Advice often given to writers, but seldom taken is to imagine a well-explored story from a different perspective. Kelly Davio did just that in her poem, Senescence. Ms. Davio, using The Qur’an rather than The Bibleas her story reference, considers how a change in a well-known character’s age might have affected the story. The result–simply elegant.
Poet Marvin Bell says, “Read something, then write something that shows the influence of what you read.” Bell (and many other writers) believe this is the best way to improve your craft. One of the best short story writers I know is Bruce Holland Rogers.
Bruce’s short-short stories make me think about the elements of story and what makes a story satisfying.
To fit reading into my schedule, I have to trick myself–not that I’m too busy to read, but that I get distracted. So, I subscribe to Bruce’s annual short short’s, stories that take a few minutes to read when they arrive by email about three times each month. Here’s a sample of Bruce’s work.
Dinosaur
When he was very young, he waved his arms, gnashed the teeth of his massive jaws, and tromped around the house so that the dishes trembled in the china cabinet. “Oh, for goodness sake,” his mother said. “You are not a dinosaur! You are a human being!” Since he was not a dinosaur, he thought for a time that he might be a pirate. “Seriously,” his father said at some point, “what do you want to be?” A fireman, then. Or a policeman. Or a soldier. Some kind of hero. But in high school they gave him tests and told him he was very good with numbers. Perhaps he would like to be a math teacher? That was respectable. Or a tax accountant? He could make a lot of money doing that. It seemed a good idea to make money, what with falling in love and thinking about raising a family. So he was a tax accountant, even though he sometimes regretted that it made him, well, small. And he felt even smaller when he was no longer a tax accountant, but a retired tax accountant. Still worse, a retired tax accountant who forgot things. He forgot to take the garbage to the curb, forgot to take his pill, forgot to turn his hearing aid back on. Every day it seemed he had forgotten more things, important things, like which of his children lived in San Francisco and which of his children were married or divorced.
Then one day when he was out for a walk by the lake, he forgot what his mother had told him. He forgot that he was not a dinosaur. He stood blinking his dinosaur eyes in the bright sunlight, feeling the familiar warmth on his dinosaur skin, watching dragonflies flitting among the horsetails at the water’s edge.
(c) Bruce Holland Rogers. Used with permission of the author.
If you liked the craft Dinosaur demonstrated, consider subscribing to his short-short series $10.oo/year to read something, then write something that shows the influence of fine storytelling.
The Poet
Last night 51 friends of poetry assembled to read Song of Myself in tribute to the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass‘ crucial (read includes the erotic parts) third edition.
Why David Oates and Wendy Willis embarked on this crazy venture is this:
to chant electrically, to boogie, and to unscrew the doors from their jambs; to raise spirits, give heart, and remind ourselves of Whitman’s enduring and inspiring global reach.
In this poem, Whitman moves us from Maine to Missouri, challenges us to accept each person, discusses immigrants and aboriginal peoples, delivers humor, eroticism, and epic battle scenes–everything the box office demands in 2010. I worried differing readers’ voices would jar this listener. I was right, but for the wrong reason. The variation of voices demonstrated to me that this poem is for every person.
I read section 36, the scene on a ship after a great battle; cleanup begins with the silenced guns and ends with the surgeon’s saw.
36
Stretch’d and still lies the midnight,
Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness,
Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the one we have conquer’d,
The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance white as a sheet,
Near by the corpse of the child that serv’d in the cabin,
The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl’d whiskers,
The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below,
The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty,
Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars,
Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves,
Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent,
A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining,
Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors,
The hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw,
Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan,
These so, these irretrievable.
If you don’t have a copy of Leaves of Grass, U. Toronto has this.
