Crazy Pete's Blotter

Fogo Island

2012-01-29T19:25:00.000-08:00

I'll be spending this coming summer off the coast of Newfoundland, at the Fogo Island Arts Corp.

Fogo Island is far away and takes forever to get to. It's got a fishing economy, a wild history, and a world-famous accordion group. And it's being remade. The Arts Corp. studios are designed by a local architect, and remind me of something out of Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

Things on my Fogo to-do list so far:
Start novel #2.
Eat a partidgeberry jam tart at Nicole's Growler's.
Write essay about children of homeless parents.
Go to (and throw) a kitchen party.
Read Infinite Jest, all the way through this time.
Spend time in towns with names like Seldom, Tilting, and Joe Batt's Arm.
Go all crazy chasing aurorae.

A Night Among the Books

2012-01-20T10:24:00.000-08:00

Opa! A piece on my sleepover inside Atlantis Books is up on the Tin House blog.

2011-11-04T13:42:00.000-07:00

Jeez, what's new? I went to Tin House's writing conference, and the Squaw Valley one too. My liver is doing alright, considering. Last month, thanks to Vayama.com and the generous, peaceful, delicious Limnisa Retreat, I spent two weeks in Greece. (I almost spent more than that, due to the protests and transportation strikes. After sweet-talking a Japanese tour bus and later bribing a local man to take me to the airport at 5am, I escaped a modern Athenian drama.)

Limnisa: a typical day.

After a wonderful week among locals in non-touristy, sometimes-egg-smelling Methana (writers: enter their story contest), I explored a few islands, the centerpiece of which was a visit to Santorini and Atlantis Books. In fact, I'm not embarrassed to admit that the entire final week of my trip was scheduled around visiting a book shop. I mean, the shop's in a cave house on a cliff on Santorini. And the employees sleep among the books. Lucky me--I got to crash there for a night, too.

In other writing news:

My story collection, Ms. Yamada's Toaster, is a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press. I like Black Lawrence's style, announcing a list of finalists before choosing a winner. Some presses announce everything at once, which takes the fun out of being named a finalist since you don't find out about your specialness until it's been officially deemed less special than someone else's. Like when someone tells you they saw this awesome thing that totally reminded them of you and they were gonna buy it for you...but then they didn't. Or something.

I've got a poem, "North Rim Love Song," in the current issue of FIELD.

What would you do if your wife confessed she used to have a tail? "The Blue Demon of Ikumi" won second prize in Salamander's fiction contest and will be out in their winter issue.

And...I've been awarded a fellowship to Playa, an artists' retreat in Summer Lake, Oregon. Looks very isolated and very beautiful--two of my favorite things.

And finally, my contribution to the "Under the Influence" feature over at Fiction Writers Review: the literary image to which I compare all images, thanks to my first writing teacher, Stuart Dybek.

Wanna Make Out?

2011-08-29T15:35:00.000-07:00

Dear San Francisco, would you let me get to literary second base with you? How about tomorrow night around 8pm?

I will wear a pretty dress.

I will have drink tickets for at least two of you.

Is that a maybe? Maybe means yes!

For Sale: Everything You've Ever Lost

2011-06-24T12:18:00.001-07:00

"Reunion," a story from Ms. Yamada's Toaster, is up at The Kenyon Review Online. Features vacuum cleaner parts, smelly beetles, a shell game, and the opportunity to buy back Missing Things.

2011-06-01T21:27:00.001-07:00

Apropos of nothing: "Prairie" was the word that lost me the school spelling bee in fourth grade. Stupid extra i!

I'm spending the next two weeks at the Ragdale Foundation thanks to the Frances Shaw Fellowship. It's a wonderful place. A little weird to do a residency in "the Chicagoland area," since though I am getting away from it all, I am also going back to it all, to the place I grew up and went to college. We'll see how it goes, balancing work with the desire to see family and friends.

There is something magical about the prairie. On first glance, it seems such a uniform space. But if you stare for a moment, it's overwhelming how much is going on. A bullfrog's croaking, butterflies of different colors whirl through the air, a red-winged blackbird couple flits past. Illinois clouds come in different shapes than California ones. And on the prairie you can feel the wind speeding in ahead of an afternoon thunderstorm, see the clouds piling up.

It's here I hope to find the title of my novel. The book is ready to go, finally, but those last few words that sit on the first page remain elusive. Maybe they're out there hovering between the blackbirds and the cumulonimbus.

Look Ma, I Got Blogged About!

2011-05-25T13:29:00.000-07:00

This is neat: a review of my Storyville story, "Ms. Yamada's Toaster." And check out the slots on that thing!

New Story: Major Leaguer

2011-05-15T20:10:00.000-07:00

One time I went to a Nippon Ham Fighters baseball game in Tokyo and got shown on the JumboTron. Needless to say, I was very excited. For a few seconds, anyway.

The Awkward Phase of being portrayed on a JumboTron begins approximately 3.5 seconds after you recognize you're on it, and you've smiled and waved and wiggled around in a dance you've never done before in your life and you close your eyes, hoping that when you open them the cameraman will have moved on to someone else but he hasn't; he is still pointing the lens at you and giving a thumbs-up so you give a thumbs-up back and then look up at the screen and see the biggest dork in the world--you--and after ten seconds have passed you begin to wonder if the camera guy is actually trying to humiliate you on purpose, for being foreign maybe, or for buying and wearing the team cap with the stuffed pink animal on top.

It was sort of like dealing with Mister Shake Hands Man, the guy on Banzai who sees how long he can shake celebrities' hands.

Anyway, I wanted to write a story about that time with the JumboTron. The anecdote made people laugh. "You should write about that!" they said. So I did and of course by the time I finished the story, the JumboTron wasn't even in it. It ended up seeming too ridiculous, too tacked-on, too obviously something the author was trying to "use." Turns out the story was more about the dynamic between the newly-engaged couple attending the game and their run-ins with a once-great American player who's finishing out his dwindling career in the Japan League. It's called "Major Leaguer" and it's up this week at the Good Men Project Magazine.

By the way, if you like baseball, or Japan, or reading period, check out Robert Whiting's classic You Gotta Have Wa. The conflicts between foreign players and the Japanese teams who pay big bucks to import them are legendary and Whiting's book dishes the most ridiculous, hilarious, and terrifying examples. It's also a fascinating look at how Japanese culture and aesthetics have made Japan's take on baseball so different from that of the U.S.

Storyville

2011-03-16T07:44:00.000-07:00

This week, "Ms. Yamada's Toaster" will be the featured work on Storyville, an iThing app. The app delivers a new story every week and includes a story-behind-the-story note from the author.

Micrograffiti

2011-02-27T23:10:00.000-08:00

A teeny story of mine is up at The Owls. It's about a little girl who grows a tail, and it's one of a series of micro-stories inspired by Ben Walters' photos of the South London graffiti tunnel. The photos inspired quite the range of work. A couple of my favorites: "The Things They Sold" by Nina McConigley, and "Blue Grate" by John Evans.

ASF Atlas Project

2010-12-27T20:37:00.000-08:00

American Short Fiction has put together a quirky, cool holiday Atlas Project on its blog, taking place-related info about a number of stories they've published this year (where the story's set, where it was written, and more) and creating a Google map.

My story, "Heliotrope," got atlas-ed a few days ago, and the result is here, along with an interview. (How awesome is it they were able to map Hyrule?)

By a Nose

2010-12-02T15:40:00.001-08:00

It's hard to write about home. There's just so much there, I find it hard to see the story. Maybe that's why Japan has been such a fertile setting for my fiction--I can see in the window clearly but I am still outside the glass. Childhood, though...I'm in the house, I am the house. There are no windows.

So I'm excited to have maybe done it, or at least attempted, to write a story about a place that's part of my past that actually, for a sentence or two here and there, captures that gut-based and wordless knowledge I have of the place.

The story, called "The Far Turn," is close to my heart not only because it was the last one I finished before shifting focus to my novel last year, but because it centers on the now-demolished Sportsman's Park racetrack, where I spent many magical summer nights in the grandstand as a kid, eating raspberry soft serve and "voting for" the gray ponies to win. Special thanks to my mom, who provided me with colorful details about Racetrack Rosie and The Genius, and who was there the night Jate Lobell busted the track record in one of the most memorable late-race moves in harness race history.

Sozopol Seminars Essay in Fiction Writers Review

2010-10-27T13:45:00.001-07:00

Why don't sailors shave? How does a fishing snake fish? What's the least popular position in the Kama Sutra? Find answers to these and other pressing questions over at Fiction Writers Review, where my piece, "The Road to Much Excess," is part of a four-part, multi-personal essay about the 2010 Sozopol Fiction Seminars. (The other essayists are the dear and brilliant Carin Clevidence, Paul Vidich, and Charlie Conley.)

Pub crawl + literature = crazy delicious

2010-10-01T13:09:00.000-07:00

I'm reading at one of the Lit Crawl (part of Litquake) events next Saturday. Stop in if you're on the Crawl!

Official info:

San Pablo Arts District Presents Lip Service West: TRUE STORIES
Casanova Lounge
527 Valencia St.
San Francisco, CA

Part of LITQUAKE'S famous "Pub Crawl," the event will include Eddie Muller, Karen Benke, Joe Clifford, Herb Gold, and Kelly Luce.

A Fairy Tale, Surely

2010-08-31T15:26:00.000-07:00

A single frog croaks under the deck. Crickets chirr out of sight in little grass rocking chairs. Tonight, it's still August.

Here's the text of one of my favorite short stories, one I've re-read every summer since discovering it in a coursepack abandoned by a Loyola University student at the Marigold Bowl in 1999. It's called "The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket," by Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kawabata wrote flash fiction long before it was called such; he referred to these minis as “palm-of-the-hand stories.” He said that while others wrote poetry in their youth, he wrote palm-of-the-hands instead.

Aperture. Inscribed. Lozenge. Wise child-artists. Shadows of the bushes like dark light.

The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket
by Yasunari Kawabata

Walking along the tile-roofed wall of the university, I turned aside and approached the upper school. Behind the white board fence of the school playground, from a dusky clump of bushes under the black cherry trees, an insect’s voice could be heard. Walking more slowly and listening to that voice, and furthermore reluctant to part with it, I turned right so as not to leave the playground behind. When I turned to the left, the fence gave way to another embankment planted with orange trees. At the corner, I exclaimed with surprise. My eyes gleaming at what they saw up ahead, I hurried forward with short steps.

At the base of the embankment was a bobbing cluster of beautiful varicolored lanterns, such as one might see at a festival in a remote country village. Without going any farther, I knew that it was a group of children on an insect chase among the bushes of the embankment. There were about twenty lanterns. Not only were there crimson, pink, indigo, green, purple, and yellow lanterns, but one lantern glowed with five colors at once. There were even some little red store-bought lanterns. But most of the lanterns were beautiful square ones the children had made themselves with love and care. The bobbing lanterns, the coming together of children on this lonely slope – surely it was a scene from a fairy tale?

One of the neighborhood children had heard an insect sing on this slope one night. Buying a red lantern, he had come back the next night to find the insect. The night after that, there was another child. This new child could not buy a lantern. Cutting out the back and front of a small carton and papering it, he placed a candle on the bottom and fastened a string to the top. The number of children grew to five, and then to seven. They learned how to color the paper that they stretched over the windows of the cutout cartons, and to draw pictures on it. Then these wise child-artists, cutting out round, three-cornered, and lozenge leaf shapes in the cartons, coloring each little window a different color, with circles and diamonds, red and green, made a single and whole decorative pattern. The child with the red lantern discarded it as a tasteless object that could be bought at a store. The child who had made his own lantern threw it away because the design was too simple. The pattern of light that one had had in hand the night before was unsatisfying the morning after. Each day, with cardboard, paper, brush, scissors, penknife, and flue, the children made new lanterns out of their hearts and minds. Look at my lantern! Be the most unusually beautiful! And each night, they had gone out on their insect hunts. These were the twenty children and their beautiful lanterns that I now saw before me.

Wide-eyed, I loitered near them. Not only did the square lanterns have old-fashioned patterns and flower shapes, but the names of the children who had made them were cut out in square letters of the syllabary. Different from the painted-over red lanterns, others (made of thick cutout cardboard) had their designs drawn upon the paper windows, so that the candle’s light seemed to emanate from the form and color of the design itself. The lanterns brought out the shadows of the bushes like dark light. The children crouched eagerly on the slope wherever they heard an insect’s voice.

