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Filtering by Category: Writing & Publishing
The following picture was created in a game that we played last night. (There is a video that explains where this came from on Facebook.) Write your haiku as a comment and come back often to see all of the other haikus that are written by other authors. (If you're on Twitter, please tweet your haiku with the hashtag #PHS. If you don't have Twitter, we will be tweeting some of the haikus that we love.)
Photo courtesy of Sheena Tatum.
Directions:
1. Write a haiku inspired by the photo and post it in the comments.
For extra chances to win:
2. Follow @reliefjournal on Twitter
3. Follow @Quo Vadis on Twitter
4. Twitter @reliefjournal with your haiku and #PHW (Photo Haiku Wednesday)
* * *
The good people over at Quo Vadis have generously donated some prizes!!
The weekly winner will receive a Quo Vadis Habana Journal and a bottle of J. Herbin ink!!
Every week Relief will choose a random winner! So play along and tell your friends. See the information below for extra chances to win.
* * *
Winner will be announced via Twitter Thursday afternoons.
We can only ship to U.S. addresses right now.
You may only win once every three months, but you may play along every week for Twitter Super Bonus Points.
* * *
Would you like to have your photo featured on Photo Haiku Wednesday?
Email your photos to Michelle: photohaiku@reliefjournal.com
You'll get a photo credit link here on the main blog and you'll also be entered in the drawing for the Quo Vadis Habana journal and bottle of J. Herbin ink the week your photo appears on the blog!
Photo courtesy of Jaymi Spencer Photography.
Directions:
1. Write a haiku inspired by the photo and post it in the comments.
For extra chances to win:
2. Follow @reliefjournal on Twitter
3. Follow @Quo Vadis on Twitter
4. Twitter @reliefjournal with your haiku and #PHW (Photo Haiku Wednesday)
* * *
The good people over at Quo Vadis have generously donated some prizes!!
The weekly winner will receive a Quo Vadis Habana Journal and a bottle of J. Herbin ink!!
Every week Relief will choose a random winner! So play along and tell your friends. See the information below for extra chances to win.
* * *
Winner will be announced via Twitter Thursday afternoons.
We can only ship to U.S. addresses right now.
You may only win once every three months, but you may play along every week for Twitter Super Bonus Points.
* * *
Would you like to have your photo featured on Photo Haiku Wednesday?
Email your photos to Michelle: photohaiku@reliefjournal.com
You'll get a photo credit link here on the main blog and you'll also be entered in the drawing for the Quo Vadis Habana journal and bottle of J. Herbin ink the week your photo appears on the blog!
This is the third of four entries on “being” a writer. The first can be found here and the second here.
True story: when I applied to graduate school, I was asked why I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. I said it was because I wanted to be a better liar. I got in and four years later I am about to be awarded that degree.
I am, I think understandably, conflicted about this. In essence, people will now refer to me as “Dr. Clark” (a term I think will still indicate respect because I will never be an HMO-funded health care provider) and a university has entrusted me with students to influence because I achieved a dubious goal. I improved my ability to deceive.
Sure, sure, you can parse words and say “it’s not lying, it’s fiction.” But the best fiction carries that one key caveat: people want to believe it. Or, as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, “People do not believe in lies because they have to, but because they want to.”
A note before I continue – I love the lies of fiction, when they point toward a truth worth exploring. Lies expose truth, much as “the shadow proves the sunshine.” But, within me is an existential dilemma. How does one lie ethically without crossing over into James Frey territory or worse, begin to enjoy the lies more than the truth they point to?
Some might call this classical conditioning. Lies are a slippery slope that lead from Thomas Jefferson’s “He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual” to Austin O’Malley’s “Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind” to (with apologies to Stephen Swanson) Adolph Hitler’s “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”
Lies, as we’ve all experienced personally, are a cage full of horny rabbits.
How then can one be “possessed by the truth” and a writer of good fiction? Again, I return to the views of people more intelligent than me. Some, like A.A. Milne, point with humor to the work that goes into lies with purpose when he wrote “If one is to be called a liar, one may as well make an effort to deserve the name.” Emerson went the sublime route, saying “Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.” Some, like Clare Boothe Luce, take the pragmatic view: “Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego and lessens the frictions of social contacts.” Plato used reverse psychology (before reverse or psychology were in vogue) “They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth.”
Here’s my thought – fictional lies have limitations in spiritual truth. When they tie into the “greater than me,” they cease to be lies and become reflections of the walls of our caves. The argument could be made that this is transubstantiation of a sort. Inventions become actualities. This, of course, demands that one believe there is truth external of one’s own experience, a concept some consider as dated as high-waisted jeans on men. But I tend to agree with Karl Barth’s idea that “Man can certainly keep on lying…but he cannot make truth falsehood. He can certainly rebel…but he can accomplish nothing which abolishes the choice of God.” And when the presence of discoverable truth combines with the desire to find it, the lies of fiction make sense.
Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction and is in the final stages of earning a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. His work is set primarily in his hometown of San Diego and has been known to include pimps in diapers, heroin-addicted pastors who suffer from OCD, and possibly the chupacabra.
