I have a folder of old family photos saved on my computer. My cousin sent it to me, and it’s a wild mix of birthday photos from our childhood, a handful of pictures from when I studied abroad in Ireland (and got an eyebrow piercing!) and she visited me, and some pictures of our mothers’ childhoods. I was looking at them recently and thinking about the miracle of those old black and white photos.
Some are fairly posed: there’s my grandfather as a young father, holding a baby in a christening gown. But most of them feel like snapshots: a baby in the playpen, the room around her a bit of a mess; my aunt as a white-blond little girl looking stunned at the camera while her uncles sit behind her on the couch, cigarette smoke curling up above her head. I’ve been thinking about the labor of those photographs, how someone had to get a camera out, load it with film, take the picture and get the film developed. I don’t how those photos got digitized, but they did, and then they made their way to me, all these years later.
I’ve been wondering also about how much of that time was lost, about the stories and moments that weren’t captured, everything that was happening just outside the frame. Today’s prompt asks you to think about an image or a photograph from your own life and imagine the world around it.
We’ll use Lynda Barry’s freewriting exercise again to get started. (I talked aboust Lynda Barry and the rationale for freewriting in prompt #6, and we used it again in prompt #10.) Credit again goes to Erinn Batykefer for the prompt and the Lynda Barry connection.
Prompt #17: aperture
You’ll need to start with an image. It could be a photograph - either a particularly special one, or just one you find on your phone or in an old photo album - or an image you hold in your mind. Now try to zoom out. What’s just outside that photograph? What didn’t make it into the frame? What got cropped out? Start your spiral there.
If you tend to write short, or if you tend to stop your poems just short of a page in word, see if you can stretch this one. You’re going to have to make things up, or really reach your imagining. See what you can do. Can you hit two pages? Three? How far do you have to look to keep the poem going?
Sharing your work helps sustain momentum. I’ll leave the comments open, so you can share a poem title, a snippet of a line, or something else about your writing life.