Guest Post, David Meischen: Hiding in Plain Sight

Hiding in Plain Sight: How Ambient Noise and Clutter Feed a Story

 

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf poster“Clink. Clink.”

We’ve spent an hour and a half with them at this point, with repeated eruptions—Martha savaging her husband, George setting off timed explosions from his store of resentments. Then suddenly: the voices go silent, no sign of George and Martha, of Nick and Honey, the bested guests. Moonlight through tree branches, a yard we see from above, as if from a bedroom window. In the background, stringed instruments, serene. Then Martha’s voice calling for the others and, before Elizabeth Taylor appears onscreen, the sound of ice cubes in her drink, something we’ve been hearing since the opening scene: director Mike Nichols’ brilliant use of ambient noise.

The dialogue dazzles, of course, thanks to Edward Albee, in this case so perfectly delivered that sometimes as I watch “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”—at least a dozen times I’ve indulged the pleasure of this viewing—I take the words, the execution, for granted and marvel at what the director is doing to riff on what the words are getting at. In the scene referenced above, I am not surprised to hear ice cubes clinking before the camera reaches Martha, meandering drunkenly across the yard to her car. The camera has not followed the station wagon here from the foursome’s drunken dancing excursion, but it feels as if we’ve seen the inebriate braking—front tires up over the curb at an angle so that the vehicle lists slightly, passenger-side turn signal winking, winking, winking, rear passenger door flopped open. Nichols doesn’t waste the turn signal. Martha staggers around the car, opens the driver’s door, reaches in, and the turn signals wink back and forth between each other before they blink out. Martha wanders the yard, then, calling out intermittently, her drink glass clinking the while. Finally, the screenplay gives a nod to what the director is doing: Martha says, “Clink. Clink.”

*

I recommend “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” to fiction writers. Consider it a tutorial in the uses of your characters’ environment, the details of their surroundings—indoor clutter, appliances, items of food and drink, features of the outdoor landscape, sounds so common (clinking ice cubes, anyone?) a writer might overlook them, and so forth. Always in this film there are things for George and Martha and Nick and Honey to do while they speak the language of wreckage.

In what is for me the funniest moment, Elizabeth Taylor leans into a cluttered refrigerator, opened by Richard Burton, grabs a drumstick from a platter of chicken sitting inside uncovered, grabs a salt shaker from the messy table Burton is clearing, salts and devours her piece of chicken, her mouth open as she chews, talking around mouthfuls. Then the perfect capstone: Taylor returns to the refrigerator, still open, tosses the chicken bone onto the same platter, and shuts the door, all without pausing in her run-on monologue about a movie Martha can’t remember the title of. We see a woman, her husband, their relationship, their way of life here. If you didn’t know a word of English, the details would tell you all you need to know.

*

A decade ago, I took a weekend fiction workshop with Daniel Mueller, author of the stunning short story collection How Animals Mate. Our focus was landscape, Mueller’s mantra:

Let the landscape of your story tell your story.

If a story stalls, look around. Something in your story’s landscape, its environment, will get it moving again.

As an exercise, Mueller asked participants to picture an odd item, oddly out of place in its setting. We went around the workshop table then, each participant volunteering such an item, all of us recording the items on our own list. Our assignment was to select an out-of-place item from the list and write a scene for it.

I chose a wristwatch buckled to the branch of a tree. I already had fragments for a story about a boy named Berndt whose father has committed suicide. For Daniel’s assignment, I imagined that Berndt’s father had taken off his watch on the morning of his suicide and buckled it to a mesquite tree branch before slashing his wrists. The scene I wrote was set several weeks later. Berndt is on his way to feed pigs on the family farm, when morning sun flashes off the crystal of his deceased father’s missing watch. Berndt unfastens the watch and beats it against the mesquite trunk until the crystal smashes, crying and cursing his father. This scene became the closing scene in a story about a mysterious watch and the riddle of a father who owned it. My challenge was to make the watch real and then to build a story around it, leading to the father’s suicide and his son’s subsequent discovery of the watch buckled to a tree.

