Part 1 can be found here.
Part 2 can be found here.
“I didn’t expect to see you here man,” Jack says to me. His voice speaks with all the strength needed to talk through his smashed nose and eviscerated- ah, almost let it slip there.
The only person I’ve seen angrier is your mother.
“You gonna answer me or what?” says Jack.
Continue reading “I Am A Mountain (y estoy hundiendome): PART 3”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I made some changes to Part 1, so you might want to read here before you begin.
Jack and OddBo, they’re next to each other, talking. Jack declares that if anyone gives him a hospital bill, he’ll push it into their eye socket. Jack said that, and he didn’t see my hand hovering over his shoulder, about to tap him. I dart my hand behind my back. I’d rather go round two with Beaver-Man than face Jack on a bad day.
Continue reading “I Am A Mountain (y estoy hundiendome): PART 2”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: After making this post, I did some edits to the story’s beginning. If you want to read what I originally had (including some deleted scenes), then go here and enter in the password “errishuman” . On to the story proper!
The nurse lady says that my health insurance doesn’t cover the condition I called, “getting my ass kicked by Beaver-Man.” Unbelievable. Can you see what I’m dealing with here? I gave this woman at the desk of the emergency room my name, my ID, even a State Secret my boss told me about. I’m in trouble if my wife looks up my medical records. And this nurse won’t even give me the courtesy of trusting my henchman honor. She didn’t even mention insurance, I had to bring it up, and I’m pretty 100% sure that that’s not how it goes, okay? Our president passed a health care bill right after the Omni-Man Collateral Damage Act. Something about health care had to change. In my line of work, people my age need all the help they can get. Estoy a punto de llorar.
Maybe you didn’t understand what I just said. Maybe you only speak English so far. Let’s keep it that way. I’d like to have some thoughts for myself, and I let you into my head as a favor, gracias.
Continue reading “I Am A Mountain (y estoy hundiendome): PART 1”
A while back, I uploaded, piece by piece, the ultimate character creation list. Now it’s all in one place at this article here. Also included in this article are a World Document Template and a character example of all the stuff I ramble about in the guide.
Also: if you want to follow me on MyTrendingStories, that would be most appreciated. I’ll soon be posting articles there that are exclusive to that site, and you wouldn’t want to miss out, now would you?
I’ve noticed a trend in certain collections where the closing story brings matters to a quieter, more contemplative state. You can argue that the most recent example of this pattern, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, does the same in a sense, despite all the time travel and action. It’s the same way for “The Orange Parka.” After stories about public hangings, ghosts, and a refugee crisis (which aren’t exactly blockbuster action movies to begin with), we end the volume with a tale about what it’s like to be an empty nester, and the loneliness that resides within a generation that’s fading away.
Continue reading “Glimmer Train Fall 2014: “The Orange Parka” by E. A. Durden”
I try to maintain a professional tone reviewing this magazine, but… hoo boy, did this one piss me off. This story’s the worst story I’ve read in a Glimmer Train magazine, and it’s difficult to think of other short stories outside of a student workshop that induced such rage in me over how much nothing there can be in ten pages.
Continue reading “Glimmer Train Fall 2014: “Here for Life” by Gil Filar”
The last story I covered, “Hialeah,” ended with the narrator swimming out from the shore “until he could no longer tell where the sea ended and his body began” (Brooks, 168). The next story in the collection, “Maghreb and the Sea,” picks that connection right up in terms of imagery. Our tale concerns two boys from the titular region of northern Africa travelling north to find both work and a better life. But on a thematic level, the story’s about water vs. sky vs. earth (or sand, in some cases) and what happens when they intermingle. Key moments in the plot focus on this dichotomy, like when our protagonist is hit by the police and is “bleeding into the sand again” (Powers, 181), or when the two boys sit in an abandoned ship and look “to where the sky meets the end of the world” (Powers, 175). This description is likely intentional on the part of the protagonist, who’s telling the story through a letter to his former traveling partner. All of this must seem like a blur to him.
Like with the previous minimalist story in this collection, “The X-250,” I find myself wanting for more description and more clarity. And this goes beyond the fact that I don’t know what these characters look like. Early on, the police beat up the main characters for throwing rocks at black cars. It’s sad, yet the boys’ behavior becomes understandable when you consider thatm, just a paragraph earlier, they were discussing how the rich don’t care about them. But two paragraphs after the black car incident, the narrator says “And then one day we were beaten again for throwing rocks at foreign trawlers” (Powers, 175). Ok, fuck the rich, I get that. But why the hell would they do the same risky behavior again? Not only does the narrator not tell us, but he has no reason to tell us; he’s writing this letter to the person who underwent the same beatings and threw the same rocks. And it’s unclear why exactly this letter is being written to the other boy besides maybe the protagonist needing to bury some demons. Does it serve the story to have it be told in this way? This might be the rare occasion that I’d encourage a story to me more vague. Minimalist writing lets you get away with less imagery and fuzzier context. It might actually fit in with the narrative’s thematic concerns: just as sky blends with sea blends with earth, so might past blend with present blend with future.
