Inside your Plume mailing you’ll find a vintage photo. And you may be wondering why. One of our Kickstarter contributors (an old family friend) wondered just that. She thought we’d made a mistake and she returned the photo with a thank you note! “Thought you might want to keep this,” the note said, not knowing that it was a photo of a vintage stranger–some friends of mine are avid garage sale shoppers and gave me a giant envelope of old black and whites to use as writing prompts.
I’ve also been going through boxes of old photos and albums inherited from my grandparents and from my parents. Many of these are of people I don’t know. And I have duplicates, or triplicates and I’ve been slipping some of those in as well. Or making a post for Instagram. I really like the thought that my family will become your fiction! My ancestors can live on through stories.
In the picture above you’ll see my mother (center) and my grandmother (far right) and a woman I don’t know. I’ve deduced that the photo was snapped in Spain, around 1962 (because of the album I found it in). My grandfather was in the US Navy and stationed at the Naval base in Rota, Spain heading up the dental clinic there. My dad (also in the Navy) was at sea so my mother took went to stay with her in-laws in Spain and travel around Europe. She brought my sister who was two at the time. But if you didn’t know that you might write about these women and imagine their story. Why are they dressed up? Where are they going? Write about what’s inside the frame and what’s happening outside the frame as well.
And let us know if anything you write from a Plume prompt turns into something you publish! Or consider submitting the piece, or a bit of it for our Lady Bits column (coming soon).
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