UPDATE: A New Piece of Writing [Artist's Note: Please be gentle]

UPDATE:  Shortly after I posted the story "Josephine" on this blog, I also submitted it to the on-line publication, The Danforth Review (under the name "MAN WOMAN SOFA").  I just got word that TDR is going to publish the piece in an upcoming issue.  I have therefore taken it down in order to not negatively impact TDR's publication of it. 

Thanks to those who commented or just took a look!

So, we're here and it's now ...

Well, 2012 is off to a good start, with a real sense of opportunity and change blowing a hopeful breeze into the dark corners of a Canadian winter existence.  Something particularly exciting may be just around the corner, but more on that later if it pans out...

In any event, after a long hiatus from submitting and getting writing published, I got back on the horse over the last 12 + months, and finally succeeded in having another story published by Scrivener in its Summer 2011 issue.  There are still plenty of submissions out there (fingers crossed), but this represents the most recent work I've had published.  For those who are interested, however, in the business of writing and getting short fiction and poetry published, I would recommend joining Places for Writers on Facebook.  They offer a good community of writers to engage with, as well as a constantly refreshed listing of publications and contests looking for submissions representing a wide array of subjects, interests and genres.  A must for any aspiring writer on-line!

Scattershot on a Monday evening

Just some thoughts with no particular association and in no particular order.

1.  Automobiles come equipped with headlights AND taillights.  People who fail to turn on their lights at dusk seem to forget the latter.  Athough you may have daytime running lights that provide some illumination ahead, a black car on a dark road with no taillights is a virtual phantom that you can't see until you're right on top of it. 

So, ... please turn on your lights before dark if you don't want to end up as a hood ornament.

2.  I listen to REM's greatest hits album, Part Lies,  Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage, 1982 - 2011, on my long commute home and I can't help being struck by how Michael Stipe's plaintive "I nee-e-ed this" on Country Feedback still feels like a cry for help. When I was recently indisposed (to be as delicate as I can be), the refrain to Green Grow the Rushes started running through my head.  I sat wondering if any music I've listened to since 1995 will ever have the intimate impact that REM, Midnight Oil, the Smiths and U2 (and a handful of other bands) did.  Okkervil River?  Arcade Fire?  The broken poetry of Art Brut?  I wonder if anything, musical or otherwise, can ever be that romantic and immediate again.  Middle age.  Meh.

3.  Watch when you use the word we, I and you.  It can be very telling.  The best laid plans of mice and people, especially the ones that require a clear delineation between 'us' and 'them', are so easily undone.  Even a pronoun can be a tell.

The Summer of '98

In the summer of 1998, my creative output had waned significantly.  One bad relationship had given way to another which was by then on its last, wobbling legs.  I was staring down the barrel of my 30th birthday, with little to show for my life but 2 degrees and a job that was taking me nowhere.  By the end of the early autumn of that year, I would make some significant decisions:  I dumped the girl; I moved out of the townhouse we were sharing; and I decided that I'd become a lawyer.  By the new year, I was getting ready to move into my own place, had scored reasonably well on my LSATs, and was waiting for the outcome of my application to the law school at the University of Western Ontario (where I'd done my undergrad degree).  In the words of a story I once read (liberally paraphrased here - I believe it's Amy Hempel, but I've perused her Collected Stories, and can't locate it), I'd pulled out the junk drawer of my life and turned it upside down on the floor.

While none of these details are directly relevant to this publication, I think there is a sense of being on the cusp of something that also comes through in this poem.  It was published in connection with the Forest City Poetry Contest, in Afterthoughts:  Today's Best Poetry (which ceased publication in 2000), published by Harmonia Press right here in London, Ontario.  Until I re-read it , I wasn't so sure about this poem - now, I think I kind of like it.

The Slowing Fall

So many ants without love as trees shed

and terminal house flies by windows reflect

their dying

in 1000 eyes

The word slipped out –

this time of browning greenery,

trees going fiery, thinning

as the days;

of all the times

for one slow-burning

phrase to find

withered lips.

I said it quietly, imitating Autumn, uncertain

of words dying mid-air, and you

returned it

with geese

stabbing south.

