Poetry Reading Response

Having read Lost Alphabet, I had already learned much from Olstein’s work, particularly her ability to marry image or sound with an idea in a way that transcends the ordinary thrust of meaning.  That, of course, and her sly use of symbolism and mastery of metaphor.  Upon listening to her read, however, I was struck more by her insight.  Her perceptions are balanced by a humble, observant voice, so that they do not leap from the prose, didactically, but are woven into the poem as in Space Junk: nothing likes to be abandoned/no one likes to be compared.”  She is similarly intuitive in You Can Tell a Tiger by its Stripes: “sometimes picking things up and putting them down is enough.”  In Different Animals, “we are beakers emptied and refilled.”  I was surprised that, unlike Daniel, she does not write about her child.  I would think it would be difficult to divorce one’s art from the experience of motherhood.  Even the self-consumed and suffering Sylvia Plath wrote Child.  As always, I am fascinated by the poet who writes in some refuge of isolation: Olstein states that it is important to “get away” and often stays alone in the house of a friend to write.

It seemed fitting to me that David Daniel penned a poem entitled Rock and Roll, as he seems to be a bit of a rock star himself.  His love for the punk rock band X and The Replacements (an Irish band that used to refer to themselves as “the niggers of Europe”) gives us an idea of what he’s all about.  I enjoyed his anecdotal stories and the seeming simplicity of his poetic voice held a profound potency.  I was riveted by and would love to emulate his ability to make a poem build and soar.  At times I found his use of repetition to be effective, at others, it seemed distracting and dramatic.  The nostalgic, emotional implications that evolve out of the exquisite detailing of Ornaments is palpable.  I would like to be able to weave description and meaning and emotion in this intricate way.  I most admired the primitive description of The Earth where “you dig and you wait in the dark heart of earth.”

Lost Alphabet: Reader Response

There is much to admire and emulate in Olstein’s Lost Alphabet, including her sly use of symbolism and mastery of metaphor.  First, the unique, log-like structure of her book with its fictional lepidopterist located in a shack outside a village, places the poetry in a context that lends to the poet as observer with the omnipresent eye:

The eye—finger of the soul—responds with varying degrees of constriction, expansion, extending backwards to the brain.

My eyes have adjusted to looking more and more closely.

The true eyes pool behind a hood of pale feathers.

There seems to be a trend in contemporary poetry to reflect on oneself as poet and Olstein is no exception, for she scrutinizes not just moths and her environment, but poetry, itself: “The limitations are those of my imagination” and “I have imagined a new way of holding my instruments, more of a laying down in the fingers.”  Indeed, it seems that fingers represent Olstein’s writing process as in [the heart is always beyond the fingers] and throughout the book:

I learn more by hovering my fingers above their dark channels, but it remains difficult to trust this knowledge or give it a name.

Fingers are too blunt.

It is a strange gymnastics, their bodies, mine: what to grasp, when to release, the nature of a turn, the will of the whole channeled into the fingertips.

I like Olstein’s repeated, symbolic use of the image of animals in stalls or pens with a domesticity that I believe stands for a civilization that she misses.  We know that she sometimes feels isolated: “I admit to being lonely”:

Perhaps I stay because they are a horse people and I miss my stable.

They love to be led from their stalls.

I see them gaze longingly at the animals in their pens…

…animals quiet in their pens…

…tell stories of animals turning back into the burning stalls from which they were just released.

I am charmed and mystified by Olstein’s ability to marry image or sound with an idea in a way that transcends the ordinary thrust of meaning:

With the animals, the scrim of language is pulled back and I am fluent.

…the only sound is the low ticking of vegetables underground.

Olstein deftly captures and pins down that which seems too elusive to describe:

Slowly, the absence of pain arrives like snow falling.

I could only hope to distill language down to its purist form, as Olstein does.  The simplicity and specificity, here, reads like a haiku.  Anyone who has been in severe, chronic pain knows this almost imperceptible, gentle, unexpected lilting of relief you dare not disturb like a blessing.  Like snow falling.      

Writing Prompt: A Color

Spring
Green is the color of spring.  It is the air and the earth and what’s in between.  It is a nursery rhyme: a child sing-songing and dancing over the dead.  The ground groans and shifts and births the muck rot stench of skunk cabbage, a sachet of aching anticipation from hidden quagmires, shaded from the chartreuse sky whose blinding light and bruising breeze invade the flesh.  Dampness creeps in through the skin.  There is no inoculation--no shot against the pox of digesting stimuli in too great amounts, too quickly.  Night delayed, day prolonged, the trees grow big and round and smug in their soon-to-be viridian perfection.  The birds rise early to shriek with apprehension.

Some Haiku Poems

Our pale young bodies
the bluff with the tree and bird
warmed by the round sun


You walk down the path
a book conceals your coy smile
blossoms in your hair


Toiling through deep woods
taut with the tail lights of dawn
you reach for my hand


Oh how a willow
can show the westerly wind!
Angry long-haired girl


We reap our own way
with makeshift machetes 
whipped by thin branches


Sweet drop from the tip
of a honeysuckle wick
plays on my plump tongue


still I know the joy
of seizing on that red daub--
cardinal in the trees

Writing Prompt: Assumptions About a Place

The Pact

No cumulus clouds.

No harps.

No infinite green hills undulating their way through eternity. Just one big sprawling patch of park at the edge of an ocean and the forgotten splendor of a vast blue sky and one single day that never ends.

One perfect day that never ends. With you.