What might have been peripheral, unimportant, became the story’s vehicle. The story of a watch becomes the story of a difficult father. A son puzzling over the watch itself provides a way of expressing an inner life that is not accessible to or expressible by the son himself. I loved writing this story, loved unfurling the watch’s story, letting the watch carry the bigger story of son and father. Unanswered questions about the watch stand in for unanswered questions about the father. The discovery of the watch, in the closing scene, provides a believable stimulus, without sentimentality, for the protagonist’s anger, his grief. When I was done, the watch even provided a title, “Center Wheel, Balance Wheel, Escape Wheel” (available at Prime Number).

*

This approach carries one of my first published stories, “In the Garden,” online right here at Superstition Review. A husband and wife converse over breakfast in their backyard. By increments, without intending to, they say things that can’t be taken back, irreparably damaging their marriage. Talking heads cannot carry a short story, at least not one I am capable of writing, so early on, a mockingbird sings out from a live oak near the breakfast table. Then the household tomcat slinks in from the creek. Turns out his name is Tyger, which opens a window onto the protagonist and his wife. The yard has room for a tomato garden, the wife’s—and a pesky squirrel hanging out among the cages. A newspaper at center table has a photo of Ronald Reagan above the fold, spurring an exchange that gives away the year—1982—when the husband says, “Look on the bright side. Two more years and we’ll vote him out.” The husband has a bit of a thing for his best friend; the wife suspects as much. This is a breakfast just for two, though—no reason for the best friend to drop by. Except then a repairman arrives to address hail damage on the roof. Wife notices that husband has noticed the repairman. Both turn at the sound of the repairman’s hammer. Then this: “A patch of sweat, like the map of a harbor Blake wanted to explore, darkened the blue of the man’s shirt in the space between his shoulder blades.” And so it goes. The conflict reaches a peak vicariously, when the mockingbird dive-bombs the squirrel and the cat leaps at the bird’s sudden accessibility.

*

Ambient noise is my personal catchall for the material stuff, auditory and non-, that surrounds us, often without our notice, the material stuff upon which we can launch credible and engaging stories. This “noise” includes any and all sensory details, any and all physical aspects of the landscape, any and all items at hand in your characters’ environs. A caveat, though. Ambient noise is not a fiction writer’s sole tool. A story can overwhelm itself and its readers with this kind of detail. Nothing impedes narrative momentum like a margin-to-margin thicket of details. Nothing is more tedious.

*

Watch “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Let yourself revel in the many ways by which the characters interact with facets of their environment—ice cubes, drink glasses, liquor bottles, cigarettes, a platter of fried chicken, a child’s swing hanging in the tree outside, door chimes, a chain lock on the front door. . . .

Read good stories. Here I’ll mention only two—and very short. In “Say Yes” by Tobias Wolff, a husband and wife wash dishes and prepare for bed. That’s it. But the meandering path of talk over dishes leads this couple into a hypothetical question about mixed-race dating, with an answer that changes everything. A younger couple, five years married, figures at the center of “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” by Irwin Shaw. As they walk New York City on a lovely day, the wife catches the husband more than once distracted by the girls of the title passing by on the street. Questions lead to defensive answers, and as in “Say Yes,” things are said that cannot be taken back, that change everything between man and wife.

Immerse yourself in the quiet noise of Wolff’s story, in the vibrant noises of Irwin’s city walk. Then settle into the noises that will tell your next story.

 

Editor’s Note: David served as co-editor of Wingbeats and Wingbeats II, collections of poetry writing exercises from Dos Gatos Press.

SR Pod/Vod Series, Recording: Author Katie Flynn

Katie FlynnThis Tuesday, we are proud to feature a podcast of SR contributor Katie Flynn reading her short story from Issue 17.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes channel, podcast #230.

You can follow along with Katie’s short story in Superstition Review, Issue 17.

