Three session highlights of my weekend included:

Midwest Gothic: Dark Fiction of the Heartland.  Cathy Day read from her haunting book, The Circus in Winter, in which a young mother witnesses the rising waters outside her bedroom window during the 1913 Winnesaw River flood. In the darkness she hears the screams from the circus animals that winter over in the barns on the banks of the river. A bull elephant’s trunk snakes through the open window and gropes the frame like a “tongue licking the corners of a mouth.” The river eventually swallows the elephant and most of the other circus animals, save the hippopotamus, in its deepening muddy currents. I discovered a name for the dark, eerie, secretive yet polite subjects that I’m drawn to: Midwest Gothic. I can’t wait to pick up my copy of The Circus in Winter and study a masterful rendering of a genre I want to emulate.

Reinventing Realism: The Craft of Alice Munro. With standing room only, five Munro experts shared their insights into Munro’s uncanny sense of transporting the reader without leaving any clues as to how she did it. Michael Byers, director of the MFA program at the University of Michigan, discussed how Munro uses the subjunctive to keep the reader guessing at exactly what the narrator thinks. Rarely is the narrator truly certain when Munro twists and turns through the temporal and relational with qualifiers such as always, usually, sometimes, rarely, and never. She Increases friction, tension and realism with the use of and, or, but, and however. Munro shows that the possibility of what the narrator tells us is true and steadfast is in constant flux, teetering on the edge between certainty and doubt, and gives us multiple possibilities of interpretation. I’ve got to try this magic, this multiple approach to give my characters more depth with their doubting human nature.

Four Over Forty. Daniel Libman, Zoe Zolbrod, Chris Fink, Goldie Goldbloom, and Francesca Abbate shared their humor, struggles, and wisdom regarding their experiences at publishing their first books after the age of forty. Goldbloom, author of Paperbark Shoe, impressed me profoundly with her deeply possessed wisdom about the mature writer, one who’s lived life, raised children into adulthood, and experienced the deaths of love ones. She said that as a teenage writer she could write, but that she just didn’t know what she wrote about. “Now we know,” said Zolbrod in her gentle, but firm Aussie accent. “And we conspire to say everything we couldn’t dare to say before.” Indeed, I cannot imagine my writing from 20-30 years ago ever reaching the poignant depths that it does now.

Besides the formal sessions, and in addition to the dinners, receptions, and other large social gatherings, the personal highlight for me came on Saturday night. While some of the younger writers sang pop tunes in a karaoke bar or drank whiskey at a Goth bar, I started the evening over a Fat Tire beer at Bennigan’s with another woman about my age, a friend from my Hamline MFA program. We punctuated the conversation with riotous laughter regarding the slaughter of the Amazon-sized cockroach in our 19^th floor hotel bathroom earlier. We garnished more than a few stares in the restaurant as I dabbed my eyes with a paper napkin. It’d been a long time since I’d laughed so hard.

For the rest of the evening until 2 a.m. as we lay in our hotel room, we shared our experiences and thoughts about lovers, husbands, children, and the maturing sense of self that comes when choosing either to stay with or leave a partner after a quarter century of marriage. We spoke of memoirs written that remain in a basement box and those not yet completed. We agreed that our two twenty-something roommates wouldn’t fully comprehend the depth of our 50+ years of experience. But, someday they will.

And this is why I value growing as a writer: to bridge the gaps within my own understanding and with others who might or might not fully comprehend, but still share in the universal struggle to make sense from our experiences. Thanks to AWP, I’ve grown and become a part of a fuller, more meaningful community of writers, whether with 10,000 others from across the country or a single friend from across the room.

Cathy Moser, Bob Ekstrand and Erik Lillestol at Dusty's Bar

As much as you might try and succeed at keeping a daily writing habit, you’ve got to take a day off once in a while. Last Thursday, case in point.

