Flashfiction - Two Outs, Seventh Inning

     Another Creative Writing flashfiction(500 words or less) assignment I hope to expand on later. It's not very good, but written as kind of a response to the tenth anniversary of my grandma's death.

      "The neighborhood kids were playing ball again, they weren’t using a tennis ball today. Instead they were using an enormous and heavy softball cousin called a cabbage ball. She smiled and listened to the game. Last summer she used to sit on the porch and cheer them on. The Alley Cats were leading 2-0 over the Bulldogs. She liked to imagine that her grandson in Wichita played with other kids that he knew; and he enjoyed hearing about the neighborhood games, so she tried to remember everything she could about them. Carol just really lacked the energy right now to write out a letter. So she just sat and watched the window instead.

     Jocelyn slapped out a ground-rule double; planting herself firmly on the pizza box that was second base. Now Aaron was up at bat; Amanda threw one of her fastballs following two elevator balls – Strikeout.

     To the players, Carol was just some older lady who liked baseball. She used to have a dog named Sassy, but not anymore, and she let them use her yard as a field, so that was cool. She was sick more often now, from something that had to do with eating too much crab dip.

     Bulldogs at bat, David facing Rich’s pitch. The bat swung around and met the ball for a pretty solid line drive. He reached the first-base Frisbee easily. Sarah Kate scooped up the ball on two hops and threw it to Danny.

     Carol had given Sassy to Amanda’s family since she was too sick to keep a dog. She’d always liked kids; maybe that was part of why she became a librarian. Of course, once the cancer came she had had to give that up, but… So now she didn’t get out much. Folks in town thought of her often; Carol was pretty well-known and liked decently. There was this C.S. Lewis quote from the foreword to The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe; “Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” Sometimes she fixed them some cookies if she felt well enough. They were just store cookies from Dollar General, but they didn’t seem to mind. Hmm, cookies sounded good. She walked into the kitchen and took two out of the package, pulled a glass off the shelf and set about enjoying some milk and cookies. Except she didn’t; because the half-gallon was too heavy to pick up. So she ate one of the cookies dry and left the other for later.

     The kids were engrossed in their game; which was how things ought to be. There were a lot of educational things they were learning without realizing it. And they reminded her to treasure the mundane; cookies unexpectedly, a base hit, a caught fly ball. She was going to die soon, but the kids had their lives ahead: High school, dating, divorces, college, kids, marriage. She wasn’t important to them; they’d forget about her. But maybe someday they’d remember."

Short-Story Critique - How To Become A Writer

      This was an assignment for my Creative Writing course.

     The short story I read this week was written by Lorrie Moore, which I found in Penguin Academics’ Fiction: A Pocket Anthology, but was originally published in her short-story collection Self-Help. The story’s title is “How to Become a Writer”. It was interesting. Most things are, in some way. People tend to often use “interesting” to describe something they don’t know what else to do with, which has always struck me as the wrong usage. Everything has some aspect of interest within it; even if it’s unpleasant or mainly irrelevant to your life in terms of enjoyment or study.

     Why did I enjoy it? First off, because of the subject matter. You enjoy reading about other people enjoying or doing the same types of things you do. It’s part of human nature, somehow. And it kind of seems like there’s no set destination for writers; the journey is long and never-ending at times, but it’s necessary. And people either understand that, or they don’t. The people who get it are rare. Secondly, this story is written in second person. That’s unusual, and so it stood out. Also, the second-person tone really draws the audience in, because it’s a conversation with the reader.

     Another thing that stuck out to me was that it’s really written in the style of a recipe. I read cookbooks for fun, so it was neat to see that style used in fiction. It felt very autobiographical, so you admire the honesty and intensity Moore put into the story, however true(or not) the events were.

     She did a very good job of capturing the essence of college life in a short space; though the setting wasn’t mentioned much, you felt how important it was to the story. (After all, it’s because of Francie’s school projects that her failures of stories are being written.) And the glass breaking while loading the dishwasher was a brilliant touch. It’s the common moments like that which make great writing stand out. Most of Francie’s stories sound atrocious; but I wanted to read them for their bizarre happenings, if nothing else. And they sound hilarious.

