Club we wrote to several music videos hoping that either the tone of the music, or the images on the screen would provoke thought and writing. This video in particular is stimulating for both the ear and the eye, I think members of the group were inspired by both.

The following is one example of writing by the group:

To begin
in the late 1800s the United States built the railroad to connect the north of America to the south
these refrigerated cars brought cold cattle from southern Mexico
to the tip of the United States' fat face
transportation of resources was the business
leaving the south of Mexico like a swollen tongue into an engorged dark mouth

and these children ride the trains
the beast
they slide notes under their parents doors
at twelve, thirteen
grab hold of giant smoking metal snakes
that derail feet off legs
torsos from heads

to ride on the top of a train is to ride a cold river on your bare back
the world splits open for you.

The MacGuffin

Spices

Today for Writing Club we wrote to smells. I brought two different spices to the Skybox, one brown, one red, and we were all challenged to come up with four words to describe each spice. Then, we were to write three places, people or things the spice reminded us of. All the while attempting to stray way from "traditional" cooking and baking words. Once the descriptors were all complied we shared them. Brittany reminded us all that smell is the sense most evocative of memories. I think we all found that our pieces were ripe with many different types of memory, both personal and cultural, as well conscious and subconscious. Here are a few samples. The first is by Sumara, Sammi Baig, a freshman at Lake Forest College and the second by myself. More to come.

Sammi's  Spice Piece:

The two women spoke in harsh Arabic.
 “Yalla! Yalla!”
 She tugged my hair, the other tugged harder. One had my fingers; smoothing them, roughing them, buffing them. Clipping out the parts unliked.
 The ceiling light emanated a dusty brown hue from which a ray of light thickened by dirt danced; limited by its thin ballroom. 
 “La, la, khamsa” spits out the one whose hands are cleverly entwined in my hair. Her accomplice picks out the fifth bottle of polish from the shelf; a smoky red, as if the sun was set on fire and all that was left was ash.
 I look over at my sister, who flips through a magazine as her mouth sloshes around gum that has been drained of all its candy sweet taste.

Kaisa Cumming's Spice Piece:

Remember feet held close to the fireplace and how the skin tingles as 
it creeps back to the bone as you creep up the cold stairs to bed.

Remember the quilt made with two hands twenty years ago by a little 
old lady with winter hands or maybe it was a little old lover with
dainty, fairy hands who pricked her winter fingers so many times you 
think you might be able to smell blood in the
fibers--but that's romantic, right?

Remember the warmth of Novemeber sun. You can see ghosts come out 
your mouth in clouds that never last.

And remember the Indian medicine woman holding her crooked bones in 
the crooked door way and the crooked-legged dog  with cloudy eyes and 
the way the song she sang when you had the fever of a fire-warmed 
cabin inside you cracked around the     
edges of her mouth.

Alex Andorfer's Piece

traveled south every summer 
    - ironically, to the state I live in now -
looming over the Sound
a mile's walk above the ocean
our collective society stood seven days of june.
i stayed in the middle room,
in the middle of the house,
the very middle of the Sound.

a ladder took you up there
           to my room (the middle one)
           to my bed
that's when bunks weren't associated with
dorm rooms
cramped living
the inability to get you laid.

the breeze carried my innocence and
Sound
sand
through the society
      the innocence and Sound to everyone's pleasure
      the sand less so

Caravanning neighbors
enthralled with the Sound.

My spice piece (oddly similar to Urrea's talk later that night)

They called our mothers

when we didn’t have a water bottle at school--

rung through telephone wires

the way this clay

feels when the sky refuses to open
we fall

after the water jug they told us to carry

drained eighteen hours ago

and the urine stopped running too

fell into a cyan green

plant our faces in the colony, 
like an animal god that smells after rain.

we ask in the city 
didn’t anyone ever tell us how much
water to bring on a desert walk?

because our bottles hang in holsters on our hips.

we may think we are the suncrowned rooster

but the flint of our every step

ignites and mummifies the cold cut pollo we are:

found

like an newborn artifact

one lime green shoe

still left on 

Walking Backwards in the Dark: Luis Alberto Urrea

Luis Alberto Urrea, the author of  The Devil's Highway, and The Hummingbird's Daughter, along with many other books, told an audience at Lake Forest College tonight that his mother used to read him Dickens before bed as a child in order to give him a sense of culture. Although he didn't understand the words or the stories she was recounting to him, as he was still a young child and primarily versed in Spanish, he said the beauty of the words overwhelmed him. As he fell asleep he could picture a stream of words flowing through his mind like a trail. Tonight, at a discussion aimed to illuminate the issues of the Mexican-American Border. He said, "Do you want to know why I can write about the border? Because it is right here," he gestured towards his chest drawing a line down the middle of his button up shirt, "I have a border fence right here in my heart." Not only did Urrea experience first hand the cruelty and the beauty of the physical border between the United States and Mexico, but as a child he learned intimately about the borders between people. Between his mother and father, the city and barrios of his youth, even the Mexicanism and Americanism of his own self. Urrea said, "I don't like fences, I like bridges."

What Urrea intimately reminded us of tonight is the fact that writing can be used as a tool of self discovery, a crisscrossed map of bridge building within one's own self, and to raise the community up. Urrea's books are poignant examples of walking the line between striving for a personal resolution within one's own life, and promoting education and understanding within the community. What a better way to be a writer but to define the gap of ones self-understanding as well as the communities and attempt to bring each closer together. Here is one of his poems for you to enjoy.