Photo courtesy of Jaymi Spencer Photography.
Directions:
1. Write a haiku inspired by the photo and post it in the comments.
For extra chances to win:
2. Follow @reliefjournal on Twitter
3. Follow @Quo Vadis on Twitter
4. Twitter @reliefjournal with your haiku and #PHW (Photo Haiku Wednesday)
* * *
The good people over at Quo Vadis have generously donated some prizes!!
The weekly winner will receive a Quo Vadis Habana Journal and a bottle of J. Herbin ink!!
Every week Relief will choose a random winner! So play along and tell your friends. See the information below for extra chances to win.
* * *
Winner will be announced via Twitter Thursday afternoons.
We can only ship to U.S. addresses right now.
You may only win once every three months, but you may play along every week for Twitter Super Bonus Points.
* * *
Would you like to have your photo featured on Photo Haiku Wednesday?
Email your photos to Michelle: photohaiku@reliefjournal.com
You'll get a photo credit link here on the main blog and you'll also be entered in the drawing for the Quo Vadis Habana journal and bottle of J. Herbin ink the week your photo appears on the blog!
It was December 20th and I was waiting for a flight at Dallas’ Love Field...
If I were your usual high-quality literary writer penning your usual high-quality literary Relief post, I’d continue: December 20—41 years to the day since John Steinbeck died. Later that afternoon, winging west to LAX, I read a quote from Andre Dubus (in Novel Voices) that writing fiction doesn’t change the world, that “Cesar Chavez did more than six John Steinbecks could have done.” And I thought to myself how everything’s connected....
But I’m not your usual high-quality literary writer. (Blame Christopher Fisher for inviting me: he’s why you can’t have nice things.) So, instead, here’s the best I can give you: December 20—41 years to the day since I was born. My wife and son had given me an iPod Touch as a present and I was thumb-typing a list/article for the someday (please, God, soon) return of The Wittenburg Door:
“Ways to Reboot the Christmas Shoes Franchise”
and so on...
The subject of dead moms and God returned a few days later. Van Hagar’s, errrr Van Halen’s “Right Now” had cycled through on my iPod, and I hunted down its video online. One of the signs appearing in the glorified Powerpoint presentation reads “Right now God is killing moms and dogs because He has to.” (Provocative verb, but substitute "calling home" or “gathering thereunto His bosom,”—or if you're Pat Robertson add “because they made a pact with the devil” to the end—and you've got much the same thing.) Thankfully, that was the last of dying moms on the trip.
But the signs and videos thing came up a couple more times. After “Right Now” I tracked down Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (he flips cue cards with the lyrics throughout the video) and on Palindrome Day (01/02/2010) I checked out “Weird Al” Yankovic’s parody video, “Bob” (all the lyrics in the song/on the cue cards are palindromes: “Was it a car or a cat I saw?”). A day or so after that another Dylan pastiche appeared in a book I got from my folks (mom’s fine, by the way; good on shoes, too), The Stephen King Illustrated Companion. In one of the wax paper sleeves was “The 43rd Dream,” a poem King wrote as a teen, riffing on Dylan’s “115th Dream.”
Toward the end of my California Christmas my family took in Cannery Row. Yes, the Monterey Bay Aquarium is more responsible for its renaissance than any Steinbeck story, but I posed by his statue on the waterfront, nonetheless. Meanwhile, back in Texas, my pre-AP students were (allegedly) reading Steinbeck’s novella The Pearl. And we’ve come the long way round to the idea that “it’s all connected.” (Another “Right Now” slide reads “Right now oysters are being robbed of their sole possession” … hmmmm.)
In his book How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster says “There’s only one story … Whenever anyone puts pen to paper or hands to keyboard or fingers to lute string or quill to papyrus. Norse sagas, Samoan creation stories, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Tale of Genji, Hamlet, last year’s graduation speech ... On the Road and Road to Rio and ‘The Road not Taken.’ One story.” Pride and Prejudice and Zombies makes his point as well as anything, I suppose. And while Solomon wrote “there’s nothing new under the sun,” it’s true that there’s increasingly more “nothing new” under that sun, influencing, intersecting with all the “nothing new” yet to come. Steinbeck to Dubus for the smart set; Christmas Shoes, Sammy Hagar, “Weird Al,” and Steve King for the rest of us. (Dylan, maybe, bridging the gap.) All of it to all of us via this blog entry. This blog entry to your angry letters to the editor. And so it goes. Circle of Life. Hakuna Matata.
Honor those who’ve influenced you, good or bad. Make the most of the chapters to the story you write. You never know whose chapters they’ll intersect with down the road.
***
Chris Mikesell teaches sophomore English at a public school in Dallas, Texas. His short fiction has appeared in Coach's Midnight Diner 1 & 2; Dragons, Knights & Angels; and Ray Gun Revival. His haiku have appeared here at Relief on numerous occasions.
Photo courtesy of Michelle Pendergrass.
