Who’s Cooking in Your Covid Story Kitchen

Personal Storytelling, ,

Who’s Cooking in Your Covid Story Kitchen? Someone once said that watching me cook in my kitchen was like watching a captain on her ship. Sure of every move I make, piloting with confidence however agitated the sea may be. Don’t you love that feeling?

Or, you might prefer a dance metaphor. Cooking up a story comes with its own choreography. When all is well, we glide from counter to cupboard, sentence to sentence, light on our feet. Each gesture has purpose. Each word has its place. We take charge.

No need for a long mirror to watch ourselves. We know how we look in this familiar place. More important, we know how we feel. At home in our natural habitat. Free to deviate from the recipe, a pinch of plot experiment here, a dollop of quirky dialog there, without counsel or critique from anyone.

Who’s Cooking In Your Usual Story Kitchen? You are. Occasionally you may invite collaborators in, but generally trust your own judgement first. Prefer your own fingerprints on the spice jars of your imagination. You perform with comfort on this stage, and soloing here gives you peace.

I pause now to focus on those sensations in my personal experience. Luxuriating, mid-pirouette, toes grazing tile, fingers flying over keys, commanding whatever my creative corner of the world might be. All are, for the moment at least, part of my past.

My Covid era story kitchen is another place entirely. I no longer flow freely from one inspiration to the next. No longer relax in my familiar creative place. I am no longer a captain on the bridge of my ship. Because I am no longer alone.

My husband is here. He simply showed up one day, buffeted by circumstance onto my private preserve. I might have been less taken aback if he possessed more aptitude or affinity for the practical tasks at hand. But maybe not.

His choreography is clumsy at best. He wants to be here about as enthusiastically as I am eager to admit him. He is out of his element and imperfectly replanted in mine. We attempt a compromise amidst our mutual discomfort. Try our best not to blunder into each other’s path.

All the same, he taxes my parameters. Asks endless questions, makes furtive moves, displays little inclination for blending into his new, accidental environment. He captained his own ship in another place, at another time, but that ship is on covid drydock now.

Our pandemic pas de deux may improve with practice. Lately, we are less at odds, but I doubt he will ever slide smoothly between storage cabinet and stove, or that his bumpy ballet will become a beauty to behold. And this is only in the cooking kitchen.

In other rooms, something more troubling pervades. I have lost my private creative space. Writing has always been a solitary occupation for me. I am challenged to maintain motivation in a shared environment. Are you in a similar circumstance, struggling to contend with the same question? Who’s Cooking in Your Covid Story Kitchen?

Meanwhile, an even deeper discomfort lurks  beneath our displacement dissonance. The absence of supper guests who never arrive. We yearn for company worth unearthing our most lovely table linens to pamper and please, so sadly absent now.

We are in lockdown, staying at home, staying safe, whatever. No feet other than our own tread the deck of whosever ship this may end up to be. Which, we find with regret, is the least tolerable intrusion of all.

Who occupies your Coronial creative place? Who samples the kettle and adjusts the seasonings just so? What characters concoct your story stew and contrive the plots in your pots? Who’s Cooking in Your Covid Story Kitchen?

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.

A Wrong Way Home

Aunt Dee cooks to heal the heart in Alice’s novel The Wrong Way Home – the ladle-licking-luscious first book in her Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series. Sample this delish dish for free HERE. After that appetizer, dig into the four Riverton Road story courses that follow. Find those, and the rest of Alice’s books, HERE.

What Readers Say: “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”  “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.”

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Write Thru Crisis – Muffled Cries

Personal Storytelling, ,

Write Thru Crisis – Muffled Cries. My son was three when this first scene occurred. I had entrusted him to the care of another mother, while I went to the laundry room. We lived in a suburban apartment complex at the time, and I anticipated no danger.

When I returned, my son was nowhere in sight. My friend had turned away – for a single moment – to tend to her own child. I saw my son then, past the wide green grass of the play area, across the asphalt sidewalk and a border of more green grass. He was rocking back and forth on a curbstone at the edge of a busy highway.

I dropped my laundry basket and ran. I didn’t stop to wonder how his small-boy legs had carried him so quickly into peril. I didn’t stop to ask anyone if they had seen him take that perilous path. And, I did not cry out. If I startled him, he might topple into traffic, so I muffled the cries that terror had catapulted into my throat.

He was almost twenty when he caused me to do that again. He was back from college and staying with us for the summer. He’d gone out with friends into a formidable city and, though it was hours past midnight, had not yet returned home. I couldn’t run after him this time, and cell phones were years short of invention.

I sat on the couch, muffling my cries once more. I didn’t turn on the lamp. A lone streetlight outside the window illuminated my fears. Nightmare scenarios raced through my mind, though I didn’t once envision my son being locked into a cell, or a police club bashing him. Years later, female offspring would take my imagination to that horror show.

First, it was my granddaughter, in another large, possibly ominous city. She was there to march and shout in protest against the injustice of poverty and oppression. My son, of age by then to be her father, was near enough to find her at the precinct, if arrests should occur. Still, on that bright fall afternoon, I muffled my urge to cry out my worry and fear.

