The Last of the Tellers – Two: The Long Walk

Previously in The Last of the Tellers, the narrator invoked the muse. He showed us a planet and an America in the future where vegetation grows wild on everything and agriculture grows in crocks. There in that wasteland, we first glimpsed the dirt-caked cheeks of the Last Storyteller.

He was trudging, trudging into the east,
His shoes worn out, his soles inured to blisters,
The Teller brooded on the last remark
that had escaped his cracked, his wind-chapped lips.
“Water,” was the word, a funny comment
when seven miles beyond that spot sat sea.
But there, his blood-pus footprints on cement,
one word was all that lived for him to say.
He walked a mile beyond two brooding hills
then saw two shacks ahead, two shacks of hope.
Would they have water in their gilded halls?
Or crush The Teller, husk hope’s shucks of hype?

Both feet were throbbing then with every step
he forced himself to take, afraid to stop…

__________

Canto I:

One: The Invocation

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Bloom: 28,000 Flowers Installed @ Massachusetts Mental Center

You people know me. I never reblog. Ever. I try to create things here, but this was so amazing, so productive, so dangarang gorgeous that I had to share:

In 2003 a building housing the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (MMHC) was slated for demolition to make way for updated facilities. The closure was a time for reflection and remembrance as the MMHC had been in operation for over 9 decades and had touched countless thousands of patients and employees alike, and the pending demolition presented a unique problem. How does one memorialize a building impossibly rich with a history of both hope and sadness, and do it in a way that reflects not only the past but also the future? And could this memorial be open to the public, not as a speech, or series of informational plaques, but as an experience worthy of they building’s unique story?

To answer that question artist Anna Schuleit was commissioned to do the impossible. After an initial tour of the facility she was struck not with what she saw but with what she didn’t see: the presence of life and color. While historically a place of healing, the drab interior, worn hallways, and dull paint needed a respectful infusion of hope. With a limited budget and only three months of planning Schuleit and an enormous team of volunteers executed a massive public art installation called Bloom. The concept was simple but absolutely immense in scale. Nearly 28,000 potted flowers would fill almost every square foot of the MMHC including corridors, stairwells, offices and even a swimming pool, all of it brought to life with a sea of blooms. The public was then invited for a limited 4-day viewing as a time for needed reflection and rebirthContinue reading

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Paradise Lost: Book One

Reading a Harvard Classic, journaling for an MIT open course, watching a Yale lecture. Buckle up, this is about to be the most literated fantastic point of ignorance yet. We’ll have a coffee shop version, an appetizer version and a full course meal for this puppy. Respond and dialog as soon as you want to jump in, regardless of how much you read on this post or in the book.

Coffee: What You Care About

Fireworks. Magic. Cosmic battle. Midgets and Giants. Demons and Angels. Ancient mythology. Modern poetry. All this and more greets us at the front door of Milton’s Paradise Lost. For those of you who enjoy modern poetry, you’ll find some of it old-fashioned. For those who enjoy old-fashioned poetry, you’ll find Milton hates rhymey-dimey verse. Any of you fantasy nerds, if you can get past the iambic-ness of the telling, will love this. And, of course, so will those of you who try to follow Jesus or at least appreciate the O.T.

[jump in]

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Ask the Experts: Oppression and Propoganda

Senya Maximov came into my life through the Fulbright program at Missouri Southern. After I shared the only three Russian words I knew (da, spoceba, vodka), and after he shared perfect British English, shared language led to shared life. Joplin felt like Senya’s new home. Though he wanted to stay, his visa expired. I scheduled an interview at this new coffee joint on second and main called Cooper’s—they made a great pulled chicken sandwich, a rather unexpected virtue for a coffee shop. Senya popped open his kettle chips and I flipped on my recorder.