We are thankful that our dead relatives don’t come to greet us--we never liked them.

It rains, but only long enough to magnify the color of the leaves.

We stumble upon a small pond and see our reflections. Our eyes are angels falling from the sky.

Our favorite music accompanies our gestures. We hold hands to harpsichord music. The friction of our kisses produces Lou Reed’s lyrics: You made me forget myself/I thought I was someone else/someone good…


 We do not meet God, but there are other people. Only they are like colorful window dressing or cordial movie extras. They smile and nod, but never intrude upon us.

All the wild animals are friendly and have been liberated from the zoo which now serves as hell and houses the damned. We go there and toss popcorn to the lost souls from across a swollen stream.

We enter and tie for first place in a spontaneous hotdog eating contest.

Stuffed, we stroll down shady paths. We hold our head wounds and laugh because after all isn’t this just one big joke that only we are in on?

verses on bird: Reader Response

When reading Zhang Er’s verses on bird, I was, at first, distracted by her use of clichés, particularly around the common idea that words will always fall short of reality:

“the helplessness of language”

and

“Where can we find enough names to name all these things in front of our eyes?”

and

“All that ought to be said, they’ve said it already…”

I was similarly disappointed by phrases such as:

“jump out of your skin”

and

“strike a pose”

Er does, however, make exquisite use not only of birds, but bodies of water and flowers. The lotus appears again and again. As with Darwish, I like the repeated use of metaphors, and she does not exhaust the bird as I feared she might. What I would most like to emulate is Er’s immediacy. Everything takes place now, as she, herself, points to in her poetry: “This moment. Here.” This approach creates a compelling intimacy between the poet and reader. Furthermore, her writing is just matter-of-fact enough to let us in whereupon she spins into metaphor, as in the personification found in The Hardware Store:

“…knobs and handles covered with dust…
For the flood is coming, blue water marks
Painted above the roof: a mockery,
A grin, a pair of eyebrows forever knotted.

At the same time, I feel that Er is holding something back, and the reader does not like to feel cheated. Perhaps a photograph is not the best way for this poet to view the world. After all, it is a representation, a dilution, and the camera creates a distance between the photographer--or the poet--and the world. I cannot say that I culled a lot from her work in regards to influencing my own.

Response: A River Dies of Thirst

I found interpreting Darwish’s A River Dies of Thirst to be a fascinating challenge.  It seems to me that there are distinct patterns to be found in his collection, for he makes repeated use of particular metaphors throughout.  Take trees, for instance.  For Darwish, “the tree is forgiveness and vigilance.”  He depicts the tree as an ever present sentinel, as a witness to violence, even its own: “They [the soldiers] crush our grandmother, so that now her branches are in the earth and her roots in the air.”  I see Darwish’s thematic use of the sky as standing for indifference or a sort of absurd pointlessness.  It is fair or dark regardless of what takes place below: “No war there. And no peace, and the sky is clean and light above the place” and “The sky is not blue or white or grey, because the colours are points of view agreeing and disagreeing.”  I like the idea of using the same concept more than once, in an emblematic way.

Along with the sky, Darwish makes frequent cloud references which I believe stand for himself as a poet: “An apple fell on me from the clouds, and I knew my imagination was a faithful hunting dog” and “The poet becomes increasingly involved in describing the silk shawl, not noticing that it is a cloud that happens to be passing between the branches of the tree at sunset.”  In “The essence of the poem“: “A cloud in a poet’s imagination is an idea.”  I cannot fathom referencing myself as artist in my own poetry.  For me, this would require achieving a certain level of significance as a poet.  Darwish’s birds are beautiful and transcendent, flying up and above the signs of war as in “Doves.”

Finally, perhaps more than anything, A River Dies of Thirst is existential, including “What’s it all for?,” “A longing to forget,” “On nothingness,” and “Rustling.”  In “Life to the last drop,” Darwish responds humorously to the question of what would you do if you were to die tomorrow: “If I existed, as I do now, then I wouldn’t think about not existing.  If I didn’t exist, then the question wouldn’t bother me.”  In “I was not with me,” Darwish is “neither sad nor happy, for nothingness has no connection to emotion or to time.”  Darwish’s existentialism resonates with me only insofar as I’ve explored the self in some of my own writing, but certainly not in the kind of context he experienced. 

Response: King of Shadows

     Shurin goes on dizzying metaphysical tangents that expand not only the mind, but the possibilities of writing.  The world has an ethereal quality that passes over him, under him and through him.  He is most at home with nature, offering up lush descriptions of foliage and flowers.  He resides and writes in beautiful, inspiring places that are not so much romantic as romanticized--even his aesthetically pleasing apartment is as carefully coiffed as his once self-conscious, youthful head.  We see his need for organization around his writing--he cannot write until he's made the bed  As with Dillard  (and, for that matter, Thoreau) this idea of holing up in some idyllic location to write fascinates me.  I wish Sharin had shared more about his cloistered process in these locations.

     Sharin has a way of taking the simplest situation or location and gilding it with a blend of abandon and specificity.  He sets a fire under the scene, bringing it immediately up to the light.  However, some of his subjects are, perhaps, too mundane: Why does he admit to the indulgent, tiresome, narcissitic telling of dreams only to do just that?  I do not find his stream-of-consciousness while taking a stroll or lying in a hammock to be particularly compelling.  Should we care about these things simply because it is he who is doing them?  I am more interested in his unique perspective on the emergence of the sixties revolution (a subject that, without his queer take, has been beaten to death.)

