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My ancient past . . . in three locations. Petroglyphs (essentially, writing on varied stones) in Rome, the Colosseum; in Frijoles Canyon, my New Mexico; and in Hawaii, on black lava flows, sometimes as prayers for the crossing.
images: Rome, Gustave Baumann lithograph of Frijoles Canyon, Hawaiian Petroglyphs © Tor Johnson
Uncharted seas ahead . . .
with words to buoy us,
keep us on our course.
image: Christie, collage page
“When he died, their father had two requests. First, that his ashes be taken to the palacio on the river the third week in September, on what would have been his 90th birthday. And second, that the whole family be there to take part in the scattering. Or, as he put it in the codicil, quoting his favorite poet, Walt Whitman, and underlining the words twice, ‘These are the days that must happen to you.’
That second was the sticking point, of course—though he'd cunningly left generous funds with Daniel Kim, his dexterous executor and sandcastling buddy, to cover travel from their various boltholes across the world, and made it clear that only if they carried out that dire last commandment would there be another cent. But even so, could they forget their rancor, their cherished pet peeves, and tolerate each other's company for three interminable days?”
Thus begins another story inspired by a prompt from The First Line. (Yes, there are many yet to come!) This was published yesterday by Eucalyptus Lit, who had this to say:
“Today is the winter solstice: a natural pivot in the seasonal cycle, aligning with our exploration of change in this issue. Allow yourselves to be changed, inspired by the work of the community around us. Great art is meant to be enjoyed—to be shared—so please feel free to spread the word about our issue to your friends, family, and fellow literature enthusiasts.”
I told them when it was accepted, "It is especially nice to have my story published by you, since eucalyptus has graced much of my life—from the Mills College campus to the foothills around Palo Alto where I spent some thirty years, to the park here in Santa Cruz whose eucalyptus shelters long-traveling Monarch butterflies.”
And it was fun to spend some time in the Carmel Valley with this peevish family over three days, along with Walt Whitman, and see where all of us came out.
Here’s another of my wilder whimsies, a.k.a. "What Should We Do with the Body?", in response to a prompt by The First Line—who (in more sober frame of mind) did not accept it for publication. It’s been picked up instead by Cerasus Magazine, appropriately situated, as is the story, in England.
For those who enjoy whimsy involving Punk rockers, Paladian bridges, Polish chickens, an early Renaissance stiletto, and a stray cassowary (or, indeed, as an editor I once worked with once enthused, for “anyone with an interest in anything”), a paperback copy of Issue #11 can be purchased from Amazon, or the pdf can be downloaded here.
I’ve imagined that an ideal film version of this story would star the following:
John Gielgud as old retainer
Ken Stott (Rebus) as Digby
young Stephen Fry or Simon Callow as Aiken
Ian McShane (Lovejoy) or David Jason (Frost) as Man with Clipboard 2
Richard Briers or John Cleese as Lord Ashenden
Bill Nighy as Parson Q
Peter Vaughan as the Major General
But that's just further whimsy, of course . . .
Image: Palladian Bridge, Prior Park, England
This will accompany stories now, until further notice—
"Christie Cochrell is grateful for the several awards and Pushcart nominations given to her diverse array of published stories and creative nonfiction pieces, and for the favorite places far and near that have inspired her writing. Chosen as New Mexico Young Poet of the Year while growing up in Santa Fe, she has more recently published a volume of collected poems, Contagious Magic. She lives on the northern California coast in Santa Cruz, the unceded ancestral homeland of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe, and honors those who came before."
Image: Santa Cruz Beach, with Author
Ocean and Black Dog, and Two Waters, Christie Cochrell
It makes me so happy to see this long, rambling meditation finally published—and with photos I took (New Mexico, Oxford, Kew Gardens) nicely fitted in by Sybil, making it a true hybrid. Prose, poetry, and images all mine, and me. A kind of screenshot of who/where/why I am at this juncture. Started towards the end of lockdown, when it was dawning on me how stir-crazy I'd become, after so many years of traveling more or less whenever I wanted, and having to worry that I'd never in my life get to travel again; and finished/edited as I was getting ready to travel again (yes, really!) to Santa Fe—time-travel back, for my 50th class reunion. Getting ready to babble on about (in twenty words or less) what I'd been doing all that time, and where I have come out.
So here we are!
The format kind of rambles too, which seems appropriate.
(And I learned after coming home that a Santa Fe friend named Sybil had just passed away—so a tribute of sorts, as well.)
One small excerpt from towards the end:
I am still sad, far from England and all the other far places I love, missing my life as Clarice Lispector describes it perfectly—
“I miss everything that marked my life. ... I miss
the things I lived and the ones I let go. ...
How many times I want to find I don't know what...
I don't know where... To rescue something I don't
know what it is or where I lost it.”
But I have understood, putting the recent feeling of loss down in words, in the same notebook that now holds the little beach, the cardamom, the dogwalkers, the Sterling Silver “wishy-washy” ink I find today along with letters from Emily Dickinson translated charmingly into Italian, that I’m still me, enduringly, even at this remove. Still weird as weird can be. That the whorls of labyrinths, like fingerprints, are uniquely and indelibly mine.
Images: On Museum Hill, Christie Cochrell
Cycladic Figurines, The Ashmolean, Christie Cochrell
The wonderful online journal, The Plentitudes, has again honored me by publishing a story in their Fall issue, “The Clarity”—this, all about doors and what they signified to Emmy Salas.
Doorways were fraught. Portals to the unfathomable place where absence dwells. The loneliest, most haunted spaces in the world. They swallowed people whole. Emmy had lived with a phobia of doors—entamaphobia—much of her life, having watched too many of her loved ones vanish through what Rilke in one of his Sonnets to Orpheus called “the inconsolable open door.”
Other elements in this story, “Salve Porta,” include Mesa Verde and Aztec Ruins, Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House, Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, and a black Skye terrier, Pautiwa, named for one of the Hopi sky gods.
Images:
Aztec doorways, photographer unknown
Gates of Heaven, Bali, photographer unknown
Pisa light, Christie Cochrell
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The empty space which dwells now where the tree once was—the haunted space, uneasy with recriminations and with dread, heavy with loss, mourning, fraught with remembered days and skies and moods, passing seasons, passing travelers, hopes past, love holding on, but just—exactly there, we enter into the sacred, echoing precincts of writing.
"The tree was so old, and stood there so alone, that his childish heart had been filled with compassion; if no one else on the farm gave it a thought, he would at least do his best to, even though he suspected that his child’s words and child’s deeds didn’t make much difference. It had stood there before he was born, and would be standing there after he was dead, but perhaps, even so, it was pleased that he stroked its bark every time he passed, and sometimes, when he was sure he wasn’t observed, even pressed his cheek against it."
—Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd, from A Time for Everything
Said to be 300 years old, this famous tree was cut down with a chainsaw by a vandal on 28 September, 2023. RIP compassion and love and gentleness.
Spaces between . . . summer and fall (rising, falling), the light and dark, the trees and their deep (soaring) clarity- and mystery-laden interstices . . . Places in which the writer gladly dwells.
image: Helena Miozga/ChingYang Tung
A story I revised in response to an inspiring class on revisions at Stanford, “Wayfinding,” was originally published in The Avalon Literary Review. (See details here.) I am particularly fond of it not just because it’s set in Salisbury, a favorite place, but also since it set in motion these past several years of writing faithfully, fully, fantastically (salvation during the Pandemic) and publishing most of the shorter things I write.
Now, “Wayfinding” has been published again, this time online in Wild Roof Journal, Issue 22 – Sept. 6, 2023 (in Gallery 2, or find me by name). I do really love their format and their art, so do browse all the galleries.
Here’s a sampling of my rather wistful piece:
“She felt again the rise of the great spire above them, its miraculous continuity. Continuity: the connective breath of families, of the universe, that the Tewas believed they kept alive.
Like hope, the only thing left in Pandora's box—and in Hazel's. Brother Raymond had given her that. This quiet cloister, the sweep of stairs at Wells, the chance to know the brave, bright Salisbury spire, triumphant over despair. In-spire-ing, breathing into, ‘filling the heart with grace.’ Inspire came from spirare, to breathe; the breath of life continuing.
Continuing, if in shuddery gasps, after the human storm. Out of the box opened by Pandora, that fatally meddlesome woman formed from clay by the gods, had sprung war and pestilence, the stuff of Evan's work. Hazel's intention, as she'd told herself over and over, was only to set free a wistful prayer, fragile as one of the Holly Blue butterflies found in old churchyards. Palest blue wings with a small spattering of ink spots, embryonic words. What she had loosed instead had been catastrophic.”
Image: Photo by Cas Holmes on Unsplash
I’m immensely grateful once again to be one of the authors published by our wonderful local journal, Catamaran Literary Reader. My story “Sea Stars,” also set on the Monterey Bay, has just launched in the Fall 2023 issue—Volume 11, Issue 4. It’s also featured online, here. The artwork chosen to grace it, used on the cover too, is an amazingly perfect complement, particularly to the myth mentioned at the end of this passage.
“Tobias slept for hours when Lainey had gotten him into the house, into a cozy yellow room with fog outside and kindly evergreens standing sentry.
Later, well after normal suppertime, her old friend woke, uncomprehending, in the foreign yellow room, the soft yellow throw blanket over him, but when he saw Lainey he smiled tentatively at her, the way a baby or a child might. Practicing. Following her lead. She brought him warm potato soup, and bread with unsalted butter, and he ate a little before sleeping again. She followed Leonard’s directions to the linen closet, and found herself sheets and a comforter for the daybed in the front room.
Tobias still hadn’t said anything, which was entirely unlike him, and Lainey worried, despite the reassurance of the others. She sat in a butterfly-print wing chair, and talked to him again. She told him his aquarium was safe, the fish fed, his fellow docents missing him, his stars aligned. [She mentioned the Greek myths, the stories of the sea creatures and constellations he so often talked about. That had in many ways brought them together.]
‘My favorite is that myth of Poseidon extinguishing the stars in the heavens to help the Cretan fisherman woo the woman he loved. They fell into the sea, all of the stars . . .’ (she waited for the old marine biologist to chime in and finish, but he stayed quiet) ‘. . . and he gathered them up in his hands to offer her—a gift she couldn’t possibly refuse.’”
Image: Andrea Kowch, “Light Keepers,” Catamaran
Sadly, the appearance of this story set on Maui was terribly timed—its online publication by JMWW coming on August 16, 2023, only a week after the terrible fires. I like, though, to consider it a kind of celebration of the island and its unique spirit; a gathering of mana to wish all its denizens good health again; a healing prayer, pule ho’ouluulu. After all, my heroine is rather lost until she summons back (or conjures back, as is her wont) the special magic that she found there once.
“As usual, her approach was to brush the crumbs fallen from the mess of her life under a bright magic carpet, Turkish or Flokati. Ignoring the real problem. She thought of Gilbert and Sullivan's Bunthorne, lofty Aesthetic poet and self-acknowledged sham, asking his beloved Patience, lowly dairymaid, ‘Tell me, girl, do you ever yearn?’ And her matter-of-fact answer, ‘I (y)earn my living.’ That was Hana's standard approach as well, deflecting all attempts at getting at her emotions, through side-stepping words, adroit language and puns. The stage magic she used daily, to make herself seem whole and functional.
In her job as Dear Sybil, dispensing advice, she had to endlessly sift and digest the advice of others—ancient Persian poets, Motown greats, Athenian philosophers, Tibetan sages born in the year of the Wood-Pig, Bishops of Lesotho, experts on black holes and relativity, Jungian analysts, the butler Jeeves, the Farmer’s Almanac and the ancient Toltec, the rich-voiced Maya Angelou, all-seeing Mary Oliver, Pippi Longstocking, cartoonists. Shakespeare, often. She was a collage artist, when you came right down to it. A pickpocket, a thief of ideas and words. A conjurer, of sorts, pulling bright scarves out of her empty sleeve. Out of thin air.”
Image: Photo by Dwinanda Nurhanif Mujito on Unsplash
The First Line Literary Journal has once again inspired a story bringing together far-ranging memories and ideas. “Green Was the Dream” was subsequently selected for their Volume 25, Issue 2—Summer 2023. It’s mostly about lawns, a poem of Federico Garcia Lorca’s I read and loved in Spanish class long, long ago, a class trip to Baja, Mario Lanza, and how the world has changed. (Also a little bit of this and that.)
Here's a taste of Cody’s green dream, vastly different from her father’s—
“A closet Romantic (with a nostalgic cursive R), Cody despite her guilt can't stop loving that pristine patch of Kentucky bluegrass. She lies out in it sometimes too, luxuriating, reading the GarcÃa Lorca poem her class has been assigned, and dreaming herself green, desired, like the woman in the poem, on the Spanish balcony. Green, how I want you green. Dreaming that Nolan Ewing, who is (ever so much) in the class, will murmur that into her ear one afternoon, beside her in the sultry shade, or as evening lengthens and deepens into night. Verde que te quiero verde . . . And then those other dreamy lines, Con la sombra en la cintura, ella sueña en su baranda . . . With shadow at her waist, she dreams . . . She traces the shadow of the camphor tree that lies across her skin where her shirt has rucked up, imagining Nolan sitting above her, leaning down, his sun-bleached hair brushing his cheek, and hers.
Keeping those dreams of green alive for others and not just for her makes her feel powerful and cool, like the sorceress in the Waterhouse painting of Circe (the poster in her bedroom) with her grass green dress and deep green bowl—poison, admittedly. Dangerous and enthralling. Unlike the practical Cody of the pert Stoppard-like screenplays, the papers on Lorca and on the donkey, Platero, she writes in competent Spanish with no mistakes.”
Image: Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
The fun Pigeon Review has published a story I had fun writing, indulging one of my favorite fascinations, etymology—and right along with it, wordplay. You can find “Etymology for Beginners” online, here.
And for an amuse-bouche—
“Florence would have liked to be named for the famous Italian city, with its Etruscans (the tower builders) and its bridge of gold. Or, adding an F for femininity, for the Friar in Shakespeare’s play, with his knowledge of herbs and family politics, his role in that famously bad ending. Or for the Saint, patron of poor people and school children, comedians and cooks, martyred on an iron grill in the third century. (Another bad ending.) Or even for Quebec’s great river, bedded in an ancient geologic depression. That she'd been named instead for her Aunt Florence Wilson, with no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever, other than her stolid decency, had set in motion a lifetime of yearning and making do.
Her fascination with names, for one. (Flo—Flora—Flory, all considered and rejected as not suiting her at all.) With words, more broadly—and what they meant, what they implied, and where they led, both backwards and forwards. Her need to be part of the great world and its wonders, setting off a lifelong quest for connection. For following the rivers (and their flow—so maybe after all, then, Flo would name her perfectly) from source across uncertain boundaries to outlet (River of the Algonquins, Big Water Current); the aqueducts from snowmelt in a slow descent to the Villa d’Este’s glittering fountains via Rilke’s poetry; the nightingale (also related indirectly by her name) from nurse to lovers’ near mistake.”
Image: Photo by Ruiqi Kong on Unsplash
My short story “Release” was published online in the Spring Issue (2023) of Amarillo Bay. Set by the Pacific Ocean in Santa Cruz the day after Thanksgiving, it involves a chance encounter and a spur-of-the-minute decision which will change the direction of Georgiana’s life—sadly stifled lately.
"Though unseen, the tides of the Monterey Bay were ruminative in their overheard rhythms, their profound exhalations, over and over, and Georgiana's own breath began to imitate them naturally as she traversed the night. A bright planet hung low in the darkness off towards Monterey, and then eventually Japan, farther than far. Venus, she guessed, wishing she could remember more from the semester of astronomy she'd taken for fun one year at Mount Holyoke.
What a relief to be outside, walking, her thoughts her own, the possibility of other places there again. Places with life, color, substance, quirks. Not all high tech and ungiving unalluring white or stainless surfaces. A few dogs, flitting or lumbering along the oceanside sidewalk. Lighted windows to look in, passing. She envied some with deep bookshelves and antique wooden tables set with burgundies, burnt oranges, copper, chocolate, mulberry, and dusty rose. Always the gentle soughing of the nearby waves as they came in, went out, audibly grazed the shore.
This was, nearly, what she'd been looking for."
. . .
"He picked up the soft-sided mesh carrier the mouse had traveled in, and a bigger canvas shoulder-bag, which he opened when they got to a couple of Adirondack chairs just off the parking lot.
'Oh, I'd forgotten,' he said with what sounded like amusement. 'We can dine in style.'
Out of the bag he pulled a candelabra with five flameless taper candles which flickered realistically when he set it on the slightly tilted stump between the chairs and turned it on.
'You carry that instead of a flashlight?' Georgiana teased him, amused and curious.
'I took it along to my boyfriend's apartment last night for our Thanksgiving revels, and hadn't gotten it home yet.'
From Bly's more prosaic thermos cups they drank Mayan hot chocolate with ground chiles and cinnamon and ate wedges of vegetable pakora and curried eggplant roti. Though Georgiana felt out of place and embarrassed sitting 'slumming' in it, as her mother would scold, she was grateful for her warm shin-length camel hair coat."
image: Photo by White.Rainforest ™︎ ∙ 易雨白林. on Unsplash
It’s always fun to write stories for The First Line, following their four prompts a year. The first of my attempts they published was the rather unique “Checking Out,” back in September 2020 (Vol. 22, Issue 3), beginning “The Simmons Public Library was a melting pot of the haves and have-nots, a mixture of homeless people and the wealthy older residents of the nearby neighborhood.”
I have just had a second story published by them, in Vol. 25, Issue 1. This, “Ambiguous Figures,” begins with the line “I am the second Mrs. Roberts.” And continues:
No one seems to know except for Perry's sister Jane; his otherwise-absorbed students and colleagues haven't noticed any change. The neighbors to our south are half an acre and luxuriant hedges away, and to the north an impersonal major intersection cuts us off from one-on-one contact. In this hectic, clamorous world, who pays attention to the introverts, the chronically depressed, those who would rather pass unseen?
"Dulcie," the academics say to me, indifferently polite, over the Brie and dry baguette slices at the Art History dos—thinking they recognize me by the wavy bob, the half-glasses, the frumpy clothes. The fading-into-the-woodwork faculty wife demeanor: nothing to stand out. Jane's face shows disbelief when she sees me accept their assumption, but it hasn't seemed worth the trouble explaining that I am Johanna, instead; how my own clothes burned up with house and everything I once was, in the terrible Caldor Fire last fall.
It includes, variously, Salvador DalÃ, two older Golden Retrievers, Stanford’s Festival of Lessons and Carols, a bunch of academics, some shrimp remoulade (my mother’s recipe), an illicit kiss, and a wayward Nunuma bush buffalo colored by red ochre and black resin.
image: Salvador DalÃ, The Hallucinogenic Troubador
How fun! I’ve been given my very own Valentine’s mini-issue by Poor Yorick (A Journal of Rediscovery). It’s Santa Fe being rediscovered in this story, as well as a high school romance, and besides some mischievous exchanges between the old sweethearts (an author and an editor, no one I know), I enjoyed remembering my own Spanish class trip to Mexico City, back when—especially Chapultapec and Teotihuacan.
See here, for some travel back into past places. And even some cockatoos!
“On beautiful October days with brilliant leaves and skies, she sat in her new second bedroom/office with its rustic trestle table in a pullover that had been Julian's, and skinny jeans, and as the month went on turned up her ancient writing files. There were a few old stories that she thought weren't bad, from early classes in college, all of them exploring the insatiable aches and hungerings of female adolescence. That fateful trip to Mexico City with her Spanish class. The story of the pyramid she hadn't finished at the time, suddenly catapulted into her future instead. Maybe, she thought, something worth rescuing? A little personal—but so much time had passed, she knew it couldn't make any difference to anyone, including her.
She fiddled with the language of the stories, changed a name or two, and sent them off to various journals she found online. She hadn't published anything for years, since her two lesser novels, and thought she'd like to find herself writing again after too long just helping with Julian's papers and reports. It would be one more step towards rejoining the living. Last week she'd been persuaded by a coworker at the Library for the Blind where she'd started volunteering to buy a pair of cockatoos whose owner (the librarian's mother) had just gone into care. The birds, Salsa and Mambo, did add some whimsical color to her days.”
image: Christie B. Cochrell, figurine from Teotihuacan