For twenty-six years Senya lived in Russia. “I grew up in Moscow,” he said, “and it’s a huge city. I was born in the Soviet Union.” He remembers enormous lines for loaves of bread, bone-bare shelves in shops and waiting necessities. “You’d come to a shop and one shelf, there would be like… chicken. And on another shelf, there would happen to be soda. So everyone would be buying soda and stand in line for it. Your neighbor would come home and say, ‘Hey! There’s fish today!’ And you would rush to the shop and try to get the fish before all the other people.” Continue reading

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The Last of the Tellers — One: The Invocation

for Doberman
and, as always, for Kiddo


I

“We must buy the water we drink;
our wood can be had only at a price…

We get our bread at the risk of our lives
because of the sword in the desert…

Our skin is hot as an oven,
feverish from hunger…

Young men toil at the millstones;
boys stagger under loads of wood.
The elders are gone from the city gate;
the young men have stopped their music.”

                                    – Jeremiah, 6th Century B.C.

One: The Invocation

Fill up my lungs this one last time to tell
of what we lost, of what weak life we choose
when we invest in ads despite my tale— Continue reading

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Fletching the Sandman’s Arrows

“What’s your name?”

“Fletch.”

“What’s your full name?”

“Fletcher.”

“What’s your first name?”

“Irwin.”

“What?”

“Irwin Fletcher. People call me Fletch.”

“Irwin Fletcher, I have a proposition to make to you. I will give you a thousand dollars for just listening to it. If you decide to reject the proposition, you take the thousand dollars, go away, and never tell anyone we talked.”

“Is it criminal?”

“Of course.”

“Fair enough. For a thousand dollars I can listen. What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to murder me.”

Fletch said, “Sure.”

That’s how Gregory McDonald kicked off the pitch-perfect dialog in his novel Fletch back in 1974. Fletch is a jerk, an absolute pain to everyone he meets because he only cares about the story. He’s not a detective, he’s an investigative journalist and he’ll sacrifice anything–two marriages, relationships with employees, even a rich man’s life–for the sake of his column.  Continue reading

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On Seeing, Believing and Pick Up Sticks

Yesterday, I saw Barack Obama’s motorcade cruise down Airport Drive. It was Monday. He was en route to speak at our city’s high school graduation, a graduation big enough to reserve the gymnasium at our local state college. Last year on the same date, they reserved the same gym and then dispersed for various parties around the city. That was mid-afternoon. By six o’clock, a twister tore my town in two.

Since May 22nd last year, everyone from Time to the Times, from ASPCA to FEMA, from the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street has said something about the events surrounding the tornado. Most of the people talking about the events got here a few days too late. The way my professor taught it, investigative journalism is supposed to… y’know… investigate what really happened. Though I’m no journalist, I’d like to tell you the truth about how our city set the pace for fast recovery.

By “fast recovery” I mean our people hopped to work long before any aid agency set up shop in Jasper County. Those of us able to fog a mirror and flex a bicep tossed rubble out of the way, dug out the trapped, the injured and the deceased. Continue reading

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“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”

Recent Work Miscellany

The following articles by yours truly will come out next month, this month or next year at this time:
  • “To Prevail or ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Flak’” in Hollywood and Vine (article, May/June 2012)
  • “Poker in the Pokey” in Poker Pro (article, June 2012)*
  • “Stamping the Name” in Encounter (article, May 2012)
  • “Choices Make the Man” in Encounter (article, Spring, 2013)
  • “The List” in Encounter (article, Spring 2013)
  • “Remember My Death” in Encounter (article, Spring 2013)
  • for older stuff, see published works and projects under the Writer tab
*This was cowritten with another writer under the pseudonym Thom Schriver

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Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen

Yesterday was a weird day for me. Really weird. Emotional and weird–not like yesterday’s post or anything, just yesterday . Since I feel like writing, but don’t want to mess with any stories or editing or whatever on Saturday, let’s chat about the best film I saw recently. It’s like a digital bowl of comfort ice cream, only with less calories and more Woody Allen.

Midnight in Paris follows a family who travels to the capital of France for business. One’s a screenwriter who wants to turn novelist. The other’s a brat-princess-daughter of some jerk Tea Party capitalist tycoon. Screenwriter and brat are engaged. Brat wants to do lame tourist things. Screenwriter wants to get in touch with his inner self and the city, as if to accommodate him, changes at Midnight into Paris of another era.

