Author: Jackie Pick

Jackie Pick is a former teacher and current writer living in the Chicago area. She is a contributing author to multiple anthologies, including Multiples Illuminated, So Glad They Told Me: Women Get Real about Motherhood, Here in the Middle, as well as the and the literary magazines The Sun and Selfish. She received Honorable Mention from the Mark Twain House and Museum for her entry in the Royal Nonesuch Humor Writing Competition. Jackie is a contributing writer at Humor Outcasts, and her essays have been featured on various online sites including McSweeney's, Belladonna Comedy, Mamalode, The HerStories Project, and Scary Mommy. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, Jackie is co-creator and co-writer of the award-winning short film Fixed Up, and a proud member of the 2017 Chicago cast of Listen To Your Mother.

NaNoWriMo Day 5: Closets

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NaNoWriMo Day #5

Words Today:   2201

Total Words: 10,237. I have passed the 10,000 word mark and for that I am grateful and excited. 

 

I am unsure why I chose to write about closets today. It was a personal piece, certainly more memoir than essay, possibly more fictionalized than reality. I burrowed into some pretty sparse and deeply buried childhood memories. I don’t have many memories of growing up, or even through college. I have some theories as to why, but I am reluctant to speculate at this point.

I haven’t written much of my life story before age 25 or so mostly because I don’t have a strong sense of my own history. I find it weird and unsettling. There are few pictures of me or my family, we just weren’t photographers. Stories I’ve been told about myself are filtered, obviously, through other lenses. I don’t trust these versions.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve wanted desperately to write a novel, and I believe that mining one’s own past for starting points, for descriptions, for characters is a great beginning. You can see my problem here.  Most of my writing now that I’ve taken it up as a career has been about my adult life and/or things that matter to me as an adult.

I read a lot of writing prompts the last few days, and there was one that eventually led me to describe closets (it wasn’t a direct prompt, but I’ve learned to use prompts however the hell I want to. I’m not in 6th grade anymore, I can improvise.) It was a weird feeling, writing what felt like a gauzy, dreamy version of my own past, yanking things out of my subconscious. Meaningless things, images, nothings, moments that I can’t contextualize.

As a writer, pretty cool and really sloppy. As a human? Weird. And very sloppy. This is something close to what I’d hoped for when I committed to this writing. Close, but not quite what I expected.

I think this will be, perhaps, the a cornerstone, a starting brick in a short fictional piece. It’s exciting. I feel like I’ve been allowed to peek into a room everyone else has been partying in for awhile.

Also, and I shouldn’t even have to say this at this point — two kids home sick again today. Le sigh.