Directions:
1. Write a haiku inspired by the photo and post it in the comments.
For extra chances to win:
2. Follow @reliefjournal on Twitter
3. Follow @Quo Vadis on Twitter
4. Twitter @reliefjournal with your haiku and #PHW (Photo Haiku Wednesday)
* * *
The good people over at Quo Vadis have generously donated some prizes!!
The weekly winner will receive a Quo Vadis Habana Journal and a bottle of J. Herbin ink!!
Every week Relief will choose a random winner! So play along and tell your friends. See the information below for extra chances to win.
* * *
Winner will be announced via Twitter Thursday afternoons.
We can only ship to U.S. addresses right now.
You may only win once every three months, but you may play along every week for Twitter Super Bonus Points.
* * *
Would you like to have your photo featured on Photo Haiku Wednesday?
Email your photos to Michelle: photohaiku@reliefjournal.com
You'll get a photo credit link here on the main blog and you'll also be entered in the drawing for the Quo Vadis Habana journal and bottle of J. Herbin ink the week your photo appears on the blog!
This is the second of four entries on "being" a writer. The first can be found here.
I had a job interview recently in San Diego and while I was there I got a chance to have dinner with my sister Jeanette. She’s in the middle of reading my first novel length manuscript and spent a good ten minutes before the food came trying to confirm which real people from our past were basis for my characters.
Tommy is totally Rob Machado.
Nope.
Well, Craig is you, isn’t he?
No, I see myself more as Bibs. (I should note that most people who’ve read the book think Craig is my alter, so they may be right. However, it really throws them when I say I identify more with Bibs, a deacon’s daughter turned prostitute and right-hand woman of the local pimp/drug dealer Marley Bob).
Well, what about BT?
She got him right, sort of. By the end of the conversation, I realized I really like this game. As a writer, I freely admit I crib the lives of the people around me. If you know me, I’m probably going to use a part of you. Writers don’t invent, we compile and alter and then graft what we’ve taken onto the pieces of ourselves we put into every person we “create.” We mix and match like the socks we don’t think people will ever see us wearing.
But the conversation of “who” my characters are is really interesting to me because I generally don’t know who I’ve composited until it gets pointed out to me. I think that may be one of the reasons I choose to do something as frustrating and low-paying as write fiction without wizards or vampires. I like the way something so personal only makes sense to me when other people explain its facets as they see them.
I even like when people get my stories “wrong” because explaining my intentions has a similar effect. I guess I could never be Emily Dickinson. I can’t write for myself and my four walls. I need feedback earlier than a posthumous release would allow.
Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction and is in the final stages of earning a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. His work is set primarily in his hometown of San Diego and has been known to include pimps in diapers, heroin-addicted pastors who suffer from OCD, and possibly the chupacabra.
Photo courtesy of Michelle Pendergrass.
Directions:
1. Write a haiku inspired by the photo and post it in the comments.
For extra chances to win:
2. Follow @reliefjournal on Twitter
3. Follow @Quo Vadis on Twitter
4. Twitter @reliefjournal with your haiku and #PHW (Photo Haiku Wednesday)
* * *
The good people over at Quo Vadis have generously donated some prizes!!
The weekly winner will receive a Quo Vadis Habana Journal and a bottle of J. Herbin ink!!
Every week Relief will choose a random winner! So play along and tell your friends. See the information below for extra chances to win.
* * *
Winner will be announced via Twitter Thursday afternoons.
We can only ship to U.S. addresses right now.
You may only win once every three months, but you may play along every week for Twitter Super Bonus Points.
* * *
Would you like to have your photo featured on Photo Haiku Wednesday?
Email your photos to Michelle: photohaiku@reliefjournal.com
You'll get a photo credit link here on the main blog and you'll also be entered in the drawing for the Quo Vadis Habana journal and bottle of J. Herbin ink the week your photo appears on the blog!
Web Editor Ian David Philpot addresses the topic of eBooks from the perspective of an undergraduate student looking to become an author immediately after graduation in eight weeks.
I have two bookshelves from IKEA that take up a lot of space in my room. They are wonderful and everything I had ever wanted from a book-holding structure, but they are also very full.
My girlfriend, who bought me the first of the two bookshelves, recently asked me if I wanted a Kindle for graduation. My immediate response was "No." I mean, how could I stand to ever read a novel from anything but an actual book? As an aspiring author, the thought of eBooks is nauseating. When I get a hold of a published copy of my first novel, I want to feel the pages, not the pixels. I want to breathe in the stories just by smelling the physical object in my hand. (Have you ever tried to sniff your computer screen? I tried it once. Apparently there was some static build up on the screen. I got zapped.)
I'm also aware of the large stigma attached to "online-only" publications. Don't get me wrong, there are some I follow very closely because I know who the editors are, but a majority of the literary community is concerned about the quality being produced by online-only journals. (And if someone happens to read a story they don't like from one online-only publisher, they may forever be turned off to the idea, whereas that person isn't likely to give up physical books.)
Parts of me wants to have an eBook reader: the tech savvy part, the part of me that always travels light, and the environmentally conscious part. That last part is where my biggest struggle exists.