More about the author:

Katie M. Flynn is Fiction Editor at the Indianola Review. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Carve, Flyway, Monkeybicycle, Paper Darts, and elsewhere. She’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice and holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco. Recently, she completed her first novel about love, revenge, and uploaded consciousness. When she’s not writing, she’s teaching herself classical guitar, nerding out over chess, or chasing her two kids through the wilds of San Francisco.

 

Guest Post, Douglas Light: Shadows

The man ran late. He hailed a cab. The cab was packed with milk jugs of laundry detergent pre-mixed with water. There was a lot of talk between the man and cab driver. Nothing happened.

Understand, this was a short story.

Understand, this was the first short story I ever wrote, some 25 years ago. I spent a hundred-plus hours in a dim loft on Occidental Street in Seattle crafting the six page story that was—at least in my mind—pure, brilliant literature.

What it really was was awful. Pointless. Embarrassing.

If my present-self had been around then, I would have destroyed my then-self’s typewriter. “Stop,” I would have said. “Trust me, please. Just stop.”

 

***

Summit in ColoradoJuly 2016. Colorado.

Two miles in, my girlfriend Micah and I saw the summit. The guidebook claimed the Mount Belford hike, a 14,150 feet trundle to the summit, was 3.1 miles long. We were close, twenty more minutes of hiking, at most. “We can make it,” I said.

Two hours later we discovered the summit we’d struggled toward was a false summit, the real one a solid half mile farther.

But we’d committed. We were here. Now. We were going to make it.

And we did. After nearly four hours of hiking and climbing, we reached the peak.

At the base, in the dirt parking lot with toxic Port-A-Potties, the day had been brilliant. 76 degrees. A pleasant breeze.

Up top, the temperature bottomed to 43 degrees and the winds whipped so brutally that we had to crouch then crawl the final hundred yards.

Five pictures on the phone. Proof.

Rain clouds wedged their way onto the once blue skies.

We made the descent, believing we’d conquered the mountain.

The first fall left me bloody and laughing.

The third found me on my back like a broken turtle, my plastic water bottle cracked and draining and the mountain air crowded with my curses.

Rain hit, lashing and full.

I hobbled the remaining way, miserable.

In the parking lot, the rain stopped. The sky brightened.

I took my boots off. My socks were red with blood. My right knee had taken on the hue of a eggplant. “I can drive,” Micah said.

I refused, for no good reason.

Driving the once-dirt-now-mud road toward the highway, we saw three men sunning themselves on rocks, shirts off and smoking with a bottle of Dickel whiskey on the ground.

Pointing to the three, Micah said, “There’s a lesson there.”

 

***

The writing group met in Brooklyn. I was the only male. “This is a meet-and-greet, a trial to see if you’d be a good fit,” the woman hosting the session said.

I brought a bottle of wine—rather, I bought a bottle of wine. I dropped it in the subway station, staining the pages we were to review that night.

Snacks, soda, and cupcakes. The critiquing was a combative free-for-all, with arguments erupting and people being cut off mid-sentence. I managed two comments over the course of the hour, both which were dismissed.

“I’m not sure you’re a good fit,” the host said, seeing me out. “You don’t seem to understand how to make thoughtful comments.”

 

***

Micah and I sat at a small table at Sunny’s bar in Redhook, Brooklyn, drinking scotch and debating the cultural significance of the new World Trade Center with Steve Buscemi while Norah Jones played. The place was packed, though there were no more than forty.

Pausing mid-song, Norah said, “Look everyone, it’s Mick Foley,” and then invited the former pro-wrestler on stage, where he played a woodblock in time to the tune.

“Where else but New York City,” Micah said of our evening as we rode home to Harlem.

The next day, Micah got pulled over by the police and ticketed. $425 for turning right on a red.

On her bicycle.

Where else but New York City.

 

***

When my first novel came out, I organized a reading for myself and three others at Bluestockings Bookstore on the Lower East Side. I sent out invites, contacted the media. Time Out New York featured the event both in print and online, calling the three authors reading with me “literature’s new, important voices.”

My name was missing from the announcement.

