Writing Contest

They're gone! My entries for the annual Rose State Writer's Short Course competition are in the mail.

No more editing. No more rewrites. No more thinking and rethinking. Questioning, doubting, second-guessing.

"Heroes," my entry for Flash Fiction is my absolute favorite. It is my way of honoring all those mothers out there who allowed their children to do dangerous things because those things needed to be done. Like my friend Allegra's grandmother who let Allegra's mother take part in the lunch counter sit-ins in Oklahoma City in the late 50's and early 60's.

Flash Fiction is almost poetry. It must tell a whole story in two or fewer pages. That means the writer must use the absolutely, most evocative, right word -- Hemingway's mot juste. The writer must engage the reader's experiences, their sensory memories, their fears, their dreams, and their hopes. And, most importantly, the writer must trust the reader to be willing and able to participate as an involved reader.

"Dead Birds and Broken Bottles," is creative nonfiction -- a new field for me. The trick to creative nonfiction is that it has to be true. Somehow my personal experiences have just never seemed exciting enough or well-plotted without embellishment. Or they were too personal and I was not comfortable being a character in my own story. Or somebody would get their feelings hurt and get mad at me. It wouldn't be safe to accidentally meet them at the local Walmart.

Everyone, no matter where they live, has a weather or natural disaster story. And being from Oklahoma, tornadoes lend a certain excitement to my own memories. Living in a small town offers all kinds of interesting characters. So I had the excitement and the familiar characters for a nonfiction piece. Then the creative part was to turn the factual time-line into a plot.

This particular tornado happened more than half a century ago so most of the characters are dead now and not likely to show up at Walmart. I'm feeling relatively safe in that respect.

Then there's "The Girl in the Reeds." Those of you who know me, know that I am particularly fond of mysteries. Murder mysteries.

Because I am currently working on a follow-up novel to Murder on Ceres, a Science Fiction/Murder Mystery, I didn't want to take time away from it to spend days and weeks on a murder mystery for this competition. I decided to write a murder mystery short story.

Keeping in mind that Murder on Ceres started out as a short story, this was a dangerous undertaking. I didn't know if I could write a mystery in short story form. Short stories are generally 7,500 or fewer words. I'd written short stories before, but not murder mysteries. The question was could I construct an interesting puzzle and solve it within that number of words.

And, you know what? I did. (Here insert a vision of a white-haired sexagenarian doing a happy dance, whilst humming the Theme from Rocky.)

I am excited. I am pumped. Look out, Oklahoma. I'm on my way!

Kingsolver – A Review (Rumination)

I thought to call this piece a review, but I have a daughter. And as any mother of a daughter knows, what we think doesn’t matter. She graciously pointed out to me that I’ve never written a “review.” Not a proper review. She likes what I write but, they’re not reviews.

Okay. I’ll call this a rumination – as I will all my reviews henceforward.

That same daughter introduced me to Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, a marvelous novel written in first person. First person from five points of view. As a writer, I understand the difficulty of portraying a character’s unique point of view, then maintaining that identifiable point of view through the length of a novel. Kingsolver did it with five characters, a mother and her four daughters, the children ranging in age from five to fifteen at the beginning. She wrote each as an identifiable individual with particular peculiarities of thought and language. Five significant and singular points of view.

So when I was looking for a book of creative nonfiction Kingsolver’s name in the credits of Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, along with Amy Tan and David Sedaris, I was sold.

Creative nonfiction is new to me. At least the term. Having enjoyed David Sedaris and Bailey White and Baxter Black for years on NPR, Creative nonfiction in the short form is not new to me at all. Come to think of it, Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” would be considered creative nonfiction.

“But that’s not what I come here to talk about.”

I came here to talk about Barbara Kingsolver, the woman I met in her work “High Tide in Tucson,” a wonderful true story that begins with a displaced hermit crab and moves into her life.

Kingsolver doesn’t define herself as a high school English teacher would, giving us her date of birth and where she went to school and when she married and how many children she has and how many awards and commendations she’s received. Or, as too commonly with autobiographies and memoirs of people successful in their field, what celebrities she’s met and slept with and/or disapproved of.

She offers us her view of living. Not in florid and overblown language, but concretely as a true word smith should.

“It’s not such a wide gulf to cross,” she writes “from survival to poetry. We hold fast to the old passions of endurance that buckle and creak beneath us, dovetailed, tight as a good wooden boat to carry us onward. And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore.” 

I've been there and am doing that. I bet you have and are, too.

An Educator

My parents were natural educators. I didn’t know that until I got to watch them in action with my children. When John and Grace were still arm babies, my dad would carry them around his place showing them trees and plants and animals, both domesticated and wild. I doubt they remember learning which is a box elder. Or not to touch poison ivy. Or that goats don’t like the rain. As far as they know, they’ve always known.