     It didn’t exactly have much of a plot, more like a letter of an older Francie writing a letter to her younger self describing what her life will be like, but covered from her high school days to sometime after college. Maybe it’s more of a character study than focused on plot. Anyway, most of anyone’s writing will be far worse than what the writer thinks it is. But this writing journey is kind of like digging for gold; most days you throw out a lot of unneeded rocks, but every once in a while you find a nugget. Those strikes keep us going, keep us panning through the dirt of failed stories that didn’t quite work.

     I hope to be able to play with second-person narration at some point on a later project, perhaps called No, THIS Is the Way You Do That; a humorous collection of play-by-play instructions for everything from making peanut-butter sandwiches to braking on ice skates to doing homework. That project has simmered for a while, with a ways to go before it’s ready to get itself written, but reading this story reinforced the way I’ve planned to write that project. 

Short-Story Critique - "The Green Door"

     Another assignment for Creative Writing, critiquing a short story.

     The short story I chose to critique is “The Green Door”, from a 1968 mass-market paperback called O. Henry’s Short Stories. It was originally placed in Henry’s 1906 short-story collection The Four Million.

     It opens with several paragraphs addressed directly to the reader in a formal second-person conversational tone, presenting a highly unusual scenario of a beckoning adventure, then pointing out that most people would ignore the call to action. Our narrator then continues on for several more paragraphs in defining what a “true and pure adventurer” was, and then begins the story in third-person limited, but going inside our main character’s thoughts and impulses. Our narrator tells us that Rudolf Steiner, music-store piano salesman, was one of these true adventurers, who go out on journeys and quests with no goal in mind other than seeing what will happen.

     Rudolf sets out one night walking with nowhere in particular to go, as he does most nights, and a man handing out a dentist’s business cards gives him one with a message marked upon it: “The Green Door”. Rudolf wonders a bit, then walks by the man again. “The Green Door”.  He flips over some of the discarded cards on the nearby sidewalk. They all feature the dentist. Rudolf enters the nearby apartment building and explores around the top floor, seeing a green door lit almost in a halo. Our adventurer takes this for a sign and knocks upon the door, which is opened by a beautiful and very ill young girl, who immediately faints. Rudolf picks her up and carries her to a couch, noticing the cleanliness and poverty of the apartment. The girl explains that she is out of work due to illness and hasn’t had money to eat in three days, whereupon Rudolf buys groceries for the girl and promises to check on her the next morning. The story implies that they will become a couple. As Rudolf leaves, he notices that every door in the building is painted green. He then asks the man what the “Green Door” cards mean; it turns out they are advertising a play.

     In this way, Henry illustrates in his memorable way that most happenings in life, both good and bad, come about by taking chances and seeking to seize opportunities. Fortune may not always follow the brave, but those who are courageous have a better chance of finding happiness. There is a large element of fate involved with any decision or action we undertake, and coincidence is often the means fate chooses to work through. Adventure should be accepted whenever the chance comes. You get good material to work with writing them down afterward. 

More Maycomb and Mayberry

     One of the poems we had to write for the Creative Writing portfolio was of a current event in the format of a villanelle. So this is the final draft of that current-events poem.

What’s going on with this world, anyway?

With all the issues we find ourselves in?

Looks like we need more Maycomb and Mayberry…

Government treating common folks like an ashtray,

Wishes of unborn and elderly knocked aside like bowling pins,

What’s going on with this world, anyway?

Race troubles near St. Louis; and some dumb college kids’ fraternity;

Talk-show hosts shake their heads in chagrin,

Looks like we need more Maycomb and Mayberry…

Common Core? Scout Finch has something on that to say:

Reading untreasured until it’s lost, “One does not love breathing.”

What’s going on with this world, anyway?

 Pop-culturally at the moment, it’s all Fifty Shades of Grey.

“Yessir, that’s something you can’t preach enough about – SIN!”

Looks like we need more Maycomb and Mayberry…

Lessons learned from Andy, Atticus and Miss Maudie,

But most hearers didn’t get it, and those lessons were forgotten.

What’s going on with this world, anyway?

Looks like we need more Maycomb and Mayberry.

Searching for Meaning in the Modern Novel

     The second major essay for the Study of the Novel at Rogers State University for the Spring 2015 semester.

