Finding your voice (II) - A Touch of Stardust

Storytelling - scraps, zentangle,
washi tap, and a button

A blog is a wonderful place to make confessions and I have made a couple in several posts, so here goes another: I have never seen Gone with the Wind in its entirety. There. I know perhaps that doesn't shock you, but for someone of my age, the movie was a perennial event on network TV, back before cable, and well before Netflix, so what else was there to watch? It would be spread out over three nights (mini-series style, which was popular back in the seventies) usually starting on Sunday and continuing on Monday and Tuesday nights. I always saw Sunday night and Tuesday but for some reason missed Monday, which meant I missed the big burning of Atlanta scene.

The burning of Atlanta scene is exactly where Kate Alcott's A Touch of Stardust opens. Julie Crawford, aspiring screenwriter, is a studio flunky trying to get a message to the all important producer David O. Selznick who just so happens to be burning down the movie studio's back lot - the inferno is Atlanta and when the embers cool the crew will build Tara and the rest of scenery needed. And here again am I, listening this time (audiobook) as I dig in the garden, to this all important scene to Gone with the Wind.

The event was so important to history and to the people who lived through it that Margaret Mitchell was inspired to write her story. By the way, I did read the novel. I was an precocious reader and by eighth grade I was picking up paperback editions of books like: The Godfather, Jaws, The Exorcist, and Gone with the Wind. I can distinctly remember sitting on my bed at my family's cottage on the Rhode Island shoreline just soaking up the story.

And that's where finding your voice comes in - storytelling. We each tell stories. There are the stories of our childhood, of our families, of our school experiences, of good or bad work experiences, of our loves and losses, and of who we are. Most of our stories are pure non-fiction and others - well let's face it there are embellishments. Perhaps we don't want to share the whole truth or we need to throw in some humor to take the sting of pain out of the telling. Perhaps we are afraid others won't like us if we tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But it is in telling the whole truth that we let our true voice be heard by the world. Our voice tells the truth. Our voice is who we are. We are the author's of our lives and it is only by using our voice that we can create something worthy of winning the Pulitzer or an Oscar, or better yet an epitaph that we are proud to read.