I sold four books at the reading, left ten more with the bookstore on consignment. “Stop back by in a few weeks and we’ll cut you a check for tonight’s sales and whatever else we sell,” the manager said.

When I returned three weeks later, all my books were gone.

I was thrilled, positive I’d sold them all.

“What’s your name again?” the manager asked. I wasn’t in their system. My book wasn’t in the system. “I can’t pay you for what we didn’t sell,” the manager said, adding, “Are you sure you left them here?”

 

***

September leaked into October. The weather grew cold. I was squatting on a boat in the Puget Sound, Seattle, Washington, sneaking aboard at night. I’d rifled the cabinets for crackers and canned oysters, polished off the bottle of cheap port.

This was 1994. My situation was temporary, I was sure. I was going to be famous. Soon. I’d published my own chapbook of poetry, had handed it out to the people who mattered, the Seattle artists and writers who were on the path to make it big.

Through them, I’d make it.

Twenty-two years later, Wikipedia has no mention of the Seattle artists and writers I once knew. Barnes & Nobles doesn’t carry their books.

 

***

In graduate school, the Brazilian boy who wore prescription sunglasses to the nighttime writing workshop said of my story, “You cannot start a sentence with the word ‘And.’”

“But what about the piece?” the teacher said.  “Overall, what do you think?”

The boy lifted a shoulder, a half shrug. “It’s a draft,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

The next day, I mailed the story off to a magazine. It got published. It received an O. Henry Prize.

 

***

After three months of sleeping on the streets, I called my folks. Collect.

“What do you want to do?” my father said. “You need to decide on something to do and then we can help.”

I needed money, needed a place.

The pay phone was sticky and a fight between a man on the street and a woman in an apartment above had erupted. Beer bottles flew down from her window.

“I can do anything,” I said, watching the explosion of glass in the street.

“But you’re doing nothing,” my father said. “So how am I supposed to help?”

The next day, I moved into the homeless shelter.

 

***

The man ran late. He hailed a cab. The cab was packed with milk jugs of laundry detergent pre-mixed with water. There was a lot of talk between the man and cab driver. Nothing happened.

But no.

Thinking about it, I wouldn’t tell my younger-self, “Stop. Trust me, please. Just stop.”

And I wouldn’t destroy the typewriter.

I’d destroy the story.

And I’d say, “If you want to do this, then do it right.”

I’d say, “Move into the shadows. Get lost. Be scared. Find that place where the light stops being light for you. And then sit down. Just sit and wait. Trust me. It’ll happen. As long as you just wait.”

Guest Post, Bill Gaythwaite: Any Particular Day

swimmerIt occurred to me recently, not for the first time, that my swimming reminds me of my writing process. I’m a lap swimmer in a community pool.  I swim very long distances. My pool is not part of a fancy gym. The locker room is way too small. Sometimes it’s as crowded in there as a subway at rush hour.  There’s a grungy gang shower too, with cracks in the tile and some broken fixtures.  Hot water is more a hope than a reality.  You have to bring your own towel to this place and last week someone pried open my combination lock and stole the money from my wallet while I was doing my laps. I was grateful they left the wallet though, and figured maybe they needed the $22 more than I did. Actually, I love this gym and I love the pool, which, unlike the locker room, is clean and well-maintained. The lifeguards are friendly. Now, writing has its challenges too.  Sometimes the water isn’t hot and the fixtures are broken. And the most obvious comparison between the two is that lap swimming is this solitary effort, where you literally throw yourself into the deep end and just take off. Most writers understand that part. Personally, I’m not the flashiest swimmer or the fastest. My technique isn’t the prettiest either, but I do keep at it. That’s like my writing. And like writing, the benefits of swimming work best when you stick to a regular schedule or routine. You increase your stamina over time. Writing a short story is like a long swim for me. It’s tough to get started sometimes. You can struggle at first. You flail away. And then you eventually find a rhythm and you pace yourself. You don’t stop. You try not to lose steam before the finish. (If writing a short story is like a long swim for me, then working on my unpublished novel was more like running a marathon at a high altitude – but that’s another topic entirely.) I don’t think of lap swimming as only a metaphor. It has become part of my writing process too. Sometimes a swim will clear my head and get me back into a space where I can work. But I’ve also tackled plot problems, created back stories for characters and tried out dialogue as I thrash around in the pool, sometimes losing count of my laps as a result. I’m grateful for my time in the water and for my time at the computer too, when things come together and I have enough momentum to carry me through. I think my writing and lap swimming have become somewhat linked in my mind, the endurance part anyway, the personal challenge, the dogged persistence. As with anything, it comes down to commitment — that happy dedication to something that will eventually become part of who you really are, at any moment, on any particular day.