     World War I was proclaimed as "the war to end all wars". In theory, that sounded great. In practice....it really did not work that way at all; creating far more problems that it solved. Most people had no idea how to cope with this terrifying new landscape they found themselves in; as their former lives had been vaporized by the devastating war. So the survivors were left restless(Fitzgerald 3, 6, 64), idle(Hemingway 180) and, in some cases, hopeless. In general, Daisy Buchanan spoke for her generation when she described herself as "pretty cynical about everything", as did Brett Ashley when she complained of being "so miserable" (Fitzgerald 16, Hemingway 32). Some people tried to discover or create new meaning to their existence, while others were content to drift along.
     Once Joyce had led the charge into literary modernism, many other writers jumped on this chance to play with language in seeking the Holy Grail of placing reality-as-it-was onto the printed page. Some succeeded more than others, but most often remembered of the group are William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Albert Camus was greatly influenced by this group of writers in his work about twenty years later. Journalists like Camus and Hemingway did well with this new style; as they were used to telling the facts as accurately as possible with as little opinionated ornamentation as necessary. Questions abounded in the post-WWI world, and answers were difficult to find. So modern novels do not typically provide answers, instead they get readers to grapple with the problems presented and come to their own conclusions. Part of the modernist language experimentation take place shifted the focus of the novel gradually inward; conflicts within oneself rather than in the world one inhabits. Also, in The Great Gatsby, by Fitzgerald, The Sun Also Rises, by Hemingway, and The Stranger, by Camus, the narrator was allowed to observe and take some role in the events of the tale; but he was no longer exclusively the protagonist. Nor were these first-person tales told with an explicitly educational or moral focus in mind; they were just stories that must be told.
     Among other things Nick Carraway observed about his neighbor, Jay Gatsby had an extraordinary war record, perhaps because in part due to his equally extraordinary gift for hope(Fitzgerald 150-151; 2). Combine this gift with incredible faithfulness in all things, and you understand how he found meaning; in the lost hope of reclaiming Daisy (Fitzgerald 98). Because she is so achingly nearby yet distant at the same time, his possessions derive meaning from their associations with her memory(Fitzgerald 45-46, 91), as does the green dock light(Fitzgerald 20-21, 93, 180).
     Machines were on the rise during this time, too, and that was hard for people to deal with. As Meursault states in Stranger, they "destroyed everything" (Camus 112). And in that destruction, mankind no longer mattered. One met their demise violently and without total finality; machines like Gatsby's car or the guillotine ruthlessly and without error cut the Fates' string of life. Though Meursault is talking of the machine which will bring about his own death in this passage, Gatsby's Myrtle Wilson was also "killed discreetly, with little shame and great precision" (Fitzgerald 137, Camus 112). Meursault is, in a way, a machine himself; with his abject apathy to anything outside his own phsyical well-being and his incapability to feel remorse (Camus 100). As the prosecuting lawyer states, he doesn't really have a soul and moral principles are foreign objects (Camus 101). Because machines are without souls, they do not seek a meaning or reason for their existence. And so the closest Meursault ever comes to a life philosophy is when he says that life is absurd (Camus 121).
     Strange thigns are part of life, yes. Besides killing you, the machines could woud or maim, as it is implied that Jake Barnes' injury occurred due to a plane crash (Hemingway 120). Jake manages to adapt to the postwar world best of anyone we meet in these three novels. He has a steady job(Hemingway 19-20) and gets along with folks well. In some ways he might have replaced religion with his ardent following of bullfighting(Hemingway 136-37), which seems like a common response in the small Spanish town we visit (Hemingway 157-73). That seems to be a very modern sentiment; as our football stadiums and basketball arenas have been described as our American cathedrals. Perhaps our 21st-century society is one filled with domestic expatriates (Hemingway 120).
     While Meursault obviously could not care less about religiion, because he lacked the understanding of what it is to be human, and Brett has the rather hopeless substitute of "not being a bitch" (Hemingway 248), perhaps the answer is the church. Nick and Jake and readers can't help but be a little interested, confused and disgusted about the careless people(Fitzgerald 20), and while Jake may be "technically" a "rotten Catholic", he still strives to be a better person (Hemingway 128, 103). Nick wishes the world would stay at a sort of moral attention forever(Fitzgerald 2), which is understandable. There will always be careless people in the world like Jordan, Tom and Daisy(Fitzgerald 58, 179), but on the other hand, there will also always be people like the magistrate or the priest(Camus 66-71, 115-122).