Since I had a doctor appointment, I went ahead and took the whole day off from my regular writing routine. Getting poked in more ways than one would not normally inspire me, but while I stood in line at the appointment desk, a new character for my story appeared from the exam rooms and stood behind me. I’m a tall woman at five feet, ten inches, but he towered over me somewhere around six feet, four and hardly fussed while waiting in the long line. He wore a leather jacket with Harley Davidson embossed on the back, clean, crisp Levis and cowboy boots with ornate silver plates nailed to the back of the heels. He sported a trimmed salt and pepper goatee and curly shoulder-length hair tied neatly behind his balding head. I’ll call him my Harley Man.

Harley Man will usurp my current ho-hum supporting character, the Honda Guy in the story I’m working on right now. Imagine: It’s October and just started to snow along Minnesota’s north shore. An average-looking middle-aged IT guy on a Honda Goldwing stops to offer a ride to an attractive Latina woman who’s neglected to keep enough gas in her Jeep Cherokee—no, no, no. Honda Guy just won’t do.

Imagine my Harley man instead: A rumble approaches from behind the woman. A beating bass drum jars her heart. It startles her at first, but triggers a primal sense of comfort. Harley Man pulls up side by side to her stalled Jeep, leans over and taps his leathered fist on the glass... Oh, yeah. Goodbye Honda Guy. Hel-lo Harley Man.

Okay, so letting my mind drift while waiting in line at the clinic helped me spice up my story, what about after the doctor’s visit at the bar that night?

I don’t make a habit of frequenting the neighborhood watering hole on weeknights nor am I especially fond of beer, but last night was exceptional in every way. For the longest time my friend and talented musician, Cathy, had invited me to hear her and her musical partner, Bob, play at Dusty’s on Marshall Avenue in Northeast Minneapolis. I finally made good on seeing my dear old friend on the coldest night of the season when the mercury dove below zero. I brought my husband with me and we ended up eaves dropping on an extremely talented jam session.

The BobCat duo’s guitar plucking and soprano siren pleased our ears, but soon the night turned into unimagined musical ear candy. Every now and then a man bundled in a parka came in through the door of the hole-in-the-wall bar, ordered a drink (or two or three) and found a vinyl-padded seat within the bar’s brown paneled décor. Each one gave a friendly wave to the bar keeper and other patrons. These were more than just your friendly neighbors stopping in for one before heading home…

 By the end of the night, three of those guys had a guitar, a bass fiddle, or a microphone in their hands and at one point the Bob-Cat duo had swelled to a strumming, crooning, harmonizing quintuplet crammed into the middle of the bar’s long narrow layout. Before my husband and I left, we’d heard various renditions of blues, jazz, folk, bluegrass, basso nova, calypso, and soft rock—all with a glass of dark New Castle in the palm of my hand. Who says you have to go to Glasgow or Dublin for soul-satisfying pub entertainment?

So today, with memories of BobCat and friends who so generously provided the spirited break I needed, I’m taking up my pen and beginning fresh with Harley Man—and what’s this? The snow is falling outside my window like flour from a sieve. Time to write!

Thanks goes to the BobCat duo, Cathy Moser on guitar, flute and vocals (Buffalo Gals) and  Bobby E. Ekstrand on guitar, and their special guests, Erik Lillestol on bass (Café Accordion Orchestra), Tom Craven on guitar, Maurice Jacox with vocals (Willie and the Bees) and Dean “Deano” Mikkelson on the archtop guitar.

Enjoy!

I Wanted Her to Go Kicking and Screaming

Instead, Ruby lied, crafted a story of shells and salt, Buddha and incense. As if in a trance, she spoke not a word when she brushed my cheek with her wispy lips. When will you come back? I asked as I pushed some stray hairs up off her forehead, anything to touch her, to keep a hold of her. I reached for her hand and instinctively felt for the ring I’d given her in the spring, but she pulled her hand away before I could feel its absence.

She never answered my question. She flashed a brief grimace of a smile, glanced at the giant airport lobby clock, and she was off through security, piling her backpack filled with her sole possessions into a grey tub on the conveyor belt. She passed barefoot through the metal detector, never looking back.

That was in November, a year after my promotion to grain consulting manager and the 60-hour work week, a year before I joined AA and surrendered to the Higher Power, and two years before I met and married my wife.

It was seven years before I saw Ruby again.

