PotW #106

6.5.25: Vignette

Rodrigo Vignette #14

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Endnotes

A moment in the day. A camera’s panning shot. An end to a story overheard in an elevator. Are these brief experiences different from a poem?

It’s the end of my second year of studying cross-genre literature and creative writing. I have finals to write, finals to grade. I’m thinking about the different forms we choose to express ourselves with—emails and movies and clothes and photos and fists—and how different those forms are.

Remember the novella I shared last year? I’m still working on it. Revising it and rewriting it. As part of the process, a professor recommended I take a poem (a form to express life’s ambiguities and complexities outside of conventional grammatical and syntactical designs) and convert it into a prose vignette (a more logical yet just-as-fleeting form to express life’s ambiguities and complexities). In this vignette, I took the “original” poem I wrote a couple of months ago and rewrote it as a prose paragraph. What was a personal reflection about my nomadic lifestyle was turned into a glimpse into the messy translation of parental secrets to kindred understanding. In rewriting my life into that of a character, I can probe that character and better understand how small moments fit into a larger context.

What if that last text you sent had line breaks? What if you had to describe the last photo you took in a few sentences? What if you could change the world around you by first looking at yourself in a different way?

Hope June is good to you,

Ricky