My mother helped teach them to read, first because she read. Then because there was comfort reading side-by-side with her. She taught them the joy of watching young ones grow and learn. Baby goats, baby chickens, baby flowers and vegetables.

“Plants?” you ask.

“Yes. Plants,” I say. The yellow rose, climbing on a trellis. The peach tree, espaliered against the barn’s north wall. The strange little bonsai lemon tree.

I guess the plants were more trained than educated, since they did not learn how to grow. Learning does require a certain amount of choice and the plants had none.

So maybe the babies were not learning, either. Since they were too young to choose. Have I written myself into a thought quagmire? Make an assertion then in the next few paragraphs prove myself wrong?

Where was I?

Ah, yes. An Educator.

We all learn in different ways. As an anarchist by nature, I don’t take well to training. Rules turn me to rebellion. Maybe that’s why English suits me so well.

“But English is full of rules,” you might say. “I before E. No double negatives. Do not end a sentence with a preposition. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

And you would be absolutely right. But the joy in English – and rules, in general – is that they are so easily broken.

The way I learn best is to be given a question rather than an answer.

Now you know why I rail at postulates in geometry and self-improvement and how-to books in the library.

So what have I done to learn how to write creative nonfiction? I bought how-to books. There are so many. You can make a steadier living writing how-to-write books than you can by writing. Kind of like a lawyer getting steadier checks if he’s elected judge.

There are probably how-to books out there that could educate even me. The ones I got are not them. These, instead, make me want to go back to fiction and stay there.

Then I found Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lex Williford and Michael Martone. This is not a how-to. It’s a they-did. It has creative nonfiction from David Sedaris and Amy Tan and Barbara Kingsolver and so many others. The stories remind me of Bailey White and Baxter Black. And my friend Daniel Alexander (who writes fiction so real I know those folks.)

Their creative nonfiction is not journalism. It is not vignettes about famous people. It’s not memoir too much about themselves. It’s about regular people they know. Characters they love, maybe not like you love your children, or your spouse, or your favorite teacher. But characters you’ve run across in your own real life whom you remember. Maybe with a touch of anger, or a tear, or a laugh.

They were someone you learned something from because they made you ask yourself a question about you. They were an educator.

Discovery, Despair, Dead, Done.

“Good morning,” my husband said.

“Creative Nonfiction has to be true,” I replied.

He put down his reader and looked at me in that patient-I’m-gonna-point-out-the-painfully-obvious way he has and he said, “That’s why they call it nonfiction.”

Epiphanies before coffee are not pleasant.

Let me explain. My daughter Grace, who is a talented writer, is taking a creative writing course at a local college. She writes “literary.” She’s good at it. She wants to be awarded a Pulitzer one day. And to be honest, there’s a good chance she will be.

Ah, to be “honest.” There’s the rub.

I’ve been telling stories my whole life. Some of them, I’ve been telling so long I think they’re true.

I have only ever considered writing nonfiction during moments of greed. Nonfiction sells better. Or during the rare psychotic break, when delusions of grandeur tell me I can write the definitive biography of Dr. Angie Debo.

Grace believes I can write anything she wants me to and right now she is studying creative nonfiction and is enthralled with it. She’s grown up with my stories and loves them. (She’s a good daughter.)

Last Friday I wrote a favorite story from my childhood. It was good. It was better than good, it was grand! It would be accepted on the first submission. Readers would await my next nonfiction story with bated breath. There would be a book, a collection of my recollections.

Then serious questions arose. Should I use real names? If I do, will I be accosted at the local Walmart by an angry relative? Or sued by an angry relative of someone in the story?

I ordered books. They came yesterday, only a week after I wrote the story. Lee Gutkind’s You Can't Make This Stuff Up has an index of words so I cut right to the chase, page 37. “If a person is identifiable . . . you are not shielded from litigation.” Even if you change the name.

Then comes a section he heads “Libel, Defamation, and Writing About the Dead.” I’m saved. I’m the only one in the story still alive.

But – there’s always a but isn’t there – he goes on to say “be honest, accurate, and ever so careful.” He uses words like “fact check” and “ethical” and “legal” and “moral.” He tells frightening stories about journalists and novelists, and biographers who were “caught.”

Okay. My dad’s still alive and he knew all these people in my creative nonfiction. So I asked him, “Do you remember So-and-so?”

He did.

“Was he the local Such-and-so?”

Daddy laughed. “No. He was the depot agent for the railroad.”

Discovery. Despair. That piece of creative nonfiction is Dead. And I’m Done.

But wait. It’s a good story. It’s just not true. I can Deal with that.