Category Archives: Storytelling

Quilting Bee

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Mask quilt by Deanna Taylor
The good, the bad and the ugly. All part of life’s crazy quilt.
Bits and fragments that create great beauty.
Pieces ready to be joined
African motif quilt by Deanna Taylor
Detail from mask quilt
This is a lovely poem written by my friend Isidro and painted on my wall. It is his version of a story I’d earlier written entitled “In Mexico There is Always Music.” We all keep contributing to each others’ stories.

(Click on photos to enlarge and to read the rest of the story.)

Quilting Bee

I chop my life up into bits, incongruous and varied:
struggles, victories, tragic loves, the day that I got married.
Clashes create beauty as pains mix up with cheers,
making a lovely pattern as each new piece appears.

In stories as in patchwork quilts, all bits are not roses.
Part of the beauty comes from the pain that it exposes.
We put our art together, fragment after patch
and no pattern emerges if all the pieces match.

A convenient truth of works of art as well as that of life:
beauty’s found in perfection, but also found in strife.
Sweet berries come with brambles and each rose has its thorn.
Both great passion and great pain predate the time we’re born.

Perhaps pain is the awful price that we have to pay
to experience the pleasure of when it goes away.
So with the ugly fabric that finds a place to fit
when contrasting beauty is stitched in next to it.

Life is a lovely story, but not all of it is writ.
Why were we created if not to add to it?
In taking all the pieces we’re provided with,
We take part in creation by adding to the myth.

 

 

Prompts today are patterns, chop, clashes, cheer, incongruous, convenient and brambles.

Family Details

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The Prompt: Spinning Yarns—What makes a good storyteller, in your opinion? Are your favorite storytellers people you know or writers you admire?

Family Details

The very best storytellers are those who are not aware of a distinct line between fact and fiction. My father was a storyteller of the first order, which might tell you something about the dependability of his details. From telling to retelling, distances multiplied and facts grew in magnitude. This is why as he grew older, his tales grew more and more spectacular.

When Colima volcano blew a few days ago, I was 50 or so miles away, but if my father had been alive and had been telling the tale, he would have had me standing at the rim, dodging boulders, with lava lapping at my heels as I fled down the mountain. Barefoot.

Yes, I inherited my father’s storytelling propensities, but as in everything, inheritance is a matter of degrees. The fact that my father did not squander the fruits of his life’s long efforts and so passed some of them on to me has contributed greatly to my comfortable retirement. What he seems to have used up is the family quota of exaggeration. So it is that I try to refrain from hyperbole as much as my genes will allow me to. Still, with many of my stories, I worry about whether people will believe me. That is where cameras come in handy. Oh that I’d had one those nights when I saw the flying saucers!!!!