     Sharin's song-like, chanting list of what he is makes for a humorous and revealing way to get to know him: "homophile, bibliophile..."  We also get to know him through his relationship with books, which he perceives as living entities: "strapped to the passenger seat."  He reacquaints himself with Proust, years later, and builds an entire chapter around the word: abattoir--an appealing idea for a writing exercise.  Shurin's lush language was simply not enough to make me care about what he had to say.  His  devices illuminate his own shadows, making him "king" of his own domain, to be sure, but a bit too precious, at that. 



   

The Writing Life: Reader Response

     Hardly a "how-to" book, the most striking thing about Dillard's The Writing Life is the way in which the text demonstrates good writing.  It is as if an artist were to teach us how to paint by offering up a great painting.  Dillard's approach is philosophical: "If he had noticed how he felt, he could not have done the work"  and "Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block."  Rarely didactic, Dillard does sometimes tell us what not to do: "Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book; give it, give it all, give it now."  She also reminds us not to be precious with our writing--our words are not written upon a gilded page: "--your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares about whether you do it well, or ever."  Dillard humbles us, here, by pointing out that writing should not be a self-serving, ego driven act--we must not lose sight of the reader.

      It never occurred to me that re-reading one's work too often can be counterproductive, yet I can see how doing so can falsely render the writing true.  Dillard also cautions us against editing as we write, something I know I'm sometimes guilty of.  Thoreau's dog-with-a-bone metaphor coupled with Dillard's directive to "probe and search each object in a piece of art" got me thinking about the tenacity with which I write and the need to examine the weight of each word, for it is so easy to "course over' what is written.  This brings me to Dillard's own Thoreauesque existence where she lives and works in a shed or cottage--a privileged arrangement that few writers have the time or resources to imitate.  I wish she had written more on how this experience impacted her writing.  Finally, The Writing Life shifts gears at Chapter 7 where metaphor is overdrawn, Dillard forgets the reader, and gets lost in her own language like Dave Rahm and his stunt plane swirls.  

Story Submission: Workshop #1

Untitled

Etiquette is a comprehensive term; and its observances are nowhere more to be desired than in the domestic circle.

Amanda waited until Robert left before pulling the old book from the kitchen drawer and sinking into the suede blue living room couch with her coffee.  She should have been working—typing up computer product descriptions and specs and emailing them to her editor, but she would have time for that later. A worker had found the book in the eaves of their barn when they were converting it a year before.  She took it, reverently, from his gloved hands, inserted it into the bookshelf and promptly forgot about it.  She and Robert fought a lot that year.  Part of the house, which she had decorated Southwestern style, had been portioned off into an art studio and Robert, an accomplished artist, hadn’t produced anything in months.  That--and she couldn’t have a baby.  Robert had been forced to “sell out” and get a graphic design job in the city.  Amanda missed the gallery openings and the way men would faun over her as they always did, only now, as the enigmatic, presumed muse.  She was getting worried about Robert.  He had abandoned his strict vegan diet in favor of bloody hamburgers and Cherry Garcia.  His skinny frame was becoming fattish around the edges, like bacon. He was not an attractive man to begin with, he was shortish and balding a bit, but at least before he was…streamline.  But he was cerebral and self-contained, and smart in a zen master kind of way, offering up insights in unexpected places, proverbs over breakfast, poetry in the car.  He began overcompensating in the happy department.  Last night he came home early with a bouquet of plastic-wrapped convenience store flowers in one fist and an enormous cup in the other.  He sucked loudly on the straw, his eyes skittering around the room, before they settled on her.  “Blueberry Slurpees are the very best!” he explained.

Amanda rediscovered the book while dusting—something she rarely did.  It became an excuse to peruse their collected titles and pick out an old book:  Black and White Photography, The Bell Jar, Metamorphosis, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  She had climbed the shaky authentic wooden Kiva ladder, spotted the spine and plucked the book from the shelf: Martine’s Hand-book of Etiquette.  That’s when she realized it was time to make dinner.  Now, she sipped her coffee and examined the cover.  It featured an illustration of a pristine, Victorian-looking woman seated under an arbor.  The title was in huge, jagged lettering surrounding and imposing on the woman in an almost threatening manner.  Amanda opened the book and turned a page.  1866.  She spilt some coffee and lunged forward to catch the drips in her palm before they landed on the cowhide rug.  The book flopped open.  Something fell to the floor.  A photograph.  She picked it up, smoothed it out and examined it closely.  It depicted three roughly dressed men wearing hats pushed back on their heads.  The third man was tall and handsome in jeans with a big belt buckle and a dark, double breasted shirt.  He looked like a cowboy.  The photo had been folded over so that it only showed him.  There was no date on the back, but it was clearly old.  These guys hardly looked like the type to be concerned with etiquette.  But that tall man—he looked dark and dangerous.  She imagined his big arms enfolding her, his dark eyes searching out her face for a clue of what she wanted.  She stood up, slipped the photo into her jeans pocket and strode to the bedroom, feeling like a dirty cheat.    

·        

It is the aim of politeness to leave the arena of social intercourse untainted without any severity of language, or bitterness of feeling.

