If Ezekiel could see it, why not me

(A Chinese dwarf, courtesy of the Met; my alter ego) As a follow-up to my August 4 posting, I’ve done it, revisited my not-yet-published fiction. Deleted: several paragraphs on what a dumb schmuck I am. Yesterday I submitted one of the revived stories to a contest and charged the fee. Thank you, Chase. On the 21st of I sent off another of these revived stories. Not for a contest but there’s money if they take it. Two stories now out there, waiting. Last month I pulled together a novella I’d started again years ago. Found a reader who has a great eye. So now it’s ready to go asking for what it's worth. It's a delight. Two stories and a novella. Then a novel is collecting dust, all the dust there is in my Cloud. The one solid piece of advice I was given in grad school was: Leave New York. I don't belong here. I never have. I wonder if I'd feel better about my work if I'd moved. I'll be back to this blog in September. Ezekiel? Read the skies. Was he in pain?

Fiction: the missing paragraph

Napoleon, after I edited out
The Paragraph

My mother was so complicated and so sweet; so strong an energy blocking any normal trajectory of a life (my life, specifically) and yet so supportive in other ways.

She loved my short stories. I know that alone makes friends, some writers, gape at me with envy. Let me have something, already.

As I've mentioned, I didn't start writing poetry until I was in my forties and by then my mother was well into her self-inflicted thirty-year march to death (a Christian Scientist's preventable death).

But I began fiction in my thirties, after I started teaching (thus ending ne-er-do-well-dom, at least for a time). My novel The To-Do List Manifesto, which I've rewritten enough times it really could be published, is dedicated to her. Today I thank her. She saved every story of mine up to about 1989, all of them typed. 

My sister sent me the batch after Mom died in 2001. I'd forgotten, and just chanced on the box yesterday. (I'm debating whether or not to hold onto two scrapbooks and that box was under the two scrapbooks.) I thought I'd lost work and now, ta da. I also thought I'd lost a paragraph that haunted one of my stories, first titled "Problems," finally titled, in 2010, "Napoleon on the N-page" and published in ragazine.cc (Nov-Dec 2010).

A friend used to call it "The Paragraph:"

It was a big deal when I finally dropped or edited out The Paragraph. I now see it begs for a few deletions, periods or at the very least, semis.  But it is a tumbling leaf in autumn, something to admire, in my mind. The world seems to have managed, the fiction world, the greater world. Would Julien Assange not be facing trumped-up prosecution if I'd published this paragraph?  Would the common cold be, by now, a thing of the past?  Would infinitives split like geodes to reveal gleam and glitter?

We'll never know but at least the paragraph gets a little life on the shelf of today's posting.

It is the uncertainties, perplexities and difficulties of life that haul our spirits to the depths, that cause us to wallow in mire at the merest of disasters, and the removal of these leaden weights, these dark transmuters of our native golden selves, is the aim, the desired success of many people, each of whom employs a means, perhaps unbeknownst to them, and this search for an elixir of inner peace, this methodology of the psyche's self-purification, if you will, is what Vina was trying to discover, to isolate as would a scientist seeking a remedy, and her initial approach was to observe her milieu, to look at her friends' problems.

Editing fiction: an outtake, and why, from "The Devil Is Her Friend"

I recently wrote here of trials and tribulations of getting my story "The Devil Is Her Friend" published. It ended up, gloriously, in Stone's Throw Magazine. Here's an outtake from the story, a section I edited out over a year ago with reluctance and wisdom. It wasn't working, however much I denied it or appreciated my own early reading history.

I am revealing some of the process of editing in hopes another writer might find it useful. This story had been around for a long time, as I previously wrote, and my attachment to the outtake was hard to overcome.

"Devil" is about (or "about"--who ever knows what anything is about, really) Pearl Miller, a hybrid. In her case that means half Christian, half Jewish, although readers who are racially or otherwise mixed also favorably responded to the story. She's also a rebel.

And bucker of authority figures. I had to do intensive research for that character trait, ho ho. Her dual background, or, rather, reactions to her dual background, are explored briefly, as Pearl winds up teaching at a Catholic high school. There's a crisis when the Archdiocese demands all teachers, Catholic or not, attend a periodic faculty Mass in addition all-school Masses, at which teachers are more chaperones (to the pews, to keep them free of gum and graffiti). Pearl decides she will read during the mandatory Mass.

Pearl being Pearl, the question looms: What will she read? Her back-and-forthing on this issue is what I partly deleted as it was too much of an intellectual segue which served neither story nor characters. I am fond of that internal discussion, however. So here it is. (The story, sans the OUTTAKE/book debate, is at (copy and paste): http://stonesthrowmagazine.com/authordisplay.php?authorid=141

OUTTAKE BEGINS:
So much for the tensile strength of a dual upbringing, Pearl thinks. “I’m on my own,” she tells her rear view mirror as she drives home. She is hurt and annoyed. And determined. Her only decision is what to read during the faculty Mass. The choice will be everything, and so she thinks long and hard.

