Fiction – Goodman

How do you know where to begin?

A List- a simple list can be the gateway to something grander.

Let’s start with your shopping list. I write mine in the order that I move through the shop. When I first walk in the fruit and veg is right in front of me, so that’s what my shopping list would start with…

Carrots, peppers, potatoes, apples, satusumas, cucumber.

How do you write your shopping list? Do you write it or do you wing it? I know this may seem mundane, everyday or even *gulp* ordinary but the ordinary stuff is important – rituals, routines, habits that ground us.

So let’s pick something from my list. I’m going to focus on potatoes. Now, I love potatoes, don’t you? I hate sweet potatoes. I’m talking about white potatoes. The little baby ones we buy every week without fail.

So now I’m going to write another list- a list of describing words for potatoes.

Brown, tasty, roasted, mashed, chipped, spil, blemish, eyes. EYES!

Eyes have caught my attention to be honest. A long time ago, I spent a 6 hour unwaged trial shift in a café in Napier in New Zealand.

My quest: to prove I was worthy of a job.

My job: to remove the eyes from old potatoes.

I failed my quest but this isn’t the story I am ready to tell. So I’m gonna leave that memory for another day…

Eyes caught my attention because it made me think what if potatoes had actual eyes. Not weird growths but actual eyes. What colour would they be? If they grow underground, do they even need eyes? Do they need glasses when they drive? Hang on, my questions have started to step off to the fantastical. So you could try writing some questions too. You could start with 10 – allow memories to run, use what ifs to conjure the fantastical. If it feels silly, good! What’s wrong with that anyway?

So in simple terms

Write list 1
Pick something off list 1 and write another list of describing words.
Ask some questions about this item?
Enjoy yourself!

Don’t worry about absurdity or whether or not the questions can be answered.

Don’t worry about your handwriting or your spelling or your grammar.

Don’t worry if it’s good or not.

You’ve just started.

And if you are wondering about a potato with eyes still, I offer my humble drawing…

Reading Challenge

Last November, I finished reading Phillip Pullman’s Book of Dust. Wow, I was swept up in the storms and flooding of Oxford and thrilled with reading about the early days of Lyra, 15 years after first picking up the Amber Spyglass. I was pleased, I had had a good run of books, before Book of Dust, I had read Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest book, Here I am and re read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for the twelfth time.

I thought about the books that I wasn’t reading. The majority of the books I have read have always been written by white, men. Here I was, trying to throw myself into other worlds. Worlds as varied as the last few books I had read and yet I wasn’t challenging myself to read work written by other, not enough. So I decided to challenge myself to only read books by anyone other than white men. Six months in, I am more excited about reading than I ever had been. I have time travelled along the Indus, with Alice Albinia and trapped between the pages of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. I have been haunted by the language of Nikita Gill’s Wild Embers. I have commuted with short stories and essays from Chinua Achebe, Betty Friedan and Dorothy Parker (Penguin Modern Classics, £1 a book). I uncovered the history of the women and their voices with Mary Beard and am currently lost in 1970’s America with Joan Didion in her collection The White Album. These are just some of my highlights.

However, I have had to break the rules. Normally when it came to do with work. Storytelling and folklore theory have tripped me up and I have had to read books that where edited, collected or written by white men. Women are present in this scene, but seminal works belong to white men – clue in that adjective.

Generally this challenge has been really fulfilling and exciting and I currently have a shelf full of books that are still waiting to be read. I am always looking for recommendations, what do you suggest?