Transatlantic: The Litro Anthology of Short Stories

Transatlantic: The Litro Anthology of Short Stories by Anthony DoerrSean BeaudoinNikesh ShuklaLucie WhitehouseJenn Ashworth, Ian Sales, Charlie Hill & many more. Edited and Introduced by Eric Akoto & Dan Coxon.

 At home his wife says,

‘You’re home early,’ and he says, ‘Yes I am.’ He fumbles through boxes in the basement.

There is a 35-millimeter Nikon FG-20 buried in here somewhere, beneath football jerseys and an antler chandelier she’d made him take down.

All through dinner she asks questions about work. To pacify her, he says he has managed to collect some overdue funds from Hitachi, one of the ‘majors.’ This is an outright lie. The tree book sits on the hall table, waiting.”

  from ‘Trees’ by Anthony Doerr

litro

 

Announcing Transatlantic, the first anthology from long-running London literary magazine Litro, Transatlantic collects together some of the best stories – and the biggest names – to have passed through its pages.

Litro magazine has always taken a global view of the literary world, and this collection is no exception. There are stories from authors on both sides of the Atlantic, spanning locations as far apart as Ithaca and Nairobi – and even the surface of the moon. What connects them is the strength of their voices, and the vibrant originality of their storytelling.

Transatlantic contains disturbed choristers and post-apocalyptic survivalists, aspiring rock stars and morally bankrupt nuclear power plant workers – but more importantly, it contains some of the most exciting and unique new voices to have appeared in modern fiction over the last few years.

Transatlantic: The Litro Anthology collects some of the best writing to have passed through the pages of Litro magazine, including stories by Anthony Doerr, Sean Beaudoin, Nikesh Shukla, Lucie Whitehouse and Jenn Ashworth.

It also introduces Reece Choules and Iain Robinson – the first two authors to sign to Litro’s bespoke literary agency, Litro Represents.

Find out more about Litro at www.litro.co.uk, and at the new US-based  site www.LitroNY.com.

 

Transatlantic: The Litro Anthology

ISBN: 978-0955424564

$2.99

Ebook available now from Amazon and Oyster Books

 

 

 join litro

Become a Litro Member Today!

Why not join the Litro community and connect with like minded people and support our efforts to find new ways of looking at the world through stories, as well as providing opportunities and exposure for emerging writers, perhaps kick-starting their careers.

For less than £2 a month why not sign up to our Litro Book Club.

A membership to Litro will help us to continue to support our many emerging writers, and who knows, your support could be the one that helps launch the next great literary talent!

Membership to our Book Club gives you access to a community of writers, as well as the following:

  • Four times a year you will receive an advance copy of the featured book in the post (worth more than £50)
  • See your book reviews published online and have the chance to enter special Book Club member writing competitions
  • Exclusive author access including face-to-face events in London and online Q&As
  • And much more “Members Only” content including special reader gift offers from our many partners

Other Membership Options:    

litro access 50With our all-access UK membership, you get Litro Magazine delivered to your door: 10 issues of Litro Magazine a year, plus exclusive access to hundreds of short stories from past issues in our digital archive.

