Ice Cream

Free (?) Writing from the Iowa Summer Writing Festival

I am getting ready for vacation this week. Packing took precedence over writing, so I thought I’d share something that I wrote last year in an Iowa Summer Writing Festival class. If you’ve been reading for a while, you’ve read several things that I wrote there, things that I drafted in class and then polished, read aloud, polished some more, workshopped, polished, and finally sent out into the world.

But many of the in-class exercises from my Iowa Summer Writing Festival classes live in my Lowly Worm writing notebook, their purpose already served. These were the exercises to get the juices flowing, the ones where I wrote without picking up the pen. The instructors gave us a small prompt and set the timer. Free writing is what some call this.

Free writing doesn’t feel very free to me. When someone says, “Write the first thing that comes to your mind,” the first thing that comes to my mind is that I’m supposed to be writing. I have limited time, and I want to use it well. What if I start down a path that dead-ends at a cliff or a gully that is impossible to cross? I know the point is to get the pen moving, and writing many words might lead to an interesting sentence or a well-captured detail. I’ve read Bird by Bird and The Artist’s Way. My freeze response says more about me than about the exercises.

Still, I am a rule follower, so I start. And when the time goes off, I finish. And sometimes there is an interesting sentence, a well-captured detail, or a memory I got to revisit. The outcome may not be impressive, but the process was satisfying. Here’s one example. The prompt was, “Write about ice cream.”

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Ice cream has come and gone from my life over the years. Grandpa Bob loved butter pecan. He had a dish almost every day - a very big helping. What kind of ice cream did Grandma Louise like? No one knows. It never came up. We all ate butter pecan in a quantity that my mom would have insisted was for sharing.

The local Dairy Queen was across the street from our church. It closed for the winter, but from spring to fall, we would each get a cone after church. I longed for the dipped cone, but Mom was afraid I would spill it on myself. Dad was the only one who got a dipped cone. The chocolate stains came out in the wash.

Now that I have a family, we buy small tubs of Ben & Jerry’s. Everyone gets their favorite flavor. Sometimes we share, but other times we don’t - allocating our tub across days, or eating it all in one sitting. The patriarchy of ice cream has ended with my generation. We have doggie ice cream, too, because Annie is also against the patriarchy.

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I was going to write about Carver cones, but the timer went off. A story for another time.

Photo Credit: Little Village Magazine