QWERTY #2 - Spring 1997

This story was written after I had completed my M.A. thesis (and during a time when I was battling the inescapable conclusion that I no longer had anything new or interesting to say).  It was published in the spring 1997 issue of QWERTY. 

i wrote a story about vienna while my father lay dying

I sit composing a fiction about Vienna and about falling in love with someone other than my fiancée, when the phone rings; I look at the clock – 7:13 p.m. My mother's on the other end. ”Dad's in hospital. He’s okay, just some chest pains" She tries to sound calm, talking like she’s rubbing my back. Instead, that false calm sounds like dead-silence before an alarm. I'm thinking of buildings a disturbing shade of gold, the colour beneath five centuries of soot, and the imperfect beauty of the woman who might have loved me. Mom suggests it's his heart, considering the man's age; hearts forever breaking down as they do. My mother implies he'll be in hospital a while, as they mend what’s broken. I think I hear coronary, infarction, angina. I swear my mother said those words, then promised to call back if there was any change. Mom, sounding calm as low tide, sends love.

Something breaks inside so I build verbal buttresses around frail muscle. In my head a castle falls down. I write a story, not about the Blue-Danube, postcard Vienna; St. Stephensplatz crowded with pigeons like mawkish old men; Klimt faces in every Kaffeehaus, but about the other Vienna: the cold-hearted place with its harsh cigarettes and forty-shilling coffee, walled against foreign features. This contrary, miraculous Vienna, an oddly shaped beauty moving me by one ginger elbow through the Christkindlmarkt. Past stalls of ornaments, Glühwein, Maroni …     

In the story the woman loves me. You can make people love you in stories. I wait for the phone to ring, thinking my father will die before I finish. His heart is broken. My mother's hopeless reassurance becomes long-distance silence. Midnight: I assume my father is deeply cold or under a knife. I stop writing a story about Vienna as my father lay dying.

I have a problem telling the truth, so I tell stories.

The call actually comes at 3 p.m.: I start the story later. I like Vienna more than I say, and love the woman less. Her feelings for me are pursued by question marks. My heart, therefore, is not so bad. Neither is my father’s, not nearly so bad as I pretend. He passes tests of the heart with flying colours. My mother sounds calm because she is calm; she says nothing about hearts — I compose words to justify writing about a woman who probably never loved me. If I told you that I retreated into fictions because my father had chest pains from eating pepperoni, you wouldn't have come this far.

In retrospect, everything’s fine. Except the story. The story is a disaster. 

QWERTY - Spring 1996

This story is actually the title piece from my Master's Thesis, which I finished in the spring of 1995.  It was selected for publication in the inaugural issue of QWERTY, which was published at the University of New Brunswick (where I did my M.A.).  The editors were my friends and peers during the 2 years I completed my degree, and at least one of them (Darryl Whetter) has gone on to publish a book or two (The Push & the Pull, Origins, and A Sharp Tooth in the Fur).  Just looking at the story now, and the issue of QWERTY in which it was published, I'm transported back to a very special, formative time.  It may be the golden light of nostalgia, but it still engenders very fond memories.

The Things We

There is a photo on my desk of my father in a suit hidden by a long black gown. Graduation day. My father has a piece of paper saying that he could be a social worker. Instead, my father unloads trucks, heavy with crates and boxes and pails and canisters, and labours for the union, for his fellow worker, making sure that agreements are kept, that the letter of the law is followed. My father works too hard at everything and now he is tired. But we shall not want.

For a moment I am back home. I imagine my mother saying, “Ron, did you hear anything today about the contract?” Her voice lingers through the house and I hear my father’s weight leave the easy-chair by the window; his feet and worn- out knees move him to the hall closet, where he pulls out a riffling of photocopied collective-agreement pages from his union satchel. I’m sitting looking at the photo of my father, proud and hopeful in his black gown; short, light-brown hair tugged by a breeze tousling the surface of the St. Lawrence, visible in the background. I can see all of it at once; the day in the photo holding me and my mother, too, and the college building set back from the road and the short grass, all tended by that gust and the sun, a grainy black-and—white glow; that day and this — my father moving slowly (I notice it is always slower whenever I am back home for a visit) to the kitchen where Mom is finishing the shepherd’s pie. My father and his documents, treading the linoleum, explaining the slowness of processes, cursing occasionally the inefficiency of bureaucrats. There is constancy in this imagined scene. A comfort in knowing that when I turn my back Life slows down but goes on. I can be secure at a distance.

