New Publications

I've had some new publications recently:

A short story
"The World in Red" in The Sun Magazine

Three haibun
"Memorial Day" in Contemporary Haibun Online
"Cairo, Illinois" in Haibun Today
"Spring Passage, May..." in Notes from the Gean


You can read an excerpt of "The World in Red" by clicking on the link above. 

Bruce Ross, one of the editors of Contemporary Haibun Online, chose "Memorial Day" as his commentary piece.  Drop by to read what he says.

"Cairo, Illinois" is based on my Ohio River River journey of 2005.  Friends of this blog will remember my preparations and hopes for that journey.  It is only now starting to yield results in my writing.  
What to do with this little blog?  It's gone through so many incarnations.  I think from now on I'll be publishing less original poetry.  I have another (private) blog I've set up for the purpose of organizing and archiving poems and another for haiku.  This one will probably revert back to writing about process and experience in my world of teaching and writing.  Some photographs and art from time to time.

To the future.

Floreta and the Ohio

Just had a great editing session with the second Floreta story. I think it's ready to send out.

I have definitely decided that the Floreta stories will comprise the Ohio River novel, which I have been working on for four years.

The Ohio River novel has been tough going, not for lack of material but for lack of story. I've had touble finding the right characters and a central conflict that works. Everytime I'd get the narrative action to Pittsburgh, the story would die. I'd lose interest.

The only way I can stick to a project is to be curious about what will happen. I now have a character with a compelling problem, miles to go, and enlightenment waiting. Getting her to the end is going to be a lot of fun.

Now that I have two Floreta stories, essentially Chapts. 1 and 2 of the novel, I can see exactly how to structure the novel. I did an outline of it tonight (a very sketchy one) and was so excited because the entire project looks like something I can accomplish now.

I have all the writing I did at Provincetown and writing I've done since Provincetown. I just have to figure out how it all fits into my scheme.

The trip out west this summer showed me what I needed to do. A similar thing happened when I was working on my first novel. I floundered for many years until I took up weaving. We bought a floor loom and I learned how to use it, making rugs and scarves. It was such a meditative practice and it taught me that I am a weaver not just of yarn and cloth, I am a weaver stories, too. So, to emphasize this new awareness, I made my main character a weaver in that first book.

The western trek changed me: As a result of that trip, I understand so much more about the world. The unusual landscapes spoke to aspects of myself I had not formerly explored, had not known existed. So as I introduced the loom in my first book, I have brought the westward trek into my second. This provides structure and also meaning.

I start back to school Monday happy about what I accomplished over break. I hope to be able to keep writing, although I know this will be a very busy semester. Then I hope to make real progress this summer. It would be so good to finish the summer with a full first draft of the book: maybe I'm overreaching here. I guess I'm just excited. I realize the task of writing even one story is harder than it may first appear. There's no end to the trouble that a writer can run into. But I've hacked through some serious weeds the last week, and the view is much more clear ahead than it's ever been.

The Floreta Stories

I'll call them my Floreta stories. That's the main character. The first Floreta story was completed a few weeks ago. The second story went haywire but I think it's found its feet now, just this afternoon.

A New Short Story

I didn't get a chance to go out to the Airstream today, but I did surprise myself by writing a piece of sudden fiction from start to finish. That hardly ever happens for me, but the material is some I've had around for a while. I used snippets of journal notes and pieces of letters and even incorporated a thought encountered in an essay by D. H. Lawrence. (I typed a draft first, then I rewrote the story by hand, adding and moving paragraphs around. Then I typed the finished draft.)

Proof that writing does come together when you diligently make pieces as often as you can and when you live for the opportunity of piecing parts of life together in exciting ways. This one's ready to submit and I've already decided where it's going. Wish it well as it goes its way to cold editor's eyes.

25 Books of Poems and 1 Book of Stories that Made Me Want to Be a Poet

This prompt is going around Facebook, and I was tagged.