I want to do everything I can to help out with the environment. I turn off the faucet when I brush my teeth. I take home plastic bottles from work--my day job doesn't have a recycling program in place. These are little things, I know, but I like to think they're helping out. So what if I didn't have to buy any more physical books at all? (Textbooks especially.) Then I started the process of justifying timber sacrifice for my personal needs.
Then NPR posted a link on Facebook to Lynn Neary's article "No Ink, No Paper: What's the Value of an eBook?" I was scared when I started reading. What if I finally write something good and it's never actually printed on paper? What if Richard Stallman gets a hold of it and starts distributing it for free? What if my book never makes any money? I dropped my laptop and ran to find a paper bag to stop from hyperventilating.
When I regained consciousness... Okay, so maybe I didn't really pass out, but I did freak out. What right did NPR have of presenting me with the harshness of reality? I was so upset, I went back to the article to read the rest. And a peace came over me when Neary quoted Chris Dannen, a freelance writer:
"If you have iTunes selling your books, you have this entire store right on everyone's desktop and you can expose them to a lot more," Dannen says. "You can just get them into the habit of buying books, and more importantly, you make the whole process of buying completely frictionless."
iTunes--where I spend over $100 a year buying music--could be selling my book to anyone near a computer? How could I not like that idea?
So Erin, if you're reading this, I'll have the Kindle with a side of eBooks, please.
***
NOTE: Relief will not be abandoning the printed form anytime in the foreseeable future. Our eBooks are available on Scribd.
***
Ian David Philpot is studying English at Northern Illinois University and spent one year in Columbia College Chicago’s Fiction Writing program. He writes fiction, poetry, and music. Ian prefers black to white, vanilla to chocolate, and only eats yellow cake.
Photo courtesy of Stephanie Kasan.
Directions:
1. Write a haiku inspired by the photo and post it in the comments.
For extra chances to win:
2. Follow @reliefjournal on Twitter
3. Follow @Quo Vadis on Twitter
4. Twitter @reliefjournal with your haiku and #PHW (Photo Haiku Wednesday)
* * *
The good people over at Quo Vadis have generously donated some prizes!!
The weekly winner will receive a Quo Vadis Habana Journal and a bottle of J. Herbin ink!!
Every week Relief will choose a random winner! So play along and tell your friends. See the information below for extra chances to win.
* * *
Winner will be announced via Twitter Thursday afternoons.
We can only ship to U.S. addresses right now.
You may only win once every three months, but you may play along every week for Twitter Super Bonus Points.
* * *
Would you like to have your photo featured on Photo Haiku Wednesday?
Email your photos to Michelle: photohaiku@reliefjournal.com
You'll get a photo credit link here on the main blog and you'll also be entered in the drawing for the Quo Vadis Habana journal and bottle of J. Herbin ink the week your photo appears on the blog!
Lisa Ohlen Harris provides us with a short passage that didn’t make it into her forthcoming book Through the Veil. (This post first appeared on her website LisaOhlenHarris.com.)
I stayed home with the baby that night. I must have fallen asleep on the sofa, because when I woke about midnight, Todd wasn’t home yet. The gathering at the Manning’s house must have run late, I thought.
While I was putting on pajamas and brushing my teeth, Todd was helping Tim out of the wrecked taxi. A couple of Arab shabab stopped at the scene of the accident to ask if they could help; they took Tim to the emergency room to have his head sewn shut.
When they left the Manning’s house, the guys had waved down a taxi. Tim sat in the front seat, because his Arabic was better than Todd’s. There was a seat belt on the passenger’s side, Tim remembered later, but it was grimy and dusty. He thought briefly that he should put it on anyway, but pushed the thought away knowing that the driver would interpret this as an insult to his driving—and a lack of trust in the will of God.
Todd woke me up when he finally got home, early in the morning. It was still dark, but I remember hearing the birds sing outside our bedroom window. When I turned on a lamp, I saw blood all over Todd’s sandals and a deep gash between his toes, almost splitting his foot for an inch or so. It should have been sutured, but he hadn’t noticed his own injury while he was at the hospital with Tim. Todd’s wound took weeks to heal, and he still has the scar. It’s easy to hide under socks and shoes.
We didn’t see Tim over the weekend, and when he came to the language school that Monday he had a big piece of gauze taped over the wound. When his forehead healed enough he took gauze off, but it wasn’t until the sutures were removed that we all saw the jagged crescent.
----------
So there’s the “deleted scene.” The guys were in a taxi crash. Tim hurt his head and ended up with a crescent-shaped scar. It’s kinda interesting, but so what? I mean, really, why would this story matter to anyone but our family and Tim’s? I might tell about the accident when we get the old gang together, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s book-worthy.
As I assembled my chapters for Through the Veil, I wanted each memory, each chapter to say something more than, “This happened then that happened, now isn’t the Middle East exotic?”
Ultimately, the taxi accident memory just didn’t make the cut.