My father stilled by the frame is proud of his paper, the certificate rolled tight in his fist, but where am l? – outside, somewhere, on the grass, in my mother’s arms? The invisible wind plays forever with that now absent hair.  

* * *

I am slogging through endless reams of paper. Scholarly articles, essays, seminars. Scanlan has noted   Berger's reading of Benjamin  Derrida  phallocentrism  closure. Someone pipes more work onto my desk from somewhere above in the bowels of the machinery, so I roll up my sleeves and empty my head of fictions and set to processing another slew of information, repackaging and shipping it along. Barthes has remarked   metonymy   Scanlan. The engine, fuelled by coffee after coffee, injected with nicotine, chugs on into night, duty-bound.

In the morning I will have to turn my back on the reams; I will rise, shower, eat and go to work at the grocery store, 9 to 5. Eight hours of turning my mind off completely, trying to perfect the art of dough. This weekend I have the night-crew shift, as well, so I'll be returning to the store at 11 p.m.  Sleep in on Sunday and complete a paper and a seminar in time for Monday morning. Next week: more of the same. By summer it will be two jobs, the grocery store and the hot, dusty factory making vinyl windows. It helps pay for school and school will pay for itself, I hope. 

The things we must do.

Simultaneously, my research supervisor requires a rigorous perusal of his references by Wednesday; his bibliography must be unimpeachable, complete, beyond question, not a comma out of place nor a single slip in proper MLA format. I bow my head to four a.m., in this the hour of our...  but where is the fucking carrot?  I bow my head to the pages spread flat and spinning beneath my eyes.  Up at eight a.m. How long ...?

The things we must.

Thanksgiving: at home again and Mom is in peak form, not having had anyone to retell her stories to for a couple of months. Dad has heard them all and it shows in another old episode. He parks in front of a nature show or toys with the hide-a-word puzzle in the 'Funnies’. Or he walks the dog.  Mostly when he wants to be somewhere else he walks the dog, sometimes three times a day and I sit and listen to my mother. I can't help but listen. Either I like the stories or I like the ritual. What's the difference? I am receiving the familial catechism, like interrogating the old Bible, but with answers, details. Shadows.

She begins her telling with the time Uncle Fergus' tom cat, the one with the huge head, ate all the kittens in her father's barn. One at a time they went missing from Fluffy's nest until her father caught the unfortunate tom at it. “Dad loved animals. He was really upset about those kittens.” He caught the big-headed bastard and swung him by the hind legs up against the end of the barn. Then my grandfather, Daniel Grant, took the carcass down to Fergus', walked up the driveway with the cat in tow, passed Fergus and flung it on the manure heap. 

“It was Uncle Fergus' prize cat, but dad just tossed it on the manure pile. Fergus was some ugly." I love this story and the grandfather, who predeceased my birth, and whom I am said to resemble in more than looks, who so loved the kittens. But there are other stories from life on the concession, a deck of cards that my mother cuts and shuffles and plays out, a litany] am familiar with.

“Then there was old Stan Stadnik, on the next farm, and that lot of his." And so begin her tales of the Stadniks who lived more by their thievery than by farming. Neighbours dogs poisoned, cattle and machines and tools that went missing in the night, through mysteriously broken sections of fence:  the calling cards of old Stan and his brood. “No one ever caught them, but everybody knew who’d done it.” There are lots of these stories, but mostly there is the time young Joe Stadnik (probably twenty at the time and sturdy as a Massey-Ferguson) tried to have his way by the light of a new sun with mom in the milking barn. “He kept walking closer, close enough I could smell him. I just held onto that old butcher knife and kept walking backwards. I don’t know what I'd've done if he'd gotten any closer ..." It's as clear as imagined pain. His snowy boots making puddles on the floor, the sun smudging through the few filthy panes and my mother, maybe sixteen, cursing shakily in imitation of the men’s voices on the porches where they sat in the evening shooting the bull.  Just that knife in her hand and him in menacing proximity, and finally somebody coming out of the house and him hightailing it out the far end of the building before he could commit the one word, rape, or end up bleeding among the cows' hooves and the shitty straw.

Usually the stories take a turn then, to the comical, like she reads my breathing and wants to offer me some fresh air. There was the wedding — "Malcolm McAllister and the bus driver's daughter from the fifth? Or was it Ian, the one who always had a runny nose? Anyway" — when the men let the goat into the house during the reception and it ran all over the place, pissing on the father of the bride, and the men outside, all spic'n'span in their Sunday go-to-meetin' clothes, happy on corn liquor, dropping their cigarettes and their pipes and slapping their thighs and laughing tears and wetting themselves. My grandfather, of course, among them.

“Oh, he could be a devil, Dad could. Deaf in one ear, but you didn't dare whisper anything halfway nasty but he'd be on ya. Christ. Ears like a hunting dog, right up to the end." The end, it smells to me of hospitals, the hospital in Kingston, though I've never been there, where they poked and prodded, did every experimental treatment on him they could.  Cancer.  They were just learning about cobalt and chemo in those days, but my grandfather let them try it all out on his withering body. For the future, for others. Or just for a few more days.

“Still, they couldn’t stop him smoking. The nurses had a fit. His feet wouldn't hit the floor before he had a cigarette in his mouth. Even in the hospital. ” In the hospital where he was rap- idly dying until he demanded to be taken home, to the farm.

The stories go on, easy and gentle and seemingly without end. My mother collects them to her like a euchre hand, careful of the order in which she plays them, holding some trump. I sip coffee from a black mug, steam insisting its way onto the lenses of my glasses. Mom pours the last of her tea from a tiny brown pot and whitens the cup with milk. Dad always asks her if she'd like some tea with her milk, but I let it pass this time, smirking to myself.

"Funny. I’ll never forget the day that Uncle Fergus died.” I love this story. More even than the cat swung up against the barn, or the tales of ‘Tiny Tim’, a distant crazy cousin of ours, and his suit that smelled of mothballs and the time he approached my father at some family occasion, most likely a funeral, saying "Ronald, I have a matter to discuss with you," and everyone turning whiter than the corpse, because he was going to go off on his spiel about 'the land,’ the imagined family estate he and his mother had somehow been conned out of.  Those are all classics, but this one’s my favourite. Mom cradles her tea in both hands. "Fergus was some hard-headed. Typical Scotsman. I remember that night. Dad came home from Fergus' place and told us that Fergus' bull had got loose again." I see a bovine silhouette hulking up out of a pasture, blue-black beneath the moon, munching grass, eerily quiet.

"Dad told him to leave it, go look for it in the morning.  'Damn thing’s no good for anything anyway' Dad said.  Dad thought pretty lowly of Fergus' animals." Not the least of which was the cannibalistic cat. For that matter, he probably didn't think all that highly of Fergus, blood or no blood. “But Fergus was determined to go looking, so dad came home and we thought no more of it. Fergus was pig-headed, but he knew his way around.”  She sips from her cup, feeding the story.

"The bull, Fergus' bull was well—known for being a nasty beast. It stamped a dog to death once in the barn. Toby a little spotted terrier. Dad offered to put the bull out of his misery with a two-by-four, but Fergus wouldn’t hear of it, said the bull was too valuable for breeding. Probably the only thing more stubborn than Fergus was that damn bull.  Anyway.  Fergus went looking and we went to bed, and dad went over in the morning to see if he’d got it back.  Well, he went up to the front of the house and knocked on the door. No answer. So he went to the kitchen and the door was unlocked and the kitchen light was on. He thought that was pretty strange. There’d been a couple of thefts over the last week on the next concession, the lot right behind our house, so dad got kinda worried and picked up Fergus' gun from behind the stove. He went out to the barn first and the cows were stomping and grunting and they hadn't been milked or fed. He said there was something in their eyes. No sign of the bull, though, or Fergus. Not thirty feet from the barn, just around the corner, he found him in the field, face up with his chest crushed."

Suddenly I am standing in the field, looking down, looking into …

Suddenly I know the look in the eyes of the agitated cattle.