“Does anyone want a grasshopper?” A boy, who had been peering into a bush about thirty feet away from the other children, suddenly straightened up and shouted.

“Yes! Give it to me!” Six or seven children came running up. Crowding behind the boy who had found the grasshopper, they peered into the bush. Brushing away their outstretched hands and spreading out his arms, the boy stood as if guarding the bush where the insect was. Waving the lantern in his right hand, he called again to the other children.

“Does anyone want a grasshopper? A grasshopper!”
“I do! I do!” Four or five more children came running up. It seemed you could not catch a more precious insect than a grasshopper. The boy called out a third time.
“Doesn’t anyone want a grasshopper?”
Two or three more children came over.
“Yes. I want it.”
It was a girl, who just now had come up behind the boy who’d discovered the insect. Lightly turning his body, the boy gracefully bent forward. Shifting the lantern to his left hand, he reached his right hand into the bush.
“It’s a grasshopper.”
“Yes. I’d like to have it.”
The boy quickly stood up. As if to say “Here!” he thrust out his fist that held the insect at the girl. She, slipping her left wrist under the string of her lantern, enclosed the boy’s fist with both hands. The boy quietly opened his fist. The insect was transferred to between the girl’s thumb and index finger.
“Oh! It’s not a grasshopper. It’s a bell cricket.” The girl’s eyes shone as she looked at the small brown insect.
“It’s a bell cricket! It’s a bell cricket!” The children echoed in an envious chorus.
“It’s a bell cricket. It’s a bell cricket.”
Glancing with her bright intelligent eyes at the boy who had given her the cricket, the girl opened the little insect cage hanging at her side and released the cricket in it.
“It’s a bell cricket.”
“Oh, it’s a bell cricket,” the boy who’d captured it muttered. Holding up the insect cage close to his eyes, he looked inside it. By the light of his beautiful many-colored lantern, also held up at eye level, he glanced at the girl’s face.

Oh, I thought. I felt slightly jealous of the boy, and sheepish. How silly of me not to have understood his actions until now! Then I caught my breath in surprise. Look! It was something on the girl’s breast which neither the boy who had given her the cricket, nor she who had accepted it, nor the children who were looking at them noticed.

In the faint greenish light that fell on the girl’s breast, wasn’t the name “Fujio” clearly discernable? The boy’s lantern, which he held up alongside the girl’s insect cage, inscribed his name, cut out in the green papered aperture, onto her white cotton kimono. The girl’s lantern, which dangled loosely from her wrist, did not project its pattern so clearly, but still one could make out, in a trembling patch of red on the boy’s waist, the name “Kiyoko.” This chance interplay of red and green – if it was chance or play – neither Fujio nor Kiyoko knew about.

Even if they remembered forever that Fujio had given her the cricket and that Kiyoko had accepted it, not even in dreams would Fujio ever know that his name had been written in green on Kiyoko’s breast or that Kiyoko’s name had been inscribed in red on his waist, nor would Kiyoko ever know that Fujio’s name had been inscribed in green on her breast or that her own name had been written in red on Fujio’s waist.

Fujio! Even when you have become a young man, laugh with pleasure at a girl’s delight when, told that it’s a grasshopper, she is given a bell cricket; laugh with affection at a girl’s chagrin when, told that it’s a bell cricket, she is given a grasshopper.

Even if you have the wit to look by yourself in a bush away from the other children, there are not many bell crickets in the world. Probably you will find a girl like a grasshopper whom you think is a bell cricket.

And finally, to your clouded, wounded heart, even a true bell cricket will seem like a grasshopper. Should that day come, when it seems to you that the world is only full of grasshoppers, I will think it a pity that you have no way to remember tonight’s play of light, when your name was written in green by your beautiful lantern on a girl’s breast.

2010-08-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

Oh, this is good: Better Book titles.

Also: The Literary Review's latest issue ("How To Read Music") is available to read online. For free! Somewhere in there's a story of mine called "Rooey." I dig the e-reader they use, Issuu.

And: Ms. Yamada's Toaster is a bridesmaid once again. That's four ill-fitting dresses in her closet. I hope she finds a groom before the number reaches 27.

Up the Out and Out the Up

2010-08-10T19:02:00.000-07:00

A month after returning from Sewanee, I think I'm finally getting over conference-withdrawal. Here are a few highlights that made the two weeks on the mountain so memorable:

Participating in one of many campus traditions, going "up the out and out the up." Two turrets on a building straight out of Hogwarts contain spiral staircases in questionable states of repair. The words "OUT" and "UP" are carved into the stone at their entrances. The gal who gave the campus tour informed us it was bad luck to climb the Up route; since the days when students carried swords, the proper form was to go up the Out and out the Up. It sounds like it's not to be taken lightly; you may be corrected by a ghost if you get it wrong.

MOTH WALK! 50 drunk writers + 10 nets on sticks + a 60-foot cross + 1 former U.S. Poet Laureate + 5 million moths = epic fun.

Rocking the night away on the French House porch with friends old and new. It was especially great to meet Justin Quarry, a former Kerouac House resident. It was like discovering a long-lost sibling: we'd spent formative time in the same house, under the wings of the same caretakers, heard the same gossip. Despite having never met, we had a lot to catch up on.

I'm heading to the East Coast soon, for a quick visit to NYC, where I get to reunite with some of the Sozopol Seminar fellows; I'm also really psyched meet my agent in person for the first time. Then it's off to one of my favorite places, the MacDowell Colony, for a few weeks of writing, thinking, eating, and ping-pong bliss. Fingers crossed it's less icy than last time...

ASF Interview

2010-07-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

An interview about my short story, "Heliotrope," is up at the American Short Fiction blog.

Sewaneeing

2010-07-14T13:19:00.001-07:00

For the next two weeks, I'll be hanging out on the mountain at the Sewanee Writers Conference, held at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN.

Check the VW Bug in this window in All Saints' Chapel.

This morning we heard a great reading by a few of the conference fellows--easily one of the best readings I've ever been to. One highlight was Cody Walker's poem, "Chickenless Pulled Chicken Blues," about the curiously named food item from Trader Joe's. In fact, all three readers (Fiction writer Aryn Kyle and playwright Dorothy Fortenberry were awesome as well) had the audience cracking up.

Current status, Day Two--Food: surprisingly good. Cicadas: loud enough you need to raise your voice. Dorm mattresses: crinkly. Weather: muggy. Campus: 13,000 acres of trails, caves, treetop canopy walks, LEED-certified castles, and sorcerer's lairs. Me: happy.

I want to go here:

Heliotrope

2010-06-11T15:59:00.000-07:00

Coming soon: reflections from Bulgaria and the Sozopol Fiction Seminars. The experience has been surprisingly difficult to wrap my mind around, let alone write meaningfully about, and this coming week I plan on taking the advice of my good friend John: just write a bunch of short, declarative sentences about anything you remember, and don't worry about style, meaning, or having a point. (What I have so far: "Donkeys pulling carts. Frozen tart yoghurt with honey and walnuts in a clay pot. Ivan complimented my hand. Disco rest stop. The gulls, as if in pain, said, "Ow, ow." Fields of sunflowers-to-be.")

Speaking of sunflowers, a short-short story of mine, "Heliotrope," is a Web Exclusive at American Short Fiction this month. Read it here.

Kerouacetera

2010-04-14T18:34:00.000-07:00

The last day to apply for a residency at the Kerouac House is coming up. Get those apps in; this place is the real deal. They set you up, spoil you, then leave you alone. Thanks to this residency, I'm only a couple weeks from a full draft of the novel, a goal I didn't think I'd reach until late summer. I like that the house is a meeting place: tonight three students graduating from UCF's MFA program held a reading here. The place was packed, and as always, I ended the night with new friends, extra wine, and a cleaner kitchen than before anyone showed up.

Speaking of cool things about this house...has anyone heard of letterboxing? It's sort of like geocaching, but sans GPS, old-school Zelda-like: "an intriguing pastime combining navigational skills and rubber stamp artistry in a charming "treasure hunt" style outdoor quest." Word is there's a stamp hidden on the grounds here somewhere. (Be careful...letterboxing isn't risk-free.) More on this to come.

Couple other things:

April 24 @ the K House, I'm doing a flash fiction workshop, organized by MAD About Words. I think there are a couple spots left.

I'm heading to Bulgaria next month for the 2010 Sozopol Fiction Seminar, sponsored by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation. The foundation supports and promotes all aspects of creative writing in Bulgaria.

And publishing stuff: "Rooey," a long story from Ms. Yamada's Toaster, is in the current issue (themed "How To Read Music") of The Literary Review. I've also got a poem in the new issue of Flyway.

"Jackpot" out in The Massachusetts Review

2010-03-25T09:09:00.000-07:00

"Jackpot," a short story about a Vegas mailman who goes rogue in an attempt to help an elderly woman on his route, is out in the Spring issue of The Massachusetts Review.

Order one for your favorite mail carrier today!

First Dispatch from College Park

2010-03-17T14:08:00.000-07:00

Tuning in from the Kerouac Project House, where Jack Kerouac lived, on and off, with his mother, and where he "wrote, brooded and hid out in the months after his influential novel "On the Road" came out in 1957." It’s been nine days since I became Writer in Residence here, and though I’m not 82% percent done with a new book, I’m happy with how things are going. The first half of the novel is clicking into place and for the first time in months, I’ve started a new short story.

The house is located in the College Park neighborhood of Orlando, where the streets are cobbled and the freight trains run all night. The trains and the brick remind me of being a kid in Brookfield, IL, a town boxed by railroad tracks and where tuckpointers like my grandpa always had work. Slowness is the general rule. Cars roll by as if lost. Even on a bike, I feel like I’m going too fast. The pace of my immediate neighborhood seems to be a slow jog. Across the street, my cheerful elderly neighbor rakes oak leaves in a pink jumpsuit all morning while her Basset Hound watches from the yard. Sometime between noon and two, she pulls her beige Plymouth Valiant out of the carport and backs it into the garage. The garage is about three inches wider than the car. The procedure takes about fifteen minutes, and it's riveting. So I find my day divides itself into two parts: Plymouth-in-carport (PIC) and Plymouth-in-garage (PIG). It is my goal to have written a thousand words by PIG time.

It’s a far cry from Santa Cruz or Silicon Valley, and that’s a good thing. Novelty brings inspiration. And freshness of place isn’t the only lovely thing about this residency. There’s the space: more square footage than I know what to do with, not to mention the mental breathing room. And time: three whole months in this historic house.

There’s a great old oak out in front of the house. To me it embodies the grandiosity, wildness, and grace of Jack Kerouac’s work. I’m going to climb it one these afternoons...

No-bake

2010-02-17T10:35:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to share the news that my collection of short stories, Ms. Yamada's Toaster, has been named a finalist for the Bakeless Literary Prize, sponsored by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. This means that me and nine other people have until May to chew off our fingernails while Robert Boswell reads our books and picks a winner. The prize includes publication with Graywolf Press, makers of truly gorgeous books, and a fellowship to Bread Loaf. Fingers and toes crossed!

Story out in Crazyhorse

2010-01-08T09:06:00.000-08:00

In the Winter issue of Crazyhorse, a new story's out called "Amorometer."

Starring:

*A case of epistolary mistaken identity
*A device that measures one's capacity to love
*Vodka!

Wouldn't it be cool if you ordered one?

On Memorization

2009-12-31T14:38:00.000-08:00

New Year's resolution: memorize more poetry.

The first poem I learned on purpose was Rupert Brooke’s “Sonnet.” I picked “Sonnet” out of the Norton anthology not because I was interested in Brooke (who Yeats deemed “the handsomest young man in England”) or in iambic pentameter, but because of a guy: S., my first college boyfriend, had taken the course a quarter earlier and that was the poem he’d memorized. I practiced in the dining hall, recited on the rocks along Lake Michigan. The old-fashioned English felt awkward, practically foreign. What the heck was a “Stygian tide”?

Ten years later, at a bar in San Francisco, that long-ago beau and I bumbled through “Sonnet” over beers and tequila. Dredging up those lines made me emotional in a way the poem itself never had. I realize what affected me back then was his cadence, the weight in his voice—S. had been a theater guy, though now he's in med school and still enunciates circles around me—and a confidence I find myself reaching for whenever I read my own work.