Camille plunged her husband’s wool shirt into the soapy water and slapped it against the wash board, rubbing it hard against the rails.  She dipped it into a bucket of water, twisted the shirt into a croissant-shaped knot, shook it out and hung it on the line.  That was the last of it.  It was getting dark.  She knew she should have done the wash earlier so it could dry in the July sun, but she had spent the day darning and sweeping out the tent--that, and cooking breakfast and dinner for the miners.  She toiled over crepes and pea soup and sugar pie, but it was her chicken and dumplings they liked best.  Thomas hadn’t shown for supper.  The other miners had made their way back to their tents for a nap before heading out to the saloons.  With a sleepy sigh she peeled open the flaps of the tent and dragged the rocking chair to the mouth of it, sat down and began to rock and softly sing to herself, resting her hands on her swollen belly.  Frère Jacques, frère Jacques,Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?  Thomas hadn’t wanted to cart the chair all the way from Canada, but it was just about all she had left of her mother, so he strapped it to the back of the buckboard in silence, which was unusual for him, he so liked to charm her with his makeshift chivalry—along with any other woman who would listen to him.

They had come for the gold.  They chased news of a vein all the way to South Pass City, Wyoming.  Wy-o-ming.  Camille thought it sounded mysterious and exotic, like some remote village in the Orient.  She surveyed the small city from her spot on the edge of the tent town.  It had rained the night before and Main Street, lit by the light of the brothels, was thick with mud, forcing everyone to travel by foot on wooden planks.  There were miners and merchants and cavalry soldiers on leave.  Gaudy dance hall girls gathered on the steps of the saloon, having slept all day in the city’s only hotel.  They smoked cigarettes and belly-laughed and slapped each other on the back like men.  Camille caught Thomas’s figure in the crowd.  He was talking to Smitty who appeared short only because Thomas was so tall.  Smitty took a swig from a small bottle before handing it to Thomas who took a sip and slipped it in his back pocket before turning on his heel and heading in the direction of the tent.  As the sun set in a blaze of orange on the horizon, his face darkened.  Soon, he was a silhouette.  He could be any man walking toward her.  Then, suddenly, there he was with his thick dark hair slicked back from his face and grizzled cheeks.  He was grinning.  Jittering with excitement.  More than just his jaunty self.  But then, it was probably the drink.

“Hullo darlin’!”  Thomas took off his hat with a flourish and planted it in her lap, kissing her on the cheek.  “I’ve got news!”
 
“Did you strike?” Camille stopped rocking and froze in the chair.

“No, no, it’s nothing like that—I found a place for us to live.”
 
“A house!”

“Not exactly.”  He reached into the tent and swept the mirror, toilet water, and comb from the small stool before fitting it underneath him and squatting in the mud.
“Listen, Smitty says there’s an abandoned barn a mile outside the city.  The roof’s sound and I could fix up the inside.  Besides, we won’t have to pay to house the horse.  Camille’s squinty blue eyes went wide and round.  “We’re going to live with the horse?”  Thomas shook his head and laughed.  “What’s the difference?  He’ll be on one side, we’ll be on the other.”  Camille looked at her feet and went back to rocking.  Thomas chucked her under the chin and pressed his fingers to her lips, propping them into a smile.  “Camille, we got soaked last night!  You could get sick.  Get off your high horse and think about my son.  We’re not exactly living a grand life, here.”  He stretched his arms wide and looked around.
Camille ignored what he said about a son, smoothed back her blond hair and tightened the bun.  “What about the money from my mother’s place?  We could be staying in the hotel.”

“You--with gamblers and whores?  Thomas slapped his thigh and leaned back on the stool, pressing it further into the mud.  We need that money for supplies—there’s nothing coming in!”

“What about my cooking?”

“A pittance,” he spat.
        
“Whatever you say, but to be perfectly honest I think you’re the one who’s soaked.”  Thomas leapt to his feet.  She’d never seen him move so quickly.
“Dammit girl—don’t be so uppity.  You don’t know what it’s like working the mine all day.  A man needs to bend an elbow now and then just to get through it.”  With that, Thomas pulled the micky from his pocket, took a swig, and strode off into the night.

*

Never trifle with the affections of a man who loves you; nor admit of marked attentions from one whose affection you cannot return.

Robert hadn’t touched her in weeks.  His usually elaborate love-making had become as quick and apologetic as an adolescent virgin.  He couldn’t look her in the eye.  “Pretend your tongue is a paintbrush,” she whispered encouragingly.”  He shrunk from her in shame.  She hadn’t meant to be cruel.  He started coming home from work later and later until it was after dark and she was asleep in bed.  He crawled in next to her.  “Where do you go?” she murmured. 

“The movies, he whispered.  “Now go to sleep.”

The cowboy was Amanda’s new background for her desktop.  She had scanned the photo of the men and cropped it so only the handsome one with the belt buckle remained.  She made his jeans red and his shirt bright blue, for effect.  One big image was too blurry so she set it to tile producing a cloned parade of cowboys across the screen.  It looked like an Andy Warhol painting.  “I’ll take fifteen minutes with you, any day,” she thought, aloud.  She’d never liked westerns and wondered what a real cowboy would be like.  Weren’t they writing poetry now?  That would be the ideal man: a cowboy poet who could rope cattle and never got writer’s block.

                                                                   *

     

Let neither rank nor fortune, nor the finest order of intellect, nor yet the most winning manners, induce you to accept the addresses of an irreligious man.

Camille wiped the stool clean, put it back in the tent, and and replaced the handful of toiletries before lighting a lamp and stretching out on the bedroll.  She reached into her bag for her bible and pulled out a book on etiquette instead.  Pressed, paper thin flowers fell from the pages, littering the blanket in a sudden flurry of snow.  She tried to gather them up, but they crumbled in her fingers.  She had collected the flowers by the brook just outside of town where she and Thomas would picnic on Sundays.  They were all alone, there, half the city was sleeping and the other half was at church.  Thomas would press his lips to her neck and whisper promises into her ear that made her forget to breathe. 