***
Lisa Ohlen Harris is Relief’s Creative Nonfiction editor. Her Middle East memoir, Through the Veil, will be published by Canon Press in 2010. Lisa’s essays have appeared in journals like River Teeth, Arts & Letters, and The Laurel Review, and have received special mention in Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses (2009) and in Best American Spiritual Writing (2008 and 2010). Lisa enjoys mentoring and editing the work of emerging writers through her critique service.
This is the first in a series of four entries on "being" a writer.
I’ve spent the last four years completely committed to becoming a published author and yet only recently come to terms with calling myself a writer when people ask what I do for work. Even though I’ve written since I was young, saying it out loud (and claiming it as a vocation no less) has always felt a bit presumptuous and a lot bougie. And then there’s the inevitable follow-up question:
What’s your book called?
Um, I don’t have one. Until a couple years ago, I didn’t have a single fiction credit to my name. The awkward moment that follows generally ends with another question, or really, variations on the same question:
So what do you really do? Oh, so what’s your day job then? So, writing’s a hobby then? Where does your money come from?
Since drug sales and exotic dancing don’t seem to be acceptable answers to those questions, I’ve been obliged to tell people I teach writing and am working on a terminal degree (anyone else think that a Ph.D. and cancer sharing an adjective is odd?). And then the nod comes. You know, the head bob that says, Oh, you’re a loser.
Recently, however, I’ve had a couple pieces published and some “encouraging” agent rejection letters. As a result, I find myself described in a new way. Now, I’m not a loser, I’m an “emerging writer.” I am troubled by this title as well. Am I a grizzly rolling out of months of winter hibernation? Am I a developing nation? The consensus seems to be that I’m somewhere between caterpillar and butterfly, which in my estimation makes me that nasty, gray chrysalis from which a living creature may or may not spring.
If you think I’m wrong, try out the following:
Sir, you’re going to need triple bypass heart surgery. But don’t worry; one of our brightest emerging surgeons will perform the procedure.
I know you’re on trial for murder, but you’ve got an emerging public defender representing you.
When I think about the idea of emergence, I immediately want another title. I’m trying a few out. Tell me what you think.
I am under-published. I am material heavy and publication light. I’m very market selective. My readership is still on an indie level. Commercial success isn’t all that important. My family likes some of what I write and you should too. If I’m not the next “it” writer, I feel safe saying I could be the next “that” writer.
That last one seems a bit long and probably wouldn’t go over well on a resume. Maybe the one before it too.
I guess I just want to feel less like a fraud when I call myself a writer. Then again, if great novelists like J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee, and Lauren Conrad from The Hills never settled comfortably into the title, maybe I shouldn’t expect too either.
Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction and is in the final stages of earning a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. His work is set primarily in his hometown of San Diego and has been known to include pimps in diapers, heroin-addicted pastors who suffer from OCD, and possibly the chupacabra.
Photo courtesy of Stephanie Kasan.
Directions:
1. Write a haiku inspired by the photo and post it in the comments.
For extra chances to win:
2. Follow @reliefjournal on Twitter
3. Follow @Quo Vadis on Twitter
4. Twitter @reliefjournal with your haiku and #PHW (Photo Haiku Wednesday)
* * *
The good people over at Quo Vadis have generously donated some prizes!!
The weekly winner will receive a Quo Vadis Habana Journal and a bottle of J. Herbin ink!!
Every week Relief will choose a random winner! So play along and tell your friends. See the information below for extra chances to win.
* * *
Winner will be announced via Twitter Thursday afternoons.
We can only ship to U.S. addresses right now.
You may only win once every three months, but you may play along every week for Twitter Super Bonus Points.
* * *
Would you like to have your photo featured on Photo Haiku Wednesday?
Email your photos to Michelle: photohaiku@reliefjournal.com
You'll get a photo credit link here on the main blog and you'll also be entered in the drawing for the Quo Vadis Habana journal and bottle of J. Herbin ink the week your photo appears on the blog!
The following is part 3 of 3 from Robert Garbacz.
[Author’s Note: This the final entry in my three-part series on the importance of a rich and multivaried “texture” in which different parts of the story resist each other, making for a far more engaging piece. In parts 1 (HERE) and 2 (HERE), I discussed Greg Mitchell’s genre-fiction “Flowers for Shelly” and Michael Snyder’s more literary “Normal People.” In this section, I turn to the issue of how--and why--readers might want to take the risk of making complicated, textured fiction.]
Okay, so now what? Sure that’s how I choose stories, but what good can it do for those of you who actually want to write stories with texture? Well, I’m not yet an expert writer, but I think I’ve found two simple principles:
1) Let ideas wait for a while, and don’t be afraid to mix them up. For me, an interesting idea will stick in my head for months, if not for years. My story in the first Diner started when I was listening to way too many 1920’s-1940’s adventure radio dramas. Somehow, a phrase came to me, “the cozy firelit tavern in the middle of the Abyss.” But it was several months before I started my story, in which I had plenty of time to fill my tavern with dead authors, throw in a generous portion of film noir flavorings, add a single-mindedly Quixotic Preacher, and a protagonist who goes along with him without really buying his program wholesale. And then, of course, there was the proofreading, where I looked for any odd, interesting spices I could throw in. But each stage required time, and a willingness to try to stick things together that common sense would keep apart.
