Women’s Work

Charles maneuvers Ava’s arms into the ruffled apron that waits on its hook. He pushes up the corners of her mouth with his thumbs. “There’s a good girl,” he says, and turns her toward the kitchen.

The clatter of women’s work relaxes him. Drowsing over his keyboard, he dreams of pot roast and mounds of buttery sweet potatoes arranged just so on his plate.

A crash jolts him awake. Ava stands frozen in the center of gleaming marble tile, surrounded by shards of white ceramic. When he reaches for her, a warble rises from the depths of her throat like birdsong stretched thin and plucked with a fingernail.

“Knock that off,” he growls.

Her lips curve up on their own. With an airy pop she implodes, the rubbery crumples of her smile raining down on his shoes.

Update on “The Bathhouse at Carson Hot Springs”

“The Bathhouse at Carson Hot Springs” is now available in the Fall 2011 edition of Poetry Quarterly. You’ll find it on pages 67-70. The poem appears to end on the first page, but keep reading–there are three more pages after that!

You can read it online now, and there will be a print version available soon (just in case you are related to me and feel obligated to pay for my work).

Happy holidays to you all!

The Bathhouse Poem Accepted

“The Bathhouse at Carson Hot Springs” was accepted for publication at Poetry Quarterly this morning.  Maybe I’ll go back to the springs this weekend for a celebratory soak.  =)

Dusk Swim

New audio file.  This story is set at Insula Lake, located in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area between northern Minnesota and Canada.  Below is a photograph of that lake, shot from an island campsite at sunset.

The story was previously published in LingerFiction.

Collaborative Storytelling

Last week a friend emailed me out of the blue and proposed a collaborative story game. Mel’s an old buddy from grade school, and beneath the mandatory veneer of adulthood she’s exactly what I remember—wicked smart and creative, bubbling with intricate schemes and ideas. She’s also, as it turns out, a pretty decent writer. Here’s the opening she sent to get us started:

“It’s rumored that the Oracle of Delphi once said, ‘Lies are a necessary human element, but that which begins with a lie will end in a lie—a tortured, evolutionary invention to mask the original lie and its long, stringy spawn—which distant as it may become, never dies.’”

And with that we began to write together, sending paragraphs back and forth. The emerging story centers around an unlikely foursome: Slipstream Jack, Carmella the seamstress, her beekeeping sister June, and June’s boring but wealthy husband, Gabe. It involves cats and dripping cans of tuna fish, lies and bees and sedative-dusted calla lilies.

I’m fascinated with the way our little experiment is unfolding, with each of us layering on images and elements in turn. The story is flowing in a way that doesn’t usually happen for me—there’s more plot and less fiddling.

I’ve noticed several things that are contributing to the happiness of this work:

I can’t go back and edit previous sections.  I can revise my two hundred or so words to my heart’s content before I send hit send, but then it’s done. It does me no good to fuss over what’s already been written. I can’t change it, so I don’t look back.

I’m forced to focus on external conflict. No matter where a story starts, I nearly always end up sucked into layers of internal conflict—messy stuff that’s hard to sort out myself, much less clarify for readers. With another person involved, it’s harder to get so deep into a character’s head, and I’m less apt to tangle things up with my own emotion.

The story must be written in a linear fashion. There’s no way to skip around, writing a bit here and a bit there, then backtracking.  I can’t look ahead, because I have no idea where Mel will go next, and she keeps my on my toes.

I can write until I get stuck, then hand it off. I typically waste a lot of time trying to think myself out of sticky places, determining just the right direction a story should go. With someone waiting to pick up where I leave off, there’s no getting bogged down.

I don’t have any expectations. I’m not putting pressure on myself to create something beautiful or meaningful or perfect. It’s pure play.

I’m curious to see how the story comes out, whether we can create something that holds together and blends our styles enough to be an enjoyable read. If not, that’s okay. It’s turning my gears in a different way, and that’s exciting.

Also in the planning stages is a collaborative project with Darryll A. DeCoster over at Flogging English. It’s a short art video combining my prose poem “Seeing in Reverse”, kinetic typography, kirigami and his digital photographs. I’m really looking forward to getting this off the ground—stay tuned for updates!

Staying the Course

An avalanche of rejections in April left me feeling a bit discouraged, and now I find myself procrastinating, reluctant to make new submissions. I’m still writing, but the stories are slower to form. My fickle attention has started to wander, distracted by the unexplored magic of bookbinding, ballroom dance and hand-built clay pizza ovens.

I know the time has come to settle down to the work of writing, navigate this first major speed bump and see whether there’s any real potential for me here. I need to re-motivate. This morning I decided to lay it all out and take a look at my progress.