My wife, our three-year-old daughter, and I were at the Minnesota Zoo and had stopped along the Northern Trail. Families of wild Asian horses and Bactrian camels lounged in the grass stubble of their enclosures, lazing in the Indian summer sun. Did they have any clue that they lived the royal, free-lunch life of captivity? Or that their wild, peasant ancestors, the few that survived on the wind-swept steppes of Mongolia, had to fend for themselves? I couldn’t decide who had the better life, the coddled captives or the barbaric beasts. My wife told me to not think so hard, Honey, relax. It’s just a zoo. She was right. Come on, Daddy, said my daughter. They moved on ahead to see the prairie dogs while I went back to the refreshment stand to grab us some drinks and a snow cone—grape—my daughter’s favorite.

There she was, ordering a Coke. I was ninety-nine percent sure it was Ruby. Sunglasses, the movie star kind with thick, black rims and gold embellishments rested on the bridge of her nose—her nose with the little crook in it, the nose I used to suck on with my lips, nibble with my teeth, and stroke with my tongue. She’d bleached her hair. Instead of going gray and in spite of her Czech blood, she’d chosen to go Swedish and it gave her a sexy, coquettish look. It reminded me of when we first met, back in college over summer breaks when we used to lifeguard together at the rec center pool, but then it was natural, burned blond by chlorine  and the Midwestern sun.

I tapped her on the shoulder.

Oh, my god, Ruby said.

My thoughts exactly. I was right. Lady Lazarus stood before me, but instead of the foul rancidness of four days’ rot, a field full of lilies of the valley blossomed invisibly around her. My cock stiffened.

She pushed her sunglasses up and over the top of her curling hair and with her jaw agape, she stared as if to verify what she’d seen through the Polaroid lenses.

I asked her how long she’d been back in town. She pulled her glasses back down and grabbed her Coke. She said, a while, and stepped back from the stand.

She invited me to sit on a bench in the shade with her, but by then I had two Cokes and a melting glob of ice in a soggy paper cone balanced in my hands. Couldn’t she see I had other plans, other responsibilities? I fumbled with the snow cone and spilled some of the purple syrup on my sandal as I explained that I had to catch up with my “group.”

She looked at me suspiciously from the corner of her glasses.

The familiar lull of Ruby’s voice and a peek at those doe eyes of hers made me want to confess my sins and forgive any misunderstandings there’d been between us years ago: my growing neglect of her, the drinking, her flirting, my jealousy. I loved her, asked her to marry me, but if this was love, she sure as hell didn’t want to get married. I’d work less, quit the booze, give her space, but unless she moved to the other side of the planet, I wouldn’t let her go.

All forgiven, all forgotten.

I wanted to nuzzle into the girlish ringlets that haloed her face and inhale her perfume. I wanted to find out what adventures she’d had without me in Asia over the last seven years. Had she found herself? God? Was it all worth leaving me?

I asked her to meet for drinks after work the next day. She winced, sipped on the Coke, and shrugged her shoulders. I suggested I give her a call and just as I asked for her number, I heard a man’s voice call her name from behind us.

I gotta go, she said.

I blurted out, Exactly how long have you been back in town?

I never left.

You never went to Thailand?

She slowly shook her head.

What the fuck? She never left?

She set her face flat towards me and grimaced just like she did in the airport. More syrup dripped across my toes.

Coming, Ruby called back over her shoulder to the man’s voice as she stood up. She skipped around me where she ringed her arm with another man’s and walked away barefoot, never looking back.

Like many parents of gifted children, when our children left the cocoon of family life and began spending most of their waking hours in public school, I worried. Will they make friends? Will they be challenged? Will they be OK?

Our son, Ben, and our daughter, Jillian, were so bright and capable, but also so very sensitive. I worried for their happiness. I advocated for them because I knew as small children, although they were mature beyond their years, they didn’t have the wherewithal of life experience to advocate for their exceptional educational needs. For years I wished I could read something other than the dozens of how-to or research-heavy books about gifted children. I wanted a story. I wanted to listen to someone who’d already been there, raised their gifted children, and survived to tell the tale. I found nothing published within the last 30 years, so I wrote the book I wished I could’ve read, Life with Gifted Children: Infinity & Zebra Stripes.