Not long ago, my daughter brought me similar alarm. She was demonstrating in support of her own strong beliefs, as she often does. On this occasion, armed police and members of the military lurked what I considered uncomfortably closeby. My daughter and her compatriots were herded into a roped-off area, but I guessed accurately that she would press close to the barrier and shout to be heard, while I muffled my cries.

Such stories grip the heart. Mike Nichols, an expert on how to create that gripping effect, once said, “We only care about the humanity.” That is because our own humanity resonates with the tale. Almost all of us have suffered through terror in our own lives, especially when we fear for someone we love. We know how it feels to clap our hands over our faces to shut out fearsome visions, and shut in muffled cries. I hope you will write about your muffled-cry moments, too.

My last story happened decades ago, during my own street activist days. I was in the midst of an angry crowd with a friend, when a policeman on a large horse reached down from his high perch and sprayed mace in the face of my friend’s young son. I didn’t clap my hands over my mouth that day. Instead – for a single moment – shock and disbelief muffled my cries.

Each of these stories deserves an ending. I reached my toddler son before he could fall into traffic. Years later, he came home at dawn and was soundly scolded. Phone calls, followed by profound relief, assured me my granddaughter and daughter in turn were safe and unharmed.

The ending of the mounty-and-the-mace story is hardly as satisfying. That afternoon ended my years of street activism. I walked away, into the safety of my whiteness.  Because of their blackness, neither my friend, nor George Floyd’s mother, had that choice. I am haunted by their cries, too soul deep and wracked with grief for muffling.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.

Alice has spent most of her post-activist work life in publishing, as book editor, literary agent, workshop leader, and author. She’s published 16 novels, 3 novellas, a memoir, and No More Rejections: 50 Secrets to Writing a Manuscript That Sells. Her current work in progress includes Hero in the Mirror: How to Write Your Best Story of You. Find her books HERE.

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Write Thru Crisis – Precious Life

Personal Storytelling, ,

Write Thru Crisis – Precious Life. I had a dream last night. It was deep winter, though our real season now is the beginning of summer. My son and I were in Denver, at a layover of a flight from the east coast, where we now live, to Washington State, where we used to live.

The dream details were vivid, but the time wasn’t the present. My son was young, maybe ten years old, though he is in his fifties now. I wasn’t any particular age. I was simply his mother, responsible for the safety of his precious life, and my own, and our safety was in danger.

A snowstorm raged outside, and the forecast was possibly dire. For some reason, only comprehensible in a dream, we were scheduled to travel in a relatively small plane. There was an important reason for our trip, and my son was eager to reach our destination. Everyone, including the pilot, assured me we would probably be safe to fly.

I don’t know what I believe about dreams. I don’t usually remember them after I awake. I’ve had others, vivid like this one, but I haven’t written them down afterward. I definitely have not written them down and shared them on the internet, or anywhere else.

The difference now is that we’re at a choice-making time in our personal waking lives. My husband and I must decide if we’ll reopen our business. as New York City reopens amidst the Covid-19 crisis, after nearly four months of public work suspension.

What makes this a dramatic story is the high stakes that are involved. We are both well beyond the sixty-five-plus vulnerable age for Coronavirus, and I have an underlying health condition. I won’t go into specific detail, but the physical circumstances of the company we run together are risky. My husband would face this risk in person and possibly bring it home to me.

I awoke from my intense dream to a lovely morning. The sun shone bright outside. The kitchen was flooded with light and warmth, and birds chirped beyond the window. There could hardly be a more peaceful setting. Yet, conflict persisted within our personal situation.

In a truly dramatic story, opposing high-stakes forces are at work. In our story, we hadn’t planned to retire this early. It would be to our financial advantage not to, and financial advantage is crucial to us, like it is to almost everyone we know. Back in my dream, the snowstorm continued, and threatened lives that were precious to me. In real-life, the pandemic did the same.

Have you ever been in your own high-stake situation? Has your safety, and/or that of people you love been at risk? Was a critical choice required? Did a prophetic message appear, maybe a dream? Was your flashing red light simply instinctual, or in some other warning form?

I won’t keep you in suspense. In my dream, I decided we wouldn’t travel further. My son grumbled, but the kind pilot invited us to stay in her pleasant home so all was well. Similarly, my husband and I have decided to close our business and continue the precautions that have protected us so far.

Your dramatic life stories also deserve to be told. If you’ve answered yes to any of the questions I asked about your own experiences, and I suspect you have, I hope you will write them down. Maybe also consider passing them on to me, to be shared as I’ve shared my own. Either way, I hope you will Write Thru Crisis about you own Precious Life.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.

Alice has spent most of her professional life in publishing, as book editor, literary agent, workshop leader, and author. She’s published 16 novels, 3 novellas, a memoir, and No More Rejections: 50 Secrets to Writing a Manuscript That Sells (revised version coming soon). Her current work in progress includes Hero in the Mirror: How to Write Your Best Story of You.

Read the story of another dramatic period of Alice’s precious life in her memoir Lifted to the Light: A Story of Struggle and Kindness. Available HERE.

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

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