March 6, 2009
Poetry
Braided, spun, coiled in ritual
Silk, Yucca, Willow, Wool
Strand by strand
Earth-stained fingers and fibers bind
Pattern, art, story, function
Strand by strand
Vessels to carry and celebrate
Swaddled newborns, elders’ tales
Strand by strand
Shouts, tears, and laughter snagged
Woven moments
Strand by strand
September 5, 2008
I settled myself amidst the dirt and dust that clings to the hard wood floors of the living room like a fleas to a dog despite my best efforts at cleaning (which I must admit has led to overall less sweeping and mopping thus fortifying the layers of filth). I crossed my legs, placed a notebook and pen on the floor beside me, and used the palms of my hands to inch myself forward. The order I had tried to keep in the bookshelves – alphabetical by genre – had deteriorated to such a point that any hope of finding a book quickly was lost. Between the merging marriage brings and the callousness that develops after moving seven times in three and half years, my obsessive-compulsive tendencies surrounding such matters have eased. I allowed myself a few more seconds to lament the loss of order, then moved on to more enjoyable pursuits.
First came James Joyce’s Dubliner’s, then What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver, followed by Hemingway’s In Our Time. The rest of the books tumbled from the shelves onto my unsteady piles with ease. When I finished, I sat in a sea of paperbacks – broken bindings stacked precariously upon one another, uneven colored tags flagging stories I’d previously found exceptional or that I’d been assigned to read at some point or another in my undergraduate years. I savored my piles, flipping through the tables of contents in anthologies, reading notes I’d written in the margins at a time when making such annotations made me feel smarter (and to be honest, those notes proved to be time savers while writing many a paper for Kenyon’s renowned English department faculty to scrutinize). And so, I passed several hours reacquainting myself with the authors who had introduced me to the remarkable craft of writing short stories.
You see, I realized that I was getting back into writing a few steps ahead of myself. While writing regularly on the blog is a good, habit-forming practice and keeps the dust off my fingers – I was a bit presumptuous in thinking the prose would start flowing into beautiful story lines rich with character development when I brought up a blank Word screen. So I’ve decided to start at the beginning. This means reading the stories written by my role-models: James Baldwin, Rick Bass, Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, D.H. Lawrence, Joyce Carol Oats, Flannery O’Connor, Annie Proulx, and John Updike – to name a dozen.
Amid the reading, there will still be writing. After all, I have an entire collection of short stories swimming in my head; characters whose personas have been simmering for years, plot-lines that are begining to take shape. I have started to put some of it on paper – okay, not paper per say, but the Word documents have been opened and saved to a folder on my hard drive that says “Writing,” as well as a memory stick for safe keeping. Flipping through the stories I aspire to as a writer just gives me that much more motivation to slog on. Oh what fun the reading process of writing can be!
To end, I’ll leave you with my top four writing inspirations- yes, four because I cannot figure out which one I would not include to make a tidy three and I cannot decide of a fifth that I should like to add. The following all concisely tell of a fleeting moment in life which captures basic human emotions and relations at their finest – the definition of what I think a short story should be:
(I may not have my bookshelves organized these days but I can still alphabetize with the best of them!)
Mountain Town Rambles 