His hair was wild and wavy. I secretly applied the line, “Now turn and toss your brown delightful head,” to him while we chanted iambs on my single dorm bed. But never would I have told him so. At eighteen, sarcasm was king; earnestness didn’t come til much later. One phrase we mocked for its melodrama, “most individual and bewildering ghost” now seems to me, at almost-thirty, an apt description for a couple people I’ve known.

During my senior year, I took another poetry class and encountered what’s become my all-time favorite poem: “How To Like It,” by Stephen Dobyns. It was a bit long, and the instructor assigned no memorization, so it wasn’t until years later that I learned it by heart. That summer after college, I moved to Japan. Before I left, I bought a Dobyns collection that included “How To Like It” and gave it to P., the guy I was leaving behind.

Committed to memory, poems act like songs; the experience of them is physical. When I recite “How To Like It,” I always stress the same words, pause for this line break while running through that one, accentuate the meter there. The rhythm’s organic; I find myself playing up slant rhymes I’d never have noticed on the page. I’ve internalized the poem so completely that I notice myself plagiarizing its syntax in my own writing. Robert Pinsky was onto something: “anyone who has memorized a lot of poetry…can’t fail to write coherent sentences and paragraphs.”

That first year I was in Japan, P. wrote out the entire book for me by hand. I still have it; I will always have it. He copied a poem from the book every day we were apart, adding personal notes about what was going on at the time—“ladybug just landed on the page, here” and later, when I returned his ring, I felt maybe I should have returned this fat, tattered collection of pages bound by blue electrical tape and a metal clip instead. I returned the ring at an IHOP in central Florida, and then we went to a minor league baseball game. We drank apple-flavored malt liquor in the parking lot while waiting out a rain delay. On the way home it poured so hard I had to pull over. I was new to driving long ways alone and I panicked when my windshield fogged up and I called up my new boyfriend to ask for help and he told me about the defroster. When I turned it on things became clear again very quickly.

All of this comes to mind when I speak the first line of that poem: These are the first days of fall. I think of all the friends I’ve passed the poem to, especially the ones who’ve connected with it strongly—John used the title for his blog, and has memorized the poem himself. (We’re going to volley lines back and forth next time we’re at a party…that's right! Get crazy!) I think of the Northwestern grad student who included the poem in his course pack, who, coincidentally, was in last winter’s issue of Alimentum with me. I think of the few who’ve heard me nervously recite it (I have to keep my eyes closed), the poems they’ve shared, and the depth of a person you witness during such a performance. Last summer at Fishtrap, a new friend casually busted out H.C. Chase’s “Ladle Rotten Hut,” probably the coolest (and, okay, only) literary party trick ever. Text and audio of this awesome example of homophonic translation can be found here, though Jon’s version was better—he recited it twice as fast and didn’t miss a beat.

Hear Dobyns read “How To Like It” (starts at 6:35).

What poems do you have memorized? Any suggestions? "Hot Ass Poem" by Jennifer Knox ought to be on everyone's list, don't you think?

T.S. Eliot Reads Prufrock

2009-12-04T10:23:00.000-08:00

The man himself reads "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I wish I sounded this awesome when I read.

I wonder what he'd think about being on Youtube.

Zugzwang

2009-12-01T17:51:00.000-08:00

Zugzwang, the first chapbook by John W. Evans, a hugely talented poet who I'm lucky to call a friend, is now available from Rocksaw Press.

Read an interview with John and learn his opinion of Midwestern cuisine and yellow cheeses.

Support small presses and exquisite, accessible, contemporary poetry--order more than one.

(Also, as of 12/4, read excerpts from John's longer elegy project, "The Katie Ghazals," at Hayden's Ferry Review.)

Kyoto Journal

2009-11-13T11:14:00.000-08:00

Issue #73 of Kyoto Journal includes two stories from Ms. Yamada's Toaster.

"A Sort of Deadline" is in the print issue; "Untied" is available online. "Untied" is one of the first stories I ever wrote and offers an answer to the question: What would happen if you were at one of those conveyor belt sushi joints and you saw a shoe glide past?

Get a copy here.

"Wisher" in The Southern Review

2009-11-03T13:27:00.000-08:00

"Wisher," a story from the Japan collection, is out in the Autumn 2009 issue of The Southern Review.

The story's about Nao, the aging caretaker of a soon-to-be-demolished public garden. Nao has a special ability: when he holds a coin from the garden's wishing fountain, he can hear the voice of its owner.

Go here to order a copy. Or better yet--subscribe!

A Human Encounter

2009-10-15T17:23:00.000-07:00

At Sydney’s Taronga Zoo, you can get up close and personal with a koala. They call it “Koala Encounter.”

It’s like a koala strip club. Touching is prohibited. But you do get to go in the cage, close up. Close enough to smell their cute farts (eucalyptus + marmite) and for them to smell you back.

Sadly, due to 91 kph winds and unexpected rain in Sydney, I missed the official Encounter hours (you get a photo op and feeding demo), but a friendly keeper named Blake took pity on this sleep-deprived, wind-ravaged tourist and let me in for a quick look anyway.

There I was! Encountering a koala! I gazed at Hex, a three-year-old male, from behind the yellow line with my hands shoved deep into my pockets to avoid the nearly overpowering cuddle reflex. He gazed back. He wrinkled his gumdrop nose. Then the furry dumpling reached out and...PATTED MY CHEEK.

A horrified Blake leapt for Hex, thinking the furball cupcake was going to claw me (even then, wouldn’t the scars be adorable?) But Hex was calm. He had just gently laid his paw on my face.

Blake explained that he had probably liked the smell of my shampoo or deodorant. (My money's on the Tom's of Maine lavender deodorant...I plan to slather myself in it when I'm back in Oz...have you heard Mitch Hedberg's bit on koalas?

Papa Hem

2009-10-14T17:07:00.000-07:00

A poem inspired by the Wyoming dude ranch days is up over at failbetter.

Please, Postman-san...

2009-09-03T19:26:00.000-07:00

At Fishtrap last month, I gave a reading of "Ms. Yamada's Toaster," a story about a psychic Japanese toaster and beer. Over lunch a couple days later, a fellow conferencer mentioned having an old silver toaster of the sort described in the story. Folks at the table joked that it'd be great marketing to display the little books actually sitting in such a toaster.

Well, last week, Hillary's silver toaster showed up at my post office. Along with a story written about its adventures (it goes by "Ticky") that Hillary submitted to the Fishtrap anthology.

As I unpacked the toaster, old crumbs and all, from its crumpled newspaper packing, I was happy and moved. Think I'll mail her some beer as a thank you...

August, A Place

2009-08-20T13:37:00.000-07:00

Nature’s been generous this month. We had a great view of the Perseids, Skyline sunsets have been even more spectacular than usual, and the little garden that could is chugging along at full steam.

Six weeks ago, I hacked up the ridiculous swath of jungle where last year’s garden had gone wild. There were concrete piers in there. There were hunks of scrap metal and stone pavers. Hearty grass and thistles with roots like elephant trunks had sunk themselves into clay. I pickaxed and shoveled and swore. My back ached. On July 3, I conquered that (itsy-bitsy) patch:

And now...!

Everything and its mother is trying to grow in there. There are seven volunteer tomato plants, and the number one "weed" is kale. Basil is going crazy, making for a constant supply of fresh pesto in my kitchen. So I'm a little impressed with myself at the results. Maybe it’s the fact that I did it all myself, or that I’ve stuck with my commitment to daily weeding (an activity I've found semi-addictive, capable of producing a flow state), but the veggies taste especially good this year.

Along with visits to my favorite badminton and karaoke haunts, tending the garden has proven an antidote to the cloudy-headedness produced by novel writing, which is how I’m spending a lot of my time these days. Progress comes in fits and starts. I recently had a chance to borrow a garage floor and literally lay out the book. It was helpful to get a visual on how much space scenes were physically taking--a different way to measure pacing. (“They enter the hospital up here and they don’t leave for six feet? I could probably accomplish the same thing in three feet, considering the temple scene only lasted a half-row, and look how much plot movement there is!")

Heading south to the Boardwalk is another worthy summer diversion, though lately it's been a bit hazy down there. Thanks to friendly winds, Crazy Pete's didn't get much smoke from the Lockheed fire, which is still smoldering about twenty miles away. It did make for an eerie sky down in Santa Cruz, though, and my car’s still got a fine speckling of ash on it.

Just up the coast, a more peaceful view:

Fishtrap, Kerouac (give a dog a bone)

2009-07-20T09:17:00.000-07:00

I spent the week before last basking in the cool air and camaraderie of Fishtrap, a writing conference on Lake Wallowa, OR.

The place isn’t easy to get to. I flew into Boise and drove my rented Subaru six hours southwest, through Christian radio country and Nez Perce land. Awesomely, I arrived in this little pocket of Oregon to find I already had a friend there—my Write Club pal Jo Ann, who I hadn’t seen since she moved to Bellingham a couple years ago, was attending the conference too.

It was a great summer campy week. My favorite thing about conferences and residencies is the magic that descends when people are fed, watered, housed, contained, and stripped of responsibility. It’s easier to know people, easier to be known. Time expands, experiences are compressed, so that a week or two later, I’m still mentally unpacking it all.

So, speaking of Kerouac, it looks like I’ll be hanging at his Florida house next spring as writer in residence. The College Park house is where he wrote his second book, The Dharma Bums, and where he hid out from On The Road’s unexpected success. According to the (slightly disturbing) video tour on the website, you can even stand in the very spot where Jack curled up in a ball on the ground in the backyard, “sick with fever, dead broke.” Goodness!

The house has been updated and renovated by the Kerouac Project, though the back bedroom, where J.K. slept and typed his manuscript onto one long scroll, apparently hasn’t lost its vibe. According to former resident Ted May, “There's a great concentration of energy in the back of the house. I feel him back there; I do.”

Hopefully Jack’s spirit won’t mind if I forgo the scroll-and-typewriter routine and opt for methods less romantic. No guarantees I won't occasionally curl up in the yard, though.

(...as advertised:)

An Exercise

2009-07-07T09:07:00.000-07:00

I'm spending the week at Fishtrap, a conference in Eastern Oregon. Though I usually bristle at writing exercises, Robert Stubblefield gave us a fun one today in workshop that felt like a party game: generate dialogue with a partner, in real time, where one person imparts a piece of news and the other responds with either, “I guess I’m not surprised,” or “I can’t believe you’re telling me this.” My cohort was Hank Vandenburg, one of my new favorite people. Here's what we came up with as the Waalowa River rushed by outside:

“Yes, it was Genie.”
“I guess I’m not surprised.”
“It only happened once.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“It’s the truth.”
“I don’t know what’s true anymore with you.”
“I’m so sorry. I was just so drunk.”
“Wait—I thought you were back on the wagon!”
“Well, I haven’t told you everything.”
“This changes things. It’s over.”
“I just can’t imagine being married to anyone else.”
“You don’t deserve to be married to anyone else. After all I’ve done for you, this is how you treat me? I’m going to Paula’s and I’m taking Binky with me.”
“I’ll start going to AA, I’ll do anything.”
“Isn’t AA where you met Genie?”
“She was just there...you were out of town...”
“I was out of town getting your goddamn prostate medication!”
“I'm so sorry! It’s just my addictive personality.”
“I’m sick of the excuses, Mortimer. I’m 35 years old and it’s time for me to take charge of my life. I want a baby, Mort. And I don’t want it to have an addict’s genes.”
“I love you and I can’t imagine being with anyone else, Sal.”
“I Googled sperm banks last night. I can get premium stuff for less than thirty bucks.”

etc...

I think this exercise works because it's fun--it's quick, engaging, unpredictable. It reminds us that, on the page, good dialogue ought to be all of these things; the writer is a medium, letting all kinds of folks inhabit her brain. (Or giving voice to all the loonies already in residence.)

The exercise also reminded me of the first rule of improv: Say yes to everything.
There's not an exact corollary to fiction here, since stories are anchored by conflict, but it might be a way to generate a story set-up: let two characters talk themselves into an absurd situation, then start the story there, going back and cutting all the run-up dialogue.

They're ringing the dinner bell. Feedin' time!

The Bridesmaid

2009-06-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

My collection of short stories, Ms. Yamada's Toaster, has been listed as a finalist in two first-book competitions:

The Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction from Sarabande Books, and The 2009 Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press.

