The Girl's Got Gab!

Confessions and Conversations:  The Girl’s Got Gab!

            My husband thinks of me as a fabricator. Not the kind that welds sheet metal into intricate doo-dads and thing-a-ma-bobs used to build conveyor belts and pulleys for factories. Not that.  I am also quite certain he doesn’t mean “fabricator” as in having anything to do with sewing machines and dress patters.  I get where he’s going. He knows I am a storyteller. Sometimes they involve him and sometimes they involve him making mistakes (this is the part I know he deems as fiction as we all know, husbands never screw up!) I am the campfire queen who needs no campfire over which to share tales no matter how grand or small.  All I need is coffee, an experience, and an audience.  In that order.

            When I was a young girl, I spent my summers plunking away on the old Smith-Corona that was stashed under my grandma’s spare bed.  She would drag it out from under the bed and supply me with typewriter ribbon and correction fluid as long as I kept asking for it.  We lived in the country in northern Minnesota and during the six week summers, I could compile an entire anthology of comical essays depicting life on our rural stretch of road. I was the Garrison Keilor of P.O Box 211. I loved to make up stories about my grandma’s neighbors and create phony travel brochures about our dinky town that highlighted our town’s must-sees like the collection of rock-hard work jeans at the general store that only came in one size and the truck stop that featured donut holes so big you had to cut them in three’s to eat them.  

When I was nine or ten, I read my first Dave Barry article in the Sunday paper and I was agog thinking about writing like him someday.  I loved the way he told stories about his children and his wife, how he was truthful about their simple, unspectacular life experiences and how he made them serious enough to make me begin to experience a slight emotional change on the inside right before he threw in a handful of humor to switch my heart gears again.  I wanted to write like Dave Barry, but I wanted to tell Jamie Kinworthy’s unspectacular life experiences. I now practice my storytelling while chasing an English/Creative Writing degree at Regent.  My husband thinks I am studying welding at a local technical college as this naturally should enhance my current vocation as a fabricator.

I want to make people emotional, like Jesus did with his storytelling. I have written essays and spoke at a women’s faith seminar. I naturally enjoy storytelling and doing so with gaiety and wit.  I sock my audiences with somber seriousness and then double them over with panty-hose splitting laughter.  Perhaps laughter binds us to the stories we laugh over. We find relatable situations and in peppering them with humor, we can make any situation tolerable.  Jesus told stories in truth, as he was Truth.  My panache is in writing essays that tell of true personal experience, my messes and my mountaintops.  They cover anything from living with panic attacks and taking care of a husband with a brain injury to conducting an interview with an old man in his barn on the topic of traditional farming methods when his giant Clydesdale horse “broke wind” in the man’s face and knocked his hat off.  (I then realized, perhaps journalism was not for me as it required keeping a straight face.) With writing, I too can laugh at my follies and my faux-pas in the privacy of my study and in turn, I hope that they change someone’s thinking for the better.  Like biblical storytelling, I hope someone finds a reason to seek triumph over adversity and find a smidgen of hope in their own situations by giggling at their guffaws.  I hope to present my stories where God can be seen. After all, He has implanted my ability to take my experiences seriously but my presentation style not so seriously. It is my hope that this style of storytelling makes my reader ascribe to their own lives with small comfort and a sense of semblance.