25 Books of Poems and 1 Book of Stories that Made Me Want to Be a Poet

1. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
2. Duino Elegies, Rilke
3. The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks
4. 2o Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Pablo Neruda
5. The World of the Ten Thousand Things, Charles Wright
6. Migration, W. S. Merwin
7. Loosestrife, Stephen Dunn
8. The Great Fires, Jack Gilbert
9. Book of Nightmares, Galway Kinnell
10. Collected Poems, Stanley Kunitz
11. Without End, Adam agajewski
12. The Wild Iris, Louise Gluck
13. Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke
14. Hafiz of Shiraz, trans. Peter Avery & John Heath-Stubbs
15. Questions for Ecclesiastes, Mark Jarman
16. Show Yourself to My Soul, Rabindranath Tagore
17. Above the River, James Wright
18. Birdsong, Rumi
19. The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca
20. There is No Road, Antonio Machado
21. Narrow Road to the Interior, Matsuo Basho, trans. Sam Hamill
22. Book of Hours, Rilke
23. Love-In-Idleness, John Bradley
24. Dream Songs, John Berryman
25. The Beforelife, Franz Wright

1. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson

The Sudden Story II

I reread the story I wrote on Saturday, and it holds up. I was relieved, because, you know, sometimes a story that looks good when you've just finished it doesn't look so good later.

The story needs more development. I will keep it on top of my stack of stories in progress and see if I can add to it during the new semester. It's working title is "The Weatherman."

The Sudden Story

I wrote a short story today, a brand new one that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It will surely need more work, development, especially, but it feels so good to have "completed" something in one day.

This happened because I accomplished a great deal of work for the new semester, which begins Monday, and I rewarded myself with some creative time.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Warning: Possible spoilers.

I watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button yesterday afternoon. Afterwards, I went within myself, thought about the film, dreamed about it, and, when I woke up early this morning, thought on it some more. The more I thought about it, the more complicated my thoughts got. I wanted to write some thoughts down before I got to the point of giving up trying.

It's a very good movie. Brad Pitt, who is one of my favorite actors anyway, gives a beautiful performance. All the acting is first-rate. It is a fairytale for modern times, so it draws on rich archetypes and themes.

Having just taught a course on fairy tales and modern culture at the university, I couldn't help but notice a Beauty and the Beast theme in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I thought a lot this morning about the baby boomers and how our films have followed our generation's maturation and development. We've had our Cinderella tales (Saturday Night Fever, Pretty Woman), our Little Red Riding Hood tales (Thelma and Louise, Company of Wolves, Michael Jackson's Thriller), and also our Beauty and the Beast tales, like The Elephant Man. We've considered various beasts, such as physical disfigurement, mental illness, AIDS, race, authority (Cuckoo's Nest, Cool Hand Luke). Even Disney's Beauty and the Beast looks slant at hyper-masculinity and fear of homosexuality. (The music for the animated feature was written by a gay man who later died of AIDS.)

The baby boomers have considered every aspect of growing up, but The Curious Case of Benjamin Button gives boomers a curious outlet for its fear of aging and death. In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Brad Pitt plays Benjamin, who represents the repellent beast of old age.

Benjamin, who is born old and becomes younger as the years go on, is seen as beastly by his own father, who abandons him. From a psychological point of view, we might say the father fears his own aging and death and therefore sees his son as "monstrous." Normal children see Benjamin as strange, too, as well as women in the brothel where Benjamin loses his virginity to one sympathetic prostitute.

Benjamin grows up in a sort of old folks home, where for the most part he fits right in and learns the lessons life's impermanence. He meets Daisy when, as a little child, she visits her grandmother who lives there. Daisy sees Benjamin's beauty like no other person can--even her grandmother views him as monstrous when she catches the two children baring their souls before a burning candle in a secret place under a table.

Old age is a beast, yet in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, it is depicted as both idyllic and horrifying. In the old folks home where Benjamin grows up, there is no suffering, really, just mild indignities, usually experienced by the men (one aged man goes outside naked to raise the American flag; another man repeats again and again that he was stuck by lightening seven times). But for the most part, the old people are not in pain. The women die quietly, sometimes wearing pearls. Death is a visitor, not a horrible spectre.

