Tuesday 3.47: Just a little taste

I realized today that I went through the entire month of November without updating this blog, which is an irresponsible and reprehensible oversight, but I promise, I do have a reason: I’ve been working on a couple of things.

First, the bad but entirely expected news: My initial round of poetry submissions were all rejected. As always, this is a little disappointing, but chapbook-length works are always much harder to get published than individual poems, and I have hope that when I send out some work in little groups beginning in January, I’ll have more luck.

I’ve also been working on a short story, a tiny piece of which I’ll share below. A note on the process:

Consistency is critical to getting better as a writer, but I’ve come to belive that the practice is not, as the college teachers insisted, entirely about the exclusive practice of writing itself. Writing is also a lot of thinking, a lot more reading, and sometimes not thinking. This of course sounds lazy, and it’s important to note that I think you have to write youself into this stage. You need to become comfortable being in the same room with a poetic practice, you need to let it in, and while that sounds like it’s mostly just relaxing, it’s the complete opposite. Sylvia Plath said “The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it,” but all those wild jazz masters had an encyclopedic knowledge of music theory. So you hold these two ideas.

So anyway the process is slow. If you are writing anything, you are writing, and I’ve tried to embrace this approach to this particular piece of fiction. I’m not sure where it’s going yet. Some days have yielded just a sentence, others maybe two, and still others might just change some words or syntax. It’s not perfect and never will be, but it’s a way of exploring what fiction is with some sense of ambition. At some point, you gotta try, right?

I don’t know. Enjoy the excerpt:

Morning came immaterial and shapeless with the odor of space in an emptied kitchen drawer. A hot breeze stirred dust at the edge of the road and the upper branches of a group of trees, four hundred yards across a field of wildflowers and Indiangrass. It was quiet, except for the sound of birds that could not be seen. The sky was flat and gray.

At the end of the road—which ran north and south from the spot where Alice sat, north in the direction that she was looking—the distant, rumbling breath of traffic rose and faded, sighing and snoring in a dewy haze. Alice mostly imagined the drivers: men recently showered and yawning, scratching lazily at patches of stubble missed during their morning shaves; women rolling stiff, tired necks and blinking sleep and recalcitrant clumps of mascara from the tips of otherwise immaculate eyelashes. The long familiar rigid outline of a school bus passed ponderously during a lull, and diffused sunlight illuminated the silhouettes of children, some bouncing and twisting in and over seats with simious prehensility, others nodding over whatever happened to be in their laps in solemn quiet consuming supplication.

Alice sat in the dust at the edge of the road and curled her toes, cold and dusted, the big ones turning purple as if strangled, into the soles of her leather sandals. She had a habit of switching too early in spring from the sturdy and unwieldy necessity of boots to the frail trusted comfort of the sandals, which she wore defiantly through the shoulder seasons and the height of summer, even on horseback or in the field, repairing them with epoxy and a cache of hand tools borrowed from her father’s workshop when a buckle or joint inevitably failed.