Tonight's exercise: write about ancestry, both genealogical and metaphorical, and how it shapes your opinion/understanding of art.
Statistically, I'm sure that
somewhere in my great-great-great-umpity-great grandparents was a painter or sculptor
someone whose eyes and hands were connected to record their visions.
That gene didn't make it down to me.
What I did get was a mother who taught me to write. I don't mean the mechanical motions of marking letters on paper, though she did teach me that; I mean that when my elementary school homework required me to write a story using a bunch of that week's vocabulary and spelling words, it was my mom who would sit with me, help me see the possible ways an "icicle" might enter the story, or how it might take place in someone's - whose? - "office". And that it was just more fun to do it some ways than in others, even if both satisfied the assignment.
Even now, decades later when I sit to a writing exercise using a word list, I think in the free and easy way she taught me, asking "what if? what if?" and "which is more fun?"