What a trip! From the June highs of hypertext and IF to the poetry and old fashioned story I’ve been riding the tide of traditional tale telling to its simplest form.
Perhaps it was the influence of William Gay and Peter Taylor that brought me from my treed shoe and pigeon around to the city fire escapes and magical realism and now to red-bellied birds borne on witches’ wings to where the high cliffs meet the sea.
Wither thou goest, I will go.
Freshly picked tomato & basil pizza (ready to go into the oven) (It’s rectangle because I can’t find my pizza pan):
The neverending cycle of the seasons and this time finds me bottling last year’s wine while watching this year’s fruit for harvest.
Unfortunately I marked the corks at ’08 when what I’m supposed to do is mark the year of the fruit which was actually ’07. This bothers me a lot and I’m trying to figure ways of fixing this without pulling all the corks out and resealing.
Looks like only grapes and crabapples this year.
Freedom
A laughing old man drifted past her
his mouth widening in a greedy bite of sky
she watched a moment before her one jade eye
was stolen by a rabbit washing dishes on a hill
High above the old man growled a raucous blend
of spit and noise that blew her back beyond
the safety of a door jamb as the rabbit stopped
and nibbled clover just outside her reach
This I understand, she said and frowned
up at the man who even in his passing
yawned and gave her thorny baskets
woven of some firmly planted reeds to fill
The rabbit nodded knowingly and with that sign
she raised her face up to the wind, laughing
as the old man broke apart, his white hair trailing,
his face rent open by the sky
Something was pointed out to me in my most recent writing that just about has me gagging on such an amateurish error. A simple naming of a character throws off an entire theme by establishing its own.
Eve–crabapple–naked–temptress. All in a story that obviously (too much so, to the point of contrived) screams Adam and Eve and yet this had nothing to do with the story. True, when the name Eve came up I found it vaguely was appropriate enough in a secondary way and yet never realized that what followed likely was a mental chain that overtook the story.
That’s why trusted readers are the best friend of the writer.
Today should be a happy day; bottling wine and adding just enough sweetener to bring out the taste of peach and pear. This naturally requires a lot of tasting to that point and homemade wine is potent.
Too bad the grape and crabapple do not require sweetening nor conditioning.
I don’t know why I chose this, but simply by placing Burroughs’ Naked Lunch back on the shelf, I followed the alphabetical arrangement to the next shelf and pulled it out.
While I’m not sure I wanted to go quite into a happy, early 20th century American story, I believe it’ll be a more important read than forcing myself through Naked Lunch.
I’ve made it to page 40 or thereabouts (and that’s 40 pages plus 14 of the deposition) out of only 254 total (and that should be minus about 15 for an appendix) and I just can’t take it anymore.
I can get by the language and the rather disgusting description but I honestly don’t see enough good in the work–good story, writing, impact, anything–to make my reading it worth my while. It sounds more like the random ravings of a junkie–which I am assuming it is–and less of any kind of classic literary piece that I just can’t take the time to dig deep to find the value that has stamped it as such. It’s shock value has long since expired, and there’s just not enough (and I’m being polite) fine writing to save its reputation.
So there. I’m afraid I’m moving on to something more interesting and will be announcing a new selection shortly.
Got a nice note from Scott Doyle at Lit Scribbler when he wandered onto my site via MetaxuCafe and when I went to check out his own space, I came across something that I really wanted to share.
This post on submissions is above the usual bad news/ridiculous optimism words of advice writers are served to insure their mental instability. It is open and honest and offers resources that are simple and sure.
Scott also has a few of his own stories on site, excellent reading, and has been published in a few of the highly regarded journals we so often submit to and as Scott suggests, should also support as readers.
I believe this story is the first in the anthology to be written in third person pov, but Taylor’s method of indepth character revelation is just as powerful.
The protagonist is a middle-aged woman, Harriet, with a grown son and two daughters and a husband referred to as "Sweetheart." It is similar to the others in that there is a false sense of holding no racial prejudice in that the people of this area of the South in this particular era felt there was a symbiotic relationship between blacks and whites and that that was the proper way of thinking about things.
Taylor demonstrates this concept through the woman’s relationship with her own black servant, Mattie. She will hold and hug and console her, and yet when Mattie dares liken her nephew’s going off to service during the war, Harriet is outraged at the impertinence.
What Taylor also does well with the story plot–and this one had a bit more of a plot than the others–is purposefully leave his character into a kind of limbo with himself. Not all of us change by being forced to face events and our own selves; not all stories need to show the character making a huge turnaround in his thinking. This is, of course, a writing no-no, but it is also the most realistic display of human nature.
Never really got into writing exercises outside of writing class and seminar work, but Peter Taylor’s amazing skill at character has inspired me to attempt to study, learn and practice what he does so well.
In most of the stories in his short story anthology The Old Forest, the primary theme is human nature. What he gives us through mainly first person pov–though I’ve just finished the first story in third person–is a description of a character through the eyes of the narrator that is an obvious opinion, and one that is questionable at best, downright biased or wrong at its extreme.
In other words, when he has the reader reading the words of the narrator, we see the narrator’s personality rather than the personality traits of the person the narrator is speaking about. We see a trend of the narrator ‘fooling’ himself into thinking he is giving a good description, when what it is is a perception affected by the narrator’s own prejudices.
It’s an exquisite and likely difficult way of writing characterization, and yet one well worth learning to manage.
I sent a friend a recent story; she had time to read, locked away a week up at the lake with a husband tied up on computer and telephone to his job. As an afterthought I sent a story written a few months back; one well received by a class of writers and one I really didn’t think highly of at all. She didn’t get and didn’t like the new one; loved the one loved by all but me.
Why do I not like the one? Because a lot of it is based upon reality and so I feel like it is cheating as a fiction piece and yes I know that all fiction must be based on some foundation of reality and is fictionalized by the imagination. This one happened to bear a lot more reality, however, than world experience.
Why did it go over so well then, against the ones more literary–or so I thought? Because of voice. I’m guessing that it is more honest and therefore less contrived and so the voice is pure. A friend has written some stories that just swell with personality because of voice. Yet I make the mistake of questioning the voice because it is so very like the writer that I wonder at the creativity of it all.
Nothing like writing for a number of years and coming smack dab against a wall of learning something new.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology