Notes From Labor of Love: Karna Converse
The idea for my piece had been percolating for quite some time, but I couldn’t sit still long enough for it to bubble to the surface. In the five years since my mom passed, I’d busied myself sorting, organizing, and documenting her and my dad’s lives. Him, passing some twenty-two years before her. I reveled in these tasks—the itemized lists of family heirlooms, the acid-free boxes to safeguard photos and papers such as land abstracts and letters Dad mailed home during his military stint overseas, the sentimental vs. the practical—and I was good at them. The first holiday my and my brother’s families gathered without her was relatively, and surprisingly, easy. We prepared the meal she would have and divvied up the last of her personal items to make sure each of her five grandchildren had their own special memory. We acknowledged but didn’t dwell on the new normal.
Then I got busy researching the photos and documents I’d boxed. The rabbit holes of dates, parentage, and immigration to and migration around America filled my next couple of years in concrete, investigative ways that overshadowed a deep dive into the more personal. Even though I tried to write something meaningful from time to time.
So now: a shout-out to #MamaAndWriting, Literary Mama’s week of writing prompts from May 8th to 14th, 2022.
I didn’t participate in the virtual write-in or wrap party events. Nor did I meet the word goal or write in the specific genre as prompted by that department. But I sat still. I scratched out words, phrases, and paragraphs on notecards. I’d completed my work with things so now, I could think. I reflected on how one keeps another’s memory alive and wrestled with my role in our family’s new normal. I validated the bubbles and let the percolator do its job.
Two prompts, in particular, helped bring “random thoughts about size seven” to fruition:
-Pick a significant moment. . . . Write two sentences or two hundred and forty characters or six
words. Pick the smallest container you can and distill that moment’s power into it.
-Craft three interview questions you hope your eager profilers at the NYT will ask you about the
work. . . . Write the brilliant answers you would give your interviewer.
I’ll spare you the raw and ragged renditions of my responses. Just know that the opening line to my piece—Like me, she wore a size seven shoe.—made its way to the surface that week.
I believe in writing prompts, but I don’t always write a response and even then, don’t usually do exactly what they ask. But I value the thought process and I believe a prompt speaks loudly when it needs to. “random thoughts about size seven” is proof I was listening.
I wrote one hundred prompts in my first role with Literary Mama (blog editor) and am happy to see they still have a role on the blog. I hope YOU find at least one that speaks to you.
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Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology was released on January 26th, 2024. Edited by Amanda Jaros, this collaboration with Small Harbor Publishing celebrates Literary Mama‘s twenty years of publishing the best writing for and by mothers. We asked the contributors, all Literary Mama staffers from across the years, to share thoughts about their writing process, their inspiration, or their work in the book. We’ll share those musings here on the Literary Mama blog.
Read Karna’s essay by purchasing Labor of Love, now available on Amazon.