I'm encouraged by the positive feedback because this was the first time I had put my work together in book form, to be considered as a whole. I agonized over the order of the stories, which to include and which to leave out, wondered if they would hang together as an entity, rather than just feeling like a bunch of one-offs slapped together with a binder clip. Now I'll go back through the book and see how I can strengthen it. Maybe one day, it'll the be the one in white.

Il Dolce Far Niente

2009-06-05T00:35:00.000-07:00

To start, a couple pieces of news:

“Praha,” a piece of postcard prose, is up at The Literary Bohemian. I love the look of this online journal.

And next summer, I’ll be spending a week in Methana, Greece, thanks to the generous folks at Limnisa.

Speaking of Europe and the Bohemian life, at the moment I’m in Lecce, Italy, visiting Kristin and Mattie, two friends who are living and writing here semi-permanently because, well, they love Italy.

A kitchen scene: pastries from the pasticheria down the road, cherries from the market, zucchini flowers to be fried and eaten, cappuccino, Botrugno rosso, loquats and wildflowers liberated from a local garden.

And for good reason. Lecce is in Puglia, on the heel of Italy’s boot. The region gets a lot of sunshine, which means beach days and warm nights on the terrace. For us vino lovers, the area produces amazing, under-celebrated wines that are gaining popularity and recognition by the second. We had the chance to attend “Cantine Aperte,” an open winery festival, last week, and were blown away. (Read Mattie's wine blog entry on the event here.) Wines that would easily sell for fifty bucks in Napa cost six Euros, and great quality bottles were available for as little two-fifty. Pours were generous; a “taste” sometimes reached the half-glass mark and even with the most expensive wines, the pourer (often the winemaker) rinsed out glasses not with water but with the wine itself. If there’s any correlation between literary inspiration and wine consumption, we’ll be set for life.

Aside from our morning “Write Club,” we’ve been cooking like crazy. It’s satisfying how much time is devoted to eating well in Italy. Not only does a good home-cooked meal involve a trip to the salumeria, the veggie market, the store with the best cheese prices, and the wine shop, but each place keeps its own particular hours, closing on random weekdays, and daily afternoons for anywhere between one and five hours. Sometimes business hours are posted, but correlation with reality is generally slim.

Business hours at a clothing store: 9 AM to 1 PM, 4:56 PM to 8:54 PM (or 10:40? I love how both clock hands are the same length.)

Even if you do happen upon the schedule for an official, government-run place—like, say, the city’s main post office—it doesn’t really matter, since time itself is a matter of opinion in Italy.

Centro Post Office, Lecce. Clock reads 3:40. Actual time: 4:22.

No one seems to mind, though. All that inconvenience basically leads to a mandated rest period built into the day, a time for “il dolce far niente,” my new favorite Italian phrase. It means “the sweet doing-nothing.”

When I'm not thinking about food, shopping for food, cooking food, or eating it, one of my favorite doing-nothing activities is watching the swallows. At certain times of day, these city birds take to the sky. They're are fun to watch because of their distinctive arc shape and playfulness in the air. They beat their boomerang wings, then glide, turn, and swoop. It’s like a kid sprinting toward water for a cannonball. In the afternoon they travel among trees but in the evening they play, tornadoing into building courtyards, so close to the walls that anyone leaning out risks a collision.

Maybe I'll make "to enter the courtyard at dusk" an idiom. It could mean "to carelessly wander somewhere at the wrong time."

Example: “Kristin just dropped her gelato and Mattie’s bragging about how good his scoop of coconut is. He’s heading into the courtyard at dusk, man.”

The swallows are roosting in the trees now, which means it's somewhere between 9 and 10:30 AM. Except at the post office, where it's midnight. Time to write.

What Happens at the End

2009-05-13T14:44:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading On The Road, Jack Kerouac's classic Beat novel. I'd avoided it until now, assuming it would be like the poetry I read of his years back: unenjoyably sloppy. Now, a character in my novel-in-progress is obsessed with the book; it was my responsibility to head to the library and find out what he sees in it. And there's a lot. Unlike that book of poems, there were very few sections I found in need of an editor, and plenty of passages that blew me away. I like to mark great sentences or paragraphs when I find them. There is now a City of Palo Alto library book full of tiny turned-down corners.

In my own notes, I copied down this passage:

"Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child."

I've always loved working with kids, and while I wouldn't always call what they possess "wisdom," there is something eye-opening about a child's perspective. While in Las Vegas last week, I was invited to visit a friend's fifth grade classroom during Career Week and talk about what it's like to be a writer. So I grabbed a copy of "Ms. Yamada's Toaster" (a certain fifth grader I know claims this is her favorite of my stories) and headed over to Gordon McCaw Elementary.

"Miss Larson" had warned me that this particular class was full of troubled and low-performing kids, and that most read far below the fifth grade level. I was worried they'd find me boring, or have little enthusiasm for writing. But no--the room was packed with passionate little people.

One of the first questions I got was, "Do you know John Grisham?"

Sadly, I don't. But I did dredge up JG's incredible success story semi-accurately to illustrate the value of perseverance.

The class listed their favorite authors. Dave Pilkey of Captain Underpants fame was popular, and were Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid), Barbara Park (Junie B. Jones), and R.L. Stine (one of my favorite writers as a kid!). Judy Blume was the only vintage author mentioned, unless you count John Grisham.

"What are the two things you absolutely MUST do if you want to be a writer?" I asked the class.

"Go to college and study creativity."
"Buy a sweet laptop."
"Be really creative."

(The correct answer, boys and girls, is "read and write A LOT." A quiet girl with thick glasses, who later grew boisterous when talking about reading under the covers at night, finally got it.)

The kids were very into Being Creative. With this group, creativity was synonymous with compounded absurdity, a Mister Potato Head of the mind. The kids came up with a dog character who is made of chocolate and has a raisin head and grape ears. Someone else proposed an alien who'd abduct Miss Larson and the modifications flowed: "The alien has a monkey's tail," "the body of a zebra," "with purple stripes" and ridiculous numbers of eyes, heads, fingers, and arms. I noticed the same tendencies when volunteering at the bookmaking field trips at 826 Valencia. The instinct is a good one: combine two things that don't normally go together. But I wonder why kids try to write about animals and food when their favorite books are all about totally normal kids like themselves?

I showed the class the MYT book and talked about the plot. The kids were hooked. They all wanted to talk about what it would be like to know how you're going to die. No one was asking the usual questions: "Where do you get your ideas?" and "Why do you write?" Maybe the answers were obvious to a kid: ideas are everywhere, and, in Miss Larson's classroom, writing is FUN.

Finally, I got a stumper: "What happens at the end? Does the toaster explode?"

I hesitated. How did I explain that the Jehova's Witness widow who owned the toaster took the young narrator out to the backyard to pour beer on her husband's grave, then shower in it herself? What kind of ending is THAT?

I started thinking: what is it that a story has to "do" by the end, if nothing explodes? "Then I realized" endings are trite because they don't feel true. Our problems rarely get tied up in bows. My old teacher, John Dufresne calls fiction "the lie that tells the truth." The truth about what? Being alive, I think. And in life we rarely hold on to the truths we find. I used to feel like I was waiting for some answer, some IT, to reveal itself, and then my life would really start. But the reality is that we cycle through our truths. We struggle, glean, spend shimmery moments in IT-land: we explode. But we inevitably come down and when we do, the hunt starts again. That's the appeal of art: it can capture a truth and hold it. We can open a book years later and find that feeling pinned right where we left it.

As Kerouac writes of a drive through Mexico:

"The car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives."

So, that's why I'm heading to the bookstore today and ponying up for my own copy of On The Road. And why, along with the enthusiasm of the kids I met, I'm not afraid for literature. The industry may be changing, but the same need drives it. Soon we'll have access to a universal library, and the Kindle, like it or not, is here to stay and has a lot to offer our portability-enthused culture.

Maybe one day I'll get to download a copy of The Abduction of Miss Larson.

May 3 Reading

2009-04-23T12:10:00.000-07:00

Spring is off to a good start. I'm back in California, a blizzard-free and cow pie-free zone. Flowers are pushing up everywhere and the air smells like bay and roses. And, I'm finally moved into the new place.

I'm looking forward to participating in San Francisco's bomb-diggityest new literary event, The Reasonably Sufferable Evening of Poetry Reading Series. This is the second reading in the series organized and hosted by John Evans. If you're in the area, come check it out on Sunday, May 3 at SF's Great Overland Book Company.

A few other updates:

"On This Date in 1894, Nothing Happened," is in the April issue of Front Porch. (John had a great poem in this journal in 2006.)

"Wisher," a story from the Japan collection, will be in the Fall issue of The Southern Review.

A little postcard is up over at Opium.

And, I was fortunate be named a fellow at this summer's Fishtrap Writers Conference in Eastern Oregon. I'll be taking Jack Shoemaker's publishing workshop as well as a course in memoir.

Wyoming Weather Report: Cloudy With a Chance of Doubt (or, Cows Don't Write Novels)

2009-04-08T17:27:00.000-07:00

We've developed a fun relationship with the local newspaper, The Sheridan Press. True, we don't always (ever) agree with the opinions of the political editorials of regulars like "Conservative Bill," but it's given us a taste of a different lifestyle--one where the police blotter fills a full page, and mysterious happenings such as "shrubbery violations" are commonplace.

We showed up at Jentel thinking we’d see some seasonal changes, that the dusting of snow covering the hills mid-March would be long gone come April, replaced by daffodil sprouts and new grass. We biked and hiked and joked about the shoe-stealing mud.

And then, winter made a U-turn. As local Wylie Baker told the Sheridan Press, “I thought winter was bad in Sheridan this year—til spring showed up."

Two blizzards and two "winter storms" later, in our last week of residence, we’re no longer snowed in. But there’s still plenty of the stuff out there. And it's taken its toll; this blanketing of what is already a pretty sparse landscape has a strange effect on the mind.

There’s a lot space here, both mental and physical. The only scheduled event of the week is Thursday morning’s grocery run. On one hand the freedom is good—I can immerse in a project with little distraction. But what if the project feels off? There’s a lot room for doubt to creep into my little studio. What if I just can’t write a novel? What if I'm only good at stories? Maybe I should write a memoir instead...

That’s it! I’ll write a memoir! Memoirs sell. I already know the story; I know the characters and...

Solution: I take a lot of walks.

With all the snow we’ve been having, the county road has become our sole outlet for exercise. You get to know the animals; anything with vertical rise stands out. And it seems the animals feel the same about people passing by. Grazing cows turn. In the beginning, I’d say, “MooOO!” Now I just mumble, "Hey," and keep walking. And there are horses, always in packs. When they see me coming, they saunter over to the fence. When I run, the horses trot along with me.

I took a walk yesterday to clear my head, sick of my thoughts and sick of getting sucked into my own drain. And I met this cow. She had shifted to face me and just stood there, looking. After awhile she reached down and ate some grass.

I thought, That cow isn't writing a novel. That cow doesn't spend the day wondering when she’ll hear about a fellowship. Cows don’t worry that they’re not getting enough done, and when it snows two feet in ten hours they wait for the snow to melt and when it does they move to the place where the grass shows through.

I told my fellow residents about this revelation at dinner and they laughed. But Cow Zen has relieved some of the pressure. Even with all the time in the world, you have to make room for tomfoolery. Whether it's celebrating your Irish heritage...

or building an igloo.

Let Them Eat Cookies

2009-03-21T09:17:00.000-07:00

There’s no kitchen staff here at Jentel (gasp!). Instead, we are given a kitchen fit for the Food Network and total culinary independence; once a week we are shuttled to the Albertson’s in town, handed a check, and set loose. The six of us have agreed to take turns cooking group dinners, and I have to admit, we’ve been impressed with ourselves. I made fresh pesto on St. Patrick’s Day (it’s green), Robert poached salmon yesterday, and Rebecca whipped up a lovely quiche-like casserole upon our arrival. Last night we even toasted the Sara Lee pound cake before chowing down.

Then, this morning, in the upper reaches of the pantry, we found the Jentel Cookbook.

This relic is a work-in-progress art piece, complete with illustrations and cut-up food labels and photographs of the multi-course feasts of residents of yore. Suddenly my pesto didn’t seem so great when compared with Page Lambert’s “Rack of Lamb with Fig and Port Wine Sauce” or “Braised Moroccan Beef with Balsamic Reduction and Saffron-infused Millet.” The bar has been raised. I guess that’s what happens when you put six people with lots of free time in a house where there’s an entire drawer dedicated to cheese graters.