Camille had bookmarked Chapter 17: Domestic Etiquette and Duties with a photograph.  It pictured Thomas with Smitty and a man she didn’t recognize.  Thomas had it taken when the fair came to town.  Camille shook out the blanket and returned to the book. It had belonged to her mother, who, after the death of her father, a shopkeeper, had become preoccupied with raising her station in life in the hopes of marrying a “cultured man.”  She studied the dog-eared book with all the diligence of a true scholar and quoted from it so often, that Camille felt she had read it, herself.  Her mother saved enough money to secure a family pew in church and even tagged along with Camille to an art museum in an effort to “civilize” herself.  Although, her mother seemed more intent upon arranging the flowers on her new hat than in viewing the art.  Camille had been shocked by the new exhibition of nudes—women laid out with all to be seen—so unlike the demure poses of the older paintings.  Her mother hadn’t like Thomas.  She felt he was beneath her.  He picked fruit for a living, migrating from town to town, orchard to orchard, wherever there was work.  Even he seemed incredulous when she agreed to marry him.  “You’ve had education and books and your own room with your own bed.  What do you want with a picker like me?” He was proud of her then.  Suddenly hot and tired, Camille threw off the blanket and turned off the lamp.  Later, Thomas crawled into the tent and fell asleep, his arm heavy on her neck.

*        

                               Every young woman ought to know the state of her own heart.

Robert had started spending time in his studio again.  Amanda cooked a big dinner, avoiding the candles and music and opting, instead, to cut to the chase by using the biggest cliché of all: seducing him with her body.  She wore a smoke-colored gauzy dress that showed off her lean legs and pulled her hair from her usual ponytail and primped it a bit, letting it fall past her shoulders.  She knocked on the studio door and opened it to announce dinner.  Robert was slumped over in a stool, snacking on a bag of pork rinds and reading Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.  He looked at her and froze in mid-bite.

 

“What the hell?” she yelled.  “I thought you were working!”  Robert pushed back from the table and stood up.  “I have been working—all day!  Jesus, Amanda, I’m tired.”

“Tired?  You’ve been bouncing in and out of here like a maniac for weeks.  Why can’t you take some of that energy and work on your art?”

“That’s not energy.  That’s fallout.”  He pushed past her and headed for the front door.  She followed behind him.

“That’s great,” she said, “just great.  Leave.  Go to the movies or whatever it is you do.  You’re acting like a child.  What are you seeing?  ‘Toy Story 8’?” she sneered.

Robert laughed and turned around, placing his hands on her shoulders.  “Amanda, I have been working—nights at the copy store.  Do you really think we can pay off this place with your income and my entry level job in the city?  The gas alone is killing me.”

Amanda sank to the floor and sat, Indian-style, in her dress.  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked her lap.

“Because we were fighting—and I didn’t want to worry you.”

“Well, I’m worried…”

Robert jammed his hands in his front pockets.  “Amanda, what if I stopped painting?”

“Wha-?”  She looked up at him.

“What if I never painted again?  Would it matter to you?”

“I think it would matter to you.”
 
“It would.  A great deal, but that’s not what I’m asking.”

Amanda stood up and headed toward the stairs, muttering to herself: “I’m not doing this.  I am not doing this.”
“What’re you doing, Amanda?”  Robert called after her.  “What are we doing?”
Amanda fell onto the bed and felt for the photo she had secreted in the pillowcase, flat and familiar against her palm.

*

Never offer to shake hands with a lady in the street if you have on dark gloves, as you might soil her white ones.

They had lived in the barn for three weeks.  It was set back from the main road with peeling white paint and a flat roof.  An old foundation lay nearby, blackened by fire.  Weeds poked through the ruins.  Thomas had given her a tour of the barn like it was some kind of palace.  The stalls were draped with cobwebs and shafts of gold shone through the cracks.  Without a word, she fetched the broom from the buckboard and started sweeping.  In the afternoons, Camille had taken to climbing the ladder to the loft—no easy task in her condition—and lying down in the hay with its smell like something sweet and dead and alive all at once.  Sometimes she would page through her mother’s book, other times she would nap a bit, dreaming of an ocean she’d only seen in paintings.

She woke to the sound of labored breathing.  A great, rocking weight was upon her.  She heard a grunt and something slipped out of her.  A hand groped her crotch and then fingers found their way inside, slamming against her, punch after punch.  Someone palmed her belly and flipped her over tearing into a place, unimaginable, her brain reared and bucked and went black, scanning the universe for something that made sense to hold on to.  There was nothing.  It was Smitty.  And Thomas.                   

 
         

                            




Questions:

·         What would make a good title for this piece?

·         I was torn between two names/meanings for the Amanda character:

            Amanda: “she who must be loved” and
            Cassandra: “she who entangles men”
           Which meaning best fits this character?

·         Is it better to begin the story in the present day, with Amanda and Robert or in 1867 with Camille and Thomas?  Which “works better” and why?

·         The etiquette book quotes serve as a heading or title for each section of the story.  Does each title succeed in resonating with the text.  Why or why not?

·         Amanda is the only character who possesses little in the way of physical description.  Other than her long hair and lean legs, she is described as “beautiful.”  This simple sketch of her appearance is meant to represent her tendency toward superficiality.  Does this work or do we need a more robust outward description for what we know about her character?

