Tag: short stories

Shelter and Write Prompt 20: The Worry Solution

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What is your biggest anxiety right now? Imagine that you hear a knock on the door and it is someone who has the solution to your worries. 

Who is it who shows up? Is it someone you’ve been missing? A doctor with a vaccine? Someone offering you your dream job? Your fairy godmother? A better version of yourself? Who can help fix these worries and anxieties?

Write a conversation in which you tell your worries to this person in detail. What advice do they offer? What solutions do they have? What do they bring or do in order to quell the worries? What is the outcome?

This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here. I would love to see what you come up with. Feel free to share here or to tag your work #shelterandwrite.

Shelter and Write Prompt 19: The Lasting Image

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What is one image, one photograph (from the news, or your social media feed, etc.) that has left a lasting impression on you? 

Describe this image in detail. Do not use your memory. Actually look at the picture and describe exactly what you see. What did you remember about it and what details do you notice about it now? You might even want to do a little research about the image. How do these details make meaning for you? Why and how has this image impacted you?

Now that you have all the details in mind, use your description of this image as the starting point for an essay, a story, or a poem. Create the world around this image. What happened before, after, and during the image that we see? What happened behind the scenes?

This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here. I would love to see what you come up with. Feel free to share here or to tag your work #shelterandwrite.

Shelter and Write Prompt 18: The Plot Twist

Jaclyn3 Comments

Think of a character (or even yourself!) for whom the pandemic is a major turning point, a plot twist. 

What was the trajectory before this year? What were they aiming for before the outbreak occurred? How does the virus affect them? How does the tension rise? 

Then comes the major turning point! How does this pandemic change things for them? It should be big, something that will change their major life decisions and their goals. How does it change them as people? 

What is the resolution? How does everything end?

This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here. I would love to see what you come up with. Feel free to share here or to tag your work #shelterandwrite.

Shelter and Write Prompt 11: Someone Who Thrives

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Imagine a character (or write about yourself!) thriving during the epidemic. Write their story. 

Who is this person? What was their life like three months ago? What did they want for their life then? 

How has their life been affected? Are they thriving now because of coincidence, or because of something to do with Covid-19? Are they thriving by chance or have they taken advantage of the situation? What are they gaining? Are their dreams coming true or is it a situation that is wholly different than anything they could have imagined? 

What is happening in their lives as the pandemic takes place around them? And how does their story end?

This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here. I would love to see what you come up with. Feel free to share here or to tag your work #shelterandwrite.

Shelter and Write Prompt 10: Write a Haibun

Jaclyn4 Comments

Write a haibun. A haibun is a mix of haiku poetry and prose. To begin your haibun, go outside (but keep your distance from people!) and write 3 haikus (5-7-5 syllables!) about things you see in nature. Perhaps it is the change in seasons, new growth as snow melts, or the absence of cars. What specific images do you notice? Write haikus about the small things you notice, and try to keep your focus on the concrete imagery.

Then, write prose between each haiku about what the images you used from nature make you think about. Why did you choose these specific images? How do they connect to your life right now? How do they connect to the larger picture of our current times?

This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here. I would love to see what you come up with. Feel free to share here or to tag your work #shelterandwrite.

Shelter and Write Prompt 9: Changes in Setting

Jaclyn3 Comments

Write about a setting that changes. This could be fictional, or it could be your own setting. 

What is your (or your character’s) current setting? Start small, with a bedroom, or an office. Give us the details so that we really feel like we are there. Then think about how this setting has changed in recent weeks. Are there more people around or less? New smells because of your roommate’s new baking obsession? A new makeshift desk in your garage? How has your immediate setting changed and been changed?

Then go larger and larger: How has your house been affected? Your neighborhood? Your town? Your state? Your country? Bonus points if you can then tie back to the small and the personal at the end!

This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here. I would love to see what you come up with. Feel free to share here or to tag your work #shelterandwrite.

Shelter and Write Prompt 2: Our Children’s Stories

Jaclyn2 Comments

Think about the current time through a child’s eyes. It could be your child, a child you know, or even a fictional child. 

You could write from the child’s point of view, or you could write about the child from an adult’s point of view.