2) Don’t be afraid to contradict yourself. In throwing a variety of flavors into the mix, you’re probably going to end up with a story that is true to the parts of life that don’t allow for easy solutions. Sometimes that will feel uncomfortable, or strange, and you’ll feel the temptation to make everything neat and clean and right. And maybe you should--for certain publishers and certain audiences. But the best--and most memorable--tales are the ones that don’t shy away from their endings, even if the end the story leads to only emphasizes the difference between how the world should be and how the world is.
I’ll close with one more example, from a piece of genre-fiction that wasn’t published in the Diner because it was written some ten thousand years too early and was too long. It is also, through a twist of fate, now considered literary fiction. The story is the Iliad and the scene is the climactic meeting between the (essentially fatherless) Greek warrior Achilles and the Trojan king Priam (whose son, Hector, was brutally killed by Achilles in a cycle of vengeance). In a shocking moment of grace, Achilles not only gives Hector’s body back for burial, but he feels a strange sympathy for the father of his dead enemy. They eventually eat together, remembering another story which beautifully mixes horrific tragedy and simple joy. As Achilles puts it in Lombardo’s translation,
Even Niobe remembered to eat Although her twelve children were dead in her house, Six daughters and six sturdy sons. [...] Nine days they lay in their gore, with no one To bury them, because Zeus had turned The people to stone. On the tenth day The gods buried them. But Niobe remembered She had to eat, exhausted from weeping. [...] Well, so should we, old sir, Remember to eat. You can mourn your son later When you bring him to Troy. You owe him many tears.
(lines 651-3, 659-63, 669-71)
This act of compassion is not the end of the story. As the poem’s original audience well knew, Priam’s son would soon kill Achilles and Achilles’s allies will soon kill every man in Troy. The result--texture. It isn’t just a straightforward revenge-tale, or a saccharine tale of friendship among enemies. It is something more.
Homer, or whoever wrote the Iliad, chose to interrupt his tale of rage and death with a story of acceptance and commonality (or, conversely, to surround his story of acceptance and commonality with a larger story of rage and cyclical violence.) That sort of incomplete, soulful, and very-human texture is a goal well worth seeking.
***
Robert Garbacz, when in his natural habitat, can frequently be seen arguing theology, politics, and art over ale with often excessive volume, haranguing his friends repeatedly with obscure but fascinating facts about Medieval literature, or staring cloyingly into the eyes of his beloved wife Hannah. Unfortunately, his natural habitat is Oxford in the period from 1930-1950. This is a bit awkward for someone born in Tulsa in 1983, but he is studying towards his Doctoral at the University of Texas in Austin and feels this is a firm step in the proper direction. His short story, “The Salvation of Sancho,” appeared in the previous Diner anthology, inducting him into this peculiar world of horror, bloodshed, and merciless ravagement of grammatical missteps.
Today is the last day that Relief will be accepting submissions for issue 4.1. If there is a story or poem that you've been thinking about submitting, now is the time for you to head on over to the Online Submission System and send it to our editors. If you don't think that your piece is just right, then keep working on it--or, if it's Creative Nonfiction, head on over to CNF Editor Lisa Ohlen Harris's website for a critique. The Online Submission System will open up in two short months for issue 4.2.
Brent Robison joins the blog to discuss his thoughts on finding unity within his writing and spirituality.
I write fiction, but I'm not much into plots, nor pleasing resolutions. I love the capital-Q Questions -- the questions without answers. I don't need answers, but I love learning as much as my sub-genius mind can handle about everything we humans have so far come to know in our dogged pursuit of answers to the unanswerable.
That puts me squarely in the realm of the invisible, where I travel alone. I don't self-identify as Christian. There is no "ism" I feel attached to. Yet there is a driving force in my heart and mind to explore the territory -- call it "spiritual" -- that every religion's fringe-dwellers, the mystics, have resided in for millennia: the philosophical borderlands currently going by the name of Nonduality. In Christianity today, perhaps Bernadette Roberts is its leading investigator, with her contemplative teachings and "No-Self" books. In her experience, the self and God are not separate: "I and my Father are One," one without even the concept of another.
For me, years of study fueled by parallel passions -- science and metaphysics -- gradually led me to glimpse a perfect interweaving of current knowledge and ancient wisdom. Quantum physics intertwined with Advaita (Sanskrit for "not two"). Spacetime as a metaphor for Oneness. Superstrings pointing to the Nameless Absolute.
Meanwhile, I played the writing game: workshops, submissions, the occasional publication in a literary journal. But mostly I labored away at writing stories: notes, sketches, little stories, bigger stories. Imaginary characters with lives and hearts and pains all their own kept jumping up and asking to be acknowledged. Inspired by literary realism, postmodern and classic, lush or minimalist, I worked at exploring psycho-spiritual states and getting something both meaningful and beautiful onto the page. Then out of all that jumble rose the challenge that got my blood pumping at a whole new rate....