There were lots of great recipes in the cookbook. My favorite, though, is the simplest. It’s for Jentel Cookies. I hope to try them very soon.

132 Lower Piney Creek Road
Banner, WY 82832

Wyo-bound

2009-03-10T21:39:00.000-07:00

Come this Sunday, I'm outtie once again, this time to month-long fellowship at Jentel Arts, a cattle ranch/artists' residency in the Bighorn Mountains outside of Sheridan, Wyoming.

There seems to be a me-magnet in this remote part of the country; this will be my third stay in the area, and fourth visit. My first encounter with the area was in 2000, when I spent a summer cleaning up after dudes at Spear-o-Wigwam; the second was just last October, when I was the writer in residence at Devil's Tower National Monument (where the most popular question asked of the rangers is, "So where exactly DID the aliens land?")

While there, I couldn't resist making the drive over to Sheridan, and beyond, to visit the place where the West had captured my heart. The Forest Service told me the road up to Spear-O was clear, so despite weeks of snowy late-October conditions, I piloted my little Nissan Versa (just a rental, after all!) up Red Grade Road, where, it's true, "there are no guard rails or anything that would prevent you from going over the side and dropping thousands of feet."

I did, much to the amusement of construction workers partway up, make it to the plateau, where traces of snow began to appear. As I trundled my way up the remaining thousand feet of elevation, I did get a teensy bit scared. There were foot-deep mud ruts lined with snow and ice, now, as I grew closer to what I thought I remembered as the ranch; the only other vehicles I saw were a couple big-wheel trucks with ammo strapped to the back. I wished I'd rented an orange car.

But I was determined, and I made it to a deserted Spear-o. The moment that sign came into view blew my mind. I had thought of this place so much in memory that it had ceased to exist in reality anymore.

I found many things upon exploring my snow-bound old workplace, the most wonderful of which was that the place had not changed. The bunkhouses were unlocked, and the smell upon entering the girls' bunk ("Heartbreak Hotel") was gutturally familiar. I had slept on that bunk, there, and wasn't it on this beam that--

So, I'm psyched to be heading back to big sky country to write. At Jentel I plan to focus on my novel, shaping what I wrote during my last residency, and drafting a whole lot of new material.

It will be lonely out there--only seven of us, together for a full month, walking distance to nothing--so please send Stuff and Things!

Kelly Luce
c/o Jentel Arts
132 Lower Piney Creek Road
Banner, WY 82832

AWP Madness

2009-02-20T19:04:00.000-08:00

In college, I picked up the new course schedule when it was hot off the press. What opportunities awaited me next quarter? The Beatles? Music and Meditation? Sexuality in Ancient Greece? Sign me up!

Such enthusiasm aside, I’m not good at going to class. My college attendance record was nearly perfectly un-perfect—with one exception, I never, in four years, made perfect attendance in any course. (The exception being Stuart Dybek’s Fiction Workshop my senior year.) It just seemed there were better ways to spend time than sit in lecture.

My AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference experience felt similar to this. Thursday morning, I waited in line with hundreds of other people to receive my nifty AWP zip tote holding a program schedule that rivals Infinite Jest in heft. (I won’t lie, I did a few bicep curls with it in the bathroom during the Sewanee party). I had dutifully looked up the schedule online prior to flying out, and even had a list in my purse of the panels I wanted to attend. "Writing in the K-12 Classroom?" Right up my alley! "Avoiding Sick Mothers, Absent Fathers, and Losing Your Virginity: The Tropes and Traps of Nonfiction"—double yes! A title-bisecting colon indicates top panel quality. I giggled and wondered if I had time to stop in on "The Sister Art(s): Toward A Feminist Ekphrasis." AWP even gives you a little nerd scheduler so you can plan each hour of each day. During that first panel (which I got to mid-way, and which was about running community outreach programs rather than ways to use writing in the K-12 classroom), I even filled in a few of the lines.

Then eleven o’clock rolled around. Time for “Fictionalizing Family.” The elevators were stuffed, so I tried to reach the eighth floor via stairway. I was stuck in a hot stairwell that smelled of French fries when I got a text from my good friend John:

“U in a panel? mine sucks.”

“lost in hotel bowels,” I wrote back.

“F— it. let’s walk book fair.”

And so it began. My favorite AWP moments were the times John and I connected, in person or via text message, and said, “F- it. Let’s walk book fair.”

The AWP bookfair was like Miami: hot, overwhelming, and a lot of fun for about two and a half days. Hundreds of tables lined up, end-to-end, pushing literary magazines, books, small presses, and writing programs. They handed out swag from tattoos to candy to beer cozies. There were journals hawking issues I'm in and journals that have rejected me multiple times, journals trying to make their mark and others too cool to send anyone but interns to man the booth. People stood around nervously with Starbucks cups, but I think Poet Lore’s idea of box wine and cake was better-suited to the conditions.

The writers weren’t the only anxious ones. In our extensive wanderings, John and I encountered an inordinate number of anti-social booth workers, each begging the question: why are you here? John, though, was not phased, and pioneered what became my favorite table approach:

“Your Mom’s Cat Review! You guys are great!”

Intern: Wide-eyed stare. Silence. “You…know us?”

“Oh yeah! You have a mom, and she has a cat. And it all gets reviewed!”

Intern: Blank look.

“Or is it your mom’s cat who does the reviewing? Am I confusing you with Fried Barn Owl Quarterly?”

Intern: “We have a special subscription rate for AWP.”

Which made me wonder: are literary people just crappy at socializing? Or are we more aware of the awkwardness of all this? And isn't it better that way? I mean, there’s a certain democracy I’ve come to love these last few years about the literary submission process. It felt icky to think that I should try and convince, say, Stephen Donadio, to publish me. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, a decidedly conference-averse personality, has this to say about submitting via post, no networking necessary:

“I liked the fact that there were no faces or voices; we were all disembodied, writer and editor alike. Just the slow old mail. I wanted my poems to fight their way like that. Fight and fight again. No networking, no friends in high places, no internships. I think that’s how poems finally have to live, alone without your help, so they should get used to it.”

That said, it was fantastic to meet editors in person who I’ve worked with only via phone or email. I loved spending time at the Tampa Press/Tampa Review table, where folks were welcoming and kind and enthused about publishing and the look of my story in the new issue, where “Ms. Yamada’s Toaster” is paired with some amazing photography, a far cry from the (equally great) art we used for the little book.

Another highlight of the bookfair were the large numbers of small presses producing beautiful books. Again, the enthusiasm was so high at these tables, you couldn't help but stuff yourself full of hype and Lindt chocolates. With all the talk of publishing being in the tank these days, these folks’ energy and dedication to their work was heartening. One press in particular caught my attention. Chin Music Press, out of Seattle, creates gorgeous art-object quality books with a light, yet worldly sensibility. One branch focuses on Japan-oriented work, and I couldn’t leave the table without picking up a copy of Kuhaku (and Other Accounts from Japan). The stories inside are hilarious, sobering, and well-written, and the book itself feels alive, partly due to its self-awareness (even the copyright page mocks itself).

I did make it to one panel—got there thirty minutes early, in fact—and stayed the whole way through. And, just like in college, the reason was Stuart Dybek. In the Grand Ballroom on the last night of the conference, Stuart read two new pieces and a Valentines-themed portion of “Nighthawks” before undergoing “conversation” with Donna Seaman. The reading was great (one new story, Stuart told the crowd, was conceived on mushrooms), the conversation a bit awkward, but endurable.

John and I made one last lap around the bookfair, snapping up leftover candy and free copies. That night our group went out in true Chicago style: drinks at the Palmer House, where we sat on the stairs until someone discovered a whole empty ballroom, and music at Blue Chicago, where a 200-pound black woman in stilettos wailed us into happy dancing oblivion. Every so often someone from the crowd would pass her a napkin from the bar so she could towel off.

I don’t think I slept more than five hours a night, and my brain had turned to mush after so much meeting and greeting, but it came to me while I lay on the plush carpet of that abandoned ballroom: “as long as your friends are there, the only thing worse than going to AWP is not going to AWP.”

Couple New Stories Out

2009-01-29T16:17:00.000-08:00

For those of you amassing my collected works (mom, grandma, this means you):

“The Rocks” is in the current issue of Sycamore Review.

“A Hot Meal” is in the current issue of Alimentum: The Literature of Food, available here.

I like this pairing. Both “The Rocks” and “A Hot Meal” are older stories that I cut my teeth on, and seeing them both in print is rewarding…and sort of a relief, like when an adult child finally moves out. They also represent the ends of the acceptance-to-publication spectrum; “The Rocks” took two months to come out; “A Hot Meal,” almost two years.

(2/19: one more! "Christmas Stories" is out in the Spring/Summer '09 issue of North American Review.)

Nothing Was Stirring, Not Even A...

2008-12-24T14:59:00.000-08:00

Way back two weeks ago, when I first arrived here at MacDowell, I made the hour-long ride from the airport in Manchester to Peterborough. On the way, we encountered a semi on its side, completely blocking the road. “42 degrees--not even icy,” Jim, the driver, kept repeating. Even as we careened along a muddy dirt road, a “sure shortcut” to the colony (not), Jim couldn’t get over that truck. “Now you’ll have a story to tell,” he said. “It’s like one of them omens.”

That first night, this mini-adventure already under my belt, I joined some folks in an after-dinner viewing of “The Shining.” A plotline that included a struggling writer in a remote, snowy location suited our MacDowell situation almost too well, which led to a lot of laughs (and is definitely, now that I’m reading the lines out of context, a case of You-Had-To-Be-There):

Stuart Ullman: Physically, it's not a very demanding job. The only thing that can get a bit trying up here during the winter is, uh, a tremendous sense of isolation.

Jack Torrance: Well, that just happens to be exactly what I'm looking for. I'm outlining a new writing project and, uh, five months of peace is just what I want.

(Us, doubled over with laughter.)

Or how about this one:

Wendy (the wife): Any ideas yet?

Jack: Lots of ideas. No good ones.

Wendy (upbeat): Well, something'll come. It's just a matter of settling back into the habit of writing every day.

(Colonists rolling on the floor here.)

Anyway, we all know what happens: a huge winter storm rolls in, trapping them indoors, and Jack goes nuts and tries to hack apart his family. The same thing, minus the hacking, that happened to us the following evening. “The Great Ice of ‘08” kept us up all night, and without power, hot water, or heat for eight days. I thought about Jim’s talk of ice and omens. Now I really had a story to tell.

There are times when the signs come out. Coincidences become more pronounced, and seem to carry more meaning. I’ve mentioned before that there seems to be a special energy to this place—maybe that’s the explanation. Or maybe it’s just that with fewer distractions, we become better at noticing.

When I arrived at MacDowell, I was thrilled to see familiar names on the tombstones in my studio, Phi Beta. (Named, by the way, for the arts fraternity that built the studio, and was founded at--where else--my alma mater, Northwestern University.) Those names seemed a good omen. Another, unfamiliar, entry caught my eye as well: “Louise Talma, Composer.” Ms. Talma’s name appears every year from 1943 to 1995. On one tombstone, her name shows up four times.

It turns out she was quite a woman--a talented composer, benefactor of the arts, and a good spirit to have around. According to Blake, she stayed in Phi Beta every summer, and every time she came they rearranged the furniture to reproduce the layout of her first stay.

Now that we have power and Phi Beta is warm and light again, I’ve noticed I’m not the only one who’s appreciating the luxury. A couple nights ago, while culling through photos on my computer, I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I looked over to see a little brown mouse creeping out of the bathroom. We made eye contact and he/she scurried back. It must be an extremely bendy mouse, because there are no crevices thicker than a butter knife in there.

I named her (obviously) Louise Talma.

What’s remarkable about the mouse sighting is what I was doing at the time it happened. I have over a thousand photos on my computer, and it was just as I clicked past the one of Crafty McRatterson, (my previous rodent neighbor), that I looked up and saw the mouse. I think that counts as a Twilight Zone moment.

I hadn’t seen much evidence of my adoptive pet until today. Yesterday in the mail I received a care package with lots of goodies, including some foil-wrapped chocolate mice. I put them on my mantel for decoration, but this morning I noticed something strange (look to the left of the faux cheese)…

The Great Ice

2008-12-15T09:36:00.000-08:00

Photos courtesy of fellow Colonist Corrie Francis, animator, artist, and photographer.

