A diversion

 The new short story on my site is an example of what one might classify as "Local Color." The style was popular in the early 20th Century, especially between the teens and forties. 

I have collected several books from the era, mainly adventures, for my own library. There is a particular narrative positivity within negative environments in these novels and short stories. 

My main character, Jimmy Neeley, is a do-gooder from the city. Most of your readers who could afford a novel at the time would understand Jimmy and his altruism. 

Consider the piece like a snow globe of a particular style and time...and enjoy.

More to come. 

Part 2: The Reality

Morning came with the sound of trains and coal dust in the air...and the children carrying their satchels to school, some with lunch, some with maybe an apple. 

Jimmy sat in the principal's office long before any child sat in his classroom.

"Now, James, you must be patient with these younguns. Many haven't got much at home, so they don't have that fire the city boys do. Your job is to provide the basics and see to it that they get passed on to the next grade."

"What about the Morris boy?"

"Oh, I am fixin to get the law after them."

The law? Are you sure?"

"It's what we've had to do with more than few up Boggs Holler....and up Cottonmouth Creek.....and up the ridges where the lines don't go."

"You mean they don't have electricity?"

"Lots of them. They've never seen wire before. They go to town for dry goods, meat, and all, and they use the phone at the general store." The principal paused. "This may be the twentieth century, but up there, they're living like their grandparents did. You watch out for the mule, the horse, and the wagon."

"You want a real education? Come with me on a trip to Rinard's Ridge. Nobody up there lives like Democrats and Republicans."

"I have classes soon."

"We'll head up there before the children are dismissed. I'll have Miss Holly watch your class the last few minutes so we can beat 'em before they arrive."

James Neeley stood, shook Principal Gary's long, lean hand, and returned to his 6th grade classroom.

Where The Wild Things Roam

Jimmy passed over West Fork and the dozen slightly dilapidated houses on the other side. From their clotheslined porches, old folk and children stared, forgetting the black train heavy with coal coming down through the center of town.

The boys on the corner, barely out of high school, tore tires off the rims and deposited those in a big old wooden box out back.

The truck slowed, bumping along over potholes the size of a coon dog. Jimmy stopped in front of Arlick's Truck and Tire. He dropped to the running board and took his place among the "men."

"Y'all seen Toby Morris?"

The one with the feather in his hat spit and cussed under his breath.

"I said..."

"We heard ya," the feathered hat pounced. "We ain't got time now to take care of no foreigners."

He climbed back in the truck and crossed the first set of empty tracks, the spur off the main. He found Toby's brother sitting on a bench near the old depot.

"Toby? He around?"

"He's dead."

"Look. I don't have time for games. Principal Gary sent me out here to look for the boy."

"He ain't comin back. He done went away."

"What in the sam...is that supposed to mean?"

"He's really dead."

"So,' Jimmy huffed. "He's not coming back to school?"

"That's right, mister."

"Well, of all the..."

Jimmy closed the truck door and drove up to the post office. The postman closed his office door and came into the lobby.

"And what would you like, son?"

"I would like a book of stamps..."

"OK, I will go get some for you."

"No. Not stamps. I am looking for little Toby Morris. He is supposed to be at school. This is the fifth day in a row the parents don't answer. I am tired of trying to do my job when no one around here wants to cooperate!"

The postman pinched his nose.

"Toby Morris?"

"Yeah...that boy is trouble. Don't hardly blame you. What with them parents. Half wits."

"I don't have the address. Nobody has the address. Not the school, not the secretary. It's not in the phone book..."

"They don't have a pot to piss in."

Jimmy frowned.

"No phone."

"Really? The only ones around here without a phone?"

"I think you're right there."

"Can you...at least...give me directions to the old Morris place?"

The postmaster leaned against the front door.

"Do you know where Boggs Holler is?"

"Nope."

"If you let me in your truck there, I can lead you there."

