Author: unspywriter

Virginia Festival of the Book – Day Two

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My VFTB day started at noon with “Fiction: Finding Your Way,” featuring authors Ernessa Carter, Sarah Pekkanen, Lolette Kuby, and Jason Wright. The theme was novels where the protagonists run away from something.

Wright’s book The Wedding Letters is a sequel to The Wednesday Letters, and both books are about written letters that change people’s lives. The connection to “running away” wasn’t clear, other than the characters move away from life as they thought it was based on the information in the letters. The concept of the first book intrigued me, and I bought that instead.

Pekkanen featured two books, The Opposite of Me and Skipping a Beat. These two books deal with aspects of women’s relationships, siblings and marriage respectively. A book about women’s friendships will be out soon, and another on motherhood will follow. Her summary of Skipping a Beat, where the husband in a relationship becomes a different person as a result of a heart attack, struck a little too close to home (the becoming a different person part) and made me emotional to the point where I felt I couldn’t buy the book. The premise is intriguing, but I’m not ready for it yet.

In the age of eHarmony and Match.com it’s difficult to believe that people still write personal ads, but Kuby explores them in a book within a book. The protagonist in her novel, Writing Personals, is writing a non-fiction book about personal ads and drafts one to post herself. It sounded fascinating, but I’m waiting for the Kindle version.

Carter, who grew up in a mostly black neighborhood of St. Louis, longed for a girl, with skin darker than hers, to join her sixth grade class so her lighter-skinned classmates would no longer tease her. As an adult, Carter took that longed-for girl and made her the protagonist of 32 Candles. The portion she read was lyrical and very visual, and I bought the book because I was curious about Carter’s “Molly Ringwald ending.” The book came with a hot pink tote bag emblazoned with the book’s cover–great swag!

The next panel was “Fiction: Running from the Truth.” So, two panels with a “running from” theme. The authors on this panel were Amy Franklin-Willis, Elizabeth Nunez, David Huddle, and Robert Olmstead. I think among them they’ve won just about every literary award except the Man Booker and Pulitzer Prizes. At least, it seemed that way–a very distinguished panel. Each read from their works.

Franklin-Willis was excited to be in Charlottesville because it was a setting in her book The Lost Saints of Tennessee, but she’s never been to the city. She researched extensively on the Internet and enjoyed driving through the city and seeing the places she highlighted. Her story of a promising young man who fails everyone’s expectations for him sounded interesting, and I’ll get this for my Kindle.

Nunez, an immigrant from Trinidad, likes featuring the theme of immigration in her works. She read from her book, Boundaries, about a woman dealing with her mother’s breast cancer and wondering about the fact she doesn’t know how to love her mother. Another topic a bit too close to home, but she talked about another book, Bruised Hibiscus, which sounded intriguing, and I’ll check for that on Kindle as well.

Huddle, a dour-looking professor at Hollins University, has, in fact, a wry sense of humor. He read the opening of his book, Nothing Can Make Me Do This, which is about how a thirteen year old girl learns her beloved grandfather has a stash of porn movies. The books sounds interesting, but what he said about knowing the ending before you start a book resonated–“It’s what keeps me writing, wondering what I’ll learn from each book.”

Olmstead is an ex-pat New Englander in love with West Virginia. That love came through in his reading from The Coldest Night, about a young man from West Virginia who has, as we say in the South, no advantages. He’s in love with the daughter of a prominent man, who shows his disapproval of the relationship in a somewhat expected way. Another possibility for the Kindle.

The final panel, for me, of the day was “Fiction: Conspiracies and Obsessions.” The four panelists–Alma Katsu, Amelia Gray, Virginia Moran, and Joe Lunievicz–were some of the most fascinating writers I’ve heard speak in a long time. Each of their books uses an alternate world and varying degrees of madness.

Katsu, a former intelligence analyst, now writes books she admits are almost unclassifiable, with elements of magic, paranormal, and romance. She began writing to get her mind off an illness and “to see if I could write a novel.” The result was The Taker, which is book one of a three-book deal, a deal good enough she could quit her government job to write full time. Lucky her. I had to retire to do that. I bought The Taker for my Kindle.

Lunievicz, a fencer, started his novel on the basis of a vision–two men dueling with swords on the rooftop of the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. Fencing is a thread through the book, but it is historical fiction surrounding the Errol Flynn movie, Captain Blood. I loved that movie as a child, and that was the deciding factor for my buying the book.

Gray’s book Threats is about a man whose wife dies and who then slowly goes mad. It also began from a vision–of a man at the top of a staircase and a woman covered in blood at the bottom. The premise was intriguing, but Gray didn’t read anything from it and rather treated the panel as an opportunity for stand-up comedy. To be fair, she wasn’t feeling well, but she didn’t convince me to buy her book.

Moran, an English teacher through and through, wrote a short story about a mathematics professor in a cabin in the Adirondacks trapped by a massive snow storm. She decided it didn’t work as a short story, but after studying Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, she began to reconsider her story. Woolf took a short story and turned it into that novel, and Moran was inspired to do the same. That unworkable short story became The Algebra of Snow, a novel, which was also her PhD dissertation. I liked the concept of taking a short story you’re disappointed in and expanding it, so I purchased this book as well.

Tomorrow, my day starts at 1000 and goes well into the evening. I can’t wait.

VA Festival of the Book – Day One

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The Virginia Festival of the Book kicked off at noon today, but knowing I’d need some energy for the next three days, the first session I attended was the 2 p.m. panel “Rereading: Novel Favorites New and Old.” I was particularly interested in this session because a few weeks ago, I blogged about rereading and seeing a favorite book from a different perspective. Patricia Meyer Spacks, former professor of English and Emerita Chair of the UVA English department, the sole panelist, and I were in agreement. The difference is she made it into a book, On Rereading, where she took several books she’d enjoyed as a child and youth and reread them then described what she discovered. Some of the ones she loved as a child (Gone With the Wind, for example), she found flawed rereading them now. Some, she didn’t understand why she liked them then, but she now grasped why they were good then and now, like Alice in Wonderland. A very thoughtful and interesting discussion, and I’ll likely purchase the book.

Next was a fiction panel–“The Joy of Short Stories.” This panel featured two writers I wasn’t familiar with, Laura Jones and Kurt Ayau. Each read from their short story collections (Breaking and Entering and The Brick Murder: A Tragedy and Other Stories, respectively), and discussed their differing approaches to short story writing. Jones is a planner, though she lamented she’d often gotten on the wrong road while plotting a story in the car. Ayau, a professor at the nearby Virginia Military Institute–yes, they have some civilian instructors–is more of an inspirational writer who also lamented he had a couple thousand unpublished short stories “laying around.” I liked both selections Jones and Ayau read, and I’ll be adding their short story collections to my “to read” list.

“Relationship Cartooning” doesn’t seem like a writer-friendly presentation, but it was charming and hilarious and a great peak into another person’s creative process. Nick Galifianakis’ cartoons are famous as the illustrative aspect of Carolyn Hax’s syndicated advice column. Galifianakis was also married to Hax, and though they are now divorced they remain business partners. In addition to providing the cartoons to illustrate Hax’s columns, Galifianakis edits the columns to “protect” Hax’s voice. He provided a slide show of both new and his famous cartoons. Since I’m a regular reader of Hax’s column, it was great to see this insight into how it’s produced. Galifianakis described his creative process–idea, then caption, then drawing–and it was very relatable to writing short work, in particular. He cartoons first and foremost for himself–what he calls his authentic voice–then shares it with the reader. A great way to finish off the day, and I know I’ll look at Hax’s column differently now–and with a bit more respect for the process.

And I get to do it all over again tomorrow. How great is that?

 

Politics Wednesday – From Emmett to Trayvon

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I was too young to remember Emmett Till. In fact I’d never heard of Emmett Till until the early 1990’s when I read Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle, a novel based on what happened to Emmett Till. Till was a fourteen year old black youth from Chicago, IL, visiting family in Mississippi and not attuned to the racial protocols in the South in 1955. He spoke to a white girl, an offense that got him killed. His killers mutilated his body hideously, so much so everyone encouraged his mother to have a closed-casket funeral. “No,” she said, “let them see what they did to my boy.”

If you Google “Emmett Till” and click on the Wikipedia article, you’ll see a picture of Emmett taken the Christmas before he died. You’ll see a smooth-faced, handsome kid, sporting a man’s hat at a jaunty angle on his head. If you scroll down, you’ll see what his mother wanted the world to see, and it’s tough to look at; but don’t you dare look away.

Till’s death didn’t stop the wave of violence against blacks in the 1950’s or 1960’s, but it put a face to it. Till was a diminutive young man, small for his age and no match for the two, grown men who kidnapped him, beat him, gouged an eye out, shot him, then disposed of his body in the Tallahatchie River after they tied a seventy-pound cotton gin fan to his neck. Months after their acquittal, his murderers admitted to the killing in an interview; double jeopardy prevented a re-trial.

Today, what happened to Emmett Till is abbreviated to KWB–Killed While Black–and too many of us think, “That was the past. That doesn’t happen anymore.” Flash forward almost sixty years to a time when Emmett, had he lived, would likely have grown grandchildren, and hear the name Trayvon Martin.

Trayvon was murdered and buried before we ever learned how he died. We may be past the time where Trayvon could be executed for speaking to a white woman; however, he couldn’t survive a walk to a convenience store and a return to a “gated community.”

I’ll digress for a moment and say I abhor gated communities. The thought of putting up a gate to keep out the riff-raff is medieval. Oh, the homeowners would never say “riff-raff,” but, wink, wink, you know what they mean. When I was looking for a house after retirement, someone recommended a community in Haymarket, VA, near where I grew up, so I went to have a look. I had an appointment with a realtor, but the rent-a-cop at the gate wouldn’t let me inside unless he Xeroxed my driver’s license. I refused and left. When the realtor called later to find out why I stood her up, I said, “I didn’t know it was a gated community.” “What’s wrong with that?” she asked. “They’re fucking elitist.” Digression over.

Trayvon was allowed to be in that gated community; his father was visiting someone who lived there. They had been watching a basketball game, and the seventeen year old, probably needing a break from the adults, walked a short distance to a convenience store to purchase an Arizona Iced Tea and a box of Skittles. It was a rainy, February afternoon in Florida, and Trayvon wore a hoodie.

Trayvon committed the “crime” of being a young, black man dressed in a hoodie while walking in a gated community in a state where you can say anything short of shooting someone in the back is self-defense and get away with it. Trayvon had the misfortune of piquing the attention of a self-ordained neighborhood watcher and wannabe cop who followed him after a 9-1-1 Dispatcher told him not to, who apparently accosted Trayvon, and who, though he out-weighed Trayvon by more than 100 pounds, was so frightened of that can of tea and that box of candy that he put a single 9mm round in Trayvon’s chest. Trayvon’s body was drug-tested; the shooter wasn’t. The shooter claimed self-defense, and the cops looked at a dead, young, black man in a hoodie and decided no arrest was in order.

We all know the shooter’s name, but I’m not acknowledging him as a person right now. Yes, my religion tells me to appreciate the inherent goodness in every person, and eventually I’ll forgive. The name we need to have on our lips every minute of every day until the shooter is behind bars is Trayvon Martin. White or black, or any color in between, sit your children down and tell them Trayvon’s name. Tell them Trayvon was a good kid, a good student. Tell them he loved airplanes and wanted to be an aviation mechanic. Tell them he played football and loved basketball. Tell them he was murdered because he was black. What? You don’t want to tell your children that? Tell them anyway.

Because Trayvon has to be the last one. Do you understand? The last time this happens.

Spring – Time for the Virginia Festival of the Book!

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If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, the Vernal Equinox (aka Spring) begins at 0114 Tuesday, March 20. My Celtic ancestors called it Ostara (in truth, the Christians may have “borrowed” that name and turned it into Easter) and celebrated the fact it was time to plant, that the earth was being reborn. Anyone who has watched the daffodils and crocuses pop up lately, it indeed seems like a rebirth.

For writers, it can mean emerging from our dark, wintery writing caves into a world of light and inspiration. Yeah, that may be pushing it. As I was weeding my flower bed yesterday, I wasn’t inspired at all.

There is a spring event–and I’m sure this was planned–that will kick-start your winter-dulled writing senses, and that’s the Virginia Festival of the Book (VFTB). From March 21 – 25, not just Virginia writers will come to Charlottesville, VA, to celebrate “The Book.” I can’t think of a better way to start off the Spring. And, with the exception of several lunches with speakers, it’s free.

Once again, much like the multiple panel choices at AWP three weeks ago, I have a busy schedule of indulging my love of books and writing for four days.

VFTB offers something for everyone–from the fledgling scribbler to the established author, for poetry fanatics, lovers of historical fiction, writers of creative non-fiction and history. The list approaches being endless. If you click on the link above, you can scroll through the schedule for each day and see I’m not exaggerating. I’ll have to pack snacks and water, because I haven’t left myself much time for lunch.

These panels are not particularly craft-focused, as in a “how to” workshop, though hearing the publishing stories of panel members and how they approach writing is certainly instructive–and inspiring.

Then, there’s the book fair. Truthfully, I can’t add many more books to my shelves until I winnow and donate to the local library, but that never stops me. Where the AWP Book Fair seemed to focus on small press publishers and literary magazines, the VFTB Book Fair is wonderfully eclectic–there’s something for everyone. Just expect to exceed your book-purchasing budget for the year.

I like the fact that something that celebrates books–and by association, their writers–is free. VFTB is produced by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, a non-profit organization, which provides grants and funding for educational and cultural activities around the Commonwealth. I’m not affiliated with either organization, other than as a citizen of the Commonwealth who benefits from their work, but I’ll still make a pitch for donations. I want the VFTB to be around for my book-loving grandchildren to enjoy.

I’m sure most every state has something similar to VFTB, but as a true Virginian (i.e., born here) I have to brag on this one. Try it. You’ll love it.

Friday Fictioneers Go to the Dogs!

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I hope the title gets your attention. It’s all about the inspirational photo for today’s Friday Fictioneers–the weekly explosion of creativity restricted to 100 words. We’ll get to that in a bit.

I signed up for my first week-long writers’ workshop, the Tinker Mountain Writers’ Workshop in June at Hollins University in Roanoke, VA. It’s a pretty intense schedule, and I’ve signed up for a fiction workshop taught by Pinckney Benedict (Miracle Boy and Other Stories, published by Press 53). I went to his reading at AWP and was enthralled. If I get his workshop (you have to pick a primary and two alternates, in case your primary is full), I know I’ll learn a lot. I’m looking forward to it and can’t wait for June to get here.

When I saw today’s inspirational photo from Madison Woods, I felt very nostalgic for the dogs of my childhood. How could you not love this face?


But, of course, my love of dystopia took over. Here’s a 100-word story I call–

“The Last Dog on Earth.”

Yeah, I have an image to maintain, you know. And all this you see? It’s mine. I’ve peed on every tree, rock, and blade of grass, and no one would dare set paw here.

This is my gig—sitting here, surveying all that’s mine, looking cool. I trained myself not to chase squirrels or gulp my food. Not cool. I’m beyond puppy behavior anyway.

I get a herd now and then to show off my skills. They’re robots, though, and programmed, so it’s not quite the same. But what the hell? You gotta give the tourists what they expect.
——————–
For more snappy, 100-word fiction go to Madison Woods’ blog. Please read all the offerings, leave a comment (writers love it when you love our works), and consider joining us. I warn you, though. It’s addictive, but it’s a sweet addiction and costs you nothing.

Politics Wednesday – Shared Responsibility

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At some point in a not-too-distant future, we may pay a high price for waging a war based on lies.

Reams have been written on the problems of multiple deployments into combat zones, and the psychology on this is not a flawed science. Post-traumatic stress disorder is the rule, not the exception. Studies have shown even one combat tour, even a single fire-fight, in a high-fire zone can foster PTSD, and the military culture and, in some cases, the American tendency to turn a face away from mental disorder, leave our soldiers, sailors, and marines without support or acknowledgement.

This weekend when I heard of the Army staff sergeant who left his base, walked to a nearby Afghan village, and systematically executed sixteen people, including nine children, I was horrified and angry. When I learned he was on his fourth deployment in a combat zone, my anger returned to the people who got us into a two-war situation in the first place. This staff sergeant, who returned to his base and surrendered, is allegedly (innocent until proven guilty) responsible for the physical event, but in a way I hold the Bush Administration just as responsible.

Whether some of my fellow Liberals accept it or not, there was a case for action in Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11. However, I preferred Special Operations over “Shock and Awe.” As we’ve seen, the case for a war in Iraq was based on false intelligence and out-right lies. It emerged from the deranged philosophy of neo-conservatism and American exceptionalism and a perversion of global manifest destiny. And for Halliburton’s profit margin.

And now we have a thirty-eight year old man who suffered traumatic brain injury in a Humvee roll-over back on duty in Afghanistan after an evaluation wherein a diagnosis of PTSD may or may not have been covered up because treating PTSD is expensive. And of course the media has to get some “let’s blame the woman” in the mix, speculating that a message the sergeant’s wife sent him shortly before his apparent rampage “set him off.”

The Afghan villagers want the staff sergeant to be given to them, but with the Taliban returning to supremacy there, we all know what that justice would be like. The Army is considering a court martial on site at his base in Afghanistan, which would certainly give the Afghan people small assurance. Because this could be a military death penalty case–very rare indeed–I would rather it happen here in the states and with more transparency than a typical military trial.

I also wish he’d have sitting with him in the dock Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et. al. There should be shared responsibility for this latest murder of innocents.

I’m sure there are troglodytes out there who consider any Afghan–even a child–an enemy and who will try to justify the unthinkable. I can only ponder about what my father would have thought of this–the man who, for a time, was responsible for guarding WWII war criminals. He would have been disappointed in this soldier, but he would have been outraged at the circumstances that put him in that time and place and mental state.

When we first went to war in Iraq, I wondered how many Timothy McVeigh’s we were creating. Now I wonder how many military men and women are here, at home, operating with a hair trigger. What we need to say to them is “It’s not your fault.” The best thing we can do for them is acknowledge PTSD without being afraid and make certain our Senators and Representatives find the funds to restore their normalcy.

Yeah, that’s going to happen.

Re-Reading

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One of the first books I received as a gift was Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. I was six or seven, already in love with horses thanks to my Dad, and I think I read it in one sitting, which probably went well into the night under the covers with a flashlight. I re-read that book so often, the front cover fell off. Literally, and it was a hardback. I still have the book, though I haven’t re-read it in a couple of decades or so. Hmm, maybe I’ll remedy that soon.

Over the years, there have been works of fiction I’ve read and re-read, from Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre to The Left Hand of Darkness and Slaughterhouse Five and many others in between. Re-reading something I love is like comfort food–you know it’s going to taste good, and you know you’re going to eat all of it, but each time is a different experience.

This month for a book club I belong to, I re-read Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale. As I re-read, I realized when I first read it in 1985, it was as a woman’s rights activist. Her dystopian tale of a theocracy in America reinforced the feelings and fears I had then. Sadly, we’ve come back around full circle to the things that make a society, as described in A Handmaid’s Tale, possible, even probable, but that’s not the topic for today.

I realized, as I re-read this book, I was regarding it more with a writer’s eye, which makes sense. In the past two plus years I’ve been focusing more on the craft of writing than anything else. So, I noticed how Atwood opened the story with it already tightly wound, i.e., she starts “in the present” and unfolds the story with hints and flashbacks. In the beginning her descriptions are sparse, but as the story moves forward, the people, the settings, the threads of the story all become richer and fuller. The book’s “ending” is up for grabs–it could end happily or it could be a disaster; it’s up to the reader.

At least, that’s what I came away with the first time I read it. The book actually concludes with “A Historical Note,” which I apparently ignored the first time around, likely because I thought I was in the midst of the history in 1985. The historical note is a continuation of the story, and it’s a bit more optimistic than what you think the real ending is. In the historical note you discover what you’ve just read is a diary or memoir of sorts discovered almost as if it were a relic in an archeological dig. I realized what some criticized as the “herky-jerky” pace of the novel was incredible story-telling. The protagonist was on the run, putting down facts and events as she remembered them. This was an instance where linear story-telling would have made the novel a bore.

In that re-reading, then, for a political book club, I learned a valuable writing lesson. I remembered as well why that book resonated with me twenty-seven years ago and grasped why, this time, it left me a little depressed because, well, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Which books do you re-read? What is it about a particular book that makes you go back again and again–character, plot, setting?

Friday Fictioneers – I’m Back!

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As much fun and as much as I learned at the American Writers and Writing Program Conference last week, I really missed doing my 100-word story for Friday Fictioneers. Moreover I couldn’t wait until Wednesday rolled around to see the picture, and, wow, the story popped right into my head. I almost couldn’t wait until Friday.

For a review of a chapbook I purchased at the conference click on: Book Review – Betty Superman.

Here’s the inspiration photo from Madison Woods:

The following story is dedicated to friends who served in Vietnam. By the way, in the story I use a term which some may find offensive, but it is a historically accurate term used by U.S. soldiers in that war.

Reluctant Sojourn

I never liked working on the plumbing in an older house. The cellars and crawlspaces were damp; their fetid smell stirred memories best kept hidden. I needed this job, so I went in.

The day was cold. Fear made me sweat, and the corrugated ceiling put me back in the box where Charlie kept me during my reluctant sojourn in the Hanoi Hilton, the old one, not the Hanoi Hilton Opera there now, a real hotel.

I kept my eyes away from the air hole. If I looked, Charlie would be looking back, like he does in my dreams.

———

For more 100-word stories by Friday Fictioneers, go to Madison Woods’ blog and have a read.

Politics Wednesday–No KO, Again

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Willard M. Romney was certain he’d score a knock-out on Super Tuesday yesterday, and, once again, he had to settle for a split decision. In the key primary–and national election–state of Ohio, Romney beat Rick Santorum by just one percentage point. Santorum won Tennessee and Oklahoma, Newt Gingrich won Georgia (not a surprise), and Romney’s hope to lock up the nomination so he can concentrate on President Obama was dashed. Yay!

Romney spun it well, but so did Santorum. And Gingrich again, as he did after Florida, gave what sounded like a victory speech–victory as in “I’m in Bizarro world where multiple third and fourth places mean I won.” Ron Paul, well, you didn’t hear a peep from him, but he’s still there, like the loony relative you don’t send invites for family functions, but he somehow finds out and shows up.

What the results show is that Romney, the pretend conservative, has difficulty winning in the deep south. His Florida and Virginia wins aside–he and Paul were the only Republicans on the ballot in the Old Dominion–Romney has trouble appealing to the voters who traditionally go for candidates to the right of Ivan the Terrible. This could mean the primary battle will extend through the spring and into the summer, if Santorum continues to do well in southern states. Gingrich and Paul show no sign of dropping out of the race any time soon, even though it’s coming down to a Romney/Santorum bout.

I initially thought, yes, let it be Santorum; Obama will cream him. Besides, there’s no way people will vote in Rick Santorum as President. Then, I remembered I felt the same way about George W. Bush, and America elected him. Twice. Granted, Santorum’s social, economic, and policy positions make W look like a, well, Massachusetts Moderate, but if the Republican base can get motivated and if progressives stay home in a huff, Santorum could… No, I won’t put it in print. Just thinking about it will give me dystopian nightmares.

Romney, I believe, will be the nominee, after a long, protracted process that will leave him emotionally spent, and the President will be fresh as a daisy. The polls look good for the President now, but it’s March. We’ve got eight months to go, and we can’t take a single thing for granted. As the Republicans disinter the rotting corpse of the War Against Women and flail its stink about, we need to remember that few Republicans with national presence denounced Rush Limbaugh’s odious words about Susan Fluke; we need to remember that Republicans brought up the Blunt Amendment, which would allow any employer to not cover any medical procedure or medication for any one for any reason. (That was defeated, thank goodness.)