Sugar-glazed grass.

Lunch baskets by the fire.

Watching the ice fall from the safety of Colony Hall.

And fall it did. All...day...long.

Sights from the gloomy...

...to the stunning.

Fire and Ice

2008-12-13T14:11:00.000-08:00

The residency’s off to an unusual start. On Thursday night, twenty-four hours after I arrived, an ice storm came through, knocking out power here at MacDowell for the first time since the power lines were buried in 1996. Ice coated everything—every blade of grass, and, most importantly, every tree (and there are a LOT of trees) and for a good part of the night and the following day, it was too dangerous to venture outside. A log cabin sized branch totaled one resident’s car, and trees hit a couple of the studios. Luckily, no one was hurt, but the arboreal carnage is massive. All day Friday, every thirty seconds or so you’d hear a crack like a shotgun, and another treetop would come slamming to earth.

Nonetheless, I’ve been getting a decent amount of work done. While most of the others spent the night in the main colony hall (the only place with heat, thanks to a small generator) I decided to forgo sleeping on the wooden floor and sleep in my chilly studio. Luckily, I have a small studio with a huge fireplace, and I was able to get the temperature up to about 61 in there (I think it was about 9 degrees outside...) The fire, combined with about thirty tea lights dotting the room, made for a cozy and productive evening of writing. I think I'll try it again tonight. It must be true what they say about this place, that the energy is different, of a higher vibration, if you will, that the spirit of the founders and those who have come after has soaked into every rock and tree and path. The native Abnaki people found the colony area to be a place where thoughts cleared and great realizations were made.

Yesterday, the first morning after the storm, people met in the kitchen, earlier than even the usual 7:30 breakfast time. No one had slept due to the constant racket of trees snapping and we were all hungry for information and to swap stories of our encounters with the cold and darkness. Maryel, the breakfast cook, had managed to get to the colony despite massive road closures, downed trees, and dangling power lines. That she came in, braving the cold and at times off-roading to get here, is just one example of the dedication and overall spectacular-ness of the MacDowell staff. She could have (and maybe should have, it was dangerous simply to be outdoors without a helmet) easily stayed home and let us forage cereal and fruit. Thanks to the generator, the kitchen had a few overhead lights but no working outlets; in these conditions she still took personal breakfast orders and while the forest crashed down outside, we sat warm and cozy at the table, gulping hot coffee and feasting on mozzarella-tomato-feta omelets and blueberry pancakes thick enough to sleep on. (This may sound like a weird metaphor but let me explain: people have been using anything and everything to make the wood floors in Bond Hall sleepable—I’ve seen towel beds and beds of cardboard and I can think of nothing more comfortable than a bed of Maryel’s blueberry pancakes—warm, if possible.)

My studio, Phi Beta (pre-storm). Among the previous Colonists' names on the "tombstones" hanging on the walls are two writers who mean a lot to me: Stephen Dobyns and Ann Patchett. Quite an inspiration to know that my desk was once occupied by writers I admire so much.

I write this from Keene, about 45 minutes from Peterborough and the MacDowell Colony, on an internet-and-booze run with a couple new friends. The latest word is that we might have power by next Wednesday. Fingers crossed. At least we know there won’t be a shortage of firewood at the colony for a long, long time.

Stuff and Things

2008-11-29T14:43:00.000-08:00

It’s been a busy month. The Intersection reading on the 17th was fantastic because of all the friends, family, and friends-that-feel-like-family that came out. I had a cheering section, which was really cool, since it was my second public reading ever and I was more than a little nervous. The free wine helped, too.

(Pic by Mattie Bamman--poet, friend, and wino.)

Intersection reading, me and the girls: Geri, Robin, me, Kristin, Tiffany (and Tiffany's dress)

Dad flew out for the day. Quite possibly his first-ever literary event...

Some other writing news:

In its Winter/Spring 2009 issue, Sycamore Review will publish “The Rocks,” an oft-rejected story I’ve always been proud of.

The “Ms. Yamada’s Toaster” mini-book is now available for direct order from UT Press, here.

“Christmas Stories” will appear in North American Review’s Summer 2009 issue.

The editors at Kartika Review have nominated “Cram Island” for a Pushcart Prize. It’s my first nomination and I’m thankful for the recognition.

From December 10th to January 7th, I’ll be in residence at the MacDowell Colony, an artist colony in Peterborough, NH. It’s hard to imagine what it’ll be like spending Christmas with a group I haven’t met yet, but if it’s anything like recent years' festivities, I’m sure I will enjoy myself. (And I’ve finally found justification for getting that collapsible travel hula hoop!)

My mailing address from 12/10-1/7:

100 High Street
Peterborough, NH 03458

Please send stuff and things. Especially edible stuff, or things with your handwriting on them. Those are the best.

As Advertised: Tomfoolery!

2008-11-20T08:30:00.000-08:00

Wine tasting in the Santa Cruz mountains...how come I don't look like I'm holding the wheel or watching the road?

Cooper-Garrod Vineyards. Ask a guy who's 6' 8"--my trunk is NOT small.

Literary Awards Reading @ The Intersection 11/18

2008-11-16T16:12:00.000-08:00

I'm excited for next Tuesday, the 2008 Jackson Phelan Tanenbaum Literary Awards Reading & Reception at SF's Intersection for the Arts. I'll be reading in amazing company, with the Phelan Award winner for poetry, Alison White Benis, and Tim Z. Hernandez, winner of the 2006 American Book Award. I'm also thrilled that many people special to me are making the weeknight trip into the Mission, and will meet one another for the first time.

Event details can be found on Intersection's website.

You can read what the judges said about "Ms. Yamada's Toaster," the manuscript of stories that won the Jackson Award, here.

San Francisco Intersection for the Arts Jackson Award

2008-11-13T17:43:00.000-08:00

I'm honored to share the news that part of my collection of stories set in Japan (Ms. Yamada's Toaster) has won the 2008 Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation. The winner in poetry is the fantastic Allison Benis White.

The judge's review of MYT:

"The three short stories that comprise Kelly Luce's fiction manuscript, "Ms. Yamada's Toaster," are engaging feats of imagination and awakening. In the collection's title story, divinity becomes as accessible as a toasted piece of bread. "Cram Island" takes karaoke to a place beyond song while the last and longest story, "Rooey," maps intricate social and emotional terrain. Each narrative effectively challenges commonly held beliefs and raises important questions about the multi-layered relationship between life and death. As if "working a jigsaw puzzle in the dark," Luce masterfully threads ordinariness through a focused lens, be it a street, an alley, or a beer bottle, with captivating results. A fusion of magic and reality dramatically expands the possibilities of our human existence. These stories do not end with their last sentences but rather they are a shore from which the reader sets sail on a journey of transformation. And it is truly "a marvel for anyone who care(s) to look.'"

The award reading will be held Nov. 18 at 7pm at Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia Street in San Francisco. Free wine!

Yes We Did!

2008-11-05T10:42:00.001-08:00

Igneous (Without Intrusions) is Bliss

2008-10-22T12:05:00.000-07:00

"There are two places I love: Africa and Wyoming," said Ernest Hemingway, who finished "A Farewell to Arms" (my favorite of his novels) in a cabin 8300 feet up in the Bighorn Mountains. 72 years later, during my summer tenure as a housekeeper at Spear-o-Wigwam Ranch, I cleaned that cabin daily. I had no idea if I'd even pursue writing seriously at that time, no idea what a writing life might look like. But that summer--my first out west after a lifetime of flatland living--did change pretty much everything that came after.

Now I live in my little cabin in the woods, and I do have a sense of the writing life, which of course is more or less like any other kind of life: day job, relationships, bills, car trouble. Which is why I'm psyched to be spending the next week back in Wyoming, a place that's always been a little too out of the way to conveniently return to. Specifically, I will be at Devils Tower National Monument (the country's first national monument!), as the park's writer-in-residence.

I'm looking forward to a solid block of uninterrupted writing time, as well as the chance to explore the terrain. Geologically, Devils Tower is pretty cool--the tower itself is a monolithic igneous intrusion, also known as a volcanic neck. The best part is that the formation is still a mystery: some say lava pushed up the rock but never surfaced itself; others think the tower is all that's left of a huge explosive volcano. Somehow it seems fitting to write in such a place: the formation of a story, like the formation of the tower, is a mysterious process about which a little ignorance is probably a good thing.

I'll fly into Rapid City and rent a car; I considered parachuting in and landing on the tower, but it might be too chilly this time of year, plus, this way I can drive over and visit Spear-o. And delight not only in the indulgence of nostalgia, but the lack of any bed-making or toilet-scrubbing responsibilities.

"Ms. Yamada’s Toaster" Mini-book

2008-10-10T12:26:00.000-07:00

It’s here! Thanks to the hard work of the folks at the University of Tampa Press (Editor Richard Mathews in particular), my short story, “Ms. Yamada’s Toaster,” is now available in book form. The book features cover and interior art by Michigan-based artist Roberta Ann Busard, who created black and white line drawings specifically for the story, and whose gorgeous cover piece, “Petal,” is available (along with other work) here.

UT Press has set the price at $6 a copy. If you want one for yourself, let me know!

Litquake Reading and Joseph Henry Jackson Award

2008-09-29T16:34:00.000-07:00

This year, I’ll be participating in Litquake, SF’s big annual literary festival. I’ll be doing a short reading (Kristin Kearns is reading too!) at Opium’s event at the Elbo Room on Lit Crawl night, Saturday, October 11 (schedule and details here). I might even have a special something to give out to friends that night, as the University of Tampa Press is putting out a mini-book of my story, “Ms. Yamada’s Toaster." Once I have the final proofs of the mini-book I’ll give more details on that project, and the awesome artist who’s contributing the cover and interior art.

I also got the wonderful news this weekend that my manuscript containing three short stories ("Cram Island," "Rooey," and "Ms. Yamada's Toaster") won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, an award from the San Francisco Foundation and Intersection for the Arts.

KMF Fun Run & Walk: October 25 in Lake Villa, IL

2008-09-25T14:58:00.000-07:00

Attention all runners, walkers, and funners in the Chicagoland area! Next month, on October 25, the Katie Memorial Foundation will be holding its first Fun Run & Walk (details here). The goal of the event is “to have fun and to tell you about what KMF is doing and what we plan to do in the coming year.” If you can’t make it to the run, consider making a donation to the foundation—KMF is just in its first year and already doing great stuff, including giving small grants to educators, so it’s an event that definitely merits your support.

The Story of my Dreams

2008-09-08T12:56:00.000-07:00

I have writing dreams. In these dreams, I am scribbling or typing a fascinating story and though it's a story I don't know, the words still pour forth. It’s like I’m channeling a master storyteller. When I wake up from a writing dream I grab around in the dark for the nearest pen and writing surface, convinced I’ve dreamed a tale that out-plots The English Patient.

For instance, I have a fragment of a microwave popcorn bag with the following scrawled in Sharpie:

“House with doors in floors, trapped in cube but she must go DOWN to go up—puzzle!!!” Below this is the word “SOLIPSISTIC.”

A frantic tornado underlines DOWN. I had to look up “solipsistic” when I re-awoke later that morning. (Solipsism is the theory that only the self exists; it can also refer to extreme self-absorption. Hmm…)

I don’t hear the individual words as I’m dream writing. What I do hear is their rhythm, the rise and fall of their pitch across the page, maybe a sixteen-bar cadence, for example, that pauses for a minor third semicolon and then slams home the tonic chord with a big fat period.

Sometimes the story’s lost before my eyes can open all the way, and I’m left with one or two tantalizing lines:

“Once a week before Christmas he stopped outside Sheboygan to hear the one about a dead fish from a guy named Mike.”

or:

(Old man’s voice) “I guess out here, bein’ lost’s about the same as bein’ someplace.”

or:

“I lived in Tokyo then, and so did the girl.” (Don’t steal this; I’ve got plans for it.)

I wonder just what’s going on here. If I can recall the last line I “wrote” before waking, does that mean that I’m really composing an entire story, but losing most of it to my subconscious? Or are my neurons just randomly firing away as I coast through REMland, and instead of visualizing a regular, senseless dream scene, I’m writing it?

Does this happen to you, too?

Some final dream-food for thought, from the back of a USPS receipt for (how appropriate) story submissions:

“Sometimes you stop and think, maybe it won’t be okay. And I could tell by the way he was holding that underwear that maybe it really wouldn’t be, and I realized how much work had to be done.”

