As I write this, I’m in the middle, in a very abbreviated liminal space between one big event and another. A mere fifteen hours in between.

I’m still aglow with the voices and meanderings of the New Orleans Writing Marathon (NOWM). This morning, I begin a different kind of marathon: five days of training with Amherst Writers & Artists. As I wait for latter to kick off, I’ll reflect a bit on the former.

The New Orleans Writing Marathon

During the NOWM event, I thought I might be brave and write a blog at the end of each day. I’d highlight in-the-moment passages written and shared in the cafés, museums, bars, and restaurants of the French Quarter and Algiers Point. Alas, I returned every evening in overload mode. A hyper-mindset akin to the glee of a child returning from her best day ever at the amusement park. Every ride was her favorite, and every moment the best of her life. Her words fall out in effervescent, unintelligible syllables that tangle her tongue.

I needed sleep after the writing day, I needed to digest my amusement-park food.

The writing might be rough, but, as one fellow writer from Indiana said, “I write a hundred words and get maybe twenty good ones in the middle of it.”

I like those odds.

Here are some random words in the middle of my NOWM experience.

23 June 2025

10:30 a.m. BK House, Kickoff prompt

I am a writer.

I say this in all the ways, with all the words that I finally allow to bubble up, that my inner writer unlocks and takes out with glee, “This is me!”

11:30 a.m. Croissant d’Or

I’m crossing the bridge today. The temptress is waiting just beyond the gate to remind me it’s okay to undress the moment, defy the ogre, be myself, and break through the crusty gate of resistance. It’s okay to bare myself on the page because sometimes, often in my experience, I’m not the only one.

12:15 p.m. Frank Relle Gallery

The Manchac photo is stunning. I spent a summer working by that water. Middendorf’s.

We wore brown polyester uniforms that we had to make or have made. My Mama Wilson sewed my uniform, my uniform of indecision. I had just graduated undergrad and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. Actually, I knew what I wanted to do but I didn’t have the courage… just write.

2:30 p.m. Café Pontalba

It’s easy to dodge the truth, let my eyes slide right on by all the “risky” dishes on the menu. Let my pen outrun the truth, keep it off the page. But I know that’s where the juice is. In our truths, in our vulnerability, no matter how silly, embarrassing, or even risky it is to speak it out loud.

3:30 p.m. Hotel Monteleone

“The way-back machine.” He says it with glee, but I’m like, “No, no, no.” It’s not way back. It’s sideways, off the rails, not reminiscent of long lost color, just a bad reframing. …

I took a photo of the back of his head where his ponytail and crown sported about fifty shades of “I’m not gray.” The photo didn’t completely capture the ridiculousness of it, but it was enough.

“Turn off the machine.”

“Ok,” he consented.

24 June 2025

10:30 a.m. BK House, Kickoff prompt

A lot of lace
elegant
mostly black
pink.
A souvenir.
Your special kind of
manikins
from New Orleans
heads or arms to spice up
calves or feet
I chose to whisper
home fires, tidy bosoms.
My favorite ear.

11:45 a.m. New Orleans Historical Museum café

Here, the “pleasant” seasons are choked. Autumn cinched up tight into the tiny waist of a corset, squeezing most of summer into the bosom. Winter fills the hips and buttocks. But it’s a tiny butt, and the legs didn’t get much oxygen. Winter is thin, never long like Wisconsin, bleeding briefly into a diminished spring, gagged by the tight straps of sandals.

12:15 p.m. St. Louis Cathedral

The god of thunder sat at my feet on the sofa where I slept. For a moment, I levitated, jumped, suspended above the couch and outside the moment.

Where am I?

Who are you?

The storm was inside, sitting thunderously next to me.

3:30 p.m. CCs on Royal

The heat wasn’t the reason that day was a misery. It wasn’t her boys, even though Jeff did throw a fit at the Ferris wheel. The misery bloomed inside. She could feel baby Ronnie kicking at it, pushing it around, a clatter in her center.

It’s over. She couldn’t form that thought in the moment, but she felt it, and now, six decades later all by herself on Grace Hill, tending to wild dogs, a bob-tailed cat, and yard birds, she reflects and knows Pontchartrain Beach was the day, the moment, the place where she was caught again in a hopeless web.

25 June 2025

10:30 a.m. BK House, Kickoff prompt

I can see her, wearing the jean capris she used to wear to outings and prayer meetings, those comfortable worn capris. But before she wore them out, she wore them around wet paint. Now they are work pants, sporting some twenty shades of Sherwin Williams paint chips, the colors of my house, some from hers, and others from her church.

11:45 a.m. Algiers Point Tout de Suite

Sometimes circles aren’t full, they just come round, close to where you were, without closing.

1:00 p.m. Congregation Coffee

I’d never heard a writer speak about being more successful and motivated by product. I need process, the act of writing that isn’t directed or dictated by product or project.

2:30 p.m. Crown & Anchor English Pub

I would have made a terrible professional bartender for the same reason I’d make a terrible chef. I’m not good at following recipes.

I understand the words, even the passive aggressive commands that come baked in. But I get antsy, and my Unitarian comes out. I ask all the questions: Why? Why not? But what if?

3:30 p.m. Molly’s at the Market

I can imagine writing a sex scene that includes peanut butter. But I’m not sure it would be as satisfying in the flesh as it might become in my imagination or even the imagination of my readers. It would become more like porn, where the moves and angles are all about camera and tableau, not the senses, not the pleasure.

Thanks!

If you made it this far through my snippets, double-thanks!

Some of the special bits of this marathon will escape the page, but this jumbled stream of marathon memory is enough. My inner writer is rubbing her word belly and already poking at my 2026 calendar: “Save those dates! We’re going back.”

©Pennie Nichols. All Rights Reserved. 2025