When I began writing in earnest, Ben was an eight-year-old fourth grader who was soon accelerated another year in math and Jillian was a fresh five-year-old kindergartner with interests beyond playing house or racing cars on the carpet. Ben went on to excel in math and declare himself a physics major at Carleton College. This week he’ll step on a plane to Germany and live with a host family while studying theater and the history of Berlin. Next week, as a recent high school graduate with a National Merit Scholarship, Jillian will meet her roommate from Chicago, an artist like her, and begin her freshman year at Carleton.

What’s happened since advocating for our children in grade school? The teenage years are often described as the most tumultuous phase of a person’s development that can provide enough angst to last a lifetime. Anxiety, depression, and loneliness marked our children’s lives in various degrees. On the other hand, so did hours of caring for lizards and snakes at the nature center, nights creating web pages for a neighbor, winters nordic skiing with teammates, and days earning academic honors, as well as developing friendships and falling in love for the first time. That’s what has happened. Mind you, Jillian celebrated her 17^th birthday only two weeks ago and Ben is still 19. The process of searching for a circle of friends where they can truly relax, be themselves, and be understood, is still unfolding. The main difference is that now, they’re in a social and intellectual environment of their choosing.

My most satisfying realization as a parent of gifted children is that after graduating from high school, they’re lucky enough to spend their next four years in an environment that supports their intellectual curiosity as well as their quirky and intense interests. An alumnus once told me that this will be the only time—four precious years—that their true peers will surround them. Once they get out into the real world, they’ll work with and serve people from all walks of life. These four years are a gift that will allow them to continue developing their talents and interests, develop lifelong friendships, and grow into people who’ll make a difference for themselves and others in the world.

In the meantime, both Ben and Jillian continue to discover and wrap their brains around the what-ifs. Ben continues his fascination with mathematical and analytical problem solving. In addition to his physics classes, he’s taking as many computer science classes as he can. He’s a modest kid. He doesn’t say much about his college work, but when I ask, he will. I can tell that he simplifies his explanations for the sake of my elementary understanding. If only I could discuss Saturn’s rings or the properties of the low-temperature helium he’s researched over the summer like his housemates can, but I can’t and that’s okay.

Jillian continues in her persistent and private ways. She’s an artist. Stories constantly simmer beneath her calm exterior and bubble out her fingertips in writing and hundreds of doodles and sketches. Very few people know and even fewer understand how these narratives and images run through her veins. She’s not an exhibitionist, but a true artist whose primary purpose is to make her characters come alive and solve their problems. And what problems they can be! The worlds she creates are half science fiction and half fantasy, sometimes with whole civilizations teetering in the balance.

Everything changes, and yet, nothing does. The external circumstances, the geography of our lives, will change completely. In a week my husband and I won’t hear the floorboards creak at night when Ben jumps out of bed with a startling discovery or hear Jillian laughing as she watches an episode of The Big Bang Theory from her laptop. Our grocery bill will decrease by 50% mostly because “the Hoover” (as we’ve nicknamed Ben lately) won’t be around. I won’t be picking up the water glasses or socks that Jillian routinely scatters around the house. As much as our home will change from bustling to stillness, Ben and Jillian will always be our children. On occasion they’ll need our guidance as they navigate the many firsts to come—filing income taxes, renewing a passport, booking a flight, dating for the first time or maintaining a long-distance relationship.

What advice would I give parents now that our children have crossed the threshold from home to college and beyond? Persist. Expect the unexpected. Lay a solid foundation for them. Know that no matter how brilliant you think your children are—and they’re probably more brilliant than you’ll ever know—they’ll find their way. In the meantime, you’ll have more sleepless nights when you ask yourself, Will they be OK? Take it from a mother who’s been there: with your love and guidance, they will be all right.

Susan Power, author of The Grass Dancer and Roofwalker

Susan Power, a Dakota Native American writer, won the PEN/Hemmingway award for The Grass Dancer and the Milkweed National Fiction Prize for Roofwalker. Susan’s writing is circuitous and timeless and her process is revelatory, a deliberate approach without deliberation. She doesn’t manipulate her characters like puppets to show readers what she believes. Instead, she listens and allows the characters to show her, the writer, what they believe. Over the semester, Susan shared her magical gift with the class: the courage to surrender control and to open the heart to listen and give voice to whoever shows up.

