My friend Eddie Lee Milbrandt Jr.  has had no formal education in English or writing, but OMG! He lives on a lush farm in Iowa and thus lives his life immersed in nature, even has animal friends. So it makes perfect sense to me that his creative tendencies run wild in this environment.  Here are his words describing it:

Well, I live in the countryside, now all decked out in summer greens and lush plush growing greenery. July has presented the various lily plants, showcasing here and there tiger orange, and enchanting yellow, and radiant reds. Mother Nature likes to paint, as she demonstrates with her rainbow of colors, after a sun shined upon raindrop sky easel.  Corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, growing to its full height in fields and meadows stretched out across the land, streams playful and rivers talking, when you listen when you walk along shores where a beaver may be at work building his idea of a dam, and deer looking inquisitively at every sight they behold. Rabbits playfully darting into tall prairie grasses, and back out again, to see who else might come to play.  Small towns’ way of living, with a slower stepping through sunshine’s travel across the summer sky.  Star constellations and various planets, moon phases performing, and other cosmic capers, performed in the nightly night-time planetarium, built exclusively for and by Mother Nature, to present to all of Earth’s creative creatures.

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It’s clear to me now that knowing the ‘rules’ and stuff that warrants a degree is necessary mostly to steer Eddie on the track he is already on naturally. He just doesn’t know what to do more of–his brilliance is scattered–because he has never had any guidelines articulated. That’s where I come in.

Eddie and I began a short story called “A Bountiful Blanket of Beginnings” showing the dominance of nature in our lives on the occasion of our first meeting each other. The blanket is spread for our picnic as the foundation of our intellectual intimacy is laid as well. (that’s my interpretation anyway.) We took turns writing a few paragraphs at a time, and it was quite a challenge. Eddie gave me the supervisory role, so I had to preserve his beautiful sentences and phrases in my rewriting as well as preserve unity in our different writing styles. As I said, Eddie’s brilliance was scattered, so I had to change some sentence structures too. I taught Eddie what he was doing correctly and the poetic techniques he was already using that I believe make good writing. I was simply guiding him, giving him the ‘official parameters’ and lots of praise. Well, it took us a year and a half to write two pages, and I decided it was taking me away from finishing my novel, Burst of Life. So now I think Eddie and I are taking a long-overdue hiatus.

Please look for future posts about Eddie’s brilliance.