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“Kamikaze.” Reading at The Blue Monk in Portland, OR, for the Ampersand West Coast Invasion! 18 September 2012. (Photos by Jennifer Snoek-Brown.)
To read my story from Ampersand Review, “Horror Vacui,” click here.
To read the story I read at the event, “Kamikaze,” go to Red Fez.
This is an old poem. I’m still not happy with it. In retyping it here, I’ve made some small changes. Always tinkering.
Sunrise. A cold wind moves only
the surface of this pond. Down in that quiet, muddy mass,
small fish doze while above, a blue heron
stalks through the waters, more tai chi than hunting. Two old men
wade into the reedy far end, cast
lures, stand against the sky. I have come to this small pier
to write a poem. This heron knows
our purposes — mine, the old men’s — looks between the flashing
lines and my wooden rails in the weeds.
The heron unfurls his gray head like a new bamboo leaf,
leans toward the men, then
collapses his tube of a neck like a hook, his black beak low
near the water, as though to explain that
the fish are small and not worth catching. But I have come for
the small. And there’s always the sunrise.
Today, my wife and I went “day camping” out at the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia. We watched the freighters and barges huff upstream while sport boats and jet skis zipped around tugs. But in between vessels the air and water were calm, the sky a cool blue and filled with migrating geese. At one point a heron soared in low over the lapping wake near the bank, but a dog chasing a tennis ball surprised it and it lifted at the moment it touched water, wheeled away and flew to the treeline on the opposite bank.
That heron reminded me of this poem, which I wrote several years ago in grad school and never did anything with. It still has problems, but I still enjoy the memory it.
Are you a writer? A reader? A film buff? A library lover? A nerd?
A little naughty? 😉
Help Reel Librarians celebrate its one-year anniversary by checking out the site this weekend and next week! It’s a couple thousand hits shy of 20k for its first year, and Jennifer Snoek-Brown (yes, that’s my wife) would love to crack that ceiling before the anniversary!
Also, the site is awesome, and you’ll love the posts and character analyses and movie lists and resources there. Seriously.
Have fun! 🙂
I don’t know what the deal is with Sept. 12. Maybe, after a national day of mourning and remembrance, we all feel the need to unwind with written art. Which sounds great to me.
Anyway, in addition to my own new story that turned up online yesterday, several of my friends published or announced stories or poems (or hybrids) online yesterday as well. So, as I do from time to time, I thought I’d share a long list of the awesomeness that has appeared in print in the last week or so:
Got any other announcements we all should know about? Feel free to share them in the comments!
I am so, SO happy to share my story “Lightning My Pilot” with you now that it’s up at Bartleby Snopes today. It’s easily the happiest, most pleasant story I’ve ever written. Like, my mom loves this story. It’s that pleasant. But I love it, too — it’s definitely up on my top five list right now — so don’t think it’s all sunshine and roses. In fact, it’s all clouds and brooding.
It’s complicated.
Which is why I love it.
The other reason I’m so thrilled to share this publication with you is that it puts me in the company of so many great writers who’ve published in Bartleby Snopes, especially the excellent Sarah Rose Etter, whose beautiful story “Koala Tide” appeared here, and Ethel Rohan, whose awesome “A Family Outing” is also here. I can’t tell you how honored I am to be in the same digital pages as these two amazing writers, easily two of my favorite three writers this year.
But this is about my story. “Lightning My Pilot.” Out on Bartleby Snopes today. Go read it. And I sincerely hope you enjoy it as much as I do. 🙂
Still continuing my Texas stories series. This time I’m posting from a story that isn’t available online, so you’ll just have to track down a copy of Red Wheelbarrow from 2008 and look for “Bathe in the Doggone Sin.” (Or email me and beg me to send you the file.)
It was just a few days past Valentine’s when I found the dogs. This was when the weather dropped so fast the ground nearly froze, and Janis sent me under my back deck to find any firewood I hadn’t let rot. I cracked my knee on a buried rock, and that’s when I first saw the dogs, huddled up under the old pine steps near the side of the house.