How much work indeed.

New Story Online

2008-08-10T09:52:00.000-07:00

A new story from the Japan collection, "Cram Island," is now online, in Issue 3 of Kartika Review.

The magazine's editor, Sunny Woan, posted an editorial about the issue on his blog, and warmed my cockles with some kind words. I'm glad "Cram Island" found its home in Kartika.

D-Day

2008-07-28T19:41:00.000-07:00

It’s been like ripping off a Band-Aid: Friday, I found out Demolition Day was set for Monday. Saturday, I hosted fifteen people for games and a BBQ. Sunday morning, I woke up, jiggled one or two folks out of the hammock and off the deck, and started packing up my worldly possessions. By Sunday night, thanks to lots of help from Sky “The Ladder” Kelsey, the Caboose was totally empty and my new digs were mostly set up. And now it’s Monday, D-Day.

I drove up this morning, thinking I’d spend some time watching the demolition guys at work, satisfy my scientific curiosity about just what the heck was living under there. When I arrived around 11, I think a part of me expected the cottage to be standing there untouched, the demo crews called off for one reason or another. But they were there, working—hard.

It was a shock to see my home--and workplace--of three years in this state, with a team of strangers hacking it up. But what really got me was the noise. It was just so... violent. Apparently they had a tough time tearing it down; it was extremely well-built, lots of long nails and solid construction. It’s a bummer that such a good building had to go to waste in order to appease the Permit Gods.

I left a couple minutes after I arrived. This evening I ventured back up, and thankfully, the job was finished.

It made me smile to see this old fella leaning against the fence.

And for all of you who were wondering, there were piles and piles of evidence underneath the shower, all pointing to Crafty being…

A family of rats.

A Tiny Home of My Tiny Own

2008-07-22T09:39:00.000-07:00

For the next couple months, I will be semi-homeless, living in what we here at CP’s call “the gypsy house,” an Airstream trailer from 1975.

Yes, my beloved Caboose is being knocked down, demolished, all tore up. For now, it still stands:

But the foundation’s not up to par, among other things, so we’ll be starting from scratch to build a “tiny home,” a supersmall dwelling with an efficient, creative use of space that will run on solar energy and be ever so green. I’m hoping we build a nifty bookstair to house my tomes.

The plans for the house will be loosely based on these, from Tumbleweed Houses (check out the “Tarleton,” 117 sq. feet)

These mini-houses have been around since the 60’s, but are rapidly gaining popularity as housing and energy costs increase. They can house guests, grown-up kids returning to an empty nest (let’s face it, the second you’re out the door, your childhood room was turned into a home gym/sewing studio/Beanie Baby graveyard) or retired folks looking to be close (but not too close) to their kids and grandkids. I’m excited by the popularity of these houses, because I’ve always felt that, on the whole as a culture, we are over-obsessed with independence and self-sufficiency. Not that there’s anything wrong with those things, to a point. But when everyone needs to have their own car, own piece of property with a mile-long driveway and a gate to keep out the riff-raff, and kids no longer live close enough to drop by and play together, and entire towns give up on sidewalks…well, you get the idea. It's kind of nice to think that we can live cooperatively and independently. Like in those halcyon dormitory days...

The demo may happen as early as next week. I'm having a BBQ and game night up here on Saturday, so that will double as a farewell party for my home of the past three years. Most of all, I will miss this gorgeous redwood crosshatch window, where my writing desk sits. There is a tinychance we can salvage it, maybe even incorporate it into the tinyhome.

Not to get totally depressing, but I'm debating whether or not to be present when the wreckers come. Probably I will, at least for a little while. We'll see if it feels like a wrecking ball to the heart. But hey, I won't be alone in losing an abode...

A Dose of Awesome

2008-07-06T17:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes awesome short stories make it online, and I’m collecting them here. None are more than eight pages, and they all kick ass, and provide more substantial stimulation than, say, stuffonmycat.

If you've got a favorite story that's available on the net, leave a comment and I'll add it to the list. Otherwise, I invite you to chomp down on any one of these:

“Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff. The title tells us what will happen to grumpy Anders, who’s waiting in line at the bank. What’s mind-blowing is the description of his final moments.

"The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket" by Yasunari Kawabata. A group of children gather with homemade lanterns to hunt bugs. It's a short-short. Read it slowly.

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. A classic. What will happen to the “winner” of this small-town lottery?

"All Summer in a Day" by Ray Bradbury. On Venus, kids get ready for the sun, which only comes out one hour every seven years. (Very short)

“A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” by Carson McCullers. A short, simple meditation on love.

“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez. Another classic. Just who is this filthy old guy, anyway?

“Brisket” by Stuart Dybek. A down-on-his-luck guy buys a sandwich.

“The Second Bakery Attack” by Haruki Murakami. A newlywed couple is overcome by a supernatural hunger. How a small event that happened years ago can linger, subtly…

“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway. Two waiters and an old man. Hemingway uses such simple language that it’s tempting to skim over his descriptions. Read the opening paragraph out loud, though, and it’s something like a mantra.

"Winter Dreams" by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"Trilobites" by B. D'J Pancake.

"There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury.

Katie

2008-06-23T00:17:00.000-07:00

We lost Katie Evans a year ago today. I want to mention her here because if this blog is about writing, and art, and life, it is inevitably about grace, and no one exemplifies this trait more than Katie. Sure, she had the credentials of generosity—Peace Corps volunteer, M.A. in Public Health, AIDS and Family Violence Outreach Project Manager in Romania—but it was her spirit that most impresses.

I got to know Katie all at once. I first met her and John in Miami, at the orientation party for FIU’s creative writing program. Afterwards I emailed my mom: "There seem to be at least two normal people here. John went to NU too—though we never met there—and Katie grew up near Chicago, which I could tell right away. Not just her accent but her warmth and comfort in her own skin—that down to earth attitude that manages to accept whatever might happen yet still laugh about it.”

I say I got to know Katie all at once because a week after our brief party meeting, she and John invited me to sort of, well, move in to their apartment. Hurricane Ivan was on its way, and they invited me and another newly arrived grad student to hole up with them while the storm passed overnight. I was grateful to have company instead of sitting in my still unfurnished apartment, alone.

During those three LONG days, Katie remained positive. She always found something to laugh about—the TV newscasters trying to report in a downpour, the flying coconut warnings, her and John’s often-conflicting taste in music. She made me feel, though I knew it couldn’t possibly be true, that by camping out in their spare bedroom and making a mess in their new apartment, I was the one doing them a favor.

If you’re reading this and you’d haven’t in some way been touched by Katie, it’s only because she hadn’t got to you yet. You can read more about her and her life here:
Katie Memorial Foundation
How to Like It (John's Blog)

Writing Camp

2008-06-22T18:13:00.000-07:00

The conference was a blast. I felt fantastic the whole week, and busier than I’ve been in a long time. In an email I told a friend: Here, I think more clearly; I’m funnier, its easier to find the right word; I’m stimulated, I laugh, I am blown away over and over by peoples’ diversity and their similarity; I am constantly impressed, and heartened, and happy.

It was an intense week of learning and drinking and talking and drinking and sharing (and...more drinking). The Celtics won. I got five new best friends, and thanks to Facebook I’ll be able to send them virtual cocktails and smack them with sheep. It was just like good ol' Camp Caribou.

Here, in no particular order, are a few of the big ideas on my mind in the aftermath:

The writing (sub)conscious. In class, some folks liked to ask (and others liked to complain about them) questions like, “How do I structure a story?” or “How do I choose a point of view?” Alex Chee got to the bottom of these unanswerables by talking about standards, and the idea that you’re only as good as your own. Immersing in good writing—through reading, writing, exercises, classes, self-examination—serves to elevate your consciousness and allow you to write from a better place. Good writing isn’t about knowing “how;” it’s about sharpening your instincts and then writing some more.

Timing: Writing is an art, but publishing is a business.

We writers are hungry for recognition, and it’s always easy to find someone who’s both younger than you and more accomplished. Yet throughout the conference I kept hearing stories of success too soon. We all want the next thing—a certain publication, an agent, a book deal—but just because you can take that next step doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

Case in point: Alex Chee told us that he got an agent based on the first hundred pages of his (awesome) first novel, Edinburgh. Woo! Party time, right? But he hadn’t yet written the rest of the book. Based on those early pages, the agent developed an expectation for the ending, and when Alex turned in a different book than she'd imagined, the agent was disappointed. And no one wants the person selling their book to be anything less than in love with it. So his advice was to keep that query to yourself until you have a finished manuscript.

Roya Hakakian told us that she got a lot less for her upcoming book than it was worth because she sold it before finishing her research. This included extensive travel and countless interviews—some with people who took years to come around and tell her what they knew.

How are we to know when it’s no longer too soon, when it’s just soon enough? According to Roya, it’s when you are a master of your material, when, as she put it, you are person CNN is going to call if they need an expert. The talk she gave referred to non-fiction but I think the same principle applies to a novel. It won’t be your best work, and its value won't be clear, until you’re a master of the story, and if it’s not your best, you’re only hurting yourself by putting it out there.

My suitemate asked on the last day of the conference if I’d been inspired to send out more work. I think, if anything, I will submit less, or at least I’ll wait longer between printing that final “perfect” draft and sticking it into an envelope. I’ve got a couple stories that’ve been rejected 50+ times, stories I look at now and think, Oh, I could make this so much better. But even if I did the rewrite and it turned out to be a top-tier story, there would be fifty fewer outlets for it.

Endings. Resist the urge to put a shock Band-Aid on the end of an otherwise good story. The right ending should feel both surprising and inevitable to reader (and, sometimes, to the writer). Put your deaths, accidents, and diseases up front. To my mind, a good ending should be more like a straw breaking a camel’s back, not a piano falling from the sky.

Constraint fosters creativity. As humans we are creatures of habit, and habit is the enemy of creativity. Like the blind man who can identify a person by their smell, obstacles force compensation, creative problem solving, and allow us to consider solutions, or words and phrases, that we otherwise wouldn’t.

Case in point: In 1939 a man named Ernest Vincent Wright wrote an entire novel without using the letter “e.” (A lipogram, for all you word nerds.) Of the experience, he said, “All words used are complete; are correctly spelled and properly used. This has been accomplished through the use of synonyms; and, by so twisting a sentence around as to avoid ambiguity. The book may prove a valuable aid to school children in English composition.”

(I tried this exercise during a 15-minute break. Here’s what I got: That night at Billy’s Pub I had a singular goal: drink a ton. My psychic and I had had a fight--lotto picks, again--and also about which guy from my match.com compatibility list was most willing to put up with that damn rash.)

Wright admits it wasn’t easy. His recommendation for getting through: “keep a bromide preparation handy.”

After such an intense last week, a little bromide doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

Main Street, U.S.A.

2008-06-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

I’m spending the week in Middletown, CT attending the Wesleyan Writers Conference.

I arrived yesterday, on two hours’ sleep, which was partly why it took me so long to figure out why there were so many cars with out-of-state plates on the highway. I finally realized that in a state small enough you could practically reach out and touch both sides, this wasn’t such a strange thing.

This is my first time in New England. It’s an odd feeling, landing in a city where no one is waiting for you. For the first time in awhile, I didn’t rush to turn on my cell phone when the plane landed. The possibilities of that freedom made me a little nervous. I could rent a car; I could ditch the conference completely, go to New York and dance all night; I could hitchhike to Boston and feast on beans and lobster and catch a game at Fenway, and no one would stop me.

In the end, though, I hopped into a taxi and made the $63 trip to Middletown. They put us up in dorms, and since the conference doesn’t officially start until this afternoon, I had the place to myself. My single dorm room is just as spartan as I remember dorm rooms being, though the plasma TV in the lounge and the suite kitchen with a bar-style seating area were swankier than anything I remember from college.

I ventured out into the kind of humidity that can wave even my hair, and took a walk. A fabulous thunderstorm brewed up as I strolled, and the skies opened just as I crested a hill overlooking a baseball field where two Little League teams were singing the National Anthem. The harder it rained, the louder they sang, until they were screaming and jumping in a downpour. The ump called “Play ball!” despite the rain, and I watched an inning of mudball from the shelter of my umbrella.

This morning I took a jog around campus and downtown. The houses here all look like the kind you draw as a kid, pentagons with a chimney sticking out the top. Green, unfenced yards sprawl all around and raise a thirst for fresh lemonade. Look behind any house and you'll likely see an old swingset, the metal kind with plastic swings. Everyone’s got a front porch.

