Archive for the ‘Prose’ Category

Stop looking at me, Swan.

Thursday, January 26, 2012
creep-ass swan

It's thinking about murder RIGHT NOW.

After exhaustive research, I have come to the following conclusion: swans are creep-ass.

I think swans are physically weird. This is a totally personal bias based on me being terrified of geese as a small child. My preschool had a farm right next to it, and geese (and once, a cow) would sometimes escape into the school grounds. Those fuckers were mean and as tall as I was; no way in hell I was gonna get near them. Besides, one bit my teacher, and they don’t even have real teeth, just burning ire. So, I still don’t like long-necked birds of any kind; the way their necks go is creepy. There’s a specific deformity of the finger called the Swan’s Neck.

Other than being physically weird, birds are connected with the souls of the dead, which heads us into questionable territory. Specifically, stories with swans in them tend to take weird, weird turns.

First up: Swan Lake. Swan-obsessed magician makes beautiful girl into swan. Okay, fine. There’s an imprisonment and/or necrophilia metaphor going on there, whatever. (Really: in the ending variation where the princess in condemned to be a swan forever…isn’t that a kind of death?) But the prince? I know he fell in love with the Swan Queen when she turned back into a human. But I think he was a bit of a swan fancier to begin with. Suspicious.

Speaking of swan fanciers, Jove. As in the rehashed Greek Ovid’s Metamorphoses version of Zeus. Now, to begin with, he was a weird dude. He liked to have sex, willing or not, with more or less anything that moved. He had some very weird sex brags (“one time I fucked a pregnant chick so hard she set on fire”; “one time I seduced some hot girl in the form of a cow”). He was like a more heterosexual and less classy version of Jesse Canon from Tominda Adkin’s series Vessel. Anyway, Jove gets his eyes on this girl, Leda. He seduces her (the nice term for “rape”, usually) in the form of a swan, which is weird even by hentai standards. Then apparently they have kids, and some parody of a family life. Family life with birds. Like you do.

leda swan children

Doesn't she look sick of it all?

That brings us to my third piece of Swan Creepass evidence: the tale with many variations known as the Six Swans, the Twelve Brothers, and other titles. It’s about a girl whose brothers are turned into swans for various reasons (Dad wants her to inherit the kingdom; the bros are turned into swans to escape actual death). Her job is to rescue them; the condition is that she must not speak or laugh for seven years, and also make shirts for her brothers out of some odd or unpleasant material (nettles, starwort, depends who you ask). Usually she succeeds, often with the sleeve of one shirt unfinished, so that one brother is left with an arm and a wing for the rest of his life.

I was thinking about this during a workshop about metamorphosis at the Richard Hugo House, and I wrote the following:

 Every Sunday, Laura would go to the shore of the lake to look for her brothers.
The swans at the lake had innate enough trust of her to swin right up, hop out of the water, and eat the chunks of bread she provided them out of a large plastic bag with a twist tie. Sometimes there would be a jogger or a dog and the swans would get spooked and flap out into the vast expanse of water, but most times they’d be bold enough to steal a piece of break right out of her hand.
She bided her time with the nettle shirts. You have to make sure a wild animal really trusts you before trying to wrestle a shirt meant for a human onto it. Besides, making cloth out of dried nettle was hard. The hippies down at the co-op must think she drank more nettle tea than any of several gods. They never said anything, even on weeks when her hands were still red and blotchy with stings. Baking soda was her #2 co-op purchase.
The day came when she had to put the shirts on or give up, be alone forever. The day marked by a red square on her calendar. She took the usual bag of bread and a backpack filled with the nettle shirts. She waited for the swans to come gliding over the water. She scattered bread and opened the sipper to the pack slowly, so as not to startle the birds.
The movement was quick, when she finally dared to do it. Woven nettle held in sweaty fingers, unable to feel the stings any more, a twist of the wrists, up and over the long struggling feathered neck. Wings beating, wind rushing past her face, her eyes, blinding her so that she never saw exactly what happened, if there was some moment that was half feathers and half skin, but in any case she was suddenly holding in her arms Richard, her eldest brother, naked except for the knit shirt made of strung-together dried leaves.
He was gasping for breath with a desperate look in his eyes, muscles under his skin still pulling against her, trying to escape. She released him, tried to not to glance down at his nakedness, and looked into his yees. For a moment her heart dropped; he wasn’t making eye contact and was breathing hard. What if he was still a swan inside his head? What if she’d revived him only to lose him to shock or insanity? She should have brought blankets. She should have brought real clothes. Richard knelt by the edge of the water and threw up noisily. The other swans had scattered.

And so. Swans. The ever-present reminder of death with weird-ass necks.

black swan murder

See? Murder. Told you so.

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An exquisite tidbit.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

This came out of a blind pass-the-paper exercise I did back in my class with David Wagoner. It’s an exercise a lot like exquisite corpse, except more aimed at prose than poetry.

The structure is to write a male character (pass), a female character (pass), a location (pass), an activity (pass), what he says (pass), what she says (pass), what society says (pass), and the moral of the story.

