I think the best thing about my writing group (known officially as Writing Group) is that in Writing Group, you can, just because of the nature of the gathering, talk about ANYTHING. Because when you’re a writer, you just have to. You always have to be figuring things out. It’s part of the unspoken job description.
And we love it, because we get to talk about things like, what’s the relative difference in the quality and meaningfulness of new-clothes smell in a K-Mart versus a Macy’s? Seriously. We have to know.
Somehow we wound our way from that to talk of music venues and art spaces, and then to an art space set up specifically so that it’s intentionally uncomfortable and difficult to navigate–so that it’s a nervous space. The Nervous Space, we decided, a perfect name for such a venue, and we kept saying it over and over. The Nervous Space. The Nervous Space. (Okay, okay, maybe it was just me doing that.) But there was something about that phrase, that concept that struck us all (not just chantress me) as worth working out. And we set it as a writing task for each of us.
So that’s what I’m kicking around these days, what I’m turning over and over in my head. It’s funny–I had an initial thought about what would be my ‘nervous space,’ and since that first blush of thinking, stuff keeps happening that’s related to that first thought. So I guess this is a good choice. I’ve gotta get this stuff down. Not doing so is making me nervous.
Jackie Lutzke 