Everyday Canvas

Writing about Carrot Sticks

On page 37 of Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott says about her students:
“But Write about what? They ask next.
Write about carrot sticks, I tell them.”

Then she takes her own advice and writes about school lunches, her piece taking off from carrot sticks. Here are her first three sentences or so.
“Code carrots had to look machine extruded, absolutely uniform, none longer than the length of the sandwich. Your parents would sometimes send you to school with waxed-paper packets of uneven cuckoo-bunny carrots, and your carrot esteem would be so low you couldn’t even risk looking at the guy against the fence. Bad juju.”

Really, writing about carrot sticks! Well, I can’t resist a challenge, although I might skip the lunch-box part.


You know how it is. When dreams fade, love’s a barren land. In spite of this, and so that you don’t forget me, I’ll put a carrot on a stick and hold it in front of you. You get the picture? I’ll even give you long ears and a big voice for braying. But you’ll never take the bait and I’ll end up becoming more cold-hearted than you have even been.

Now you may think I am long-gone and mad…What a way to treat a lover, right? Right, and so deservedly; therefore, next, I’ll lift my arms and fly, taking off to a distant land, my roots dangling beneath like carrots to be cut into sticks.

While I am away, I bet you’ll forget me, because you do that forgetting thing real well. In that moment, I’ll never gaze at the empty distances between us, and being far off and far out, I’ll un-invite you and cut all my dangling carrots into sticks or, better yet, shred them into a carrot cake, which I will offer to someone else who doesn’t have the word forget in his vocabulary.


This drivel took about six minutes…I clocked myself, but I did write about carrot sticks, and no one can blame me for not bolting away from the carrot stick challenge.