Always a good prompt

"Be a figure in a famous painting": always a good prompt for a subject to write about.  It was our prompt for the new writing group yesterday.  What a wonderful cast of characters we heard from -- heavily French.  This is a group that, so far, writes simply for fun and no critiques happen-- that bothers one member who would like criticism.  But we are feeling our way and I have some doubts that the group can continue after August.

i wrote as Madame X, painted by John Singer Sargent, an American in a dress that was then scandalous and now seems the epitome of elegance  We heard from a Degas prostitute, a Cassett young lovely, the female part of  Grant Woods' American Gothic, a Renoir dancer, a darling child in a three-child photo, the haggard woman in a Burke-White photo, a modern day woman whose self-portrait the writer actually has in her home. And so it went. Very delightful to be among a group of women willing to do a little research and use  a lot of imagination, create a voice very different from their own.

I've just read in an Oliver Sacks book (he's a neurologist) that occasionally an older person experiences a sudden burst of creativity as if some long time repressions have dissolved.  Some of the members of this group still exhibit the inhibitions but others may be freeing themselves.  I hope I can encourage some of that in the writing classes I teach.  Once in a while I think is actually might be happening.