I can’t list all the things we need to remember come Election Day in November, but as a progressive who has been disappointed by some of the President’s policies, I know he has my vote. The alternative is just too dark and reactionary to consider.

—————

One of my readers who thinks I’m an “ultra-feminist” (I am, but it doesn’t bother me.) can stop reading here, so his blood pressure doesn’t elevate.

The shenanigans of the Virginia Legislature–personhood bills, trans-vaginal ultrasounds, etc.–have made national news. Our reactionary-laden legislature seems determined to return us to the 1950’s in terms of many things, chief of which is women’s right to decide what to do with their bodies. It’s something men do without thought–who to fuck, when to fuck, whether to use protection or not–and for some reason don’t want women to do. To protest the legislature’s actions, several hundred men and women held a silent protest this past Saturday at Virginia’s capitol building in Richmond. Several of them stood on the Capitol’s front steps. The governor claims he didn’t send in SWAT, but it’s obvious he did. The police arrested people who were doing nothing except sitting and standing, handcuffed them, and locked them in a bus for nine hours for something that is normally a ticketable offense. (Hello, America; wake up and smell the police state.)

Last weekend at the Richmond protest, there was one sign that said it all for me, that reflects my sense of deja vu, my feelings about having to fight–yet again–to make sure women have the same choices men do, and here it is:

Inspiration

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The interview question a writer of any renown hates to hear is, “Where do you come up with your ideas?” or some variant thereof. That’s a process difficult to explain, so it’s easy to say, “From my family,” or “From life.” But those answers are a bit glib, perhaps disingenuous to someone who sincerely wants to know how you do it to enhance their craft.

Every writer has to answer that question–or not–from his or her own background. When I was getting some counseling after my father’s death, the therapist suggested journaling. Yes, I journal-ed before journaling was cool. She told me to, as one presenter at AWP advised, “vomit words on the page.” Many of those journal items became stories in my collection of short stories, Rarely Well-Behaved, which was published in 2000. Other stories in the collection, however, just “came to me.” Yeah, that’s a technical term.

When I write short stories I’m a bit of a seat of the pants writer. I start with a picture, a word, or a snippet of conversation I’ve overheard and expand on it. I let it go wherever it wants, and sometimes that works. My short story “Trophies,” published in the February issue of eFiction Magazine started out as a writing exercise inspired by hand-fishing–from the fish’s point of view. Then it moved to a character with aspects of my brother and my father, and that character did something that a friend’s stepfather did years ago. In the end, the catching-fish-from-the-fish’s-POV got canned (a good thing), and the story got refined and published.

Sometimes the seat of the pants approach doesn’t work. Last year, I wrote a short piece about a tree that falls on a house, in response to a writing prompt from a magazine. The tree’s falling brought out pent-up emotions in a suburban community not unlike where I lived in Northern Virginia. Those hidden emotions boil over, and a slaughter occurs. I workshopped it and got some good feedback, then one person just went off on why I’d written such a “stupid mess.” I was going for quirky, psychological horror, but he excoriated the story, me, and why I’d ever thought I was a writer. Threw me for a loop, I’ll tell you. I haven’t been able to look at the story since, even though I thought it was a good piece of flash fiction. Who knows? Maybe I’ll overcome the clench in my stomach and have a second look at some point.

Almost every Friday, I write a 100-word story inspired by a photograph posted by Madison Woods, and since I’m a more visual person, I generally get more inspired by looking at something than by a word or a phrase. When I see the picture, the story plays out in my head, which is cool, but my mother used to think it was weird.

I’ve learned a lot about craft from the workshops I’ve attended at writing conferences, including the recent AWP conference, but I’ve also filed away conversations I overheard in Kitty O’Shea’s, physical descriptions of some of the unique people I observed, and a great talk I had with a cab driver on the way to O’Hare on Sunday. All fodder for the imagination.

Life, death, friends, family, your physical surroundings–all of them can have a story that needs to be told, so tell it.

What inspires you? Are you a story planner or a seat of the pants writer? Do you see the story in your head, or does it just come from the fingers on the keyboard?