Life is a collection of dots/Connecting them makes sense
Life is a collection of dots... Abigail Thomas , the American memoirist, says not to worry about chronology when we are trying to capture our life ’ s stories. Just get the dots down, she says. Worry about connecting them later. I find this freeing. In a recent writing class, the prompt was the image of an old-fashioned pencil sharpener — the kind that was affixed to the wall of my primary school classroom. I mulled on it a while, thinking about pencils and sharpening them, a most satisfying action. Then, after a conversation with a writing friend who said the image reminded her of ‘back to school’ times, I realized I had two dots stored in my memory bank that I could work with: Miss McCormack, my Grade One teacher in Montreal; and Frau Doktor Friedrich, my home room teacher at my middle-grade school in Germany. I started with those two dots, inserted a third ‘teacher’ dot in between them, and then noodled on how to extend the piece beyond those three dots into something I would share ...
