There's this thing I do sometimes ...
It’s called fiction. Sometimes people like it and publish it. Most of the time they don’t. This time they did. Click here to read.
"If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child. Break your heart inside and something will a child is the twangy song the Daddy hears again as if the lady was almost there with him looking down at what they’ve done, though hours later what the Daddy won’t most forgive is how badly he wanted a cigarette right then as they diapered the child as best they could in gauze and two crossed handtowels and the Daddy lifted him like a newborn with his skull in one palm and ran him out to the hot truck and burned custom rubber all the way to town and the clinic’s ER with the tenant’s door hanging open like that all day until the hinge gave but by then it was too late, when it wouldn’t stop and they couldn’t make it the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child’s body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self’s soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo."
David Foster Wallace, ”Incarnations of Burned Children”
"My role is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."
adapted from Finley Peter Dunne
Until the flowers breathe through our souls
For the first time in my career, I wrote a paragraph I’d be happy to read somewhere else. Thought I’d share:
”Oh never mind my pants.” She patted the floorboards beside her. ”Sit down here. Enjoy this with me. Before you go and ruin it by telling me one of the movers left fingerprints on the dishes, just sit here with me and hold my hand and think about all the time we have to just sit here and think about how much time we have. We can sit here forever if we want, until the flowers breathe through our souls.”
Busted
Every time I sit down at the keyboard to start a new project I can’t help feeling like the last successful piece I wrote was a fluke, that I am nothing more than a hack, desperate and out of ideas.
Awards Season
It’s been a while. Things have been extremely busy between school and getting ready for another baby. However, I’ll make time to pat myself on the back. This afternoon I was awarded the top prize in the Frank Waters Fiction Lectureship for a short story titled Another to the Multitude. I also won the Sutherland-McManus Award for Creative Nonfiction for a narrative essay titled The Pig Lay Dead.
Needless to say, I am proud and humbled and happy to be recognized for these two pieces. E-mail if you want copies to read.
Two words: Bad. Ass.
"[P]lain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English — it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them — then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice."
Mark Twain
It won’t get better
The news these last few weeks of the suicides of several gay teenagers is heartbreaking and tragic. As a society, we should be ashamed that our young people feel forced to take their lives because of the shame and humiliation inflicted upon them because of their sexuality. There is simply no excuse for such a thing to occur in a society that is supposed to be free, where all men are allegedly created equal.
Predictably, Hollywood has jumped on this, along with media outlets, both traditional and social. Networks news is covering the story. Facebook is working with GLAAD to stop anti-gay bullying. I’m sure your inboxes and news feeds have been flooded with videos made by celebrities calling for an end to anti-gay bullying as well, as if the bullying itself is the cause of these suicides. This is typical, coastal elitism at it’s finest, and I’m sick of it. The message of these campaigns is implicitly this: It gets better — if you move to New York CIty, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. Everywhere else and you’re still fucked. Because it doesn’t get better being gay in middle America.