                             Get in on our quarterly Book Club: four new books a year from our Book Club, plus access to live author Q&As, and the chance to see your  reviews published on litro.co.uk.  Discounts on Litro Live! events: 50% off Litro Live! events and priority booking.

litro access 57With our all-access International membership, you get all the same benefits as for UK readers, but at a small additional cost to cover postage and packaging.

litro studen access 25Our Student membership gives you the same benefits as a full membership, but at a discounted rate. You will be asked to show proof that you are a student of a school or university in the UK.

 

SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer Marylee MacDonald

Each Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by Marylee MacDonald.

Marylee MacDonaldMarylee MacDonald has won the Barry Hannah Prize, the Matt Clark Prize, the Ron Rash Award, and the ALR Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared in Yalobusha Review, New Delta Review, Briar Cliff Review, StoryQuarterly, Folio, Reunion, Broad River Review, American Literary Review, Bellevue Literary Review, North Atlantic Review, River Oak Review, North Atlantic Review, Blue Moon Literary & Art Review, Briar Cliff Review, and the anthologies ROLL and NEW SUN RISING: Stories for Japan. Her novel, MONTPELIER TOMORROW, is forthcoming from ATTM Press. She lives in Tempe, Arizona.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.

SR Pod/Vod Series: Writer Joe Neal

Joe NealEach Tuesday we feature audio or video of an SR Contributor reading their work. Today we’re proud to feature a podcast by Joe Neal.

Joe Neal has fiction forthcoming in Salamander Magazine. He is pursuing an MFA in fiction at Cornell University and is working on a collection of short stories and a novel. He is originally from Franklin, Ohio.

You can listen to the podcast on our iTunes Channel.

You can read along with the work in Superstition Review.

s[r] Goodreads #FridayReads

Here are a couple of reviews by April Hanks, a member of s[r]’s advertising staff.

This Is Not Your CityThis Is Not Your City by Caitlin Horrocks

From the woman who is able to recall her past lives to the couple on a cruise that is overtaken by pirates, Caitlin Horrocks’ debut collection of short stories takes the reader around the world and into the lives of eleven unique women. In This is Not Your City, Horrocks is able to accurately and realistically present people and situations that are extremely different while still creating an engaging and cohesive collection.

Although Horrocks deals with difficult topics such as death, a ticking biological clock, and a severe disability, the stories do not feel forced or cheesy. Instead, the emotion is powerful and realistic. Most of Horrocks’ stories do not have a happy, satisfying conclusion. But like life, they are left open ended. She explores both the lives of people who have been victimized and those who have been the victimizers. Because of this, it is difficult to read at times; several of the stories, such as “Steal Small”, will make you feel uncomfortable, but in the best way possible.

The last two stories, “This is Not Your City” and “In the Gulf of Aden, Past the Cape of Guardafui”, particularly stood out. However, the two stories are vastly different. The first of these, about a Russian mail-order bride, explores what it means to find identity in an environment you are not used to. The story is engaging but still manages to convey complex emotions. The second of these stories, “In the Gulf of Aden, Past the Cape of Guardafui”, is the story of a couple who go on a cruise as a vacation away from their severely disabled son. However, the cruise ship is overtaken by pirates. During the wait for a settlement with the pirates, the reader learns about the intricacy of the couple’s life. Despite their differences, both stories use plot to reveal deeper complexities.

Overall, Horrocks has crafted a beautiful collection that accurately reflects life and the emotions that stem from it. The powerful and descriptive writing highlights her abilities as a writer. She is able to draw you into the stories and make you care about the characters in them. This is Not Your City is not collection you will soon forget.

You can read the s[r] interview with Caitlin Horrocks in Issue 9, where we talk with her about This Is Not Your City.

 

Anything GoesAnything Goes by Madison Smartt Bell

Madison Smartt Bell’s thirteenth novel, Anything Goes, follows a year in the life of protagonist Jesse Melungeon. Jesse is the bass player for a cover band called Anything Goes. While the novel deals with the struggles of the band to stay afloat it also reveals Jesse’s complicated family history. Throughout its plot, the novel deals with complex issues such as race, abuse, and addiction.