If everything is One, how is that expressed in story?
Well, it's been done, with various degrees of success, in many ways: --exegesis of various cultural mythologies --allegory or parable with a "moral" --stories from the lives of famous gurus or holy men --the conundrums of time travel (see my friend's book The High Priest of Prickly Bog) --fanciful alternate realities like those of Italo Calvino --narrative thought experiments ala Jorge Luis Borges --straight science fiction: on other planets, things behave differently --variations on the sword and sorcery genre --human encounters with angels or extraterrestrials --magical realism --etc.
Trouble is, none of these appealed to me. Or rather, they were not what I was doing as a writer. As Harvey Pekar (American Splendor) said, "Everyday life has a huge effect on people." I wanted to write literary short stories, about us, the common folks. Our ordinary tragedies and existential crises. The mundane epiphanies that move us all incrementally forward. In other words, "real life."
It was my invented characters themselves who offered me the key. Of their own accord they had began lurking on the edges of each other's stories. But I wasn't sure what that meant. Then one day as I surveyed the whole array of stories and fragments, a complex web of faint shimmering lines seemed to materialize before my inner eye. These people, like all of us, were connected by invisible threads, coincidences, ephemeral glancing touches, by which subtle influence was being exerted. Life paths changed in seemingly tiny, but possibly powerful, ways. I saw that we're like cells in one giant body, all going about our business transporting enzymes from one place to another and effecting change on other cells, but with hardly a glimmer of awareness of our own impact.
To suggest this newfound truth seemed to me the best way I could express Unity. One friend argued, correctly, that interconnection requires separateness, so I was a little off the mark. On the other hand, ultimate oneness is ultimately inexpressible in human language. The best we can offer is suggestion, metaphor, a finger pointing at the moon. And after all, in literary fiction -- just as in this thing we call "reality" -- the needs, hopes, dreams, heartaches, addictions, and loves of daily life are the foreground. To see the background is another level of perception altogether.
I'm entirely a beginner on the road toward Unitive Consciousness. But that vision of all human beings interconnected by a vast intangible network of influence, invisible energy lines weaving us together, became the engine driving the finishing, assembling, and publishing of a collection of thirteen linked stories called The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility. All those bits and pieces of characters' lives finally came together and made sense, to me. And more important, it set me and my writing on a course for the future, and for that I'm grateful.
***
Brent Robison emigrated west to east and is now rooted in the Catskill Mountains of New York. His fiction has appeared in a dozen literary journals and has won awards from Literal Latté, Chronogram, and the New Jersey Council on the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize nomination. His collection of linked short stories, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, is available wherever books are sold. Between daddy and hubby hours, he blogs at ultimate-indivisibility.com and continues chipping away at two novels-in-progress. He is also the editor and publisher of the Hudson Valley literary annual, Prima Materia. Brent's short story "Baptism" can be found in Relief Issue 3.2.
Photo courtesy of Michelle Pendergrass.
Directions:
1. Write a haiku inspired by the photo and post it in the comments.
For extra chances to win:
2. Follow @reliefjournal on Twitter
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4. Twitter @reliefjournal with your haiku and #PHW (Photo Haiku Wednesday)
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The good people over at Quo Vadis have generously donated some prizes!!
The weekly winner will receive a Quo Vadis Habana Journal and a bottle of J. Herbin ink!!
Every week Relief will choose a random winner! So play along and tell your friends. See the information below for extra chances to win.
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Winner will be announced via Twitter Thursday afternoons.
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You may only win once every three months, but you may play along every week for Twitter Super Bonus Points.
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Would you like to have your photo featured on Photo Haiku Wednesday?
Email your photos to Michelle: photohaiku@reliefjournal.com
You'll get a photo credit link here on the main blog and you'll also be entered in the drawing for the Quo Vadis Habana journal and bottle of J. Herbin ink the week your photo appears on the blog!
Jason Hubbard Derr joins the blog to write about challenging another writer (who just happens to be the son of the Stephen King) to the death.
When Chris Fisher asked me to do a blog post to help promote my story – "Live Nude Girls" – in the latest issue of Relief my mind jumped to several immediate possibilities. I felt I could talk on a range of topics like:
Instead I have decided to challenge author Joe Hill to a duel to the death. Mr. Hill is the author of Heart Shaped Box and the forthcoming Horns and is the son of Stephen King.
In life – as both a human being and as a writer (not all human beings are writers, it’s a much longer process for us) it is important to have a nemesis. If possible one should indicate their nemesis in writing and make several public declarations of the relationship. I should point out that having a Grown-Up-Professional nemesis relationship and, say, a Deep-Wish-For-Harm-To-Fall-On-the-Guy-Who-Made-your-Life-Torture-In-Grades-4-And-5 are much different things.