·         I used some subtle foreshadowing to point to the dark side of Thomas’s character.  Do I need more of these?  Does Thomas, as we know him, seem capable of the rape?    

·         While Amanda idealizes the man—Thomas, a rapist--in the photo (she thinks he’s a cowboy), it is her own suffering, self-sacrificing husband who is the true hero.   She cannot see this.  Did you pick up on the irony?  Does it work?

    
   
 

    

The Crafting of The Mixquiahuala Letters: A Student Writer's Perspective

     Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters is about friendship and feminism, to be sure, but these factors serve as more of a scrim that, once illuminated, reveals themes of identity, ethnicity, and tension.  At first, I was skeptical about a novel composed of a collection of letters.  I suspected that it might seem trivial or stilted or overly sentimental--that it might be constrained by its own form.  Or, archaic and therefore not relevant to a culture where letter writing is nearly extinct.  Upon reading the first few pages of "Letter One," I was initially confused by the hodgepodge of characters and irked by my inability to translate Spanish.  Because of context, I got the gist of some of the phrases, but otherwise spoke these words aloud, so I could, at least, listen to and appreciate their musicality.  And what of the of the correspondence?  How can Castillo's approach work without Alicia's letters--her side of the story?  Upon further reading, I got caught up in Castillo's conversational technique where Alicia's experiences are imprinted on us by way of Teresa's recollection and reflection on and from both of their perspectives.  This, I think, is part of what makes Letters a novel.  Castillo transports us into a sort of past-present, rooting the reader in a place where memory is transformed into the here and now, transcending mere nostalgia.

     I found it easier to negotiate my way through Castillo's cast of characters once I matched my reading to the rhythm of her writing and adjusted myself to her punctuation and shifts in time and place.  There is much more to be garnered, here, in terms of craft.  Castillo begins each letter with a different salutation that sets the tone of the text: "My sister, my companion, my friend." I wonder, does Castillo use the lowercase "i" to portray Teresa as a lapsed Catholic still humbled by the capital "G" in God?  Lowercase usage could certainly be used to convey a "less-than" effect.  The pronoun "you" in reference to Alicia is always capitalized at the beginning of a sentence, as is "we." It seems, however, that the "i" is meant to represent the still developing yet-to-be-fully-evolved Teresa.  In "Epilogue" at the end of the novel, she achieves an uppercase "I."

     Castillo's sentences bloom.  They start out slow and then quickly grow big and fat and full with detail.  She saves her shorter sentences for the more profound, pensive or meditative : "She watched for a long time" and "We said no more."  She lumps things together or speaks of things in a series, creating a collage of rich sounds, scents, and images:

"High above the trash-ridden streets of Manhattan, the hornblowers, and double parkers, the winos, derelicts, pushers and pimps, the spicy aromas of cumin and garlic, curry, and fried plantains, burning tenements, stench of urined and vomited walls, blasting screech of subway trains..."

     Teresa is a writer and Castillo's decision to include examples of her poetry is an effective characterization device.  John Irving did this when he included fiction written by his writer-protagonist in the novel The World According to Garp.  The poetry offers a deeper, more immediate portrait of Teresa beyond the context of the already intimate main text.  The idea of supplementing a story in this way opens up all kinds of possibilities, particularly in contemporary terms.  A novel could include emails, urls, even a CD--say, so you could listen to a musician character's music.  In terms of my own writing, I plan on including a significant photograph from the 1800's with the story I'm currently working on.  Structurally speaking, excerpts from a book connect the two characters who live in the same house in two different times.  Castillo's novel resonates with me because I've explored themes of ethnicity and isolation in my own work.  Her approach has got me thinking about how I handle the tension between my characters.  There is much to be culled from Castillo's Letters, her physical descriptions of her characters say much about them, even before we "get to know them."  More than anything, she teaches us that, sometimes, when it comes to character, telling is better than showing: "Alicia, why i hated white women and sometimes didn't like you."  The intimacy Castillo has set up between the two women make this kind of honest "dialogue" possible.                             

Index Card Story Exercise

Index Card Story Components:

1. 1st Person
2. Chef
3. Seventeen and pregnant
4. A barn in Wyoming territory, 1867
5. "Blueberry slurpees are the very best."

My immediate dilemma when piecing together the elements of my story was this: How oh how do I resolve blueberry slurpees with 1867 Wyoming?!  I finally decided to set my two main characters in the same Wyoming barn at different times.  I've started out with Camille, a young, pregnant wife who works as a cook at a gold mine tent town in 1867.  Here are the first couple of paragraphs, which set the scene.  (She and her husband have yet to move into the barn.)   


     Camille plunged her husband’s wool shirt into the soapy water and slapped it against the wash board, rubbing it hard against the rails.  She dipped it into a bucket of water, twisted the shirt into a croissant-shaped knot, shook it out and hung it on the line.  That was the last of it.  It was getting dark.  She knew she should have done the wash earlier so it could dry in the July sun, but she had spent the day darning and sweeping out the tent--that, and cooking breakfast and dinner for the miners.  She toiled over crepes and pea soup and sugar pie, but it was her chicken and dumplings they liked best.  With a sleepy sigh she peeled open the flaps of the tent and dragged the rocking chair to the mouth of it, sat down and began to rock and softly sing to herself, resting her hands on her swollen belly.  Frère Jacques, frère Jacques, Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?  Thomas hadn’t wanted to cart the chair all the way from Canada, but it was just about all she had left of her mother, so he strapped it to the back of the buckboard in silence, which was not unusual.  Before they settled here, Thomas was not one for much talk.
 
