Narrative Practice outputs

DAY 1.

SCORE FOR NATASHA BROWN'S ASSEMBLY

ONE PAGE OF WRITING INSPIRED BY THE "TEMPLATE" OF NATASHA BROWN'S ASSEMBLY

She puts on the brown shoes with faded noses.

She will never throw them out, they were her father’s first good gift.

She slams the stained glass door behind her.

I walk with big steps, in a rush to get this over with. At the postal collection point, I hand in the package with a big return label glued onto it. The woman behind the desk scans the barcode and says I have to pay more than the label accounts for. I say I just printed what they sent me. She says it doesn’t matter, it weighs more than the label accounts for.

When Dan said he was jealous of my calmness cause he couldn’t remember the last time he felt at peace, I wanted to break his bones. But I didn’t. He might not understand me, but I understand him all too well.

I ask her how much more, she says two euros. I say that’s fine, can I pay by card please? She says it doesn’t work that way. That I have to create a new label. I walk out of the store, leaving behind the package and the label and the 50 euros worth of refund money and the woman behind the desk.

Before I was living in this house, the one with the stained glass door and the deep windowsills and the morning sun and the modern kitchen, I was renting the attic room of a young family on the outskirts of the city. I had to share the bathroom with the children, twelve and fourteen they were, but had a little kitchenette on my own floor. It wasn’t much more than a microwave and kettle, but that is all I thought one could need at that point. Then I got a job, a real job that pays real money and offers real benefits. At that job, I couldn’t possibly tell people that I was living in someone else’s attic. I lied about having a nice apartment till I actually found one, and before I knew it, I started believing that I, too, deserved such a place, that I needed such a place. It’s a feeling that only very rarely makes place for an incomprehensible lack. Moments where I try to hear if the bathroom is already being used before the realisation sets in. Even though it wasn’t my family, it was still a family.

I wash my coffee cup for too long. I am trying to hear the conversation going on at the lunch table, they are not in my team, but some names of shared bosses get dropped. A quick rinse would have sufficed, I wonder when they will notice that the tap still hasn’t stopped running. The water turns hotter and when my hand is almost burning, I finally turn it off.

If only there would have been more of us, more like me. Friends, siblings, cousins. If we would have been with more, it might have felt like enough.

You wake up in a mirrored world and every time you try to use your right arm, your left arm raises.

Back at my desk, Dan comes over. I ask him how his morning meeting was, the one above my pay grade. While he explains in intricate detail who said what and made which faces, I think about what I will cook tonight.

DAY 2.

NARRATIVE AS CHANGE - USE AN UNPROMISING OBJECT

Trying stuff with squares and circles:

File:Squares and circles 1.mp4

File:Squares and circles 2.mp4

File:Squares and circles 3.mp4

TALE BASED ON THE PROPP’S TEMPLATE

1. Initial situation: introduce a small group and their setting. Name the members of the group and their characteristics; identify the future hero.

2. One member of the group (an authority) absents themselves from home: for example, parents leave for work, to the forest, to war, they die.

3. Before they leave, an interdiction is addressed to the hero (Don’t do this: don’t pick the apples, don’t pick up the golden feather, don’t open the chest, don’t speak to the neighbour…)

4. The interdiction is violated.

5. The villain is introduced.

On a stretched out beach in the scorching sun, three young kids are working on an enormous sandcastle. It has towers and walls and chambers and moats. One of the kids is Lola, only five years old. Her age never stops her, she is always eager to prove her courage. She didn’t know the other two, siblings of eight and ten vacationing here with their parents, till she came up to them a couple of minutes ago with big steps, asking if she could help them build their castle.

Lola gets up from shaping one of the sand city’s bridges and declares to the others she will get some water for the moat. They tell her to be careful and to not go too far into the sea. All of a sudden they feel the responsibility of being older, with the young girl’s parents nowhere in sight. Lola tells them not to worry, she goes into the sea all the time, she says.

She takes two of the little castle-shaped buckets and walks her way down the beach, in between the sunbathing families, the umbrellas, the greedy seagulls.

She gets knee-deep in the water and scoops it up with her buckets. They are quite heavy now for her little arms, and she almost loses one to the tide. Right as she manages to pull it back up, a kid shows up behind her out of nowhere, older than her. Eleven, twelve maybe.

They kid says ‘Hey’. Lola responds ‘Hello’.

The kid asks to borrow Lola’s buckets, she refuses. The kid insists, she refuses again.

‘But you have two, I just need one of them.’

‘But they’re not mine.’

‘Come on, don’t be so annoying!’

The kid starts to pull on the bucket in her left hand, it’s a blue one. Lola tries to pull back but even she would admit that her age is not working in her favour. The bucket slips from her fingers and Lola falls backwards into the sea. In the split second it takes her to find her balance and get her head above water again, the kid has run away with the blue bucket.