Postcards To Younger “Arts”

The Rules:

I will only send back generalized advice and encouragement. I will be very careful that my words will not cause Younger Art to choose different life paths than the ones he has already chosen. I am happy that my life has brought me to where I am today. Each section is a separate post card sent just to the Art of that age.

Art Before Age 8

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To Art’s teacher: We both know that Art can’t read yet, that he has no math yet either. Both of these things will come to him in the fullness of time. I know that you and the other teachers who found Art in their classrooms did the best they could for him, but we both know that he needed a massive one-on-one intervention to succeed. He will receive the help he needs, in time. Woul…

If A House Could Talk

On the last day of October,

An old man and his wife

Sat together

In a small lakeshore cottage.

An all-night rain

Write a Story Capsule

Above: Detail of a painting by Mireille Davis Texier, author of A Provençale Childhood

When your story gallops away from you and you can no longer get your head around it, here’s one way to shrink it down to a manageable size.

Try writing your story in three sentences. Each sentence addresses a specific question:

From my "Carolina" notebook comes the following list:

• Turntable

• Going out tonight

• Groundhog

• Mondegreen
  

When I came across this list recently, I stared for a long time at the word "mondegreen." What did it mean? Did I actually write that? Is it a real thing? The word was very legible, written in my own hand, yet I had no idea what it meant or why I might have written it. So I typed "mondegreen" into a browser window and learned--or apparently, relearned--that a mondegreen is a mishearing of a phrase, often a song lyric or a poem. For example: