I’ve noticed a strange reoccurring motif in my writing: animals. For some reason, exotic animals always seem to slip into my stories. I don’t know why.
Not that this story focuses around animals or anything, actually, there are no real animals in it, per se. Just in the title. What we have here is another story I’ve recently dusted off. I wrote it a few years back and never really thought about it until recently.
Very quickly, a weird story. The protagonist’s name in this story is Katharine Black. As I was writing this (well after I’d chosen her name) I met a sales lady at Macy’s who helped me when I was looking for something or other for Amanda. The sales lady’s name? That’s right, Katharine Black. Okay, maybe it wasn’t all that weird. But it seemed crazy at the time.
That’s my anecdote for this evening. Enjoy the story.
Here’s a story I recently finished. I read part of it at our MFA program’s 20th anniversary bash at the San Diego Museum of Art. Never read in an art hall before. Very echoey. Anyhow, I hope to send this to a couple of contests in the near future. Comments are welcome. Enjoy!
I can’t say I’ve been idle lately. I’ve been working feverishly on my novel, which I’ve considered posting here but haven’t had the guts to do. It’s nowhere near polished.
But I’ve been up to other things as well, I just finished editing the first annual MFA Anthology of Creative Writing for the program at SDSU. The compilation is an effort of the Writers Collective, (a student organization of which I’m the head cheese). Here’s a link to the finished product, which is available at lulu.com…
It’s my first effort as an editor, and I’m rather proud of how it turned out.
I don’t know whether it’s the burgeoning San Diego spring or what, but some force is compelling me to take on more tasks than I probably should. Another thing I’ve been doing a lot of is bookbinding. Perhaps all the business with editing and publishing made me rediscover the great mystique of books, physical books, I mean. I recently bought materials to build my own book press: a couple of boards and screws and wingnuts. There’s something about binding your own book, it’s irresistible. I bound and pressed a hard-bound book of blank paper for myself recently, and I’m using it now as a dream journal. Graham Greene, the author, published a dream journal, it was his last work to be published during his lifetime. I’m convinced that dreams can be correlated with literature. Not sure how, but I guess that’s what my novel tackles. More to come soon.
It’s been quite a busy semester for me, one fraught with peril, suspense, danger, and the occasional compulsory laundry duty. The bulk of my sweat and tears have been going into starting up an organization on campus called The Writers Collective at SDSU, (check out our wiki website). But somehow I managed to recently get a story into an online magazine (forthcoming) called Theives Jargon (click here) , the story should appear around the end of March or mid April. It seems like many things are going my way, but are getting harder at the same time, so maybe that’s a good sign. I will post some actual fiction soon.
This story isn’t exactly a story, it’s an exercise that I completed for a class this semester. The stipulation of the exercise was this: somewhere in the story, you have to say “Virgil was still the frog boy.” We got together during finals week and everyone read their story. Some were about kissing frogs, one incorporated the frog suit from Super Mario Brothers 3, which I thought was rather clever. Anyway, here was my addition to the pot:
Because common arithmetic failed to explain the situation, Dr. Sound developed an entirely new set of mathematics.The problem was this: in past two months, the earth’s rotation had slowed to a halt.Physicists across the world were reacting to the situation in unexpected ways.A physicist in Holland, after sixty plus hours of mulling over formulas in a small lab without sleep or sunlight, continued to pluck at her head in frustration even though all her hair had been plucked out.In New York, only days after the crisis was announced, another physicist released into Central Park his German Shepard, his toucan, and his beloved ant farm before driving his car and himself into the East River.Every representative of the department of physics at the Sarbonne in Paris absconded to a bomb shelter in order to wait out the crisis.
Dr. Sound dropped a mirror into the fishbowl on his worktable as he was accustomed to do every other day in order to exercise his Beta-fish, Virgil.The black, tasseled fish jerked back and forth in zig-zag lines from one side of the mirror to the other. Beta-fish are easily confused and they will eagerly attack other Beta-fish, especially if the enemy moves and looks exactly like they do.
