Featured Writers 

Rachael Brown: How to Create a Space for Writing

Rachel Brown attended the Memory to Memoir weekend retreat. This piece was written in response to the prompt, "How to Create a Real or Metaphorical Space for Writing."

Simi Monheit: A Room of My Own

Simi Monheit, a native of Brooklyn, New York, moved to the Bay Area eleven years ago to play in the High Tech arena of Silicon Valley. A victim of the economic fallout of 2008-2009, she found herself finally able to indulge her curiosity about the world of writing. Naturally enough, she discovered Laura's workshops through the internet and has participated in both the Wednesday and Friday classes, where she frequently writes stories about growing up in Brooklyn in her very distinctive Brooklyn voice. Simi loves the people she has met through Laura's classes and appreciates the hard work that goes into the writing process, so different from the mind numbing and soul crushing processes she was subjected to in her former life. This piece was written in response to the prompt, "How to Create a Room of your Own."

Thing is, I've had a room of my own. Because I was a full time telecommuter, but at a Real Job, and because we have only one child, I have always had claim to a bedroom, everywhere we've lived. My space was so well established that when I've been trying to locate a missing item I've been known to say, with complete sincerity, "Oh, I must have left it at work," before sauntering down the hall to my room.

But I lost that job. I still have the room, but it has been encroached upon. When we disassembled the family computer, a workstation, no nifty laptop, because of our remodel from hell, it got moved onto a corner of my desk. Did I mention that my room is small and the workstation is huge? It sits there, old, fat and pompous, on my desk. The floor is strewn with boxes of books, papers, and files of important documents. And well, where the hell was the KitchenAid MixMaster thing that I had lusted after and contrived to get as a Mother's Day gift a few years back, supposed to go? It's sitting on one of my bookshelves, red, glaring and dusty, with columns of books piled haphazardly around her.

Enid Brock: Little Things I Love

Seven-year old Enid in the back of her aunt's VW microbus in Oregon

Enid Brock is a long-term member of the Friday morning feedback group. She has been writing, most often about food, since 2008.  She wrote this piece in response to the prompt, "Tell me about the small, everyday things you love," just a few weeks before her doctor ordered her onto a gluten-free diet. Now Enid spends most of her time googling searches like "xanthan gum chocolate cake" and "tequila gluten free." It has been 8 days since she ate cinnamon toast.

The gritty sharp sugar topping on cinnamon toast, the way it mixes with the hot melty butter into a slurry, and if you are eating it right away - as you should - the way the toast is still crisp and hot and dry. The dry toast and the wet sweet syrupy butter, all in one bite.

When Lulu is sleeping and we say her name, and she keeps lying there on the floor like a brown curly rug, like a dog corpse, like something that has never lived and never will, except for her tail starts wagging in a circle, like the rotors of a helicopter.

The twin black smears of tarnish that appear on the round, white foam sponge that comes in the jar of Wright's silver polish, the way that blackness rewards my labor, tells me I've rubbed hard enough, in the right place, and now that old fork will be shiny and new again. And then I take the sponge, smudged grey and scrunched down into a rag, and hold it under the stream of water from the faucet and suddenly it is new again; and the silverware takes a bath in hot, hot clear water and it looks like little sardines swimming in my kitchen sink. I think about all the other people who have polished that exact same fork, generations of labor and patience, and no one dropped it down the disposal, or bent the tines too crooked, or lost it at a picnic. I wonder about all the foods it has speared - not just chicken breasts and quinoa salad but I don't know roast pheasant or tomato aspic or steak and kidney pie, wedding cake at countless ceremonies, the dinner that burned, the first ripe tomato, the kipper, the egg.

Barbara Levitt: How to Be a Writer

Barbara Levitt is a member of the Friday morning feedback class and is working on two different projects. She writes, "I grew up in South Africa, and moved to California in 1981. I am currently working on a semi-autobiographical novel about my life in South Africa, and a book called What's Hot in Menopause? based on anthropological research about menopause in other cultures." This was her response to the prompt, "How to Be a Writer."

The best way to be a writer is to lower your butt and your standards, and write.  But before you do that, you have to be an observer.  Life is your material, but if you live too fully, you will not write.  You will be creating the raw material of your craft, like an artist creating a palette of experiences, you will color your work and your world.

Bur in order to write, you have o withdraw, observe and transform; and if you get lucky, or if you get good, you will illuminate.  Writing does not come from life; it comes from witnessing life.  Doers do not write; they do.  According to Bernard Shaw, they do not teach either.

At best, the writer is a participant-observer, an anthropologist studying the familiar, rather than the otherness of a distant culture.  The writer, like the anthropologist, must always be somewhat of an outsider, a sieve filtering life, rather than fully absorbing it.  Except in the case of the writer, it is your vey own essence that you are straining and transforming.