Writing Spaces

 

"The Moving Finger writes; 

and, having writ, Moves on . . . "

(Omar Khayyám)

image:  photographer unknown

Ghost Light

 

"a kind of glow—humanity, noblesse, beatitude—lingered in the great spaces that like Space itself held stars already dead but luminous, inherently present, the residue of suns long since burned out.  Ghost light, Aash thought of it."

 

Just published in Livina Press Literary Magazine, Issue 2, Fall 2022 (print only)—my short story "Ghost Light," set in the ruins of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, a museum which was originally a collaboration between the places and peoples of its collections and between the collections and the viewers who engaged with them.  And then between me, the author, who's collected them again, and the characters I have sent into the ruins to collect what they can of what's left after the world's culture has been destroyed and most animals and plant-life gone extinct.

 

This work is a collaboration too with the author of a book one of the characters once read—Russell Hoban, who offered his amazing The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz to the world.  The book is integral to my main character's identity, and has remained for many years in my own consciousness, now informing my writing.  In it are extinct lions, which are regenerated in the haunted spaces of the museum, later joined by other extinct animals gathered between the covers of a salvaged bestiary.

 

And finally, or really first, the work is a collaboration between me and a writer friend's grandson, Westley, who offered us the first line as a gift.

 

At its heart this story is about the essential shared responsibility of carrying the memories of things past, things gone, as we all do—together saving what we can in these destructive times.  It no longer takes a village.  It takes a world.  A museum, with all its salvaged, plundered ghosts.

         

 

image:  photographer unknown

The Queens Gambit [sic]

 

I've had a quirky short story published in Flights (just print, so far, but online someday, it's suggested)—"The Queens Gambit."  Not a typo; indeed there's no apostrophe, because the story's set in Queens, NY, and involves chess somewhat peripherally.  A gambit is the core of it, "a device, action, or opening remark, typically one entailing a degree of risk, that is calculated to gain an advantage," and specifically, as in chess, "an opening in which a player makes a sacrifice, typically of a pawn, for the sake of some compensating advantage."

 

A subconscious long-ago inspiration was apparently Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace," which I hadn't remembered, and I much more consciously had in mind the twist in O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi."

 

It's a playful tale at heart, and was great fun to write.  Fun to remember some of the chess moves and concepts from the also long-ago days when I played often and voraciously.

 

One of the main characters is Tante Cristelle, moved from Guadeloupe to Paris for art school to Far Rockaway, Queens—

"In recent days he'd seen his landlady becoming a ghost-in-training.  Gliding around the house both day and night, moving chess pieces stealthily in games they'd left out to finish (always to good effect), cunningly challenging the stairs as if they were an ascent of Kilimanjaro.  She went unseeing and all but unseen, shuffling along the upstairs corridor in a bathrobe the color of oatmeal but set off by her many-colored carnival headdresses, meant to hide her nearly hairless head, with her wheeled walker—a skeletal companion who Gino had seen her do something like salsa with, Haitian kompa he thought she'd said.  The last of her dance partners in this world, likely.  And on her ancient phonograph at odd hours she set playing Maurice Ravel's "Five O'Clock Foxtrot," a favorite of her Paris beau ("prince of the sturgeon eggs," she'd called him).  Ravel had been in Paris when she got there, Cristelle had once reminisced, her proud head cocked sideways, seeing it all, her young-again profile splendid."

 

image:  Chess Game, artist unknown

Sacred Space: or, Sitting a Spell

 

This meditative essay has been published in MockingOwl Roost (Volume 2, Issue 3:  Introspection), and is surely nothing if not introspective.  I felt extremely lucky to have found the space inside this discombobulated year to dwell from time to time in a lovely cerebral realm, lofty and light and well above the fog-line, and was happy to be shaping a gauzy blue and silver tissue of ideas in defiance of my off-and-on-again dull fuzzy-headedness.  The finished piece feels almost like things I wrote in graduate school, when I was fully in my element.

 

At some point while sitting a spell, I came across this poem about quiet power that seemed to beautifully sum up the power I was summoning (or hoping to) in my meditations.

 

The Quiet Power

I walked backwards, against time

and that’s where I caught the moon,

singing at me.

I steeped downwards, into my seat

and that’s where I caught freedom,

waiting for me, like a lilac.

I ended thought, and I ended story.

I stopped designing, and arguing, and

sculpting a happy life.

I didn’t die. I didn’t turn to dust.

Instead I chopped vegetables,

and made a calm lake in me

where the water was clear and sourced and still.

And when the ones I loved came to it,

I had something to give them, and

it offered them a soft road out of pain.

I became beloved.

And I came to know that this was it.

The quiet power.

I could give something mighty, lasting,

that stopped the wheel of chaos,

by tending to the river inside,

keeping the water rich and deep,

keeping a bench for you to visit.

– Tara Mohr

 

 

image:  Antelope Canyon, Arizona (reminding me as well of the quiet and sacred space—humming with possibility—that has been photographed by Adrian Borda inside cellos)

Day of the Dead

 

This story, just published in the Emotional Transitioning issue of Woodcrest Magazine,  moves through dreams and memories and hazy longings from San Miguel d'Allende, Mexico, to towns in northern New Mexico; makes brief forays to Georgetown and the Hudson River, to the Oregon coast and off to Turkey; attends a wedding on a southern California beach; and leaves us for the time being unable to travel to the mirage that is Paris, France.

 

"Lili had started dreaming of San Miguel d'Allende just after the New Year, when colors had been leached from the world as they had long since from her parched spirit.  Flavors and smells too—though the ravaging disease that took those things away officially was mostly still unknown, wouldn't arrive in the southwest United States for a couple of months.  Since Xavier's death Lili had suffered from a color deficiency the way others did a deficiency of iron or vitamin B-12, vitamin C.  Her grown children had tried to coax her out of it, with varying degrees of concern and exasperation, not knowing what healing tonics to offer.  Herbs, roots, spices (like pineapple Tepache from the streets of Mexico, with allspice berries, cinnamon, cayenne—something Xavier's grandmother would have ladled down her mercilessly at the least sign of flagging or floundering.  But she'd been resistant to all efforts to cure her until the kachinas brought colors back on Christmas day, and after that the dreams began and like Abuelita Juana and her herbs, like Xavier and his hog bristle paintbrushes, wouldn't let up. Cajoling and prodding, butting in until she couldn't possibly do other than they wanted.  Invite him back."

 

The main characters here appear in my linked stories "Tin Mask" and "Kachinas," not yet published, and are connected to the characters in "The Persian Warrior" and "L'Inconnue de la Seine."  The denouement in Paris follows in another of the linked stories, "The Inheritance."

 

 

image:  source unknown

Slowness, Speed

 

A departure for me, this story features a woman race car driver—and her car, an inherited Austin-Healey.

 

"Catrin had loved so many things about that car.  That it had been a gift from Uncle Oliver, who she'd been fonder of, to be honest, than their own father.  That it was fast as greased lightning, he'd said, and the color of blue iris.  That it had sailed Caribbean waters (past Puerto Rico, through the Panama Canal) on its way from Southampton to Los Angeles.  That she had raced it five years in a row on the track east of Monterey and ended in fifth place two of those years, and only a few seconds slower than the winner the last year, when she was four months pregnant with Windell—the son meant to inherit Ollie, as she had christened the vintage racer with Laguna Beach champagne."

 

Somehow this whimsy just happened along, as intriguing narrative byways do.  The story has been published in the Spring 2022 issue (Number 31) of Pinyon, the handsome national journal of poetry, prose, and art of Colorado Mesa University.

 

 

 

image:  1954 Austin-Healey, Classic Driver Market

Writing Spaces

 

"A daydreamer is a writer 

just waiting for pen and paper."

—Richelle E. Goodrich

 

 

 

image:  William Merritt Chase,

             Woman with Crimson Parasol