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

 

L'Inconnue de la Seine

 

This story, one of my collection of seven mask pieces—which should be called just Masks, or Masque Suite, or such, but has probably become Fugitive Colors—colors (relationships, identities) that over time can change, lighten, darken, or almost disappear.  "Colors" also refers to flags, which are a symbol of identity, and "true colors" has to do with one's identity.  Also, three or four of the stories have a lot to do with an artist and the bright paint colors that were his trademark.  So it all fits . . . in my meandering way.  The Rilke quote I use as epigraph to the collection mentions colors and also explains the relationships between my repeating characters.

             Everything, as I already wrote, has become 

            an affair that’s settled among the colors 

            themselves:  a color will come into its own 

            in response to another, or assert itself, or 

            recollect itself.

            (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne)

 

"L'Inconnue de la Seine," set in Paris, is a kind of prequel to "The Persian Warrior" (being set four years earlier), and has been published in the gorgeously artistic Wild Roof Journal, Issue #14.  Another of the stories, "Day of the Dead," is due to be published in Woodcrest Magazine (Emotional Transitioning issue) sometime soon.

 

It made me happy to visit Paris again in this story, remembering a sunlit afternoon ramble along a genteel tree-lined canal, an evening concert at Saint-Germain-des-Prés.  My nostalgia for the city influenced the story's mood:

 

"It was late September, with days waning and the light mellowing richly before finally leaching away, reminding anyone with literary leanings of Prufrock or Strether (Eliot and James, respectively), who life had wistfully passed by.  Reid, at merely 37, couldn't claim that for himself, but felt it threatening nonetheless.  He drifted for long, elegiac hours along the river, across bridges, at the alluring mouths of alleyways, past warm-lighted cafés, feeling that sense of not belonging anywhere, with anyone."

 

Come journey back with me . . .

 

 

image:  Saint-Germain-des-Prés church

Pishing

 

An old favorite whimsical story of mine, "Pishing," has been published in Issue 4 of Doubleback Review, and can be found right here.  It first appeared in 2013 in the Mills College Walrus—since gone defunct, along with Mills itself.

 

I was editor of The Walrus my senior year, and typeset/printed almost the whole thing in the letterpress studio where I spent countless late-night hours that spring, with the windows flung open to the sounds of frogs under the bridge nearby and the regularly sounding campanile designed by Julia Morgan.  A graduate student, a quiet artist, was working there too, on his own project—a calendar of skies, clouds, watercolor records of the passing days.  He listened to a staticky transistor radio with country Western music from somewhere in the Central Valley (maybe out towards Stockton and Tracy where friends and I found a rodeo one weekend), while printing tiny squares of skies into coarse textured artist's paper.

 

"Pishing involved making a variety of sounds mimicking the scolding calls of birds.   The idea was to get the birds’ attention and draw them out into the open, where you could watch them better."

 

"Every year of the three they’d been married and lived in the house off Old Page Mill Road, she’d been charmed by the plaintive minor triad of the Golden Crowned Sparrow, the bird which showed up only after summer ended, and, elusive as the last sunlight of the year, sang always hidden in the trees.  Claire was charmed by everything elusive and doomed.  So she really did try to pish the furtive lovely bird.  But instead of her sparrow, she got a mockingbird—a brilliant flash of white tail morphing into the joker, the clown, the unabashed fake.  It unnerved her, to have conjured the mocking spirit in place of the quiet one she’d asked for.  She took it as a sign, and refused to try again."

 

 

 

Image:  Esralogue at Pexels

Digging Some More

 

I have again been included in the community of Digging through the Fat—having links to my publications "Augury" and "Possessive Pronouns" posted in their Community No. 68 on April 4, 2022.

 

My friend and fabulous writer Jeanne Althouse preceded me, in Community No. 67.  It's so nice to be in company with her once more, as we have been in Birdland Journal, Amarillo Bay, Potato Soup Journal, The Plentitudes, and Catamaran.

 

 

 

Image:   Fiona Art from Pexels

Writing Spaces

 

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window 
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully 
moving a perhaps 
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

e.e. cummings

image:  Daniel F. Gerhartz, Writing Home

Child of Sky and Earth

 

Another story with a past!  "Child of Sky and Earth," just published by the wonderful Persimmon Tree, in their Spring 2022 issue, began life as a sequel to "When Bluejay Stole the Moon."  Jodi and Quinn in the first story have morphed into Josie and Clary (aka the unsympathetic Clarence, the "big-deal" Project Director) in this.

 

The main impetus was my fascination with the telescopes on Mauna Kea, and the inherent conflict just exactly there.

 

         "Many Hawaiians feel this place must be returned to the ancestral gods.  That scientists and their construction sites have desecrated the summit—forbidden to all but the highest chiefs or priests."  Atop the desecrated mountain now, defiant, stood the thirteen telescopes, probing and unrobing the skies.

         "But nowhere else is it this clear.  No other instruments are this precise and powerful."  

 

 

 

image:  Telescopes on Mauna Kea, Honolulu Star-Advertisor