I started crafting fiction about a year and a half ago, ending a long dry spell in my writing life. I hadn’t written anything since the free verse poetry of my college years, and rediscovering a fascination with words and how they fit together was exciting. Short stories presented me with a whole new set of challenges– tricky technical details like choosing the right point of view, building a logical plot, and clarifying motive.

In August I joined the online writer’s site Scribophile. It’s a great resource and I’ve been busy critiquing and learning from other writers. The community is supportive, with many thoughtful members who are willing to share their knowledge. Fiction is still a blind grope in the dark for me most of the time, but with help I’m developing a better understanding of the basics.

Once I felt somewhat comfortable with allowing other people to read my work, I began to research markets and send out submissions.  A couple of pieces were accepted early on, but since then I’ve seen only politely worded versions of “thanks, but no”.

Here are my stats as of 25 June 2011:

Completed Work

Short stories: 10

Flash Fiction: 7

Microfiction / Prose Poetry: 14

Poems: 11

Work in Progress

Novelette: 1

Short story: 1

Most of these pieces stand under the umbrella of magical realism, but there’s also some literary stuff, quirky romance, and soft science fiction.  The shorter pieces in particular walk the line between prose and poetry and are difficult to classify.

Publication Data

Submissions: 58

Acceptances: 2

Withdrawn: 1

Rejections: 39 (13 personal responses, 26 form letters)

Pending Response: 16

Waiting to be submitted or re-submitted: 20

Conclusion

That’s a decent amount of writing. I’ve learned a lot, and my skills are improving. I’m making a honest effort toward publication. Now if I can just stay focused, keep my spirits up and resist the lure of pine needle basketry, I’ll be fine.

My goals for July? Finish one new story, revise some older stuff, read up on how to craft an awesome plot, and make eight submissions. I think I’ll get a jump start and go submit something right now.

A Week From Last Sunday

I have my first audio file up and functioning! It took several tries to produce a reading without random background noises: the dog barking, the phone ringing, or small voices requesting cookies. This poem was previously published in Flashquake.

Photo of a rural gate in early morning, with clumps of Scotch Thistle in the foreground.

Vintage Mutton

This morning I had to drag Atticus-the-one-horned-sheep up the long gravel driveway. It was a bad scene all around: me cursing, still in pajamas, suffering from a nasty cold, and the sheep stiff-legged and bleating, convinced he was going to be made into gyros. I’d just untangled his horn from the wire fence for the sixth time in as many days, and was hoping fresh pasture might keep him out of trouble.

Atticus used to be a regular two-horned sheep, before he developed this compulsion to stick his head into things. He lost the right horn when he got his head jammed in a nook between a piece of plywood and the barn wall. The left one keeps getting hung up on the New Zealand fencing, and yesterday there was an unfortunate strangulation incident involving the swing set.

As I yanked on his remaining horn and pulled at the rope around his neck, feeling sweaty and out of sorts, I broke it down for him.

“Listen here, you daft sheep. When you stick your horns through the fence, you get stuck. When you’re stuck, you can’t eat. A side effect of not eating is death.”

This seemed very obvious to me, resident human and superior life form.

Atticus threw himself to the ground and looked up at me as though any mention of eating on my part was heartless.

“Oh for heaven’s sake! Get up. You’re a pet. And no one wants to eat a sheep as old as you.”

I manhandled him up the hill and shoved him into the upper pasture, where the grass was indeed greener.  I pushed the gate closed and watched as he wandered right back over to the fence and stuck his head through.

You have got to be kidding. I unhooked him again and chased him into the center of the pasture.

*

Two hours later I’m at my desk, struggling to plot out a new story. I’ve written the first few paragraphs—it’s a mystery about a young woman who walks away from a bonfire at the beach and disappears—and I’m a little bit in love with the image in my mind. I’ve played with the prose until it’s just so, drafting a picture of the burned-down fire, the gathering rain, the girl dancing away down the beach. I have, too, some hint of realization and a conflict left behind. But that’s it.

I know there must be a story in here somewhere; I just can’t find it. Formulating a logical plot doesn’t come easily to me—I make things too complicated and I struggle to provide readers with adequate insights into my character’s actions.

It happens with every story.  I keep banging my head against the same old problems, approaching every writing session with a load of negative baggage about logic and plot. It’s holding me back.

I’m scanning the first paragraph one more time when a thrashing outside draws my attention. Atticus is fighting to get his head loose from the fence again, and as I watch, he twists to one side and his second horn snaps right off. With nothing left to hang him up, he slips between the wires and makes a beeline for the rosebushes. Problem solved.

I laugh, despite the obvious fact that I will soon be spending my days chasing him back into the pasture.  I should go catch him now, but I decide to let him be. He’s paid his dues.

Now it’s my turn.