Bell ingeniously develops Jesse’s character throughout the novel. Over time, Jesse becomes a more dynamic and round character. Although you learn Jesse’s history fairly early, his feelings about it are revealed slowly throughout the book. Not only does his characterization develop, but so do his relationships. Those that seem relatively simple at first are shown to be much more complex. Both the characters and relationships in the novel are complicated and realistic, greatly adding to its overall impact.

As Jesse says in Anything Goes, “there would always be people who actually were drawn to your wounds more than to you.” The characters in the novel are wounded in different ways. They deal with complicated family drama, brushes with the law, conflicts of interest, and various other problems. Although these issues are nothing new to literature, they do not seem cliché in the book. Bell is able to write wounded characters and explain them in a way that is meaningful.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the music theory that is incorporated throughout. The musical aspects of Anything Goes only add to the novel. Whether or not you know music theory, it feels like you can almost hear the songs playing in your head.

Bell displays extensive research in this novel. Overall, Anything Goes is a well-written and engaging novel that uses plot to explore emotion. The characters and relationships are realistic and interesting. You won’t want to put this book down.

s[r] interviewed Madison Smartt Bell in Issue 8, you can read that interview here.

Check out more s[r] Goodreads.com reviews on our Goodreads page.

 

 

Guest Post, Faye Rapoport DesPres: Fireworks

Faye Rapoport DesPresWe stand in the cemetery and watch fireworks. That is, I stand; my husband sits on top of a granite gravestone, his hands casually folded and hanging between his legs.  I watched him a little while ago as I approached in the darkness. The light of his headlamp was illuminating the stone, and he was staring at it before climbing on.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Talking to the people who are buried here,” he said. “I thanked them for sharing their spot.”

As I lean against the stone, feeling the rough surface of the top against the skin of my bare arm, I decide that the people buried here probably do not mind. This sprawling Catholic cemetery has been a fixture of our Boston suburb for a century or more. Some of the people buried here have lain in the ground for decades. Some were soldiers who died in each of the World Wars. Others have died within the past few years. An Italian man who lives across the street from our house visits his father in this cemetery every day. I remember the old man; he was in his nineties when he died, and before his brief illness he dressed in a suit and fedora and took walks around the neighborhood every day. He used to knock on our door and offer me paper bags filled with pears he had picked from the trees in his yard.

Three years have passed since he died.

It is the fourth of July, a year to the day since we lost a beloved cat we had taken in from the street. Franklin lived with us for two years before that terrible rainy morning, when he ran out the door, slipped behind the back fence, and got into a scuffle with a coyote. We believe he attacked the coyote to save a small female, the last feral cat who remained on our street after I had trapped and found homes for the others. She was the only one I hadn’t been able to coax indoors, and she used to stare into the house through our kitchen window, wondering what had happened to her best friend Franklin.

I try not to think of that morning now, of the blood, my tears, the futile race to the vet while I begged God out loud to let Franklin live. I rested my hand on his side as he lay on the passenger seat and I felt his chest rise and fall for the last time.

He has been gone for a year. The little female lives with us now.

The air is warm and humid. I run the same hand that felt Franklin’s last breaths along the front of the granite gravestone. The surface is cool and glassy, smooth except where the names of total strangers are engraved.

The fireworks that periodically light up the sky are launched from a suburban park about a mile away. Three years ago I walked to the park with a neighbor and watched from the middle of the crowd. My husband was away at school that summer. The grassy park was filled with blankets and with children waving glow sticks or wearing them around their necks. I heard the laughter of their parents, saw couples holding hands. The fireworks shot up from the opposite side of a soccer field. The rockets burst above us, casting a colorful glow across the dark sky as the crowd cheered and sighed and applauded.

Here the crowd lies beneath the ground. But we are not alone among the living; a short distance behind us that same neighbor and his new girlfriend sit on a towel in the grass. Nearby a group of people is perched on the roof of a small mausoleum. They arrived in a pickup truck, parked, and crowded onto the highest spot they could find.