I knew this class was going to be different when Susan handed out a brief one-page syllabus with no reading list. She wanted us to simply write and to write without restraint. After intense, highly structured craft classes on groundings in fiction, flash fiction, and point of view, this was what I needed to generate material.

Kicking off the first class, Susan challenged the advice commonly given to students: write what you know. “Why would we bother to write what we already know?” she asked us. “Marcie Hershman says to ‘Write what you need to know.’ Let your writing, your stories, be discovered and then ask the questions.”

Yes! This is why writing fulfils me like no other intellectual pursuit because it combines my desire to mull over, to meditate, and to address issues creatively. I can still research for authenticity when necessary, but then I can take the facts and soar with the story born from them. In this process I not only learn new and interesting stuff, but I discover a greater human element that can only be understood empathetically and vicariously through the experiences of my characters and the telling of their stories.

I’ve reviewed my spiral notebook from class and have come to the conclusion that the only notes I really need to carry me on are the first three lines on page 2.

Finding the Truth of Fiction

Puppeteer vs. Freewill characters

Finding the Truth vs. Forcing the “Truth”

These phrases sum up a method of writing that Susan coaxed from each of us in the class. By freeing our minds to follow an image, a sound, a face, a phrase, we discovered characters that we had no idea were possible. We spent the next 13 weeks getting to know them and their families, friends, and enemies. They told us their stories one week at a time, one chapter at a time, and we wrote, revised, and shaped them.

We began with interrogating characters—any character that came to mind whether it was someone we’d been writing about for months, a quirky name, or a face that just popped into our brains. We interviewed our new companions to discover the motivations behind their actions. We asked them why they did what they did through a set of 10 random questions. I turned my screen to white print on white and followed the voice that rose from within my mind—I called him The Dog Walker.  No editing, no censoring, no stopping, just letting the intuitive side of me flow from my fingertips.

Some of my best stories came out of innocent questions such as What is your favorite movie? and Who are your grandparents? These questions morphed into What is it with you and Mary Poppins? And How did your Swedish grandmother and your French grandfather become husband and wife?

Sometimes the questions led to personal discoveries (because I always wanted Mary Poppins to be my hero, my savior, my surrogate mother) and others led to family secrets (they met as strangers and fled Europe’s post WWII desolation with forged marriage documents in order to immigrate to America).

Each week students read from the voices of their newly discovered characters, eager to tell their stories: a Minnesota woman recovering from anorexia; a Russian wolf-girl-woman who after a series of petty thefts in the village, steals an infant; a non-repentant modern-day dream-stealer and his quest for love; a drowned Icelandic boy whose ghost returns thirty years later to resolve his pain, and more.

Through the freewill of our characters, we discovered the truth in their stories. No premeditated agendas. No planned themes to follow. No points to prove. Just the delightfully surprising stories that caused us to sit on the edges of our chairs in anticipation of the answer to what lay on our lips, What happens next? More often than not, a student’s reply was, I don’t know where this is going, but I like it.

Magic. Pure magic. We like it too. Thank you, Susan Power.

-----------------------------------------------

Most notable works by Susan Power:

• The Grass Dancer. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994.
• Roofwalker. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2002.

A brief biography of Susan Power and a review of The Grass Dancer can be found at http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/powerSusan.php



9 of the dozen or so writers at our first official meeting. 6 pictured here and me (in the green) now form the core group.

My three goals for the summer were to read a novel every other week, to write every week and read one story at every meeting, and to submit work to lit mags. I'm happy that I met all three goals and used the structured bi-weekly meetings as a way to keep me going over the summer. It worked.

So what's at issue?

I created the group first with an invitation to women whose work I admired in my MFA classes at Hamline University. Then I welcomed anyone else these women wanted to invite. After several meetings it boiled down to a core group of us, a lovely cohesive and extremely talented bunch of 6 or 7 creative non-fiction writers and me. I've written plenty of CNF, but my focus is fiction, and I find it interesting that only CNF writers really stuck it out or found the common bond. Granted, when I first met some of these women, they were pursuing fiction or poetry, but they've since landed on the CNF side of the fence.