The postmaster locked the front door to the post office. No sign. No warning. He climbed up into the passenger side of Jimmy's truck.

"Now, the best way to go is just down that roadway over yonder," he said, pointing to a thin lane of asphalt hugging a steep bank.

Jimmy inched the vehicle between the steep mountainside and the bank below. He drove a mile before stopping the truck.

"How much farther do I have to drive to get to the boy's house?"

The postman pointed to a turn off, within sight.

"That's Boggs Holler."

Jimmie counted potholes and curves until he felt nauseous. The truck jerked to a stop when it hit something in the road.

"I'll get out!" 

The postman got down on his hands and knees and searched the underside, the exterior, and under the hood.

"You killed a perfectly fine possum."

"Sorry," he said, turning the key. 

A mile up the hollow, the postman slapped his right leg.

"What in the...did you do that for?"

"You wasn't gonna stop."

"This is the place? Where?"

"That," the postmaster said, pointing at the weathered shack. "The Morris castle."

They stopped the vehicle in the road on account of the driveway being underwater. They crossed a swing bridge. Jimmy knocked on the wooden door.

"You here to take my boy away?

This time, Jimmy stared at the woman. She was the ugliest creature he'd ever seen.

"Mam, Toby needs to be in school."

"He ain't here."

"Where would he be?"

"Last I saw him, he was way up there," she said, pointing to the top of the back ridge. "He likes to go off on his own and explore."

"I don't think you understand, Missus Morris. They've been sending someone round for months. If he misses any more school, he'll flunk out. They'll expell him."

The woman puckered up and shook her head.

"He's off with his dad. They're a pair."

"In the mountains?"

"They like to hike."

"During school?"

"It's too durn hot in summertime!"

"Missus Morris. I am going back to the school...I'm going to be late. If he does not come to school tomorrow, they'll send the truant officer after him."

She stood her ground.

"I'll do my best, but they're men. I'm just a helpless woman."

 

make poetry make sense again

 is all writing a form of storytelling...even poetry?

it isn't if the poem rails against the evils of social injustice, laden with an asbestos-like toxicity that clings to one's soul after interacting with the poem.

it isn't if the structure overpowers the rationality, leaving us floating in a fetid pool of word excrement.

it isn't if the meaning meanders around in our craniums until it leaks out somewhere unsettled.

poetry has meaning. if it doesn't, it is not poetry. it is something else. it is structural ambiguity. it is semantic nonsense. it could even be soundscript.

but it isn't poetry. it is presumptuous, mindless drivel.

make poetry make sense again.

 

 

the college poet

straight-jacket words on a page

is formulaic diarrhea,

walking blindly inside structure

profits no man, no woman

no poetic rhythm

no poetic reason

collegiate poetry.

A Moment of Disaster

 Here is a piece of poetic fiction within my WIP, my new book- a moment of disaster:

Out back of Back Fork, at the Cogar Cottage, Timmy waited for the plumber. He sat on the front porch, drinking a sweet tea.

As he stepped inside to check the time...he heard a gushing whoosh.

He tried to open the back door, but a chaotic wave crashed through the walls...splintering pine, hemlock, and hardwood-thrown matchsticks...ice chunks, water, debris busting boards...the man with a wad of bills in his pocket thrown up against studs...the white-whirl sweeping him out to the street, chucked like a limp doll against a fence, where he settled, broken and bleeding...

How would you like to be remembered?

There's a scene in So, I Married An Axe Murderer, where Mike Myers, in character, describes a distasteful girlfriend as "she smelled like soup." He rejects her based on a single characteristic that overpowers the senses and makes her odious in the audience's minds.

Such a description dismisses such characters, confines them to "the fragmentary." 

I would not wish this on any of my readers. It may suffice to call one "thin as a pencil at 20 paces" with additional details to make one create a living vision within the movie in one's head. One can build on said "pencil in the wind" whenever the character is interacting with another. Another character may reveal other traits..."she made me think of Aunt Martha, the waif of a creature that looked like she'd gone through her own private Auschwitz." 