This was my favorite of the bunch:

Robert Pattinson and Sylvia Plath are at a beachfront resort in Hawaii, holding each other, weeping.
“You’re cheating,” he says.
“That’s right. I’m working on my standup routine.”
We all know this is a foolish idea.
Moral: It’s a huge world.

The Lady Gaga/Captain Hook one was pretty good, too, but instead of posting it I’ll leave it up to your imaginations what those two would do together. Post your ideas. I’m morbidly curious.

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Another piece for class

Thursday, February 25, 2010

So, in lieu of me writing something new and provocative for my blog, I’m reposting stuff I’m working on for class. Hah! This is a piece in a very different vein than my last; I had a go at personal essay/memoir writing. I got both the letter and this piece workshopped last Tuesday, and I am pumped to revise. The letter needs to be shorter; it’s really a cover letter, and I’ll repost an updated version. This one, they said, needed to be longer…and possibly a suite of poems. Here it is for now!

***

Twelve Years of Saying Goodbye

Twelve: We’re in Alaska, and share a hotel room. I see the backs of my grandmother’s calves for the first time. They are veiny and look like they’ve been through several wars. “When you’re my age, your feet are blocks of wood,” she tells me.

Thirteen: I am in her living room that smells of camellia blossoms. She pulls her thick wool cardigan aside to show her pacemaker to me. It’s a round alien box, visible under her papery skin.

Fourteen: She is sitting on the grassy hillside on the Marin coast, gazing at cormorants and grebes through her spotting scope. The wind tousles her thick gray hair. “I want you to remember her like this,” my dad tells me. And I do.

Fifteen: She stops driving the year I start. She puts her foot on the gas, not the brake, and rams through her garden fence. She’s done after that.

Sixteen: She likes to go birding still, down by the marsh near her house. She’s starting to forget the names of the birds, though.

Seventeen: It’s the last of the yearly visits to her house. She gives me a hat she’s been knitting, wool, her last knitting project. It’s a little too advanced for me—cable knit. I take it anyway. Even if I never finish it, I figure, it’ll be something we both touched.

Eighteen: My father and brother move her out of her house, the house my father grew up in. I’m secretly glad to be busy with college, unable to help. We visit her in the home and she’s a scaled-down version of herself. Our conversations loop on each other.

Nineteen: I think about sending her some calming poetry on tape. Mary Oliver. I think about sending Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, but I don’t want to break her heart. Or mine. I send nothing. I’m afraid of calling her on the phone.

Twenty: We call her on Christmas. She has no idea it’s Christmas. She has good days and bad days, at this point. Christmas is a bad day.

Twenty-one: My mom calls her on her 91st birthday. “Is it my birthday?” she gasps, excited. “I must be one hundred years old today!”

Twenty-two: I think about sending her poetry again, but she can’t use the tape player any more. And she wouldn’t remember it. So I don’t.

Twenty-three: I realize that I haven’t seen her in years, and had better hurry up. My brother and I visit her. She’s moved from the apartment room to a glorified hospital bed. She is so frail; I do not recognize her at first. We talk. It’s a five-minute conversation but she’s lucid enough. “Don’t wait too long to come again,” she says, earnestly, as we’re leaving. Of course, I do.

Twenty-four:  My dad calls to tell me the story: It’s an early morning. She wakes, goes into cardiac arrest, and realizes that she is dying. She welcomes death. I think to myself, it was a blessing that she woke up in order to die. I wished then that I knew how to grieve now that she was actually dead.

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A Letter.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Turns out that this blog doesn’t just update itself. :)

Here’s something I’m working on for my class, wherein we write everything except poetry or short stories….

***

To whom it may concern:

I write to you today, not to complain per se (because I know that actual complaint is a bit ridiculous in a place like this), but rather to make an amiable suggestion, as a client, since I am after all one of the multitudinous throng whom you serve so tirelessly. In recent years, here on Level Eight, I’ve felt a little—how shall I say it—bored, perhaps, or at least having a level of ennui that was never, I’m sure, intended by The Management. A certain type of boredom is expected in some Levels, for example the Swamp of the Wrathful and Sullen, but certainly not all the way down here. I would imagine that a sense of impending doom, awe, and of course pant-shitting terror would be more far appropriate to the milieu. My drift, Gentlemen, is this: I believe I could manage Level Eight in a far more modern and efficient way than the current staffing.

I do not wish to overstep my bounds as a client; I simply feel the need to share feedback from my customer service experience. When I was assigned to Level Eight, I had the highest hopes that I would be plunged into an eternity of soul-wrenching pain, and indeed when I first experienced the skin-blistering heat of the lakes of burning pitch, I was impressed. My enthusiasm for Level Eight began to wane when it was over six earthly days from my arrival before I got personal attention from the staffing. Even then, the staff member in question merely prodded by buttocks and spleen with a pitchfork that was only slightly rusty, causing me little lasting damage and only a brief moment of fear. This level of service correlates poorly with the heinousness of my earthly crimes. I am personally responsible for the bankruptcy of hundreds, the starving of children, the disbanding of at least a dozen families. I took people who trusted me implicitly and turned them onto their cold, broke asses. Should I not be punished accordingly? Is a slight poke on the bum what The Management thinks is fitting punishment for someone who is responsible for the suicide of three people and the alcoholism of fifteen? Sirs, to be blunt: I was saddened by the current state of the Organization, and I wish desperately for changes to be made.

Firstly, and most importantly, the current scenery needs a major update. To be frank, burning lakes of fire and demons with whips are tacky, totally stuck in the 14th century. Considering the seven centuries of technological advances since then, it’s a wonder no use of modern technology has been made: no napalm, no nuclear radiation, no fiendish ways with hairspray. Perhaps in the era of Dante an effective contra-passo punishment for political corruption might have been being prodded by demons in a burning lake of fire, but in the 21st century? Please. Some kind of literal shitstorm, or possibly a sort of re-living of the most desperate moments of those whom the clients harmed would be more appropriate, don’t you think?

Aside from the actual landscape of the Organization, I’m quite sure that the current staff is being used in a fiendishly inefficient way, if you’ll excuse the pun. From my extensive Human Resources and campaign management experience, I would be able to downsize the staffing needs of the entire Organization by 25%, freeing up essential personnel for client intake services. We could be serving million more every day, if only we could allocate the staffing resources properly. (I suppose “Human Resources” isn’t an entirely accurate term.)

Finally, I feel that the Eighth Level in particular should be restructured to incorporate all of the varieties of fraud relevant in today’s world. Street pimps are in the same ditch as the Henry VIII and Charles Ponzi. Dot-coms and corporate fraud are a whole different kettle of fish than simony and sorcery. This level of disorganization is simply unacceptable, given the long-standing reputation of the Organization. I understand that chaos is an important value to the Organization, but let us make it controlled a chaos, a streamlined chaos, all-in-all a chaotic pit of terror that best serves its ever-widening client base while meeting the Management’s mission and vision. Please consider my offer of restructuring and assistance, as I am wholly your man.

Yours sincerely,

A Concerned Soul

Dear Concerned Soul:

Consider yourself hired.

-MGMT

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Scene vs. Summary

Saturday, January 16, 2010

One of the basic tricks in a writer’s Bag-O-Tricks is knowing when to use scene, and when to use summary. What the crap does that mean? Well, scene is like a movie: the events are happening in real time, you’re watching them, there we go. It may or may not involve direct dialogue. For example:

Elijah squatted down next to her. He moved a lot more smoothly than he felt like he ought to be able to–his  heart was pounding.

“Your house got bombed,” he said.

“I know,” she snapped.

Summary, on the other hand, happens when the implied narrator moves through time more quickly or summarizes events. Sometimes summary comes in the form of exposition. For example:

Nicodemus Tolson, whom Elijah had always known as Nico at school, or Malacode online, would not be the first person you’d peg to be a gang leader. When Elijah met him freshmen year, he looked like a perfectly ordinary, intelligent kid who was the vice president of the Technology Club and who wore suits to school that made him look a little like an Archangel. Over the course of the year, Elijah learned that Nico paid for the suits and most of the luxury in his life with stolen credits, laundered and transferred to an account of one of his online aliases.

I realize that most of Freedomland is scene. I have a habit of writing too much scene when I could be doing creative and interesting things with summary. I think usually scene is more powerful, but I’m increasingly realizing that if everything is scene at more or less the same pace, the prose gets old pretty quick.

When I was writing my NaNoWriMo draft of my next novel, which is called Changeling at this point, I used almost exclusively scene. I was also writing in first person present tense throughout the whole thing, and while there are advantages to first person present tense (sense of immediacy, trendiness), I kind of wanted to throw up in my mouth a little bit after reading over 100+ pages of first person present tense. The novel has multiple viewpoints, which helped, but it was still weird.

I did go to a bunch of fun writers’ workshops at the Richard Hugo House, including one about stretching and compressing narrative time. Then I wrote the following compressed time piece for Changeling:

It was three weeks to the day after I saw my father slap my mother in the kitchen that the two of them sat Cassie and me down in the living room and told us they were getting separating. “Separating,” they said, as if divorce was a dirty word. “You girls and me are going to move out,” Mum informed us casually, as if she were telling us what she’d made for dinner. Moving out, it turns out, meant getting visas and flying across the Atlantic to the Denver International Airport, which is just like the rest of America: large, neon, and full of fat people in a hurry. We got to our new house in January, and it kept on cold and basically shitty until June. We didn’t even get to ski. I had almost stopped hating Colorado over the summer, and even mostly forgiven Mum for ripping us across the ocean, but then it was November, and Cassie disappeared.

See? Mostly summary there, with the wee bitty bit of scene-like dialogue. So much cooler than plain scene after scene after scene.

In case y’all wondered, here are some thoughts that it is both terrifying and gratifying to experience:

  1. “Fuck, I have to change the tense of my novel.”
  2. “Wow, I’m writing some stuff for the new novel that’s way cooler than the one I just spent three damn  years publishing.”
  3. “I will probably use maybe 20% the 150 or so pages of novel I wrote last November.”

In any case! I have a revision party scheduled tomorrow with the estimable HJB, so that will be good.

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