I love my sister writers dearly, respect their input, talent, and honesty completely, but I'm feeling the need to surround myself with like-minded fiction writers, men and women who recognize the challenges and understand the nuances that makes fiction worthy of the storytelling.

It's like I'm the token, but well-loved, fiction-head amongst the truth-sayers of CNF. I know we all strive to tell truths, however, there are marked differences between the forms. My CNF friends assure me that all the genres inform each other, and I agree, but at what point does a writer need support from her own genre clan?

I will probably continue with my CNF writer friends since we will meet only once a month during classes and I enjoy the camaraderie. But after that?

I'd love to hear from you if you have an opinion about writing groups, mixed or homogeneous genres, and how writing groups can and cannot meet the needs of developing as well as mature writers. Please leave a comment here or email me with your thoughts: wendyannskinner@gmail.com

A year-long community poetry project in St. Louis Park, Minnesota

Poetry, poetry, poetry!

Last night I joined over 100 others at the Our Town Favorite Poems Party to introduce the 2010-2011 St. Louis Park City/School Calendar.

Every year the calendar features community artwork. Photography and paintings have dominated it in the past. This year, however, poetry made its debut and what a stunning reflection of the culmination of activities led by our community poet, Diana Pecoraro.

Our Town, Verses & Voices was a year-long community poetry project and celebrated with the selection of 12 Favorite Poems and their submitters at a private reception on July 22, 2010.

Readers ranged from second graders like Quinn H. Whitlow who read his original award winning poem, "Unseen Secrets" where he hides his secrets "in the core of a brick and on the surface of a star," to senior citizens Florence Flugaur and Bob Ramsey who selected Robert Frost's endearing poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

A poem and the person who chose the poem are featured on each page of the calendar--a whole month to ponder the words, images, and impressions of each poem.

At the back of the calendar is a community renga. A renga is a traditional Japanese group poem that is shared writing. Each line of the poem is from a different member of the St. Louis Park community that includes children, parents, singles, elders, longtime residents, and newly arrived immigrants.

The renga was composed from lines from residents who participated in one of eight different workshops and were charged with creating lines about our city. Sights, sounds, and smells dominate the language.

I had the privilege to read this beautiful poem with Diane at the end of the program. One of my favorite lines was, "Raindrops talking like the Chinese language-tapping, snoring like bats."

Community poetry doesn't come along every day. It takes people who care, are driven, and are supported by the community at large. The Our Town: Verses & Voices was funded by grants from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council through an appropriation from the Minnesota State Arts Board, as well as the St. Louis Park Community Foundation and the Park Nicollet Foundation.

If you're thinking of initiating poetry activities with a community poet in your "town," feel free to contact me and I'll get you connected with some great mentors!

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field. Edited by Tara L. Masih

I'm progressing through my "field guide" slowly over the summer, taking time to digest each essay with its writing exercises. I think of it like poetry. I could've read through this entire book in a day, but in order to let it soak in, I'm savoring every word, paragraph, and essay and using the experience to guide, inspire, and give the the kick in the pants I need to continue flexing my writing brain over the summer.

Here are some recent tips and thoughts about "smart surprise" that I found especially fruitful from Jennifer Pieroni.

In the section titled "Beginnings and Endings," Jennifer Pieroni, founder and editor of Quick Fiction, emphasizes the “smart surprise” throughout flash fiction—not just as a punch line at the end. The two vehicles for smart surprise are language and image.

“Examples of using language to create smart surprise could include: odd words; uncommon word parings or de-packaging common phrases; invented words; and conscious crafting of the rhythm of words when brought together into a sentence.”

“Just one strong, central image can make the difference between a story being forgettable and being one that stays with the reader forever...Memorable images are natural elements of a scene that are developed to shock readers out of a routine feeling, mood, or expectation.” Pieroni quotes Sam Ruddick, “We seek to be surprised, not by a trick ending, but by the feeling we get from reading the piece.”

