My husband Chris and I love Saturday mornings. To be honest, we love sleeping. So, when my kitten Hugo jumped on my chest at 10:30 a.m., causing me to jolt awake worried I’d missed the scheduled NSPF meeting.

“You’d better get going,” my hubby urged.

“Ugh,” I moaned. But got up, brushed my teeth, combed my hair, grabbed my laptop and bag and headed out the door. I decided to walk since it was snowing and (if you’ve had a chance to look at my blog,) I’m a walker.

I was late and walking would make me later and stopping to grab a coffee would make me later still but I justified my lateness to the snow. I figured you would all forgive me.

I got to the library at about 11:15 a.m., not bad timing, I thought. I looked around but only one person sat in our typical meeting space. I backed up, thinking maybe the meeting was being held in that conference room down the hall. But I knew my mistake. That’s what happens when you get up late and rush around and don’t double check things. I knew the meeting had been canceled.

But there was this gentleman there. So I introduced myself and he, himself. His name is/was Tom and I guess you’ve all met him before as he indicated that he came to a meeting in November. Well, we talked for a while and shared how we each got interested in writing and poetry and I again praised my mentor Cathy for bringing me back into the poetry fold so many years ago.

Then Tom shared of the poems he’d brought which were very good.

We also tried to work on a poetry exercise so I thought I’d share that exercise with you all, too.

Okay, so here goes… You have to play along in order for this work, so no reading through it and skipping ahead. You have spend the time and work through it.

Exercise: Mapping to a sense of place

1. Pick a time in your life. It could be now. It could be during your first job. It could be during your college, high school, or early childhood years. Which ever you pick let your mind go to the memories you’ve stored, the experiences you’ve had about that time.

2. Pick a place you lived during the time you’ve chosen. Visualize this place in your mind’s eye. Now take three minutes (it helps if you have a kitchen timer handy) and describe the physical building where you lived in as much detail as possible. What color was it? How many rooms did it have? Was there a fence? A garden? Did it have a basement or an attic?

3. Take a clean sheet of paper and draw the place you lived in the center of that piece of paper to best of your ability. You have 30 seconds.

4. Time’s up. Now draw the building next door.

5. Now continue this exercise for three minutes until you have a relatively good map of the street/surrounding area of the place where you lived.

6. Now for five minutes go back to your drawing and choose a place on your map that you have not thought about in a long time, imagine that place and the people who lived there in your writing.

Well, this isn’t a formula for a poem per se but a way to get the writing muscles exercised. I did this in a workshop with poet Patricia Smith author of “Blood Dazzler” during the 2011 Massachusetts Poetry Festival. I really enjoyed the workshop and I’m sure I’m not capturing it’s essence well enough here. But what the heck, something to keep us writing on a dreary (now not so snowy) day.