     They had come for the gold.  They chased news of a vein all the way to South Pass City, Wyoming.  Wy-o-ming.  When Thomas first told her of it, Camille thought it sounded mysterious and exotic, like some remote village in the Orient.  She surveyed the small city from her spot on the edge of the tent town.  It had rained the night before and Main Street, lit by the light of the brothels, was thick with mud, forcing everyone to travel by foot on wooden planks.  There were miners and merchants and cavalry soldiers on leave.  Gaudy dance hall girls gathered on the steps of the saloon, having slept all day in the city’s only hotel.  They smoked cigarettes and belly-laughed and slapped each other on the back like men.  Camille caught Thomas’s figure in the crowd.  He was talking to another miner who appeared short only because Thomas was so tall.  The man took a swig from a small bottle before handing it to Thomas who took a sip and slipped it in his back pocket before turning on his heel and heading in the direction of the tent.  As the sun set in a blaze of orange on the horizon, his face darkened.  Soon, he was a silhouette.  He could be any man walking toward her.  Then, suddenly, there he was with his thick dark hair slicked back from his face and grizzled cheeks.  He was smiling—almost jaunty.  Camille had to admit to herself: sometimes Thomas could surprise her.  But then, it was probably just the drink.

Birds of America

     Two nights ago, I fell asleep with Birds of America on my chest, one thumb planted between pages to bookmark my spot, the other in a tight fist against my cheek.  I woke, propped up on my side and stiff as a mannenequin ( if mannequins were permitted such poses.)  The book had migrated south.  It lay upside down and open, fitted loosely to my thigh like a shanty roof.  I felt as though my body had been wrapped in papier mache during the night and had hardened into a hieroglyph, only Moore had pressed her pen into the stiff gauze with her words, autographing me with her stories.  At times the pen pierced me, then a tickle. 

     I peeled back the sheet.  My right hand was numb.  I looked in the mirror.  My face was creased from the folds in the pillow.  Each mark, a memory--a chapter from her book with its sly humor and characters carved from the American landscape without so much as a splinter of sentimentality.  And yet, we care for them, be it a woman mourning over the death of her cat or the glib conversation of a scholarly set, who, it turns out, aren't always the smartest bunch when it comes to real life.  And who can forget the unexpected internal monologue of Mack in What You Want to Do Fine?  Moore's characters are flawed and generous and we love her for giving us both.  We are all in some cosmic literary seance,  having handed ourselves over, our fingers pressed to her heart-shaped planchette as she coaxes us across the ouija board, showing us words.

Flash Fiction Prompt Response: The Chat

     What you have heard is true.  It's not gossip.  It's not just a local legend creeping like cloud shadows across the Virgina hills all the way to South Carolina.  I am one-hundred-eight years old.  I know.  I know.  What's my secret?  I tell you I've lived hard.  When I was young I drank and danced and barely slept.  I've smoked for more than eighty years.  Pall Malls.  Filterless.  The brand I started with.  I tell you it's something to count on.  I've outlived my husband and two of my children.  I've gone through a whole kennel of hounds like Rocky, here.  The funny thing is I went gray, early.  I had strands of silver in high school.  Used to think I'd die young, so I lived fast.  I dyed my hair, at first, then I gave up on it.  I don't know if it was the burning or the bother or if I was just plain mad to have to do it.  It felt like a lie.

     I used to make my own clothes, you know.  Still do when my fingers aren't seized up.  This?  No, this is something my daughter picked out.  I like the blue, but the collar is a bit old-fashioned, don't you think?  You're sweating.  Here, I'll turn up the fan.  My husband?  He died young.  Heart attack took him.  Nope.  I never remarried.  One life.  One husband.  Just like I take my coffee: black with a single lump of sugar.  Nothing extra.  It's funny how people always want to put cream in your coffee.  Can I get you some more?   
    

     

Flash Fiction Prompt Response: Stolen

      Chloe wore overalls and was barefoot with chipped, blue-painted toenails.  At five foot three, she was a promising eighteen inches in length when her parents adopted her and took her home.  Now, a freshly-lit cigarette dangled from the side of her mouth.  Her usually loose, long brown hair was bound up in a pseudo-bun.  Renegade tendrils curled about her face and at the back of her neck.  She dug in the drawer in search of a paintbrush and felt something cold in her hand.  Blowing the hair from her eyes, she pulled out a small, metal object: a Craftsman tapemeasurer dated 1904.  It was rusty and round and when she pulled on the tab it crumbled in her fingers.   She had stolen it from the old summer Cape house two years before, slipping it in her pocket and holding it there, firmly pressed against her femoral artery where it throbbed, regularly, like a pacemaker or a watch.  She brought it home and promptly placed it in the junk drawer in the garage with the intention of trying to forget about it.  Chloe had "inherited" a few other unwanted odds and ends from the old house: a black lacquered ashtray, a framed collection of a variety of pressed seaweeds, and a photograph of she and her cousins when they were kids.  First her father told her, then he put the house on the market, then it was sold, then he had a month to move everything out and finally, just a day.   