It’s quite a change from Silicon Valley. I have yet to see a BMW or Porsche. Kids play in the street while adults watch—or don’t—from a porch. And people are nice. A construction worker, rather than catcalling as I jogged past, applauded politely.

Middletown is the hometown of Allie Wrubel (what a name!), composer of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” and its city website claims the “widest Main Street in Connecticut.” Hanging across Main Street is what must be the widest banner in Connecticut, advertising the Middletown Cruise and Sock Hop to be held Tuesday night. A SOCK HOP! I don't know what's on the conference schedule that evening, but whatever it is, I'm pretty sure it won't beat out "Sock Hop" on my to-do list.

On Main Street I noticed a delightful business, a store that might exist in San Francisco, albeit with different wares and clientele.

It’s fun, traveling solo, coming to a new place and letting my curiosity lead. Without a companion to share the view, I am more inclined to write about it, to take those silly pictures with my cell phone and send them off. This afternoon I’ll meet my fellow conferencers and though I won't be alone anymore, I'll still be on my own. In a way it feels like the first day of college, hanging around an empty dorm, hoping my suitemates will be cool, wondering how we will invent ourselves for each other. John bets this week is going to be like summer camp. That sounds good to me. As long as my fellow campers also want to go to the Sock Hop.

But Who's Driving?

2008-05-21T22:07:00.000-07:00

I’ve lived in these hills for three years and I've written exactly one thing about them--a poem. It's weird, though; I don’t write much poetry. When I do it comes in blasts, wrapped in some powerful emotion—after a couple glasses of wine, or, in the case of that one poem, while driving through the Santa Cruz mountains on a warm night with the music up loud.

Writing—fiction, at least—about a place never happens while I’m in it; there needs to be distance. I'm tempted to come up with an equation to determine just how much, something like d = the number of epiphanies experienced x total time spent there over pi. I’ve written a number of stories set in Japan, but I didn’t start on them until I’d been away a couple years. And only recently have I been able to put together something readable that’s set in my hometown. My journal from the India trip in March is full of notes and observations, moments that, even while experiencing them, I knew I’d write one day. But I can’t begin to make sense of them yet—there’s too much, too close.

I guess the difference I feel between writing poetry and writing fiction is that with fiction, I can control the process, at least a little. I sit down every morning and work on stories, whether I want to or not. I’m always considering story ideas, making notes. But with a poem, I’m out of the driver’s seat, so to speak. For me, poetry is an urge, an idea pushing itself out, taking over my head until I feel I’ve expelled it. That night in the mountains I drove one-handed, scribbling now-illegible phrases onto a piece of junk mail; I pulled over in the middle of nowhere and wrote most of the final draft. In a short story, I may spend months considering a line of dialogue, or a gesture, or why the hell this character grew a tail on her thirtieth birthday. Stephen King says writing a story is like excavating stone—you spot the tip of something and if you work carefully, you can bring it into the world mostly intact. Poetry, though, feels different. Instead of excavating a stone, to me it feels like…passing a stone.

The more I think about it, the more questions I come up with: if poetry is like this and fiction is like this, what does that say about the people who write them? Is there a difference between poets and fictionists themselves? There are plenty of people, of course, who do both, and do them well. But how do they divvy the inspiration? Or do ideas emerge into consciousness as proto-poems or proto-stories, the way babies are born male or female?

Either way, I'll keep my thumb out for any muses willing to pick up hitchhikers.

Another Night Drive

I’m winding into Highway 9 at night
coming up on Apple Jack’s, the only neon in these redwoods

Two figures slouched at the bar
backs to a pool table,

Pale blue streetlamp on the right,
then it’s back to darkness.

Paul Simon is singing about a chip in time
It’s one of those numbers
with a beat you could pick up, watch it kick,
then set down and it’d roll
all the way across the Pacific.

And I can’t tell
if the road is a vacuum,
pulling me ahead,
or if it’s just the music
propelling me forward.
All I know is that I can’t take credit for the motion,
I’m along for the ride,
a passenger in my body,
a South African sangoma channeling
her all-knowing ancestor.
She speaks in an obtuse language of dreams
that I record only crudely
upon waking.

~

Sometimes my car
going too fast around a curve
is the only place I feel safe.
Windows up. Top down.
The sky winks its approval.

There is something I’m supposed to see,
or maybe I’ve just always felt this way—
on the verge of discovery.

Drums seep into the creased leather seats
bound up the dashboard,
stream over the windshield,
and leave a humming trail of fading tail lights.

On those dark hill roads,
warm nights mean shooting stars.

Headlights bounce off the pavement,
a camera freezing creatures in flight.
But don’t be fooled—
Bats, moths, even wayward leaves play that game.

When the genuine article appears,
it’s unmistakable,
hot ink slipping across the blackness.

~

It’s crazy:
Sliced open, the sky never scars
but show me a meteor and I’ll jump
every time

and sometimes I make a sound
that’s a little too loud, for me.

It can be heard even over the radio,
a beat I couldn’t stop with a bulldozer

as I begin to sing,
wondering

how the absence of anything
can weigh so much.

("Another Night Drive" originally appeared in print in The Cafe Review's Spring 2007 issue. Thanks to John to for all his help with it!)

Frosty Brews and Frosty Basil: It’s SPRING!

2008-04-24T10:38:00.000-07:00

Spring is a wondrous time of growth, rebirth, and other stuff. It's the season we all look forward to. For some, it’s about hope: will this be the Cubbies’ year? For my friend Jeff in Chicago, it’s all about “Sundress Day,” when girls take advantage of that first warm, sunny afternoon after a long winter.

This is my third spring here at Crazy Pete’s, and I’ve come to anticipate two post-winter events more than any others: the planting of our garden, and the opening of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

The boardwalk is the kind of place I dreamed about as a kid, a carnival for the senses: bulbs twinkling on a warm night, the occasionally roar of a crashing wave over cheesy rock music, saltwater air on the skin, saltwater taffy on the tongue. It's got an old-fashioned appeal, right down to the prices (sort of): seven bucks will get you a 24 oz. Coors and the world’s largest donut.

If you’re still hungry there are delightful options in the boardwalk's two culinary groups, Food on a Stick, and Deep-Fried Things That Shouldn’t Be. In the first category you’ve got your corn dogs, hot dogs, cheese (yes, on a stick) and artichokes. In the second you’ll find classics like Twinkies and Oreos, plus more questionable items like the strawberry goo and chocolate-chip soft serve wrapped in a flour tortilla and then dipped in the fryer. (If only it was then wrapped in a blueberry pancake and served in a commemorative Taco Town tote…)

The boardwalk also has some great rides, including the Looff carousel, built in 1911, and the Giant Dipper, a wooden coaster built in 1924. The carousel features a ring dispenser where, as you fly past, you can reach out and grab a ring (or two or three with real agility—use both hands) and try to fling it into the clown’s mouth. Nowadays the rings are made of steel, but it used to be that they were iron, with a rare brass one thrown in the mix. If you got a brass one you’d get a prize—usually a free spin on the carousel. (Hence the saying, “Grab the brass ring.”)

So--spring. Two weeks ago, it was in full swing. Sky and I were at the boardwalk, splashing down the Logger's Revenge to keep cool, and drinking frosty beers. The garden at Crazy Pete’s had been planted:

That’s the squash patch in the back, and the main garden next to the deck, where we’re growing tomatoes, corn, peas, beans, lettuce, and carrots. Up on the deck is my basil. Four sweet pots of it. YES, it is wearing a Russian scarf. You see, that one day two weeks ago when we walked around in bathing suits in Santa Cruz, it was so hot up here that the plants got sunburned. Some died. It was Sundress Day, dammit. It was spring.

We made a basil cabana from cheesecloth, and when that wasn’t protection enough from the April sunshine, I draped the herbs with my scarf.

However, spring is notoriously fickle, and recently, the scarf’s been more useful as shelter from the wind and freezing temperatures.

"Freezing?!" you scoff. "I mean, maybe you had a cold spell, but c'mon--you live in California. It's late April. Get real."

But that, right there, is ice. I watered this morning and a few minutes later, an ice crystal had formed--right on this leaf’s sunburn.

Little Pink Paperclips

2008-03-17T21:57:00.000-07:00

For no one but me.

These things have been with me since college. I think I stole the original box from a work-study job. New, it contained every color in the paperclip rainbow: cherry, orange, barfgreen, Apple Pucker, ocean, Wildcat purple, black (there was only one of these, very ominous), dumb gray, and, yes--lawn flamingo pink.

When my stapler's been jammed or out of staples (about eleven months out of the year) I've used the clips from this box to bind my submissions. Only I've put off using these particular ones; I dunno, after working for months to perfect a story, it just seems wrong to send it off for judgment bound by a clip the color of anti-diarrhea medicine.

I picture the guys at the Indiana Review deciding whether to publish my piece, reading it again and again, each time removing and retaching that pink piece of metal. Then at the last moment, the editor looks at the paperclip, is reminded of Pepto-Bismol and the accompanying distress, and rejects me.

I recently came across an excellent Canadian lit mag, The Malahat Review, whose submission guidelines include the following missive:

"No submission should be stapled or held together with one or more paperclips."

Loosely translated from the Canadian, this means, "do not bind submissions." Still, though--one or more? It's enough to make a girl send a manuscript bound completely shut, one pink clip on each side.

The Littlest Rejection

2008-02-04T23:35:00.001-08:00

I have amassed a colorful and papery amount of rejection slips, and I save every one (if you have ideas about how to put them to use, let me know--I'd like to do something other than wallpaper the bathroom). And, yes, occasionally I'll post about one. Like this:

Measuring in at 2” x 1.25” this notelet from the Seattle Review is the teensy-weensiest of all rejection slips. The edges are ragged, too, as if it were actually ripped from a sheet, rather than chopped up with scissors in a civilized manner. I wonder if tSR has fallen on hard times—just last year, their notes were printed on an entire quarter sheet of paper--that's a 300% shrinkage we're seeing here.

You know, I think editors should just cut impersonal rejection letters completely and invest in "you-suck" stamps--postage stamp rejections that can be stuck to writers' empty self-addressed enveloped and mailed back to them. Saves the mags paper and ink, save writers forty-one cents.

Crafty

2007-12-19T11:25:00.000-08:00

I don’t live alone, exactly. There is a big fat wood rat under my house. This isn’t your typical city rat, who comes in at night and nibbles your cantaloupes. This rat is busy. I imagine he is constructing an underhouse critter fun zone, with slides and foam block pits, and a mini kegerator. He works mainly between the hours of midnight and 4am, scraping, rattling, chomping, tapping, and scampering. I have a little fan next to my bed I can turn on to drown him out while I sleep. Because he is so diligent, and because he has evaded capture for years (and because he seems inexplicably Irish), we have named him Crafty McRatterson. He’s been here ever since anyone can remember. In fact, there’s a good chance that Crafty may be more than one rat, more of a persona than a singular being, like the Dread Pirate Roberts. One time I came home to discover a hole chewed through the shower wall. Crafty hadn’t come inside, though; I guess the act of perforation itself was enough...or maybe he was intimidated by how clean my shower was (ha ha). Since then Crafty and I have lived fairly peaceably. He stays out of my cantaloupe and I stay out of his construction zone. Oh, except for that one time when my internet was out and we couldn’t figure out why…

No More Cowbell

2007-12-19T10:12:00.000-08:00

For awhile I didn't set up this blog because I didn't have a name for it. Here are some titles that didn't make the cut, and why:

I Got A Rash, Man--surprisingly, still available.
In the Parlance of Our Times--I still like this one. Might be good for a linguist.
Luce Lips Sink Ships--suggested by ZYZZYVA editor Howard Junker. For once, I got to reject him.
Pocketful of Mumbles--from "The Boxer," by Simon & Garfunkel. Sounds good in the song but makes for an emo blog title.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo--didn't want to have to explain this to my grandma.
Thought I’d Something More To Say--a nod to Pink Floyd, but doesn't really make sense as a title unless I never post.
Luce in the Caboose--vaguely pornographic.
Gettin' Luce with Kelly--ditto, plus it sounds like an exercise video.
The Pompitous of Love--invoking pompitouses of any kind should remain the sole province of Steve Miller.
More Cowbell--obviously, taken.