Anything less than the components needed to create that figure in your mind, and with that figure you've pictured, move through a series of events, either physical or emotional, does not do the reader justice. It is not fair to the contemporary reader, who may or may not have the same imagination of a well-read 19th century schoolteacher.

Mike Myers' line works because she is in a list of failed ex-girlfriends. That is the only time it should work- if we, as authors, do not want to torture our readers with more insight and then drop her from any other mention within the story.

My goal is to create the clearest image in your head as you read. It may linger like the taste of an expensive wine. It may not sharpen until you're read three or more sentences of descriptive characteristics of that person. But you should be able to envision that story in your head from my additional descriptive words, including those that create a gentle or harsh image because of the words used. 

Do you enjoy reading that helps you create such images as you read? Is it taxing when you are left with two or three words to describe a character? 

I would not like to be referred to as "the guy with garlic breath" if the only interaction with the character the readers had of me was in an Italian restaurant eating garlic bread. And then, every time I was introduced in another scene, it is my garlic breath that you remember. I never move on from that, and every line of dialogue comes "from that guy with garlic breath." Even after I am in bed dreaming about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Even after I have met the love of my life within the story, and she is described in various ways while the audience remembers me for my garlic breath. That is a failure of storytelling. As an author, I am trying to bridge the gap, to add more paint to the picture, so you, as the reader, can enjoy the story from start through the finish...not confuse you with not enough information.

 

  

when the words will not come

 i will groan from my heart

when the words will not come,

and share because i must

when the words will not come.

though seasons may change

and deep trouble sleep long

the tears will keep coming

when the words will not come.

so, I ponder my lovely predicament

amidst the rows of gathered lore

when grief steels my stiffened hand  

and i put feet, shoes, upon this wooden floor.

I have one painful wish to share my wounded heart

in the room full of books that will never depart

like a library of life these feelings galore

must come in word form or come nevermore.

There's A World Outside My Rockin' Chair

There's a world outside my rockin' chair

from the front porch to the stream

where the rocks and ripples chase each other

and the winds in the branches sing

it's a pretty stretch of piney woodland

a fine saunter by flowers in spring

but I'm eighty years old a draggin' a walker

let's see what next year should bring...

There are too many brambles, briers, and cares

from where my Pa built a house and a shed

too many tangles in the mire of my mind

when i think on all them kinfolk that's dead

to that wire gate and them plots of fate 

the winding path in the meadow I dread

where i'll lay down my cane in this very last frame

and finally find some peace for my head.

My grandkids come here, play dress-up in pearls,

When their mama's depressed, down in the holler

Their daddy spends his time selling possums and squirrels

Then visits the bars, spends nearly every dollar.

That man had a talent for paintin' building-sized murals

But ran through his money till it left them in squalor.

Still, I'm blessed with granddaughters dolled up in curls

Though I am old and frail and my young'uns are taller.

Down along the creek lives a dimwitted woman

near a shack with a loner, and his two baby bears

a Pentecostal preacher with his three-legged dog

and a mechanic who got fired for stealing some spares

That family in the home falling slowly down the slope

And that rich guy, with five kids, and too many heirs 

Dear Lord, I repent, you have spared me such trouble

So, I'll get off my rocker, for you've answered my prayers.

Silentium Aureum

 Golden silence. The curtain falls and you are no longer in foreplay. You are no longer seething with passionate muse. You are alone with page and vision; the exact act in your mind as you write the word-pictures only you and your audience follow. You are no longer parallel with the work, you and the audience are on the same line.

At this point, the two of us, you and I, have entered the new world. We are creating together- me with the words that formulate what follows in my head, you with what your background, knowledge, and interpretation bring to that paradigm. 

I cannot revel in dangerously poetic classical music anymore. I am beyond that. 

The adolescent- in composition, not age- must mature beyond what is present and enter what can be future. 