“The bull must have charged him, smashed his ribs, collapsed both lungs. He died instantly." Died, instantly and alone in the dark, finding, in that last moment as the shadow closed on him and wrapped him between its horns, feeling its hugeness move against and through him, the missing bull. All because it couldn’t wait til morning. ”They found his boots twenty feet away."  The story stops here. I want to know what happened to the bull, but I don’t ask. That's the unwritten rule of the sermon. You never ask what’s held back or look at your opponent's cards. You put a period at the end of the story.

* * *

One night when I was home I volunteered to wash the dishes. My mother sat at the kitchen table, talking away her tea; dad was out with Skip, hoping to tire him in time for bed. It was Skip’s third journey of the day down the path behind the house. Mom was barely tolerating it: my father, his silence, his insistence on spending time with the dog. ”He doesn’t have his ass in the door two minutes and he has to take the dog out.”

It was the week after my father’s buddy from work went into the hospital for double by-pass surgery He was three years younger and twenty-five pounds lighter than my father. I know dad cannot sit down, between the dog and helping with the housework and working on some grievance. He will not relax. Mom is almost frightened over the edge of tea.

“Don't worry. Mom" Those are just words that sit between us. A useless knick-knack to drop on the table. She worries. My father worries her. Dad came in five minutes later, as I was folding the dish towel over a cupboard door. He unharnessed the dog who wagged himself over to my knee, sort of sidewinding, as if led by the tail. Mom looked at me, asked dad what he was doing. Before he could answer I suggested he was going down to the basement with me to play darts, an offer so rare that he would not dare refuse. Mom was younger at the sink as she rinsed her tea cup out, and I felt like maybe I was giving us all a little more time, time that we could use to slow down.

* * *

Eventually I close up the books, reluctantly stack the photocopies that must all be read, silence my pen. No more tonight.  I've been slowing down, having to reread every sentence. Scanlan… Scanlan… Scanlan.  Time to rest. For some reason the room is noisy with voices, with shuffling papers and feet. Hazy eyes move around the room.

A group of men are playing euchre at a table in a distant corner of my mind. I shake my head. My father, tousled and somewhere between twenty-seven and fifty, deals another hand. My grandfather lights another cigarette and uncle Fergus fans smoke out of his eyes. They are talking about the government and about farming, and they are drinking rye and coke, and I am imagining the whole thing when they spot me and my grandfather pulls out the chair opposite my father.  They need a fourth to play partners. I am half-asleep, dying for a few hours in bed, but l stumble over; dream over to where they are sitting. And there is the unmistakable sound of papers blown in the wind, articles, contracts, documents of all kinds, and a smell like dry grass and hand-rolled tobacco. I have to sit with them, just a couple of hands. They need a fourth.

I pick up my cards, eye them up and try to make contact with my father's gaze, over the lip of his glass. But I see only that hair, hear his feet or maybe my sleepy feet more and more slowly pacing. The cards.  Without looking at the faces around the table I know I`ve been dealt a lousy hand. My head touches the pillow and we play on into the night. The things we do 

A belated return to my publishing history ...

In the winter of 1993-94, I had another piece of prose poetry published in Scrivener, a quarterly published at McGill University.  Titled, "green thread", this (along with "guilt") is one of my favorite pieces of writing.  Sadly, that was 18 years ago ...
Here it is:

green thread

my buttons are falling off, clattering, rattling here and there hollow on the linoleum.

i am of the belief that these falling buttons, like the hairs that show up in my hand when i rub my head, are a sign. everything is a sign: no effect without a cause; a place for everything and everything in its place. (breed one part righteous Scottish Protestantism with one part Highland insanity; add German and English to taste, and a taste for liquor -- a place for everything.)

i sew my buttons back on, when i can find them, with green thread so that they'll grow on the garments i wear, so that they'll grow on me, giving me fasteners for the things that are misplaced, slip through my fingers, for the moments that got away leaving no scars where they penetrated; here i could hook on a childhood (a satchel of elusive memories), there i'd place a missing trinket, my glasses, keys, wallet; i'd get them all back, gather them up like the displaced buttons and fasten them to my body with needle and thread, and time would never hurt me again.