The cattail dances
Pulling its feathered shadow
Swaying unto dusk
Read
I stare at words
Ticks and scratches with hats and feet
Marching
My eyes dart
Laughing behind, talking,
Whispers, Phone
Ringing, I
Scream,
Tear the pages
Drown
It all out in
Muted rage.
It is so easy
to get lost in the foreground
the infinite mesh of a window screen
the links of a chain fence
sometimes you look so hard things
lose their meaning, no frame
no definition, no perspective
the mind craves the epic
the open, the free and overarching
Job
We only wanted
What was best for him
Sometimes you need a little tough love,
Show you the error
Of your ways;
Yet he stood, stubborn
No repentance for that
Which he did not do,
Then God spoke
brought back his son Job
Denounced us.
Foreground: The splash splattered sun against the hazed glass.
The screen a grid of wire, if you move close enough it dissapears.
Paint chipping, mummified insects sleeping in the eternal breeze.
The glass is streaked, layers of windows
Middle-ground: A servery worker wanders to and fro, pacing back and forth.
The grills are out and open and the cooks are [...]
Much like creative non-fiction, writing fiction has been a transformative, crystallizing experience that served to draw together my scattered experiences in out-of-class writing into a recognizable enjoyment of making stuff up. So, in other words, It showed me that I like to make up stories. The chance to just let loose and see what happened [...]
Who could she be? Hal pictured her clearly as he played with the earring’s dangling silver shards; he saw her walking into his cafe with a look of conscious poise that only barely betrayed her distress. He was hypnotized by the swirl of her solitary earring. He cursed as the double soy latte he was [...]
Here is all the stuff that Barbara helped me cut from my short story, preserved for posterity.
Every day Hal rode the e line home from work. He would walk the two blocks down Main Street past the bustling bistros and boutiques, down into the damp underbelly of the city. He rode the rickety. He swayed [...]
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Fiction Close Reading: The Communist by Robert Ford
Richard Ford demonstrates several useful techniques in his short story The Communist I have chosen to focus on the final two paragraphs (page 542). He creates vivid imagery that serves to stop time in the story, and take up space, filling out the scene. The images are then [...]
Who could she be? Hal pictured her clearly as he played with the earring’s dangling silver shards; he saw her walking into his cafe with a look of conscious poise that only barely betrayed her distress. He was hypnotized by the swirl of her solitary earring. He cursed as the double soy latte he was [...]