It is why composure, at this juncture, can be so draining, without the winds of divine inspiration. One can research, organize, synthetize work into art, or one can use all the components and surrender form and process to what cannot be contained in the mind. It spills to the page because it is as if it was written for you.

The most creative writing is not process-driven drivel, it is writing driven to be a connection with the audience that is deeper than purely in the mind. 

 

Status Rerum

When was the last time you read fiction, written in this century, that was vivid, that was revolutionary, that left you wanting more?

Chances are you do not have a long list. It is not as financially rewarding to publish work that breaks barriers in style. It is less accepted to create not just a work, but a whole philosophy, breaking with standard publishing norms, while expecting a significant worldwide response. But it has been done. And once the floodgates open, the old ways will have to give way to a new standard.

 That is why I have left normal behind to embrace something more poetic, something more vivid. 

I am engaged in the creation of an 85,000 word journey at present, so I ask that you have patience and expect fewer posts here while engaged in this work. 

In the meantime, enjoy these posts...and expect a random post now and again...

The ruthless writer

 Of the four Ruths that I have known in my life, two of them were often quiet and calming. They were the opposite presence of what is necessary for creating a well-delivered, readable story- ruthlessness.

How ruthless must I be to craft a quality piece of readable literature?

compassionate ruthlessness.

Compassionate because the story is your love. You have woven a web of wonderful words and phrases that may even leave an audience breathless after a few pages, but.... without ruthlessly extracting what is not consistent, not in continuity, the reader, the listener, stumbles over a stone in the path. And, we don't want that, do we?

The trouble with creating a salient work of art is that it must consist of only the images formed from the words used. It cannot assume. It cannot fail in subject and number. It cannot fail in form. It cannot leave one scratching one's head wondering what on earth the author is trying to convey.

On the other hand, I am not responsible for the level of one's intellect. If I write for a graduate-level audience, I am not going to explain what I am writing. That detracts from the story.

The most famous Ruth of all my days was a woman with phrases from another era who enlightened me with archaisms like "your tongue is loose at both ends." With that in mind, I shall not be like that character, but shall return to the ruthless revision process one needs to employ to create a finished story.

So long for now- slan go foill.

Momentary blip...pardon me

I have removed "The Struggle." I wrote it in the style that was particularly common before the incoherent random style invading "Western" poetry sites today. I suspect that much of this random-sometimes-incoherent disconnected poetry is actually the work of artificial intelligence. The latter is a term I think we all can agree is dubious, particularly when analyzing attempts at poetry and music.

Like some of you who still embrace the strictly human, when I fail it is because I have strayed from my own styles. I shall refrain from becoming nebulous, unless it is within a body of work to humor my audience. In the meantime, pardon me while I concentrate on the novel in progress. The coming week's forecast is racist against freckled people, so I will be inside, hiding from Venusian weather.

Slan go foill...

   

Renaissance

 There was a time, in a corner of a shingle of Christendom, when more than your fair share of men were "pregnant" with opportunity...bearing  weight, pressing against the repressive confines of a fixed, but expanding wall...pregnant with purpose. 

They were realizing a fundamentally inadequate position in the fallible human structure of a religious entity...so much so that your man was unable to break free without a supernatural birthing that shattered the pagan structure imposed upon him and those with him who did not fit into the structure assigned to him by an aristocracy out of touch with members, active congregants, and those seeking to do God's will.

It was, frankly, a pathetic period of regression, when whole denominations decayed, when vomit-worthy nominalism forced many from those within the movement. This egress from that denominationalism freed the expectant and birthed a more organic house church movement in the flailing West.

But, I am not fixated on that time, venue, nor the aftermath of that era. I am alluding to the same kind of repressed passion in the sense of a Creative in a complicated, anti-creative tech-friendly social environment that makes that Creative feel like a baby stuck within a womb, more than ready to be birthed onto the stage, into relevancy, and freedom.

