On Exercises

Not Everything Goes as Planned

I plan to get back to writing about my mother and her life in my next installment, but for now I wanted to write a little bit about exercises, the writing kind (which I know something about), not the athletic kind (which I need more of, especially stretching exercises).

When you teach writing, you develop over time a store of tried-and-true writing exercises. Of course, it’s not wise to rely solely on these as you never want your teaching to become rote. But for thirty years or so, one of my favorites has been the “First kitchen exercise.” In this exercise, as the name implies, I ask participants, often on the first day of a week-long workshop, to close their eyes and return to the first kitchen they remember. It can be a grandparent’s kitchen, one’s parents’ kitchen, or some other kitchen. Once the students have settled on their first kitchen, I ask them to take a slow tour of it. First, I might direct them to the refrigerator. What brand is it? I ask. What color? Are there magnets on it? Photos, calendars, random bits of paper? How big is it? Where is the freezer – top, bottom, to the side? I ask them to open the fridge and look inside? Is it orderly? Is it clean? Does it smell? What’s in the door? Are there forgotten foods in the back? Old lettuce in the drawer? Expired milk? Are there leftovers? Juices? Beer? Meats? On to the freezer . . . and so on around the kitchen, opening drawers and cabinets, looking into the cupboard, examining the sink, the dishwasher, if there is a dishwasher. What’s under the sink? Where are the plates and dishes stored? The utensils. Are there any knickknacks near the stove or the sink? Anything on the windowsill above the sink? A plant or two? Is there a junk drawer. What about the floor, the ceiling, the lighting? And finally . . . the people. Who is standing there? How are they dressed? What are they saying?

I love the exercise because most of us have a kitchen in our childhoods that we remember. I’ve had all sorts of kitchens described over the years, from kitchens with iceboxes instead of refrigerators to quite recently the description of a restaurant kitchen in New Orleans, where one of the workshop participants had grown up spending a lot of time in, as the restaurant was owned by his uncle. But what I love most about the exercise – and it must be done slowly, no rushing through the tour – is that people invariably remember something they hadn’t thought about for years. Some detail that just sat there, waiting to be accessed for ten, twenty, sixty years or more. An Elvis cookie jar that was your grandmother’s and that you weren’t allowed to touch. A strip of flypaper, covered with flies, that hung in the corner of the dinette alcove, which gave you nightmares. The smell of your Aunt Zelda’s apple strudel. The olive-green fondue pot that to your knowledge your parents used only once but that took up valuable real estate by the stove. The details are gems, and they nearly all carry the elements of story and character. And they have to do with something that potentially carries an emotional wallop. As my former teacher and friend Barry Hannah once told me, “All you need to know about stories is this: write honestly about what you love and put a little music in it.” One of the best bits of writing advice I ever received.

But sometimes even the most tried and true exercise can go awry. And when this happens, this is where your mettle as an instructor is tested.

The most memorable incident when this exercise didn’t work happened in the 1990s at a well-known writing conference. I think I was relatively new to this exercise at the time and I blithely went through the instructions. When the time was up, I asked the participants to read what they had written (if they wished). The first two or three examples were just fine, I’m sure – I can’t remember a thing about them nearly thirty years later. But then one of the participants read her piece. I’m not sure of all the details, but the scene took place in her hometown. She and her mother were at the sink washing dishes, chatting and laughing, when a neighbor rushed into the kitchen and told them that the woman’s father had just murdered another neighbor, a woman he was apparently having an affair with, and killed himself. The class sat stunned. The woman who was reading, paused, looked up into our shocked faces and burst into wracking sobs. What I remember next is that things were a little chaotic. Of course, crying is not unknown in workshops. This (not this exactly) has happened several times since then – though not with this exercise, and I think I have grown calmer over the years in my response. It’s the person who matters, not the class or the exercise. I’m pretty sure I gave everyone a break at this point and several people, including myself did our best to provide comfort as best we could. Later, after the break, the writer told us that a lot of years had passed since then and she had thought she’d be able to write about it. One thing that I know along these lines is that trauma, no matter how old, can seem as immediate as the day it happened when you access it through writing. She also told us that a very famous writer had used her family tragedy as the basis for a short story. It’s odd to me that I didn’t immediately seek that story to read, but I didn’t, either out of laziness or because I felt a little traumatized by hearing firsthand about the experience. Recently, I tried to find the story and have been unable to do so. I thought it was by one very famous author, but now I think it might have been by another very famous author. I suppose it doesn’t matter. What mattered to me at the time and what matters to me now, is that you can’t expect everyone to react the same way to what you ask them to do in a writing workshop.

Lessons learned:

Not everything that seems innocent to oneself is innocent to others.

Give people the space they need when they’re overwhelmed.

Don’t fall into complacency as a writer or as a teacher of writing.