I am sure that you have already begun to ask yourself: why be the nemesis of Mr. Hill. Because he is Stephen King’s son and had publishing connections from the earliest glimmer of a desire to publish? Is it because in ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ he took what could have been a clichéd King-esq horror novel and instead – through a truly unique lead character – gave us a story that was as much about growing old and taking stock of our lives as it was about past sin? Or is it because he is doing what I want to do with life – writing comics and books (the comic I created but was not allowed to write? Apparently it’s coming out soon!)?
Yes. It’s that one!
But I won’t belabor the point – part of the fun of having a secret nemesis is that you get to keep your funhouse mirror life justifications to yourself in, say, a journal or in mad midnight ramblings.
In the end I feel Joe Hill would be a good nemesis because he seems like a nice guy – that as he ridicules your work he may actually say something nice about it. And I feel he may not agree with my weird pre-Acclaim Valiant Comic book fascination but he would get it.
So, Mr. Hill I want to do what you do: write stories of wonder that plumb the depths of humanity. And I’m a few years behind you. But I will catch up. And, oh lets say in 10 years, I want to challenge you to a Duel-to-the-Death on the top of the empire state building.
But before that – can we get a beer? Maybe poke around a used bookstore and would you autograph my copy of ‘Heart-Shaped Box’?
***
Jason Hubbard Derr is a theologian, author and independent scholar living in Vancouver, BC with his lovely new bride. Jason is a contributor to PopTheoloy.com, has been invited to submit to an academic journal and will soon see his MA thesis published. He has most of a BA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and and all of a MA in Theology from the Vancouver School of Theology. Jason's story "Live Nude Girls" can be found in Relief Issue 3.2.
The following is part 2 of 3 from Robert Garbacz.
[Author’s Note: This is the second in my three-part blog series on the importance of a rich and multivaried “texture” in which different parts of the story resist each other, making for a far more engaging piece. In part 1 (HERE), I discussed Greg Mitchell’s “Flowers for Shelly,” a piece that combined zombie mayhem, humor, violence, multiple characters, and a sweet-hearted love story in order to get itself on the “must publish” list. Here, I discuss a piece from Relief that is similarly textured, though in a more literary manner. Next week, I will conclude on a practical note, showing tips for writers and examining the payoff for taking risks.]
The sort of texture I talked about last week isn’t just for zombie romantic comedies, or even genre fiction. Another story that blew me away was Michael Snyder’s three-page tale of grief and madness inRelief 3.1. Read it yourself if you haven’t, as soon as possible. Once you have, here’s the last paragraph in full:
“I walk now. I talk a lot too. Out loud. Mostly to myself, sometimes to God. All the good smells are gone. There are no more kind eyes either, no more Tonys or groggy nurses. I do have my photographs though. And Hailey’s blanket. I bartered away Maria’s bathrobe for a pair of Pumas that don’t fit. When I get desperate, the priest will feed me or give me a coat. He tells me to keep talking to God, to say it out loud if I have to, no matter how the normal people look at me or move to the other side of the road. He says my decrease is Jesus’s increase, which sounds like total crap to me. Still, I continue to testify about the things I have seen and heard and smelled and done.”
This doesn’t look like a zombie romantic comedy, because it isn’t. What it does look like (and is) is a combination of different sorts of expectations, meeting in unique ways to provide a textured perspective that is true to life.
One would expect certain narratives, particularly in an explicitly Christian magazine: grief slowly giving way to acceptance, an increased understanding and reliance on God. Those stories are there, like the love story element of “Flowers for Shelly.” The narrator is talking to God more, with the guidance of a priest. He’s also moving on--maybe--with his final willingness to get rid of Maria’s bathrobe.
But there’s other flavors, as well. In addition to the comforting taste of acceptance, there’s a strong flavoring of bitterness and continued, self-destructive mourning. He may have given up Maria’s bathrobe, but he keeps Hailey’s blanket and the photographs. And while the narrator may be talking to God, he’s still profoundly suspicious of the preacher’s words, which often “sound like total crap to me.” And then there’s the sheer mundanity of life; he gives up the bathrobe not in some glamorous ceremony but in a trade for shoes which didn’t fit.
Again, it is the multiplicity of voices--even if they’re all within one person’s mind--that makes the story memorable, and in this case heart-breaking. And the conclusion doesn’t get rid of the complexity of flavors; it leaves them, in a melange of tastes that remain on the palate. Like a fine (and highly alcoholic) Trappist ale, the story leaves the reader a bit disoriented and uncertain, but with a delicious aftertaste to contemplate.
***
Robert Garbacz, when in his natural habitat, can frequently be seen arguing theology, politics, and art over ale with often excessive volume, haranguing his friends repeatedly with obscure but fascinating facts about Medieval literature, or staring cloyingly into the eyes of his beloved wife Hannah. Unfortunately, his natural habitat is Oxford in the period from 1930-1950. This is a bit awkward for someone born in Tulsa in 1983, but he is studying towards his Doctoral at the University of Texas in Austin and feels this is a firm step in the proper direction. His short story, "The Salvation of Sancho," appeared in the previous Diner anthology, inducting him into this peculiar world of horror, bloodshed, and merciless ravagement of grammatical missteps.