How old is the child? What do they sense? What do they know? What do they see? How do they understand what is happening around them?

Then imagine this child in the future. How will they remember this time? What are the stories that the child will tell when they describe this time to their own children?

#shelterandwrite

This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here.

Reading for Writers: Englishes in Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Foreign Soil

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A former Tamil Tiger in an Australian detention center. A transgender grandmother in New Orleans. An Australian woman trapped in an abusive relationship in Uganda. With this wide, global view, Maxine Beneba Clarke’s collection of short stories, Foreign Soil: And Other Stories, examines issues of identity and displacement across an expansive swath of space and time. Clarke uses a poetic attention to vernacular to bring her readers past the narrative, offering an immersive experience with each story.

From the epigraph of the book (“Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.” –Chinua Achebe), Clarke sets high expectations for her readers and she delivers. Throughout these stories, Clarke uses nonstandard English to tell nonstandard stories. The first story of the collection, “David,” follows a chance meeting of two Sudanese women in Australia, one who is Australian-born and one who was born in Sudan. Each woman’s voice mirrors the life she has known. These two voices side by side highlight the ways in which language shapes one’s view of the world but also the connections that can happen despite linguistic differences. From the outset, Clarke is playing with language. It’s no surprise that she is also a poet. Her attention to the smallest details of accent and sound are evident throughout the collection.

Clarke’s use of nonstandard English goes beyond dialog. For example, in “Gaps in the Hickory,” the narration is in third person but affects a dialect of the Southern United States that would be comfortable for the characters. “Ain’t no buckin up gon cover up how much Carter miss his gram,” (131) Clarke writes. Though the dialect is not always authentic (most Americans would use the term “bangs” for “fringe”), it nevertheless adds to the ambiance of the story and sets it more firmly in place. The use of dialect also requires the reader to set himself into the language and world of the characters, instead of trying to put the characters in a vernacular that is not their own.

Her most poignant use of language happens in the story “Big Islan.” In this narrative, which is written in a Jamaican dialect, we follow Nathaniel Robinson as he learns to read English. The language gives him a sense of place as he can find his home of Jamaica on the globe, but the language is inaccurate for his experience of the world. Nathaniel learns “E is for Inglan” (182) and “A is for Owstrayleah” (188). The letters don’t match his own speech. His newfound ability to read is a mixed blessing, giving him both H, which “always gwan stand fe home” (185) and “E fe envy” (189). In the end, his ability to read the newspaper makes “de city im grow te love so-so dear, Kingston, feel insignificant small” (191).

Clarke’s use of dialects makes her reader feel acutely the theme around which the stories in this collection rotate: displacement. Clarke does not stick to any one vernacular or voice. Instead, the stories cycle through some of the myriad Englishes that have evolved around the globe. Because of this, the reader can never settle in to one style of writing, but is constantly recalibrating her reading in order to adjust to the narrators.

The variety of characters, voices, and places in Foreign Soil underscores the variety of forms of displacement. One of the most compelling aspects of Foreign Soil is its “globality” (181), to use a term coined by the character Nathaniel in “Big Islan.” Clarke does not focus on one people or one part of the world. Nor does her exploration of displacement end with being in a new country. The collection explores racism, gender identity, immigration issues, and religious intolerance, to name just a few themes. Far from feeling scattered, the range of stories brings home Clarke’s point: that displacement in a global world can happen to anyone, anywhere.

The newest story in the collection, added for the 2017 edition, is “Aviation,” the tale of a Sikh child, Sunni, in need of emergency foster care. Sunni ends up on the doorstep of Mirabel, whose husband was killed in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. In her attempt to provide a home for a child in need, Mirabel comes face to face with her own prejudices. In the end, the reader does not find out whether or not she fosters Sunni. This story, like many in the collection, is a story of people who find themselves in impossible positions. The narratives resolve and feel complete, but they also often leave their main characters and their readers to sit in the discomfort. Nathaniel, of “Big Islan” is left restless in Jamaica. The eponymous main character of “Harlem Jones” is left holding a Molotov cocktail. Sunni is left waiting to be fostered. These stories are not about how displacement dissolves or is overcome, but about the displacement itself, about being in the thick of it.

Her final story, “The Sukiyaki Book Club,” feels strikingly autobiographical. The struggle of a young single mother trying to make it as a writer, told in first person, is juxtaposed with a story she is writing about Avery, a girl who is stuck upside down in an impossible position on the monkey bars. Once again, Avery and the writer are characters displaced. These narratives side by side highlight the constant question throughout the book: can Clarke’s characters find a way down, a place to land?

*This post is part of a series on the craft of writing called Reading for Writers.  This series examines a variety of authors to ascertain the choices they’ve made in their writing and the effects of those choices so that we as writers can make better decisions in our own writing.

 

 

Kanchanaburi

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The river slithered out of the mountains with such speed that it seemed the forest must have been on fire. This should have been our first clue, but we pressed on, past rice paddies and the Death Railway, past water monitors and banana trees, past lotus fields and check points. We curved around roads unable to watch where we were going because we were mesmerized by the sun setting through the jagged dragon’s teeth jutting out of the landscape. Even as night began to fall, we did not stop, further into the heart of a jungle so dark that the moon and stars could not be seen, as if we were no longer in a world surrounded by other planets and galaxies. The fauna grew more massive and the flora grew more crowded until we were shouldering our way into a deafening density. Frogs croaked wood against wood, geckos sounded like birds, and cicadas imitated longtail boats.

Beetles and dragon flies landed on us as if we were sticks. Park rangers told us to turn back. Kitti bats stayed in their caves. Street signs shaped like royal crabs scuttled away from roads. And yet we persisted, driven on by an incurable bug for adventure, a sickness that pushed to see more and more unseen, a fever that made our hearts restless and drove us from our homes.

The mountains became billowy the higher we went, as if this far from the city even they were not fixed. Mist gathered round, blurring the edges. Bamboo plumed off cliffs, looking like giant feathery ferns from a distance. Animals jumped off limestone bluffs, floating into elephants and crocodiles and gibbons of cloud. Forests sank into reservoirs, as if the earth did not know where it stood. The road twisted, uncertain of the ground beneath it. On motorbikes and bicycles and boats, we pressed, closer toward forbidden lands where borders were blurry, into frontiers decorated with coconuts and cow skulls, where cowboys wore rice paddy hats. Into a west so wild that centuries and continents fell on top of each other. And we, naturally, lost our bearings, too.

Ficus roots floated in midair so that we wondered briefly if we were underground. Strangler figs wound around trees so tightly that the buttressed giants choked and fell, leaving exoskeleton trunks of vine, hollow ghost trees that still sprouted leaves and fruit. We climbed inside and nestled there, daring the vines to squeeze us, too. They were slow to respond to our taunts, as careful foliage often is. Hidden inside that creeping constrictor, we were not so cautious.

Deprived of the embraces of elkhorns and newts, we clasped each other. As tigers turned to clouds and mountains gaped into open dragon’s maws, we held hand to hip, mouth to mound, cheek to cheeks. Arms flattened into banana leaves. Hair transformed into mountain fog. Feet flew into branches. Eyes grew into papaya. Bellies became karst formations and breasts danced into spinning seed pods. Fingers split into ferns. Orchids turned and cooed at the rustling, lizards clucked, birds whistled, mangoes dropped like dumbfounded jaws, and gibbons whooped.

We were no longer sure if we were astronauts or crickets, dinosaurs or gods. But the knowledge no longer mattered. I did not return from that heart of darkness, and nor did you. But we came home, as frangipani and limestone, passion fruit and snakes, tree frogs and jasmine, the earth and the sky.

Creative Commons  love to purplekarma, axelsaffron, and beakatude (in that order) for the photos! Thank you!

Making Love to Clouds

Jaclyn17 Comments

I did not flinch when I saw her, though I knew she expected it.  My face did not mirror hers, eyes pulled wide, lips forced apart by the sharp intake of breath she could not control,  brow clenched upwards by a mind which could not believe.

A small breath of air made its way from my lungs, but my lips could not form her name.

Her eyes moved away from mine to the ground.  She did not want me to see her this way, I knew, and she would rather have never seen me at all than to meet me like this.

Her hair, which I had never seen down in all our years together, even through sleep and childbirth, fell in front of her face, intentionally hiding it.  In the darkness, it was hard to tell the two apart, now that the night of her straight hair had spread down the length of her body.  It was the blackness of her face from which I could not take my eyes.  Not the decay of her skin, crawling into strange formations as it fell from her flesh, nor the worms escaping from within her and being more eager to return to her to feast, but the pure tar of her face.  It had been one of her more powerful features, lighting the sky with its whiteness, its power making men run for cover.

“Do not look on me,” her words were loud, quick.  I wondered if she knew I had been chasing the young nymph which had just passed her, giggling melodically, curls and young breasts bouncing teasingly around the corner.  I wondered if it had been long enough since her death, or if it ever would be.

“I miss looking on you,” I offered.

She scoffed under her breath.  I could hear the tightening of her hard face through the darkness.  It was a sound I had not forgotten.

She crossed her arms, jagged elbows sending small bolts of lightning at the ground.  In the light, I could see a cockroach on the ground, near her dirty, bare feet.  It was the first time I understood her shame in being seen in the underworld.  Her usually tidy, glowing dress looked like what a peasant mortal would wear.  Instead of her usual shining shoes, her small, sharp feet, were caked in dirt, and being eaten.  I wondered if it was difficult for her to walk with the same poise that she had always carried.

“Please,” I said, knowing she would notice that my voice was not that of a god, but of a mole.  It did not happen often, but I knew she always noticed when I lost my composure.   “We will never see each other again.  We are lucky for just this moment.  Please, just look at me.”

“I-”  It was not often that she stuttered.  Her uneasiness grew to fill the small confines of the underground cave in which we stood.

Maybe she also feels as if it were my fault.

Perhaps she did not recall her last days, after the birth of the fire.  The way she screamed as the flames came forth from her womb burned my insides also.  The tears that sparked her electric face for days afterwards as she whimpered in pain each stung me as well. And I could no longer live forever when her immortality was taken away.

“I am not the same,” she said, her voice beginning to crack.  I knew she would not cry.  I struggled in the darkness to see better the prickly lines of her long body and face, the points of her nose, chin, and hips.

“I know,” I said.  I still missed looking on her.

   He did not know. 

            I could see his misty face, churning with emotions — for me!  If he knew, he would not be taking the time to steal a few moments with me before his return home.

            He moved towards me and I was within his arm’s reach.  I moved away.

            “I know,” he repeated, taking a small, determined step forward. 

            That was the moment when the memories flew past me and I was forced to turn and look at the decaying wall.  This gave my unruly mind free reign in recalling my memories, but at least I did not look at his face. 

            The tree came back to me first, but I knew that did not mean I loved him more.  The nights I had stolen away with the tree in a forced, hushed passion were just easiest to remember — there had been so few.  Always after dark.  Embracing without kissing.  A dainty removal of his own splinters.  All so the clouds could detect no signs when I returned home.  The splinters were my favorite part, even then.

            But there were more nights — since the beginning of time, in fact — with the clouds.  After all, what is lightning without clouds, or clouds without lightning?  The best nights were always the ones spent over tropical islands — hurricanes and our children, the thunder, the rain, and the tornado, were all conceived from the swirls of our passion on nights like those.

            So, when I first realized that I was having the fire child, I stopped seeing the tree.  I had no doubts about who fathered it.  But, then again, neither did the clouds.  Perhaps that was the most painful part of the ordeal:  the clouds trusted me so much that he was sure the child was his.

            “I am sorry,” he tried.  I knew he was fumbling for words, and it made me want him to hold me.

            “I am as well.”  But I stayed cold.  Who would want to hold a sack of maggots?

            “If I had known what would happen –“

            “You should not apologize.”

            “It was my fault,” he said.

            “It was not your fault,” I insisted, my voice rising with tension.

            “I should not have–” he stopped.

            I could hear him turn, his arm brushing chunks of dirt off the crumbling wall, and return the way he had come.

 

 

 

 

 

Creative Commons Love to Liamfm on flickr.  Thank you!