“We’ll be alright, Virgil,” said the old man into the mouth of the fishbowl.“We’ll be fine ‘cause we’re not scared. Are we?”Dr. Sound’s new mathematics would soon provide the formula to explain why the Earth had stopped.He worked for hours in the low light of the kerosene lantern, feverishly penning the final lines of the formula.Sigma equals a triangle with a squiggly line through it which yields three dots in a row, is less than or equal to a little smiling frog-boy drawing, divided by gravity, times the cubed root of Hamlet, equals a sketch of an upside-down umbrella.With a remainder of plus or minus two elephants.
“Eureka!” blurted Dr. Sound.The completed formula spanned over thirty three pages of graph paper, but the gist was easily summarized into this statement: on an infinite linear timeline, the predictability of all observable events falls to zero.
Dr. Sound turned on the radio.White noise on one station.Emergency broadcast system on the next.None of the stations came through except one: a rational, aluminum voice was reading from the book of Genesis.Dr. Sound knew that soon the Earth would halt completely and gravity would loosen its grip and all things not fastened to the Earth would float away forever, including oxygen. The air was already thin and his breaths were shallow.
He flicked a lighter and held it to the hand-rolled Cuban cigar in his mouth. The flame was small, but it did the job. And through a ring of smoke he noticed that the fish had stopped fluttering around the fishbowl.He leaned closer and saw that the mirror was cracked.A thin trail of translucent blood hung weightless in the water.Above it a slick black lump barely penetrated the surface. Virgil was still.
“The frog-boy symbol,” he muttered.The cigar fell from his mouth and smoldered a black hole into the wooden desk.Dr. Sound was looking at his math.The smiling frog-boy hovered just inches from his nose, burning like a coal.It was an error.He ran his finger up the lines and labyrinths of symbols and meanings, trying to find the source of his mistake.He made a correction, then another, and the further back he went the more mistakes he found.His worn, yellow pencil scratched out rows of false symbols and it scribbled in new symbols, tearing paper, cracking graphite, until it slipped from the sweaty hand that held it and spiraled slowly, quietly, toward the ceiling.
(This is a revamped version of the story by the same name that I posted a few months ago. Feel free to leave comments and feedback.)
I pull the wrinkled paper from my back pocket and unfold it.Alvis writes like a chicken.Two weeks ago, when I received the letter, I had to decode each word.Now, I re-read it for the hundredth time and hope that somewhere in it I’ll find a clue, something telling.He wrote, How’s the acting business?Don’t give up on finding work.Dry today, maybe, but when it rains it pours. Alvis is reliable as the mail when it comes to delivering motivational platitudes.Still planning to be in the neighborhood for Christmas?Hope we can get together and talk, I could use your expert advice.And here his handwriting got smaller, more concentrated: Hate to ask, but would you mind stopping by the place to make sure everything is ok?Jim-Jim and Girl Spider Man are still in the back somewhere.Find them a good home.Signed, Fondly, Alvis Borgchild.And underneath that, in careful print: Alvis Borgchild.
A trickle of sweat rolls down my crack as I lean on the flank of my truck in the empty parking lot.Have I come to the wrong place?Is this a joke?No cameras are visible—if this is a reality show it’s not a very good one.Taken in panorama, the familiar landscape is more lonesome than I remember: grassy land rolls out flat in every direction to a grey, tree-topped horizon.The bakery I stand before is condemned.The broad windows have all been shattered, shards jut up from the frames like broken teeth.Bold white words have been spray-painted on the blackened, red-brick walls.I inspect the graffiti closely, particularly the first “a,” and feel as if I am misreading the words:
There is a region on the Atlantic coast of France where salt water daily sweeps in and back out again with the tidal pull.A small castle sits atop the hazy hill in the distance.There are two or three other hills on the horizon, but they are occupied by nothing more than grass and sheep.Everything in between these hills is sand.If the tide is low we may continue on the secret path of solid earth, which is invisible among the wasteland of quicksand that waits still and silent like a spider’s web.We follow the path carefully, but quickly, for the tide will soon return and the tall hill before us will become an island.We walk up rocky slopes on a narrow path that winds us around to the back side of the hill to the ancient fortress that is called D’Ahania, which was built before the dark ages of France.
It is no longer a fortress of warfare.It is a scientific laboratory and scriptorium for the once famous, now forgotten, Casey Dooley.The entrance to the exterior courtyard is modest, no drawbridge or heavy doors, but a single iron gate that has no lock.