WORKS CITED
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. 1942. Trans. Matthew Ward. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Print.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. 1926. new York: Scribner, 2006. Print.     

Free-Verse Poetry Experiment

     One of the things the teacher for Creative Writing has really stressed, besides the process of creating poetry and short stories, is getting outside your comfort zone and climbing along limbs you wouldn't normally try testing. I really don't much like free-verse poetry, because I don't understand it most of the time. And it doesn't have a set rhythm or tell a story or anything. It's just atmospheric. So I experimented with a type of anagram, rearranging the letters of "ROGERS STATE HILLCATS" into as many words as I could think of, and then using as many of those words as possible in a long string that still makes sense. What came out of this was a one-sided conversation at dinnertime by a nine-year-old narrator. The teacher didn't quite understand it.

"What’s for dinner, Mom? …TATERS and SHALLOTS?

THAT”S swell….(I STILL HATE TO REHEAT THOSE STALE SLICES…)

…What did you say you and Mrs. Wilson had a CHAT about?

…Right, THE GHOST HOG doesn’t wear collar TAGS….HE shouldn’t, no…

(THIS IS what happens when your mom’s a writer.)

Yes, Jenny should be AGHAST THAT THE HOG STOLE THE SCALES!

…Hmm, good question. No, CLASSES are going fine enough.

How about the radio show’s LISTENERS change the GEARS of the mower?

The mower’s SLICER could TEAR into the SHALE, cause a landslide and that

Could be the climax? (…) No problem!

Uh…Mom? Aren’t you going to finish – never mind.

Oh, well. Not everyone is a lucky enough to have your mom be a writer." 

Flashfiction - Red

     Five hundred words or less is an extremely tight box to tell a story in. This flashfiction story was a Creative Writing assignment, I'll probably expand it later on, because I like these characters. It clocked it at exactly five hundred words.

     They say some colors have emotional impacts – for whatever reason, they’re especially communicative. Red’s exciting and dangerous, like fire trucks or burns. Maybe that’s why we associate it with love. Blue is calming and restful; it means importance. “Royal” blue and all, and the carpet of the Oval Office. Green can be mysterious and/or fun, depending on the shade.

     I’ve been working at Dale’s music store for a while; Glenda was visiting her twin sister and he was picking up lunch. There was a middle-aged guy named Ron coming in for a lesson, so I was working with him on barre chords with the Rascal Flatts song “My Wish”. He was using a cat-tongue pick; Southern Cross was the only place I knew of to get them. They were easier to hold on to, didn’t get lost that much. Near the end of the lesson, Taylor tripped lightly in. “Don’t hurry, I’ve got time.” She scrounged around for a bit, checked to see what was on sale this week. She tested out a used ganjo while Ron and I finished the lesson before she got a couple dollars’ worth of fingerpicks and a new capo for her orange Ibanez acoustic-electric. She was a regular, too, and so got Dale’s discount on everything. He liked having both of us around, and we often leaned on him or Glenda for advice.

     It had been a couple weeks since we’d had a real good chance to talk; she’d been on vacation and then our work schedules made it difficult to hang out. We were fixing to team up on a duet when we headed up to Springfield with Josh and Eddie. Nina wasn’t coming this time; that was another part of the reason Taylor and I hadn’t had a chance to talk much. Nina was dropping off the deep end pretty quickly, and Tay had her hands full trying to slow the fallout. It was one of those facts everyone knows but nobody talks about, but we all knew college was going to eat her alive. She was missing….It. Whatever that “it” was. Pretty sad, but that’s life. C’est la vie, the Chevrolets would say. They were coming along the trip, too.

     With her money, she pressed something else into my palm. She took the fingerpicks, capo and change, the door chimes jingled as she walked out. I tucked the whatever-it-was into my pocket and waited on Ron. Dale got back right about then with Braum’s.

     “Ran into Taylor on my way in,” he said after a minute.

     “Yeah, she came by.”

     Dale finished his burger. “She’s a keeper, Justin. You guys…you’re something special. By yourselves, and then when y’all are together, even more. We – we’ve been prayin’ that maybe someday-“ He shrugged.      “We love you guys.” (Pause.) “’Temporary Home’ could be a good one to play.”

     I nodded, thinking, and remembered that whatever-it-was she’d given me, and curiously dug around my phone in my jeans pocket.

     It was a red cat-tongue pick.