Stories

Don't think about the odds.

I’m just back from a poetry conference and it was really special. It was small and lasted three days, so by the end you kind of knew everyone. And I liked the people a lot. Poetry by the Sea. Beautiful and well run. I was interviewed by the terrific Anna Evans, and I gave the conference talk, and I took part in a poetry reading with some great poets.

My short story came out in StoryQuarterly: Green Is Dead. It’s my first publication of fiction which is both exciting yay and exciting yikes. Let’s call it a thrill. You write a vulnerable character and then you let him out into the world. Sean is meant to be funny in his turn of phrase, though I leave it to the reader to decide how much he’s exaggerating to be funny, if at all. Everything in the story is made up, except the grief and the surprise of the first months without the person, which is when I wrote it, just after my therapist passed away.

I invented a lot of patients to tell about them each grieving Green. Some of them know each other and show up in each other’s stories. After I wrote this one I wrote a couple more with Sean’s voice. Two more Green stories will come out this summer, one in Flash Fiction and the other in Five Points.

I gathered together some stories into a book of short stories, with much thought and rethought, then I mercilessly cut and trimmed, and called the whole thing “Green Is Dead” and sent it out to the Flannery O’Conner short fiction collection prize. Odds being what they are I’m focusing on the fact that I have the collection now.

I’m waiting for summer already. Spring missed its chance. Last night I went with John and Jessie to Coney Island to see the Cyclones play. It wasn’t their night but the moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. (and the highwayman came riding, riding) And I just love a night game, the brazen refusal of darkness. For what else do we go night for day? Just the movies.

Well, I checked the weather and it looks like it will be summer by this afternoon. Writing fiction is hard but it feels good. All writing feels good when it’s going, and the one that’s easiest to get going is nonfiction, but that doesn’t mean nonfiction feels the best. Let’s say it’s an easier drug to maintain.

Fictional characters are just as out of control as widely reported. I start them and then they go.

I’ve been watching a lot of tv. It’s mostly meh. Still I report for binging when the sun goes down. I’ll follow Tina Fey anywhere so have already watched all of the new season of The Four Seasons. I followed James Marsden back to Your Friends and Neighbors even though I’d ditched it mid season during its first season because it was insufferable. Even though I like Jon Hamm and Amanda Peet. But this latest season was fun enough.

I’m a little haunted by The Crash, the doc on the girl who crashed her car into a wall killing her two passengers. She was of course very injured, but lived. Spoiler Alert, but you’ve likely encountered this already, They put her in jail because the judge believed she did it on purpose. The argument was that she was willing to die to kill her boyfriend and she had callous disregard for the other friend in the car. I wouldn’t have convicted her. Dumb kids drive too fast and misgauge when the turn is, right? And the evidence they have on her being nuts was weak imho, lots of people say super awful things when they fight with their boyfriend or girlfriend but that doesn’t mean that they would kill, let alone drive themselves into a wall. Don’t get me wrong, the girl is highly unlikable, but so what.

What else? What I don’t want to talk about is the gentle rain of rejections that have been coming in lately because I got a burst of try hard energy a few months ago and put some things out in the mail. Obviously if you have a nice acceptance in the recent past it can act as an umbrella, but you know, you still get a little drenched in No.

I don’t want to talk about it because it doesn’t make me feel or look like the shiny penny I’d like to be, but what can you do? I love when other people confess their ongoing experience with No, especially those who seem to be living in a world of Yes. So yes there’s been a lot of no.

Despite that reality, I encourage you to finish the thing you’re working on and send it out. Send it out a few places. Don’t think about the odds.

Writing is of course another way to go either night for day or day for night. Take your pick. Break all the laws of the universe. True I am determined and constrained, but my characters have free will.

And if my characters have free will, my poems have a bronco of a will all their own. For instance, rhyme is not in favor at the moment and yet I rhyme a lot of the time. also I joke. How to keep the poems from joking? Write them anyway but cut them from the manuscript.

Well this has been an eclectic post and I hope something for everyone. Anyone. At the game there was the giant net between the players and the seats, but still the baseballs came down pretty frequently on our side. Kids swarmed for them and often caught them. Men here and there grabbed them out of the air. Meanwhile, there were tons of kids and not a few babies, with their soft baby heads. It seemed dangerous but was just one of those things.

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Ok Molls and Mobsters, Dolls and Monsters, Calls and Answers, I am, as always, humble in your midst. You make the rockin’ world go round. And special thanks to my new paid subscribers—it means a lot. Thanks to all of you for coming by. Stay in it, stay salty, stay with me, and I shall return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer