Writing Spaces

image:  André Kertész

Writing Spaces (Lunar)

“The sun is a thief: she lures the sea
and robs it. The moon is a thief:
he steals his silvery light from the sun.
The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.”

—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Image:  Arthur Beecher Carles - Silence, 1908

Writing Spaces

In summertime, writing the summer days that were.  I've just reread Rumer Godden's exquisite The Greengage Summer, sunshot, drenched with nostalgia and the taste of the ripe greengages.  For me it was apricots, and I've strung a hammock between two big apricot trees in a story (half finished) about the first moon walk and the summer day in Santa Fe when the child I was then watched the broadcast.



image:  E. Phillips Fox, A Love Story

Full Fathom Five

My first mystery has been published, in Issue #4 of the Canadian journal Black Dog Review.  (It's been said, "Her name is Christie.  She writes mysteries.")

"Full Fathom Five" is definitely cozy, rather than Noir (despite le chien noir of its setting), more about dogs and Santa Cruz, art and Greek archaeology, and the Shakespeare garden the retired detective is plotting, than about any horrific crime.

By pure coincidence, Sir Kenneth Branagh was planting a Shakespeare garden too in his most recent film, All Is True—good publicity, which I greatly appreciate.

Some of the dog walkers involved in the story can be seen here—

"Back outside on the oceanfront, Big Tom, an ex-Marine who reminisced from time to time about parties with Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia, told Gabriel he'd seen nobody in yesterday's early dark.  Contrarily petite and always stylish Marilynn, with her Shih Tzus, Xishen and Chenjinggu, which she'd told him translated as Joy God and Old Quiet Lady, agreed with the artist that there had been a pair of surfers on the beach.  Her sharp eyes missed little; she'd been a scathing columnist in Washington, DC much of her life."

image:  Black Dog Review

The Pinecone

     "Besides the drivers and the bicyclists, she was sick of joggers, power walkers, rollerbladers, and the people who rode around the Stanford Research Park in those pokey golf carts that always pulled out into traffic just ahead of her.  Also of the whole crowd that sat around outside Starbucks for hours with their laptops, drinking mucho grande double-decaf soy lattes with mandarin-pistachio-peppermint syrup.  She was sick of pretty much everyone around her—the WAH moms and the OB-GYNs who seemed to need the license plates to prove it, the ITS consultants and the CEOs.  

     "She was sick, indeed, of all acronyms, abbreviations, and the use of numbers for words, like 4 sale and 2 night.  She missed real words, examined lives, old-fashioned courtesy, Henry James novels, her mother’s homey Sunday pot roast, and lazy summer mornings inner-tubing on a slow green-hearted river in the heartland of the country, somewhere far, far from the coast."

I am very pleased to have this story from my days as described above (oops, sorry—from a purely fictional place and time) in Issue 8-3 of Cumberland River Review.

The Pinecone also received an Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Contest in 2016, though it was not then published.

image:  Roman relief showing a Maenad holding a thyrsus, 120-140 AD, Prado Museum, Madrid

Alien Corn

The inaugural issue of Orca is out, and my story "Alien Corn" is among those published in it.

From the middle section, I steal back these lines, transported once again to Italy—

She felt absolved, somehow relieved of guilt and obligation, by the loving welcome of the skeletal old cat in the dark of the late October garden near the Arno, between convent and blue palazzo with its quiet tribe of long, distinct Modigliani faces Adrian would show her the next morning.  She'd been undone by the lake air, she told herself again, kneeling beside the open window, open shutters in her room over the garden where somewhere the spirit animal padded through herbs, gave chase to dreams.



image:  Orca Literary Journal, Issue 1

Forest Avenue

In the Spring 2019 Issue of Birdland Journal, with the theme "A Matter of Character," pieces published include my creative nonfiction work "Forest Avenue," as well as wonderful stories by my good friends and long-time writing colleagues Rick Trushel ("Electric Twilight") and Jeanne Althouse ("Fallen Star").

Here's a brief taste of the madeleine that sends me back to that delightfully eccentric place I lived once, once upon a time:

Every year again, on Easter Sunday, the neighborhood children came in their new finery, flowered cotton dresses, ankle socks, and patent leather shoes, or little navy shorts and clean buttoned shirts, to hunt for Easter eggs in the huge, rambling yard across the street (Forest Avenue, broad as a boulevard), next door to the private nursing home where every morning the old man would come out bundled up and stand at the curb and holler at the street for maybe ten minutes, holler and holler, then go inside again. One by one, holding parents by one hand and little painted buckets or baskets by the other, they would come and lift the latch of the waist-high gate, vanish into the yard that was like an English cottage garden.

image:  Sylvan Beach House

The Broken Hallelujah

It's summer, and the summer issue of the Remington Review is out.

It includes (on page 6) my short story "The Broken Hallelujah," describing a stolen moment on a summer morning on a tributary of the Russian River, listening to the Emperor Concerto—a song without words, since the words have been taken away from Livvy and she longs for the days back home in the house she grew up in, her father's big Random House Dictionary open to "a handful of chance words—today maybe sanctum, sampan, samsara, sand-blind," while he types Sunday letters on a typewriter with the "e" and "g" out of alignment.  Strange stuff for nostalgia, maybe, but Livvy had defined herself by words, and she has hung her hopes on Leonard Cohen's quiet moment of redemptive song,
There's a blaze of light
In every word



image:  Claude Monet, The Seine River