The courtyard is a lush, Babylonian garden.In all directions sprawling green things explode their various colors.A bent and grey old man sits on a tree stump in a thick patch of blossoming sunflowers, stargazer lilies, moonflowers, passionflowers, and many of them come up to his chin.His bony face registers no emotion but his body language suggests that he is relaxed: hands flat on his knees, head bowed as if in prayer.This is Casey Dooley.His story is long and wrought with heartache, but we don’t wish to know his heartache just yet.We are interested in what Casey is doing now: he is intent upon the effect of the breeze on an oddly shaped flower.
Today is his one hundred and first birthday.It is his ritual every Saturday to come into the garden and trim down the flowers in order to arrange them into bouquets to place in parlor of the chateau.He knew each flower by its scent, and he knew the ideal firmness of the blossoms that were the ripest for pruning.These were necessary skills because Casey, in his old age, had grown almost completely blind.
The flowers have not been clipped today.For the first time in a decade, he sees, not with his mind’s eye, or with his hands, or his nose.He sees with his eyes.This morning, he mistook the flower for a yellow dandelion, but upon further inspection he saw that there was a red-brown-ish center to the flower—at which point he assumed it was some sort of daisy.There are long, translucent, thread-like things that stretch out in every direction and curl in a smooth arcs that extend to form a watermelon-shaped sphere around the starburst.It has a peculiar smell, a must and pinewood odor that is salty and sweet and altogether unfamiliar.
“What are you looking for?”
“Detail,” says Casey.Then he looks up, turns his head.Everything is the same shade of darkness.“Who said that?”
“Don’t be afraid,” whispers the vibrant, orange flower….
Walter Percy says that a novel, for all its length, is just an extremely long name for a complex, evolving emotion that has no name but that.
Flannery O’Connor says, “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.”
As the dust settles from my move to San Diego and I’m managing a somewhat regular daily routine of writing and otherwise fighting off boredom, it occurs to me that I have not posted a story up for a while. Part of that has to do with the fact that without school I have no deadlines to complete stories; but I have been busy working on a novel.
Beginning to tackle something as big as a 200-300 page novel is like waking up one morning and deciding to be a whaler or a fighter pilot. The problem is not so much whether or not you can do it (the task is so astronomical that any fear of failure is masked by the great possibility that it will never happen anyway–it is only the possible that I fear), the real problem is figuring out how other people do it, and more pressingly what steps one should take today to begin down that road.
So I’ve taken advice from Robert Olen Butler (see Recent Books on right) and for the past three weeks have been using this system:
1) you start with a stack of note cards, 2 or 3 hundred.
2) A general sense of your characters (their desires, etc) and the milieu (where, when); these are, of course, subject to change.
3) Meditate, dream and meander through the world of your characters. Take special note of how characters react to the world and each other through their senses. (Avoid at all costs writing down abstractions on the note cards; eg. So-and-so saw the dragon destroy the house. Write notes about the heat of the fire, the sound of the wreckage, the character’s legs turning in to tapioca pudding…)
4)Over the course of days and weeks you will fill the note cards with sensory impressions, character yearnings, conflicts, and imagery, but not abstract plot elements. (Plotting a story before its written is dangerous, especially if your characters are organic and want to steer the story in a direction that would be impossible to go if you, the writer, stuck rigidly to your plot outline. If you must plot, be flexible.)
5) Organize the 2 or 3 hundred cards in the order that you want to tell the story. This is not a science. You can organize them together by scenes, chronology, characters, whatever the story, or your unconscious, dictates. Think of it as a tarot deck rather than cue cards. Intuitively place the scenes at the beginning, middle or end.
6) Write the book.
As for myself, I have completed all but step 6.
These steps can work for short stories as well, however far fewer note cards are needed because short stories are often only a few scenes long.
Creative Non-fiction is a tough genre to pin down. I mean, the name indicates that it’s defined by what it is not: fiction. So here’s my valiant attempt at a creative piece of “not” fiction. Although, I must admit, that the things that I mention in this essay (my experiences in the realm of air guitar and the madness thereof) happened more than two years ago. So inevitably I’ve forgotten many crucial details. And as a result I fill in the gaps by simply making things up. If you were hoping for a detailed and factual account of my air guitar endeavors, then you will be disappointed. Sorry.
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. ~J.L. Borges