In a way, minimalist storytelling requires a minimal story. You can bury deeper meaning inside it (all you writers probably know what Hemmingway said about icebergs), but the surface-level stuff should be easy enough to grasp. I know what the story of “Maghreb and the Sea” is (what happens), but I’m unclear on the plot of “Maghreb and the Sea” (why what happens happens).
Robert Powers’ “Maghreb and the Sea” is his first published story. I found his blog at http://adumbrate.me, which had the all-too-common tragedy of a “Sorry for the late update” post as his last post to the blog… written over a year ago. I couldn’t find much else about him on the Internet.
To be honest, I read this tale a couple of weeks ago and forgot almost all of it by the time I wrote this. Maybe “Maghreb and the Sea” is your thing, but I probably won’t revisit it.
Interested in this story? Buy it and many others here!
Dedicating myself to reading Glimmer Train means I miss out on reading truly mind-bending stories. Glimmer Train can still challenge my perceptions of the world and make me look at things in a new light— it’s just that I miss out on one of my favorite reading thoughts if I spend all my time with literary fiction. What reading thought do I mean? I’m talking about that moment when I move my head away from the page and think, “The fuck am I reading?” Sometimes when I think that, it’s a bad sign (even if that’s what the author wants me to think, like with Bleeding Edge). Most of the time, I treasure the moment I have that thought, and I end up treasuring the book. I didn’t think that thought while reading “What We Saw”… but the right ingredients are there for that kind of reaction. Which is why I find it so exciting that this type of story made it into Glimmer Train. In fact, I’m a bit envious. I’ve started this project so I can better fit in with Glimmer Train’s expectations, and here comes Kadetsky with an entirely original and different work to join the annals of this otherwise normal journal. She didn’t need to fit it, she already knew she had some great things to share.
Continue reading “Glimmer Train Fall 2014: “What We Saw” by Elizabeth Kadetsky”
After Part 1 and Part 2, we’re at the home stretch for my huge, all-encompassing, yes-I-try-to-fill-this-out-for-every-character list! But before we tackle backstory, there’s one other attribute I want to add to our previous sections…
ETHNICITY: A lot of writers focus on what life is like in white culture. I’m guilty of this limited viewpoint too. You don’t always have to write outside of white culture, but you should still have this item available. Otherwise, you’re just going to write someone with the same culture as yourself. You shouldn’t always be doing this. Research the culture a bit (I recommend everyculture.com), read the blog of someone in that culture, and, most importantly, don’t stress too much over it. http://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com is a good resource for this, although you don’t have to adhere to everything they suggest.
Now, onto backstory…
BIRTHPLACE: Location matters for character. I usually don’t have to do much research for this one… I think of a character, and then match his traits with what I associate with a city. Your easygoing character could naturally come from a small town in California, I think.
RELATIONSHIP WITH PARENTS: Freud put a big emphasis on this aspect of life for a reason.
RELATIONSHIP WITH SIBLINGS: Like above, this is a question that has a big impact on how your character becomes who she is. I tend to write these character lists by starting with a few quirks or traits that play well off of one another, then back-engineering the moments in the past that made these characters like that. I finish off by filling out details as I go. Did your character’s adventurous streak come from an overprotective brother? Or maybe a fun-loving sister?
HOW LONG MARRIED/WHEN MET: How long has your character been married for? Or, to put it another way, what was the moment where they met their true love like? Feel free to write N/A for this question.
PARENTS’ OCCUPATIONS: … I think I’m using the right possessive. Anyway, this is a more concrete way of establishing your character’s social class.
EARLY LIFE: I spend at least six lines of loose-leaf on this one. What were the early factors that influenced the person your character becomes? This is the part of the list that becomes most like storytelling.
COLLEGE/BEYOND: Another story worth six lines. Your character does not have to go to college. At some point, though, your character becomes independent and takes their own destiny in their hands. For most people, that’s around college age.
JOB: Where do they work? What as? Like the last question, disregard if your character is too young.
RELATIONSHIP TO BOSS/CO-WORKERS: How do they get along with people in a professional setting?
HOBBIES: What does your character do in his/her spare time?