Her first inspiration is to read a Catholic theologian, maybe St. Thomas Aquinas. Who can forget that odd paragraph in the Modern Library selections from Summa Theologica, in which Aquinas conjectured about the number of dancing angels on pin tops—as if all angels couldn’t fit all places at all times. Summa wouldn’t really be much of a statement; not much stronger than thumbing through the daily Missile available in the pews. Even the mystic authors of The Cloud of Unknowing or The Way of the Pilgrim can be construed as writers of commentary on doctrine, and thus coals to Lancaster, or Manchester, or the Appalachians, maybe even coals to the Devil, a perhaps dramatic perspective of the whole mess; the shebang; all of it.

Jewish theology is a possibility, although much of it seems a reach. Reading Abraham Abulafia or the Zohar would be hypocritical on Pearl’s part since she hasn’t been able to get a footing in Kaballah, other than Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, which, like Freud’s Introductory Lectures, offer as much as she imagines she wants to know on the subject, at least at this crossroads of life. Except for his translations of Hasidic tales, she’s never been a fan of Buber, and aren’t those tales too sprightly for this occasion? For the occasion of reading during faculty Mass? She might as well read Roth or Bellow, but then there is the whole woman issue.
OUTTAKE ENDS (ABOVE).

This part does remain in the story:
The night before the first scheduled opportunity for faculty salvation, Pearl is on the phone with Angelette. “I’m not a literature teacher,” she explains needlessly, “but I sure to like to read it.”

Angelette has trouble following Pearl’s mental wanderings. “Your Sunday School teachers said you were a good reader.” She sips Sanka while cradling the phone on her shoulder and thumbing through an article on “Spirituality in the Cubicle” in the Christian Science Sentinel. “Be careful.”

Makes sense; Pearl is a little nervous. After saying good night to her mother, she sits cross-legged in on the Persian rug in front of her bookcase. Her apartment is small and spare, but for the solid oak book cases and treasured carpet. What to read, who to read. Which author can be brought into a church? Well, any and all, but which one will approximate a religious experience — that’s what she is looking for. Her choices suddenly narrow: Emily Dickinson or Anton Chekhov.

Emily, well, Dickinson, but who wants to call Emily Dickinson — Dickinson — wrote a poem works, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” which sounds pretty ecstatic to Pearl. Atop a list of Ten Best Artists the World’s Ever Known, which Pearl and her friend Roger, who she met in a literature class at the university, compiled, Pearl places Emily.

“Dickinson, my dear Rog, is pure energy, crystal, zircon, an emerald diamond. Her poetry is equivalent to the cipher which the space adventurers in a movie find in the obelisk, which has the key to a galactic understanding and peace.” Roger hadn’t argued.

In the end, however, Pearl settles on bringing in a collection of Chekhov’s stories. She hasn’t read the entire volume because every time she opens the book her heart starts beating so rapidly, she gets scared. The air will thicken, and Pearl finds herself lying on her bed, or once, putting her head down on a tabletop at MacDonald’s while a girl scooping fries into a red cardboard container shouted to bring some water to the lady who’d passed out. Chekhov indeed. Isn’t there God and religion and a philosophy of hope in such artistic construction? At least. And if she faints, the Mass will be cut short.
###

More than you wanted to know? Hey. Maybe a writing teacher can use this as a warning note, or intro to self-editing. Go for it.

Sculpture of angels from: www.chickschwartz.com/sculptures.html

Writing by hand, online, typing drafts: untenable - and good - examples

Once a poem’s online I forget about it. In once sense only that’s a blessing, and I’m not sure there’s much sense in that sense because a poem is a thoughtful creation, crafted, not a geyser of emotion or cleverness, erupted.

I have posted a few unpublished poems on this blog, and in a few cases typed first runs right in. And then forgotten about them. What’s the point?

With rare exception, I work on and over and in poems as long as requested. With NO exception (except a few on this blog as mentioned previously) I write first drafts of poems by hand, then type, print, edit, type, print, edit . . . And when there’s nothing else to be done I send out the poem. Sometimes I send the poem to Siberia, a file where poems that just don’t work live. They are warm and fed but their biospheric life does not include guests. Kafka’s messenger never reaches them and they don’t care. These poems aren’t sullen. They’re differently abled and know it.

A poem submitted to a journal is most often rejected at least once and when I get it back I take another look, ask if it wants to get off the bench and back in the game (Look, Ma! I wrote a sports reference!) or needs a massage. Maybe an amputation.

However, as far as prose and nonfiction are concerned, this blog unstuffs me and that’s been a great victory.

Most reviews I’ve posted here were typed into the blog and “published” or gone live. I might spy a typo or stupid sentence construction and go back in to fix. It’s not like the blog is a dangerous mine and reentry risks life.

When I wrote reviews as a freelancer for The Seattle Times each one took an enormous amount of time. I was utterly convinced I was a slow writer, no change possible. If my current reviews were worse than those, less insightful or fun or effective in tribute where called for, I’d agree I should return to those awful weeks in front of computer, me trying to hammer out a greater piece of writing than I am capable of creating.

But what I write now, although each could be expanded – now, that’s for sure – is fine. I am writing for a blog, not an journal, and length needn’t be too long. No one’s paying me for this. A few pieces here on my life might claw at me later. They might demand more attention, more words. We’ll see.

No poem is ever done. But some poems, many, are done talking to me and so they live out in the world, make new friends and decisions about me I may not like. That’s the deal.

So no more poems typed into my blog. Only poems pasted from my collection or after they’ve been in print long enough I do no disrespect to the kind journal.