Some phrases in the story sample ("Mine," by Szilvia Molnar, from Quick Fiction) Pieroni used that surprise us through language and image are: “the girl that braided her hair with yours,” “a scent of giggles,” “a note on my skin,” “a bruise that had the backside of a rainbow.” It really sounds more like poetry and it is—poetic language to evoke a feeling, a memorable, first-time experience of surprise for the reader.

Here’s a condensed explanation of Pieroni's exercise: Revise a piece of flash fiction you've already written. Use language and image to make your work memorable; use your creativity, your ear for language, and a really good thesaurus. Revise any clichéd phrases and images, with the goal now of surprising the reader with their freshness. If it’s a longer story, try to cut it down to about 500

I took an earlier story I wrote (“I Wanted Her to Go Kicking and Screaming”) from the previous exercise in the book and improved it by removing cliché images or phrases and adding some poetic spice! Looking at a story I already liked with a fresh "smart" perspective made a difference. Now, I'm pretty happy with it (after feedback from fellow writers and three revisions) and I'm sending it out.

I'll let you know if it gets published, but in the meantime, check out The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction!

Life of Pi, by Yann Martell, Illustrated by Tomislav Torjanac. Harcourt, Inc. ©2001

What an ending! I’m sobbing, grieving for Piscine Molitor Patel! What a final twist, forcing me as a reader to decide between belief or disbelief regarding Pi’s survival story.

I favor the story with the animals and believe that the human story is one that Pi’s wishes had happened—however, then I think that the animal story is all imagined, that Pi took the psychological form of the tiger as a means of survival, that telling the story through the metaphors of zoo animals was the only way he could make sense of his trauma without completely losing all hope, his very sanity. Oh, poor, poor, Pi. Poor, poor, Pi!

Life of Pi is split into 3 parts: Part 1, “Toronto and Pondicherry,” before the ship wreck; Part 2, “The Pacific Ocean,” the shipwreck and 227 days of survival; and Part 3, “Benito Juarez Infirmary, Tomatlan, Mexico,” back on land with an interview.

Part 1 sets up Pi’s family life and establishes Pi, his family (brother, father, and mother) and friends. We become invested in each of these characters just as Pi is and when he loses his family, we feel loss too.

Part 2 depicts the minute by minute, day by day struggle for survival and the relationship Pi develops with Richard Parker, the royal Bengal tiger from his father’s zoo. A final scene with a surreal, gigantic floating island of supernatural, but evil sea algae diverges from the pattern.

In Part 3, two Japanese men, representatives of the shipping company that owned the cargo ship, the Tsimtsum, conduct an interivew with Pi (a rather humorous one) in order to find clues as to how and why the ship sank. The tape recorded conversation reveals Pi’s story.

The two men don’t believe Pi’s initial story with the animals so Pi gives them an alternate story with his mother (orangutan), a sailor (zebra), the cook (hyena), and himself (tiger) as the sole survivors on the lifeboat that includes episodes of cannibalism, grief, and evil, and the desperate, primitive behaviors of survival.

By giving us Pi’s family, name origin, and spiritual groundings (in all 3 major religions: Christianity, Moslem, and Hindi faiths), Martell establishes a connection, a deep sympathy, and empathy for this young boy of 16 years who struggles to make his own way in the world. In the process he trades his childhood nickname “Pissing” for the infinitely beautiful and intriguing name of “Pi,” and creates his own concoction of love and god.

The play by play detail of survival in Part 2 immerses us in the stark realities of a ship wreck survivor and how after his fair share of mistakes, Pi overcomes each challenge with intelligent, thoughtful actions. We believe the “dream” of the story; we believe and are right there beside Pi as he struggles physically and psychologically for survival. When Martell brings us to the mysterious, surreal algae island, it seems plausible as a delusion induced by Pi’s starvation. However, Martell crafts and explains the island and its evil inner workings to such a logical conclusion that we believe that it may be just so. We believe again!

It takes the two Japanese gentlemen and their search for the “hard facts” that convinces Pi to tell a story that would be more likely, yet is more horrifying than his original story; in its brevity, his alternate story expresses more desolation and utter god-forsakeness than the fantastical survival of the fittest in the menagerie of animals in the lifeboat.

After thinking this through more and after writing my thoughts down, I realize that when I read the last chapters of the book, I wanted so much to believe Pi’s first story with Richard Parker. By all means I’d have preferred the first story. Now I realize that the second story, the brief and horrific account of the first few weeks with an abyss of blank narration to account for the rest of the 227 days, days of complete isolation, is what I believe to be the true “hard facts.”

This second version, this stark, edgy account of insanity and survival, wounds my sense of life balance and optimism as I compare it to the original detailed narrative. The two tales in their metaphorical partnership compel me to comprehend more deeply the mourning, desolation, and despair of Piscine Molitor Patel’s survival and loss.

The Awakening and Selected Stories, by Kate Chopin, published by Penguin Classics. ©1984. Edited with an Introduction by Sandra M. Gilbert. The Awakening was first published in 1899.

Edna Pontellier, the wife of an upper class man who makes his monetary and social fortune on the stock market and other shrewd business deals, lives in New Orleans as her husband’s ultimate, complimentary object that bears his children, keeps the house and servants, and socializes with the wives of business associates that will ensure her husband's financial success.

She is “awakened” while spending the obligatory summer on Grand Isle with the other high society women whose nursemaids tag along after their children and whose husbands stay away on business during the week only to return with bonbons and other extravagances on the weekends.

Edna falls in love with Robert, a young bachelor and the grown son of a family friend who spends his summers at Grand Isle as a sort of gopher for the older married women that includes flirting and supplicating their every need and fancy.

Edna awakens to the gradual and then sudden no-turning-back realization that she belongs to no one for no reason, not her husband, not her children, and ultimately, not even her Robert whom she realizes she would in time, eventually discard thus leaving her all alone, wanting no one and no thing.

Edna’s situation illustrates the conundrum of realizing what one so desires, wants, and ultimately needs for the soul, but cannot fulfill because of the physical limitations and circumstances of ones station in society. This novel, written long before its time, runs parallel to the core of the Women’s Liberation Movement of the ‘60s. It's easy to imagine Edna as a 1950 housewife who awakens to the calling of her own independent spirit (the character of Laura Brown in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours?). No wonder the critics of 1899 were horrified by Edna's despondency and her ultimate refusal to play the dutiful wife, mother, and well-to-do society woman.

This is not a book I would recommend a woman should read if she is contemplating divorce, an affair, or for that matter, suicide. Doing so might only deepen the melancholy of depression that accompanies such crises.

Edna struck me as a woman slipping into depression from the very first pages of the novel. Without knowing she’d ultimately have an affair or commit suicide, her depression seeped out through the passages of inner dialogue and her vacillation between manic and depressed episodes.

The fact that her inner voice could not know or understand exactly how or why she felt made a big impression on me. Kate Chopin’s narrative expressed the ambivalence and confusion that comes with experiencing conflicting and/or new emotions for the first time under circumstances that were once habitual and dreamlike, but now are perceived with a new illuminating, but simultaneously blinding light.

In the end, Edna does indeed leave an out for herself, however she does not choose to take it. She contemplates that no one, not even Robert “need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul.” However, she interjects that “Perhaps Doctor Mandelet would have understood if she had seen him—but it was too late...” (176). Yes, I believe he would have understood. If she had sought him out, she would have survived her torture, her dilemma, her crisis, and risen beyond it all to greater personal and spiritual heights (perhaps even finding a soul mate in her haunting pianist-friend, Mademoiselle Reisz). Instead, she remained within her psychological isolation, never reaching out to others, as if she was her own grand island put asunder by the seductive, but cruel waves of the Gulf.

Craft comments:

• The story unfolds and deepens gradually until the accelerated and final conclusion.
• Chopin allows us to experience her husband, her children, her friends along side Edna.
• This is told with a bit of an unpredictable omniscient voice that often snaps in and out of the inner thoughts of main characters within the same sentence.
• The narrator certainly knows much more than Edna does and knows her better than she knows herself.

If you’ve read The Awakening, please share your thoughts on story or craft by submitting a comment below.