In-service Result

Due to the city's annual basketball tournament/carnival, we teachers planned an in-service day for today, knowing that attendance would be awful (kids out until well after midnight all weekend).  Our illustrious leader decided that it would be an in-service about art and integrating art with other content areas, and brought in an art instructor from Fairbanks.  I've never been particularly good at art.  Never have, probably never will.  As a result of that, I don't particularly enjoy art projects.  Thus, I wasn't particularly excited about today. 

It wasn't as bad as I envisioned it.  The hours sped by, and while my lack of creativity left me feeling somewhat less than successful, my art samples didn't turn out too horribly.  Right at the end of the day, we did a questioning/writing exercise that was actually kind of fun.  The instructor showed us a picture, we asked questions about it in groups, and then wrote about it, our creative juices fueled by the questions that we had brainstormed/heard from others.  Here's the picture, by Sandy Skoglund:

Depressing cat people, surrounded by radioactive green cats.  Lots of possibilities here.  The writing part of the exercise was open-ended - we could write whatever we wanted, in whatever format/genre we wanted.  Here is the beginning of a story that I would finish if I had any literary talent:

"As hard as he tried, he couldn't remember a life without cats. Harry sat in his chair with the broken slat. A cat had once tried to squeeze between the slats, but hadn't quite fit. Harry hadn't bothered to fix it, figuring it would probably break again soon, anyway. He and his wife, Bertha, hadn't always lived this life, this life consumed by the abnormally green cats. They used to have the perfect life: a nice clean house, children, a pet dog, white picket fence - the American dream. If only he hadn't stopped to help that poor, "injured" cat on the way home from work on that fateful day. If only they hadn't been sucked up into this nightmare. . . ."

And from there, it goes into a mystery of epic proportions, involving alien cats invading Earth. . . telling the back-story of poor Harry and Bertha. . . how the cats came to take-over the lives of poor, innocent civilians like the ones pictured above. A tragic tale, really. And it's begging to be written. So, if you have literary talent and would like to continue this train of thought, please feel free. Take it with my compliments. Change it, make it better, finish it. Consider it my anonymous contribution to the field of (bad) literature.