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I sometimes want to upend my writing life. Not quit it, just do something very different. Turn my t-shirt into a skirt and then a bandanna and then a cape.

Toward that end, I signed up for a workshop offered by Beth Kephart, author of Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir. Preparatory to the workshop, I am reading her book. I haven’t written a memoir nor do I intend to, but much of what I write has a memoir bent to it. And all memoir is story and I am very deep into story as a focus of my writing life. I just want to tell a good story.

Last night, I read a chapter of Kephart’s book called Photo Shoot. The gift hidden within was this description of how the author teaches her students to complicate their ‘seeing’ of the world. She instructs them to go outside the classroom and take a picture. When they return, she tells them this:

Study the background of any chosen photograph. Not the foreground, the background. What’s in the picture you didn’t see when you were snapping? What lies beyond the chosen subject – just to the right or to the left? How do the borderlands shadow and shape the subject? What does the startle of the once-unnoticed detail suggest to you? What would happen if this small thing – and not the obvious thing, the central thing, the thing easily seized and snatched – was the start of your story?

And so, because I want to see that ‘small thing’ that could be the start of my story, I snapped this picture. It seems to have infinite possibilities, a thousand threads, and a lot of horizon.