This last story is really cool. I like it, even after a zillion readings and edits. This one I’ll be proud to send out.
Question now is do I go back and try to fit that voice over the previous story? I don’t think so. It’s not meant for that style I don’t believe.
I think I’ll just try to think of more stories to write.
Been pretty much flattened out for the last several days by swollen glands in my neck and the resulting soreness and pain there, in my throat, in my ear, and all topped with a headache that makes my scalp sore to the touch. None of the pain is that bad but it’s the relentlessness of it that wears down the will.
While I’m not one to scurry off to the doctor (just got established last year with my first GP under pressure from the gynegologist and cardiologist) I had gone on Monday for a 3-month checkup which she insists upon and I’ll have to wean her off that idea and since I hadn’t fasted, agreed to come back on Wednesday for bloodwork. Well, you know how the doctor–no matter what type or what they’re looking for–automatically inspects your neck for swollen glands and finds nothing? When I went in for the blood draw I asked to see the doctor for a minute figuring she’d be thrilled over a case of swollen glands. She felt, poked, had to use a stick to keep my tongue down (why does one’s tongue have the instinct to wrap around whatever lands on it?) and suggested I go see the dentist. Then, after five unsuccessful attempts to draw blood (without any of the testing purposes noted for the gland problem) I left.
So I’m self-medicating because I know that if the lymph nodes are swollen it’s a response to infection and I know that there’s nothing wrong with my teeth right now. I’m taking painkillers and slightly out-of-date penicillin (men can always be counted upon to not take the full 10-day regiment of antibiotics) and feeling a little better today. Not good enough, however, to go back uptown and let a nurse who doesn’t seem to know enough to keep the draw-point on the hand below the level of the heart and let gravity help, stick five more holes in me.
Well without the self-confidence I only sent out that recent story on the Shoebox to two lit journals and figured I’d wait again till September (amazing how fast deadlines go by) and read some work by Anthony Varallo published by Agni online. I think I caught the edge. Wrote something short (850 words!) yesterday that started with this: “Mary decided that if the light turned green in this direction next, she’d leave Timothy.”
Sometimes all you need is a push in the right direction to catch the groove of what you want to say and how you want to say it. The other story was nicely written, interesting, yet was written in such a storytelling way that I knew it was wrong and am glad I stopped myself from peppering editorial staffs across the nation with its blahness.
While I’m not completely taken with some of the contemporary work that in truth holds no substance but emphasizes edge and weirdness as its goal, I very much appreciate the sharp crisp sentences and minimalist thinking of the better writers. Varallo’s stories point out how simple the basis of story can be, as long as it’s relative to the reader. Loved his stuff and I’m glad I sought and found help when I knew I needed it. Maybe reading and writing a lot of poetry lately and even Carolyn Chute’s The Beans of Egypt, Maine influenced my thinking patterns. In any event, I still have a few days yet on some of the journals to clean it up and get it in before they close for the summer, but at least I might have put myself back on the right track.
Here I am, letting myself get to the deadline of submission dates for stories and immediately after sending out to two lit journals, I read the story again and absolutely hate it.
It’s too long; it’s too short. It’s got no punch, it’s too preachy. It’s not edgy enough. Or maybe it’s just the pain that’s splitting my head in two that’s got me colicky.
The snicker paces, stabs its saber
of long-toothed loss of faith
at all the plastic daffodils
in an attempt to free itself,
escape and even so
there is a dumbness to it,
that poetry relives itself
hiding in a fat white tulip bulb
emerging just when man
or woman
needs it most
a shield
a farce
a final sizzle of the torch
a month to celebrate–imagine,
celebrate–
words written to uplift
rewind mankind into a tight yarn ball
just so he doesn’t know
he’s only rolling.
Spring blue sky warmed by
the sun-wash of yellow,
stretches from the rooftop
to the maplewoods out back, and wide,
punctured by the rosy pink
of peach blossoms, to the hedgerow stone
Far beyond my fingertip horizon,
I imagine edges fading to a gradient gray
of storms twisting out of smoking wars
until it softens, blackens into someone’s
peaceful night spent waiting
to color itself a blue warm day
With the reading period within a day of ending for many of the literary journals, I’m frantically reading, reading and rewriting a story that just showed up in my brain a couple days ago. It seems I put a good part of my day and night into tweaking it, then notice more that could be edited just when I thought I might be done.
Last go-round was with a “storytelling” voice that I figured I’d borrowed from a friend. This morning it seems like not only is there a lack of dialogue, that dialogue would be better as a ‘showing’ than the blah-blah-blah background I have. Why don’t I know these things as I’m writing or at least find them faster in the editing?
I really, really need more willing-to-help writer friends or take a class or something.