To get it out of the way, I liked the film. Maybe even loved it, I don’t know. I’ll have to see it a second time for that. Some of the imagery struck me, the poetry of filmmakers. At the opening scene, we alternate between shots of the oldest portions of the city and the newest, the ancient street lamps and the Eiffel Tower along switch places with new trees and buildings. Continue reading

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What’ll You Think of Next?

Hey gang,

Think of this like a love letter from me to you, only less romantic. I save the romance for Kiddo (ask her about the hope chest some time).

Every once in awhile, Continue reading

M.I.T. 4 Free

No, that’s not a typo. Thanks to Logan K. Stewart’s suggestion, I’m now going to take on M.I.T. at the same time as my Harvard Classics readings. Basically, there’s a list of classes:

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On Being a Public Figure Before Peforming

This post is one of my unicorns.

What I mean is I have inched toward this post without warning of its approach for years. In Southern Illinois, as is the case in other parts of the world where they don’t junk cars but “let ‘em rust down,” high school morons hill hop. Hill hopping fits onto the roster of hick track and field, those games that need “don’t try this at home” stickers. Young sixteen-year old men (and women on the coasts) rev up their car engines and catapult over hilltops on country roads, daring other cars to meet them head-on. Thing is, not all other cars are chicken–some just play chicken. Another dozen teens will die this year meeting unseen cars while hopping hills.

Somewhere between hill hopping and unicorns lies this post. No one can catch a unicorn. Unicorns find you. No one expects to die hopping a hill in a Pontiac, but it happens. I’m blindsided by this post because for the last seven years, in the midst of all of my other writing, I have worked on my world of Gergia. No other novel existed–only Gergian books and notes and maps. If Rowling and Rothfuss can work on one series, win a writer’s contest and instantly publish a best seller, anyone can, right? That’s what I thought anyway, and so I pushed off all other projects — twenty novel ideas, dozens of short story ideas, screenplays, journalistic things — for THE SERIES.

The last few weeks, my writing slowed and stalled. I… Was… Crawling… Through… Sentences. It was block in the proper sense of the word–my discipline was trying to force words like water through a clogged toilet. I stalled at the 52,000th word. I would rework scenes, attack the story from another angle and stop at the same place. Another angle, more resistance. It was like trying to chop down a cherry tree with a brand new axe WHILE circling the tree like a foe from some spaghetti western. Only the tree was no bringer of cherries. It was this colossal inbred monster of its cedar mother and redwood father. My axe also turned out to be a cheap camp hatchet.

Something happened this weekend that changed all of that. This week I was armed with an axe and a maul…

Continue reading

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Storyssentials: Sentence

Brevity and depth–that’s what you can expect from this post if you reflect.

It would seem trivial to call “sentences” essential bits of story. Part of this comes from people who assume that writers toil for words. Photographers use photoshop, but they toil for photos. Graphic designers use illustrator, but they toil for graphics. Writers use words, but they toil for stories. The medium of a writer is story-essence, not words. Because of this, I ask one thing today: what do stories teach us about sentences and what can sentences teach us about stories?

Three key parts of a sentence follow:

  1. Subject
  2. Verb
  3. Ending

That sounds stupid, but hang with me. We’re building off of what we assume. By “ending” I don’t mean “object.” I mean what word ends your statement? Sentences are microcosms of story. Your understanding of how they work reflects your story-consciousness. The most important part of the story is the subject, or the protagonist. The second most important part of the story is the verbage, the escalation of conflict, what the subject chooses to do. The third is the climax and resolution. What goal is the protagonist working toward? Do they succeed? Continue reading

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Breakfast of Champions, The Muad’dib & Hospital Visits

Thursday last I ventured with an older gentleman to some local hospitals. We called on the elderly and infirm in hopes to raise their spirits. This guy’s a pro—he’s been doing this for years, visiting sick people in the hospital, praying for any who request it, listening to them ramble about stories of the old country or of one of the many wars, always with a broader smile than I can invoke on my face, the kind of smile that gets both eyes, your nose and your teeth involved. That smile cheers them up more than anything, people who have nobody or few somebodies to come and visit them when they fall or get an infection or go through surgery or when their mind starts to wonder why it keeps wandering. Hold that thought… Continue reading

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