Daisy's death as an old woman, though, is modern and terrible. She is in a hospital connected to tubes and her physical body is in agony. The film effectively taps into our worst nightmare. Her death happens just as Hurricane Katrina, itself a figure of death and devastation, makes landfall.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald's story begins in 1860. It is situated in the old Confederacy. However, the film begins on the day that WWI ends. This is the day that Benjamin is born. Thus he experiences the apex of his youth during the 1960s, an appropriate time setting for baby boomers.

I think that those of us who have followed Brad Pitt's career and who have loved him will feel a bit of sadness at seeing him aged. It gives you a jolt. We remember him best from Thelma and Louise, where he played a sexually charged Trickster figure. We also remember him as Achilles, the beautiful god with the fatally flawed heel who, mercifully, dies in his prime rather than suffering the debilitation of old age.

It's rather difficult to accept that Pitt is not immortal. And, furthermore, if he can age, so can we.

But The Curious Case of Benjamin Button shows us that reverse aging is no picnic, either. You still experience loss of loved ones, bodily functions, memory. You still die.

What the film says is that it is essentially how one lives that matters. Dance while you can; play the piano with your whole heart. If you aren't happy with the way your life is going, make it new: it is within your power to do that. That's not a new message, but the film finds a way to make fresh old truths. That is what art is for!

This is only a rough sketch of my ideas.

Some points on writing

Between listening to music, working on my novel, and checking the Internet now and then this evening (O. J. Simpson is guilty, says the New York Times--the e-mail arrived not ten minutes ago), I found this article by Steven Millhauser about writing. Specifically, he compares and contrasts the short story and the novel. Some points he makes:

What the short story lacks in grandeur, it makes up for in elegance and grace. The short story is like William Blake's grain of sand: it becomes bigger than itself; it becomes bigger than the novel; it becomes as big as the universe.

The novel is exhaustive but the world is inexhaustible. The novel is ponderous. The novel is always hungry and dissatisfied; it fears coming to an end because then the world will run away from it. "The novel wants things. It wants territory. It wants the whole world."

15/50

Have been worrying over the new story, reading the first draft, despairing, being unhappy with myself, reading great stories, noticing how far my story is from greatness. Decided to lay it aside and start again. Will use same premise, same characters, same elements. The new draft has a different beginning; action is more compressed, story moves more quickly, is more sensory. Language is much better. Hope to get back to it over the weekend.

14/50

I worked on that new short story tonight. I sat on the couch and used my laptop. I worked from my handwritten draft, shifting and shaping. I ended up with six typewritten pages so far. It feels like the story is maybe half finished, like it will be ten or twelve pages long. I had to stop working on it because I have an early appointment in the morning, and I need to bathe and go to bed now.

7/50

Collecting stories.

Humans, like crows, are inclined to collect things. Stamps, bottles, butterflies, bugs. Stories. We have our personal stories, of course, Aunt Millie finding love or Uncle Bill getting drunk every Christmas. The time I fell into my mother's washbucket.

What I mean is published stories, those we collect in book form, those we take from the shelf when we ache for wholeness. We collect stories because we love them. We remember the adrenaline rush we received when we first read them. We collect stories because we are human, because we are like the crows. We decorate our nests with stories. We cock our heads, like crows, admiring our obsession. We know that inside the story, all is well.

Given the truth of this, I wonder how anybody talks about a story without her heart bursting from joy.

5/50

1. It feels strange to say that the first week of Spring semester is over and a new week is about to begin.
2. After a lot of talking and looking, Allen and I have bought a music keyboard. We had to drive up to Ann Arbor to get the one we wanted.*
3. I haven't had music lessons in over 40 years. Rusty isn't the word for where I am right now. But I got some refresher-books and have been practicing a little each day.
4. I am interested in how the two stories "Hills Like White Elephants" and "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" shed light on each other.
5. It's going to get very cold and snow this week.
6. Allen is going to take Sweet Pea to the vet in the morning. We are having her spayed. I hate to think about how alone and afraid she is going to feel. I will be glad when she is home and safe.

*We got a Yamaha keyboard. It is YPG 625. (Yamaha Portable Grand, model 625.) It has a full keyboard with weighted keys. It came with a stand and bench.