[…]
Around the beginning of spring, I realized they’d blended in with the leaves under my house, they’d taken wet mulchy tones on their undersides and this dusty strip of caliche from my foundation ran down their backs. That’s when I finally named them, just to tell them apart. The little one I guessed the male and named him Gib after this old bulldog of a math teacher I had in high school. The bigger dog, the bitch, I named Lorna. I didn’t have much reason at the time, except maybe the raw auburn earthiness I’ve always heard in that name. But now I think I was recalling Lorna with the nine toes.
I was driving a two-hour commute to teach a college class. I listened to the news on the radio. At one point I had to pull over on the side of the road just to catch my breath. Later, I passed others who had done the same. When I got to school, I spent half an hour trying to figure out how to break the news to my students, because none of them had heard yet. I canceled the day’s lessons. I told them they could leave to call family or friends if they needed to, or they could stay and talk about how they were feeling. I asked them to try and not react with anger, because it was almost certainly anger that caused the attacks in the first place. Eleven years later, I am still asking people to remember that.
Today is a twofer! Though this publication isn’t exactly new: it’s “Horror Vacui,” which originally appeared in the online supplement to Vol. 6 of Ampersand Review last year. Ampersand, who is always awesome, went through a massive redesign of their website this year, and in the process a lot of their work disappeared from the Internet, so they’ve been re-posting stories from the archives. Today, my story is back online!
Word of warning, though: it’s about a man obsessed with his bowel movements and what’s in his septic tank. So, you know, I wouldn’t recommend reading it over, say, chocolate pudding.
I would, however, recommend reading it, and, of course, everything else in Ampersand Review. 🙂
Gear up, folks! Today, I have a new story online, my flash piece “The Things We Said We Never Heard” over at the excellent WhiskeyPaper. (The editors’ enthusiastic acceptance email was AWESOME. They even wished me a “happy publication day” when they sent me the link this morning. I think that just became my new favorite holiday! Thanks a million, Loran Smith and Leesa Cross-Smith!)
But wait, I’m not done yet! Stay tuned next weekend(ish), when I’ll have another new story up online, and then, on Sept. 18, I’m reading on stage at the Blue Monk in Portland.
And in the meantime: write on!
Long-time readers: by now, you should know the drill. Here’s a photo.
Below there’s a draft of something. And then I explain it all.
Outside, on the driveway, the dozen black garbage bags stacked up against the siding are beginning to stink. Inside, the bleach is reacting with the glue in the particle board and my head is swimming. The beer is warm. The drawer is still missing. I wonder if she kept everything that was in it — the kitchen shears, the rusted churchkey, the ball of twine, the ladle, the steak knife, the egg timer. I doubt it. She hadn’t said she wanted any of that. She just wanted the drawer. Not even that, really, because what the hell do you do with a drawer? She didn’t want to take anything from me. What she really wanted was to leave me with something. This hole. Every time I walk in the kitchen, reach for a beer or fill a glass at the sink, there’s the hole. Here I am, it says. This is what I did to you. But it’s okay. I know she kept the drawer. Even if she trashed everything that’s in it, she kept the drawer. Maybe it’s not in her kitchen, maybe it’s in her garage, or her basement. Somewhere she rarely goes. But she goes there, once in a while, and when she pulls the string on that bare lightbulb, there it is, white and tilting on the shelf beside the dryer. There he is, it says. This is what he gave you.
I spotted this photo in a hallway at Pacific Northwest College of Art, where I started teaching this week. I love student gallery space — the work is so fresh and daring as people try to figure out how they want to express their art — and so I spent a lot of my free time wandering the halls examining paintings, sketches, sculpture, installation pieces, photographs, and so on. There’s a LOT of really fascinating work there, but this photo immediately made me want to write a story.
As a story, this is really pretty flawed. It doesn’t really make sense without the photo, I think. And while I like how short it is, it’s relying too heavily on a cliché situation and overt psychobabble. Still, that hole in the drawers is what draws me to this photo — that’s where the story is — and that demands a kind of brevity and highly imagistic or figurative language, I think. So, whatever this winds up being, that’s the direction it’s headed.
Samuel Snoek-Brown