The cemetery is located on the line between two suburbs. Like the tracks of lore, it separates our working-class former mill town from the wealthy suburb on the other side. There, the streets are newly paved and the houses are bordered by immaculate lawns and manicured gardens. The town we have lived in for the past eight years has more of a chip on its shoulder. I can guess by the names I have seen on the gravestones during the day – names like Sullivan and Lafleur and Diaz – that the people buried here were from our town.

But from this vantage point I see that it doesn’t matter where you’re from.

The cemetery slopes down from this spot. Before us neat lines of headstones pepper the hillside. At the bottom of the hill a chain link fence and a thin stand of trees separate the graves from the homes of the living on the other side. The rockets rise above the trees with a boom one by one, trailed by sparks. They shoot high into the sky and then burst into mushrooms of color.

I imagine for a moment that each of these gravestones is a person who has risen from the earth to watch the fireworks. Each of them once had a life. Each had cares and worries that would be familiar to me. Many, I am sure, paused on summer evenings to clasp a lover’s hand or to celebrate the fourth of July.

For a moment I am as much with the people buried here as I have ever been with anyone. As different as our lives were and are, we are all headed to a place where only names carved on stone or the words we leave behind, or the words of someone else, can raise us.

And that is why I write.

Guest Blog Post, David Huddle: New Girlfriend

David HuddleWhen I’m not writing I go through phases. Vague uneasiness. Mild anxiety. Crankiness. Nasty beating up of my vulnerable self. Days of brooding.

It won’t take much to get me writing again—it can happen any moment. Whatever it is that snaps me back into what I consider my true and best self is almost always random. Past experience has taught me that the solution is just to try to pay attention to the ten thousand things. So I take a lot of walks. In the City Market parking lot I’ll overhear a girl telling a guy to “Shut up!” in a flirtatious way. That afternoon I’ll have a poem I’m just itching to read aloud to somebody.

In the cemetery through which I frequently walk, I’ll notice for the first time a small stone that says “Ida Grace / Born & Died / October 3, 1935.” For decades Ida’s been down there urgently whispering, Ampersand, ampersand! In a lucky instant my ears will pick it up.

On a road trip I’ll notice lines of a Delbert McClinton song on my iPod—“She’s 19 years old / and already she’s lonely.” Shazam! I’ll have a character in my head–a half pretty and brooding kind of young woman—who’s definitely worthy of a short story and maybe even a novel.

These gifts won’t come along because I’m anxious or cranky or brutally self-critical. They will arrive because the world is generous and our lives in it are infinitely worthy of attention. The best of what I see sometimes comes catty-corner–from off to the side of where I’ve been looking.

But time is stretching out. The last piece I drafted all the way to the end was back in July, and now October’s started saying its goodbyes. I’ve gone through worse stretches, but this is extreme. Last week I decided I had no choice. I have to embrace Not Writing, make her my girlfriend, tell her that in spite of my moodiness I really, actually like her. So I’m taking her on my walks, reading to her in bed, bringing her coffee in the morning. She’s not much for talking, but now and then I get a quick grimace that could be her version of a smile.

Now that Not Writing is my girlfriend, everything I see and hear and smell and taste is intense and radiant. The mockingbirds aren’t just flying and singing–they’re gliding through my dreams. The traffic on Madison Street isn’t just noise and speed, it’s an atrocity that prophesies a future full of rage. This world wants an Old Testament prophet. Out there in the middle of the street, I’ll shake my fist and scream at the cars. They’ll swerve around me and won’t slow down. Out there in the street I’ll be crazy alive.

My girl? For a few days now she’s been making plans to leave town. Having bitten the inside of her lip until it’s sore, now she’s thinking maybe she needs to start smoking. She’s never liked the smell of cigarettes, but she already likes whiskey, and she wants to taste bourbon and smoke simultaneously. She takes a sip, then a drag, inhales, exhales.  I’m still lonely, she says and hangs her pretty head. Oh I can tell you this! If I weren’t a writer–if I didn’t believe that I’m on the verge of drafting up something that’s bound to be really good–I’d be a dead guy.