LIVING SITUATION: Describe not just where they live, but how they affected their surroundings. Is the room messy because of them? Is she a fixer-upper? Did he make the room smelly? Use your imagination here.
LIFE-CHANGING EVENT: Your character wasn’t always your character. Something happened in their life that forever changed their personality. Often, this moment in time is where their inner conflict comes from. Can be as great as a kidnapping, or as small as a lost teddy bear. In either the “Early Life” or “College/Beyond” section, write “LCE” so you know when this moment happened. Go into lots of detail in this section: this is probably the most important bit of backstory in your character’s life.
At this point of character creation, these lists take up three pages of loose-leaf. But I’ve usually filled out beforehand a fourth sheet— research. If my character is obsessed with octopi, for example, you’ll be damned sure this side of loose-leaf will be all about octopi. If you’re talking about a culture other than your own, or another time period in history, this is where you’d put your notes.
I hope this list helps you with your own character creation. I will soon put up a post that combines all three parts and includes not only a template, but also an example from my most recent character in an upcoming story.
Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4.
Ceridwen looked him over. “I don’t follow.”
“I mean,” he said, “You’re in a tough place. I want to help. What do you want me to do for you?”
Ceridwen stood like a soldier, though she couldn’t match Phil’s height.
“I want,” she said, her voice breaking, “for you guys to leave me alone. Meeting all of you has been… rather disorienting and startling, for one. I’m in a sort of do-or-die situation now, which is really embarrassing, and I’d like to find a quiet place to choose the beast or the whirlpool. So please-“
“But you don’t have to.” Phil stopped the closing door with his foot. “I mean, I’ll go if you really really wanted me to. But we can make this better for you, even if I haven’t found out how yet. I know what you’ve been-“
“Phil?”
A man walked in behind Ceridwen. An Indian man, a Clark-Kent type who looked at no one whenever he talked.
“Bala.”
Bala bared a smile for only a second.
“You told me-“
“I’m here for damage control,” said Bala. “Did you hear what Raymond did? His ‘talk’ with Emyr prompted that asshole to tell the landlord she’s refusing to pay. The landlord wants her gone tomorrow morning.”
Phil stepped inside to see the open cardboard boxes, some half-packed, some ripped into pieces. Only candles lit the room— nothing electronic was turned on. Even for Texas, this room was dry. “Can I- can I help pack?”
“I think you’ve helped enough.” Bala stepped up to him between the dusty table and the skinny door.
“Dude, calm down. I just want to give her what she wan-“
“What you want. You’ve been so entrenched in a pissing contest with those other white boys that you forgot whom you’re pissing on.”
“Oh, like you’re so much better than us-“
“I know what’s going on now. I bet you don’t even know her friends all “disappeared” when she asked for help. I bet you don’t even know how hard it was for her to ask.”
“But I listened to her!” Phil began. “I-“
“You did not listen,” said Bala, both his little feet squared at him. “She said she wants to be left alone-“
“Then what the hell are you doing here?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m not doing, which is charging in and demanding a pity-fuck just because I’m there on the sidelines watching!”
“Ok!” Phil threw up his arms. His arms almost hit Alex and Raymond, who were stepping in behind him. “So maybe I don’t know anything! Maybe I am just rushing in. And I’ve made some mistakes because I’m a guy and white and middle class and I don’t know better, but-“
“Shut. Up.”
Phil’s momentum derailed and crashed in a smoking heap.
“If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s self-deprecating white boys,” said Bala, nostrils flaring. “As if a monkey would stop flinging shit if he realized where it came from. You’re not one of the ‘good ones,’ and if you ask me-“
“Philip has at least begun to understand his errors,” intoned Raymond.
Ceridwen began to speak, but Bala spoke first. “And that stopped him- or any of you- from acting mighty-whitey all over-“
“You do know Raymond’s Hispanic,” said Alex.
Bala swiveled to look at Raymond. The graduate student nodded. Bala then said at Alex, “You’re lying.”
“Can someone say ‘ethnic erasure?’” said Alex, the bite in his voice ripping the solidifying air. He sat down on a stool with part of a leg missing.
“You pretended to ‘get’ Ceridwen, I wouldn’t be surprised if you ‘really identified’ with-“
“Does it even fucking matter!” Phil shouted. “We’re feminists. We’re supposed to be doing feminist things-“
“Well, one of us is feminist at any rate.”
Raymond glared at Alex. “Please don’t tell me it is the individual who always uses the treadmill next to the women in yoga pants.”
“What have you done for women?”
“What have you done for women? You haven’t won us a single female member-“
“Neither have you!”