      The worn tapemeasurer had belonged to Chloe's grandfather.  He used it to measure out a bathroom for his wife in their bedroom so she wouldn't have to walk so far to go at night.  He measured and cut a new cellar door.  Oak.  He measured all the kids' heights and marked them on the yellow wall in the kitchen and then measured them all over again the following year.  He was white-haired and handsome and he was always old.  Chloe and her cousins had grown up in that house with its low ceilings and steep ship stairs and musty, baked ham smell.  Chloe looked around the sparse, well-organized garage.  Tools hung neatly on a pegboard.   Ash from her cigarette fell to the floor and broke like bits of old bee hive.  She pocketed the tape measurer, stepped up the single stair, and disappeared inside the house, forgetting all about the paintbrush.                    

In-Class "Ink Blot" Story Exercise

Tea Stain Images: two poodles, twins reading with flower blossoms, pine tree on bluff with bird

     The dogs were at it again.  This is not to say that they were barking or growling or defecating in the neighbors' yards.  No, these colossal twin white poodles, perfectly coiffed, were nestled together on the front step, heads bowed reverently as though meditating.  One never saw them romp or play--and they are not old, only old souls.  They preferred to lay in repose and contemplate all that zen master canines can think about.  They remind me of Soku and her sister.  The way they were always together--in physical contact with each other, arm in arm.  A picture, aloft, settled in my mind and became a memory.  I recalled them reading, back to back, on the grounds of the university in the grass, flower blossoms falling about them, catching in their hair.  I thought of Soku and our afternoon on the bluff with the tree and the bird and our young bodies warmed by the round sun. 

Creative Autobiography, Part II

As a child, my first successful creative act was writing and directing plays put on by myself, my sister, and my cousins for the amusement of our adult relatives (who made a very captive audience!)  My second successful creative act took place when I discovered that my teacher had hung up one of my poems for all to read.  It was very validating, but, at a tender age, it also made me feel vulnerable.  Moving through and beyond a mix of intimacy and exposure made it possible for me to compete in and win poetry slams as an adult.

My attitudes toward the listed concepts are as follows:

1.  Money: an unfortunate, but necessary means of negotiating one's way through today's current society/economy
2. Power: Not interested.  Empowerment: Interested.
3. Praise: Productive praise requires explication
4. Rivals: Exciting.  Inspiring.
5. Work: I do not define myself by my vocation.
6. Play: Creative projects (I am currently designing a chair to be sold at a fund-raising auction), Scrabble, pool, museums, art galleries, Pictionary, entertaining friends, Karaoke, photoshoots, charades, etc.

I love contemporary art and black and white photography.  I am a huge fan of the DeCordova Museum and am a regular visitor there.  My favorite artists are surrealist/dadaist Man Ray and photographer Sophie Calle.  Both have produced works that are experimental and innovative--characteristics that I admire and that excite me.  To me, a muse is someone or something that inspires me.  It's a bit of a cliche, but some of my early muses have been lovers--that, and fleshing out relationships such as the sociocultural and its relationship with nature.  When confronted with superior intelligence or talent, I am stimulated and celebrate what others have to offer.  When faced with stupidity, intransigence, indifference, etc., I may not agree, but respect others' place on their paths.  Where there is injustice or potential harm, I intervene.  For me, success can only be measured by the self.  It can be validating, but is fleeting.  When faced with failure, I work to redeem myself.  When I work, I enjoy the result, but relish the process.  My ideal creative activity right now is illustrating a children's story I wrote with photographs of clay characters.

I attend church every Sunday and it is here where I am fed, spiritually, but am, at the same time, humbled by what little I know of humans' understanding of God.  This is beyond my current "reach" and I would like to study religion, particularly Buddhism.  My greatest fear is of my own vulnerability--of my sensitivity in such an overly stimulating world.  Also, (and this is a little embarassing) I am both afraid of and fascinated by the paranormal.  Thankfully, I don't anticipate coming into contact with anything paranormal any time soon.  (I am not a big fan of heights, either.)  My idea of mastery is the fulfillment of a vision.  My greatest dream is to live as a writer in the country in a big, old rambling butter yellow farmhouse with dark green shutters and a wrap-around porch.  Oddly, the house would always smell of fresh-baked bread, even though I don't bake.  I would have lots of land with a river in the back where I would paddle my canoe.  My trusty cat, Scout, would have free reign of the property.  I would have a small kitchen garden and several, expansive flower gardens where woodland animals would nibble and frolic, undisturbed.  It sounds a bit Disneyesque, but hey, it's a dream, so I reserve the right to color it with as many chalks as I can...                        

Creative Autobiography Assignment

The first creative moment I remember is dancing with my sister.  Some funky seventies track was playing on the radio.  I was probably about three and a half years old and my sister, Kathy, who towered above me, would have been seven.  Kathy was employing an awkward shuffle step clap approach, while I was getting down, Michael Jackson-style, complete with elaborate spins.  I could dance! 

My best ideas tend to sprout from different situations I'm in where I perceive a need.  When I was in the social work program, I wrote a handbook for clinicians on treating LGBTQ clients that is used by the faculty as a teaching tool.  At the non-profit organization were I volunteer, I devised a more efficient, user-friendly way of dispensing an aspect of our services.  While I learned a lot in the social work program, it was probably my dumbest idea (due to lack of foresight) to pursue an academic track that ended in an internship where I was, ultimately, dissatisfied with the actual clinical work.  I just wanted to write!

My greatest creative ambition is to publish a book.  In order to do this, I have to perfect my vision and write daily.  I start my day with two cups of coffee, four cigarettes, and my computer.  I compose a daily schedule and then set about writing.  My problem is I have multiple writing projects that I bounce back and forth between.  This keeps things fresh and exciting, but I need to pick one project and see it through to completion.

to be continued...