Workshop with Melanie Rae Thon: Part One

Today I attended a reading, dinner and workshop with a Salt Lake City author named Melanie Rae Thon.  I have only recently become acquainted with her work, but she's fantastic.  She blurs the genre line between poetry and prose, and her novel The Voice of the River, is simply fantastic.  I'm only halfway through, but I'm loving her writing style.  So lyrical and profound.  Very nice.  I recommend it.  At her workshop, she gave us some writing prompts and had us just free-write for 5 minutes or so.  What I wrote is pretty rough and nonsensical, but I'm really trying to blog every day in the month of April, so yeah...

Have you ever been close to death?

I'm not afraid of death necessarily, but I am afraid of pain.  This fear keeps me from doing anything adventurous or anything out of the ordinary hamster wheel that is my life.  So death, it seems, has never been near me.  I keep it as away from me as possible.  Except of course that time I awoke in the night with my heart determined to stab me, unable to breathe and scared out of my mind.  Probably just acid reflux or something else nonthreatening, but it felt like death at the time.  I've been on shaky airplanes where I realize how small and high up I am or in cars with reckless drivers who cause me to continually push my foot against the ground as if I can hit the brakes from the passenger side.  I sideswiped a van once and almost hit a deer, so I guess that makes me a bad driver as well.  I remember once, riding in the car with my stepfather, and seeing a herd of cattle crushed into bits before my eyes by a semi-truck in the night.  Headlights steadily illuminating the unwitting targets.  I heard their panicked mooing stop with an explosion of red and death seemed real to me.  Death was disturbing; not peaceful like the last time I saw my grandmother's sweet face and I whispered, "Grandma's sleeping" as my mother led me away from the coffin.

More mindless ramblings tomorrow...