Some of us have spotted that glimmer of hope, that foreshadowing that we shall come out of obscurity, pregnant with message and purpose, to speak to the hearts and minds of a generation drowning in mediocracy. 

Wherever humanity embraces God-driven creativity, not the warmed leftovers of artificial intelligence, the soul is once again awakened by the written and spoken word, and imagination blooms. Character grows, compassion grows, community grows. When creativity is once again on stage, in action, fervent and connective, we all benefit, we all grow. It borders on a touch of the heavenly because our intellects break free from programmed thought.

Wherever men and women gather to interact with a purveyor of that compassionate Creativity, culture finds a home, and we rise above the downward movement of a society losing touch with the divine and the human.  

I call on all those who desire to break free from this anti-creative, pro-machine world, who have a compassionate creativity to share with the world. There is a growing segment of western society longing for the creative word. It is time to return to a place of performance poetry, prose, and remembrance, to enrich society and bring back culture, a component of today's world that will die without a literary and vocal renaissance.

Mission Oaks

They told him "you can't grow that here" so many times that he purposely planted flowers, trees, and bushes in the ravine behind his house that defied every local landscape artist and every garden center.

Walking along the sidewalk outside the low wrought iron fence around the house lot, Bert planted Banana trees, orchids, and stuff that isn't supposed to grow in Ohio.

One day I was blessed to be able to meet Bert, his wife Susan, and photograph the house and gardens. And while they were inspired by a trip to the Chelsea Flower Show in London in 1990, it sounded like the local attitude toward his plans was what drove Bert to create Mission Oaks Gardens, acquire more land, and establish a Smithsonian Institute recognized American urban garden that has inspired the creation of many community gardens throughout the world.

                            Mission Oaks in May 2021

                            

                            Japanese Red Pine and Bald Cypress,

                            2018

Bert Hendley Jr. was a successful financial planner and a Master Gardener. He and his wife were instrumental in the founding of the Muskingum County Park District. Bert passed away in early 2024, and  the gardens have shifted more toward the conifer and rhododendron plantation, away from some of the more stunning exotic flowers that once lined the garden trails...

But, Mission Oaks, maintained by three wonderful people I met last week, remains Ohio's premier urban gardens. 

                                            in the conifer garden today

                            

 

when the vines creep and none are cut

you are caged by codes and regulations

all in the name of Health and Safety

power-mad manipulators ruling by control

ignorance and theft on a daily rampage

stealing your dignity, stealing your identity.

there is no freedom when a bully reigns

when your officials create illegal vendettas

destroying your every choice, your every right,

suppressing creativity, speech, and history

in decisions made in temples of immorality.

who fell for the science when the science wasn't fact?

who fell for the mantra when the mantra was a lie?

who fell for the checks when they printed worthless cash?

Drunk on Tyranny

while you were sleeping,

it slithered through your grass.

now it lives, with more slithering things

in your yard, in your house, in your garage

while it feeds on fear and tyranny,

the original sin clothed in governing.

but you have not been crafted for peasantry

nor woven in the depths with hostile hands.

 

she hides in plain sight

 

She hides in plain sight,

her brown blending

with earth...suddenly not so horizontal.

it is only because I stop to attend to my own nature,

that she appears at all…

which begs the question…

what else did I miss on my journey?

it is a question few ask until that rugged edge of time-

passing into an unplanned quadrant-

suddenly without a spouse, without a plan, without a head of hair.

somewhere between someone’s somewhere, and someone's nowhere.

on a road regularly driven in the center, to avoid wandering off

to fall precipitously hundreds of feet below

an unexplainable statistic

for this unfortunate soul, nature was kind to her

to cover her with creeping vines, soft leaves, and soft moss

where one can genuflect the vacancy marked by a cross.

For thou art more neath round yonder sun

Thou art more than dust and roses

Thou are the reflection of a Creator

Though thy bones rot beneath the sod.