A single day each year
smells of the heat
of young summer
of rain
and the pungent scent
of pavement steams
through the city
then fades with its presence
while May and July travel on
and forgotten in the next
fall and winter
to surprise with its
urgent intensity and
the next year’s
first rain
I’ve really been enjoying this book by Carolyn Chute her first, because of its character-driven plot, its simple yet shocking story of a family in backwoods Maine, but admittedly it’s the writing style that’s gotten me hooked. There were many times I wanted to post on a particular phrase or paragraph but I just couldn’t get past this one without sharing it:
Cole Deveau’s bride loves a straight-back chair. Her knitting lies black on her knee like a sleeping cat. She wears a flowered apron, the kind that goes over the head. It is dark out now but she doesn’t need a light to knit by. She is just a pair of pale hands and number-three needles, a gray face in moonlight. (p. 110)
There’s simile and there’s simple imagery. There’s metaphor: “a pair of pale hands and number-three needles” that tells us what kind of woman she is as she lets a repetive, natural action take over her life so that she doesn’t have to think. It is a conscious decision as we’re told she “loves a straight-back chair.” And why is she up and knitting, “a gray face in moonlight.” Chute goes on:
She sits by the window where she can look out, waiting. Her eyes look straight into the yard, somewhat turned in on themselves like the eyes of the dead. Her lips move, counting stitches. But otherwise she is like a big doll, unrelenting perfect posture. But no one comes. The moon lifts clear of Cole’s caved-in barn…feeble, shaky.
Wow. Such simple writing, factual yet full of observation and detail.
The story here moves quickly and it is mainly through the focus on characters and their dialogue that we get a picture of poverty and families just scraping by. There is incest–even though there’ a tv–and it’s not just the Bean family that indulges in this small comfort that makes their lives easier. The book opens with the first person account of Earlene, a young girl who lives across a right-of-way from the Bean tribe, and Chute has chosen to jump right in at the begininning of the story with Earlene’s grandmother coming to visit and finding Earlene in bed with her father. We aren’t told what happens, but there is the obvious inappropriateness (Earlene’s likely around ten) and the more obvious loneliness of Earlene’s father since his wife’s been institutionalized.
It’s a totally absorbing story, seeing human nature at its most basic where survival, comfort, and love are the values that are sought above any other ambitions.
My shop is outdoors inside. Whatever the weather is what I am too. Sometimes the rain tries to seep through the slats and I find myself weeping along. This morning I turned on the gas stove; now I turn on the fans. Wide open doorway tells me each time a car whooshes by and sometimes I’m touched by the fingers that trail behind radios blasting out songs. The outside’s inside, inside me though I swear I just watch it go by.
One of the best articles I’ve read recently on learning and literature, from The Chronicle, “Against Readings”:
Everyone who teaches literature has probably had at least one such
golden moment. I mean the moment where, reading casually or reading
intently, being lazy or being responsive, one is shocked into
recognition. “Yes,” one says, “that’s the way it really is.” Then
often, a rather antinomian utterance comes: “They say it’s not so, but
I know it is. I always have.”
Without its double-u
will becomes ill;
funny how places of things
and all things in place
turn soil into sand
maples to cacti
and adding salt to a stream
makes an ocean
The more I read the more I believe there should be further investigation of the tactics used in torturing prisoners and establishing legality. I’m not necessarily looking for blame purposes, but for the future. As Americans being represented by the military and justice departments of the United States we have to know a) how far we’re willing to go to secure our country and if we agree to that, and b) if despite established standards, there are ways to get around them without fear of penalty.
Morally, we’re likely ALL opposed to the idea of using torture, whether physical, emotional or mental and the defining point at which we may accept the concept is based upon the purpose and the value we place on what is gained, i.e., knowledge to prevent a catastrophic attack. Obviously, for a country that is willing to go to war which necessitates arming men and women with guns and ordering them to shoot and kill the enemy, it’s pretty hard to say that dead’s okay but hurting isn’t. And to be completely honest, soldiers don’t drop down dead when shot like they do in the movies, they hurt a whole lot first, and maybe for hours, days before they die.
Morally, we also kill people strapped into a bed or chair in a nice clean room with a dozen people watching–capital punishment. Now why is that okay to do? And why do we find nice ways of doing it that supposedly don’t hurt and bring a quick death and consider ourselves humane? Frankly, I’d think most of the convicted would likely opt for a public flogging than a nice meal and a needle.
It’s a group nailed tightly together
in rows of wood and paper boxes
each with a single door
that opens in, opens out
like estuaries onto the main stream
of political hallways that run
downriver, carrying their barge
that drags the waters
of concepts and theory.
There is no pause at mossy banks
no inlets unvalidated
by the iceberg that flows
according to whim of the sun
and its generated heat;
no ingress without a ticket
sorted out by color or by style
or by the ticketmaster’s knowledge
of his kin.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology