Aunt Norma
Today we are at Day 7 of Writing Our Lives.
Are you writing? If so, drop a note on the Instagram or Facebook page.
While I had considered shortening this from 21 days to 7, after getting feedback and reading stories from participants, I’m excited about going full steam ahead with 21 days in a row. 🙂
What’s up today? Mentors.
Who has played a guiding role in your life? “Guiding” can mean all sorts of things.
- Perhaps it was a phrase you overheard from a stranger that changed the way you viewed yourself, or changed the way you viewed the world.
- You had a teacher with whom you really connected. Maybe you followed in his/her footsteps in one form or another.
- Maybe your grandmother spent time with you and every single time you make pancakes you think of her and how deeply she mattered in your life.
- Maybe your role model is someone famous, dead or alive, whose art you have studied and it has influenced your own: Frida Kahlo, Charles M. Schultz, Joan Didion.
- A brother, a cousin, a friend, an aunt.
The photograph for the prompt is my Aunt Norma. She was a painter, in oils mostly. She drew and painted. I visited Norma and Uncle Jay often in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s when they lived in southern Missouri – it was only a 4-hour drive and I spent many weekends with them.
She was painting and I was writing and we bounced ideas off of each other. I was in my late 20s and talking with someone on a creative level, well, it was the first time I felt like an adult. Norma took my creativity seriously. She read everything I sent her.
We had long discussions about poetry, and about ‘sense of place.’ After reading a batch of my poems, she pronounced me “A Child of the Prairie.” Her appreciation of my poems about place, about Kansas, gave validity to what I was doing – simply writing about the world around me.
Go get ‘em!
Cheryl
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