“I’m teaching my sister about feminist role models, I’m paving a road to the future while you’re all-“
“Who’s given their mother the most? Hands up anyone who gave a fortune-“
“I treat my female instructors the same as my males ones, and you’ll be damn sure-“
“I’m giving her a chance-“
“Shut up!”
Ceridwen screamed this, and the feminists froze. “Shut up! I don’t want your help and I don’t care who doesn’t help me first! And that goes for you too,” she said to Bala as he opened his mouth. “I just want some time alone, and if you knew where I was right now, you’d give it to me! Is that understood?”
She wasn’t louder or taller than them, but they heard every word. The fragments of the glass figurine dug into her hand.
The boys looked at each other’s feet. They were too big for the low ceiling in this medicine-smelling apartment.
Raymond spoke first. “I suppose the right thing to do now would be to leave.”
“Yeah, we may have gotten the hint,” said Alex.
“It’s about time.” Phil crossed his arms and glared at Bala. “I at least tried to dance around her heart condition.”
Ceridwen’s hair ripped back as she screamed, screamed as if she were Prometheus finally breaking the chains from the mountain, beautiful and terrible as the night storm. The cry squeezed and demolished the guts of these city and suburban men, who had never been in the wild, but held onto their inner cavemen that could smell wild tigers. They reacted fast. The feminists banged into each other sprinting to the exit. Phil blasted out last, slamming the door on the raised claw behind him. He turned and sunk low, his own heart pounding at the door to his back.
Way Past the Due
She burned down the apartment that night. Her brother saw the smoke and called the firemen over before the blaze reached beyond her dwelling. No injuries. One of the few things that survived the blaze was Ceridwen’s driver’s license. The rest of the feminists, when Phil told each one individually about this, began sentences like, “Crazy… you know…” and “Well, it’s what they say about ‘them’ be cray.” They never finished them. Phil attended Union meetings until February, the third time no one else showed up.
Years later, and even longer since Barbara, he saw Ceridwen in his newspaper, and missed his bus to keep reading at the stop. The article described The New Amazons, an organization dedicated to uniting differing factions of feminism, with a focus on radical, socialist, cultural, and liberal feminist ideologies. They were only celebrating a decade of activity when Ceridwen joined them. Ceridwen’s organization dropped shoes in the still pond that was Texan feminism. And Ceridwen was just another member, albeit one with a more interesting backstory. In the article, Ceridwen talked about how, when she joined the New Amazons, she had lost her job and her apartment, and was on the streets looking for purpose. It was here she discovered, through the New Amazons, that she only needed herself to survive, not a superior, not even Western medicine. This was her story to live out, no one else’s.
The article never mentioned Alex, Bala, Raymond, Phil, College Station, or even Joe’s. All this came about, Ceridwen said in the interview, because she was embarrassed about and tried to hide her heart condition, something her father and brother lied to her about. Phil didn’t understand.
But he had an idea of what to say. Phil hadn’t become an elected official yet, but his internship in the Texas Senate granted him some time alone in that political coliseum, when the lights were out and the janitors had gone home. Phil would stand at the podium in the empty Senate floor and deliver the ultimate fate of all politicians: the apology speech.
“When you burned down your apartment, Ceridwen, two of our worst fears came true. We were worried that your life would fall apart without us. You didn’t have to destroy things to be heard. We could have helped. And yet, the College Station Feminist Union had another fear. We feared that your life wouldn’t fall apart without us. After you left, there were a lot of questions at the next meeting, a lot of shouting that followed them, a lot of shame. In short, it was all about us. We broke up the club because we thought we failed in creating feminists. That should have never been our goal. Being a politician means trying to help others, and being a bad politician means helping yourself. Politicians should fight, not invade. I may be the main character in my own story, but I am not the main character in the story of your liberation. The closest you can be to being the main character in someone’s life is being the villain. In the future, I’ll count myself lucky if I can be someone’s Sancho. I may not understand why you burned everything you had. But for now, Ceridwen, let me say that I am enlightened, and that I am deeply, deeply sorry.”
Whenever he delivered that speech to a roomy Senate floor, Phil satisfied something primal in himself, as deep as the need to start fires or find love. Now, siting at the bus stop and reading the paper, that primal feeling suggested that he call Ceridwen and make his speech more that just moved air in an empty coliseum.
Her headshot lay on top of the paper, and Phil grew weak in the knees. Her freckles danced on her cheeks. Her smile was the smile of an arsonist. Her lazy eyes were bigger than her dry hair. Her nose could stab the world, and she’d laugh to do so. She looked like she did when she raised her claws: like a woman on top of a mountain, throwing thunderbolts to those with lesser skills for talking to gods, even if their kneecaps had worn down to only bone.
Word Salad Spinner 