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Welcome back to DC’s Writers Workshop. This is the thirteenth in a series of days on the blog where writers who are part of the blog’s community present work-in-progress in search of the opinions, responses, advice, and critiques of both readers who don’t normally post comments here and local inhabitants of this place. I ask everyone to please read these works with the same attention you give the normal brand of posts here and respond in some way in the comments section below. Obviously, the closer your attention and the more you’re able and willing to say to the writer the better. But any kind of related comment is welcome, even a simple sentence or two indicating you read the piece of writing and felt something or other about it would be helpful. The only guideline I’m going to give out regarding comments is that any response, whether lengthy or brief, praise filled or critical or anywhere inbetween, should be presented in a spirit of helping the writer in question. I’ll be responding to the work too in the Comments section towards the end of the weekend. So, I guess all of that is probably clear. Giving support to the artists of different kinds who read and post on the blog has always been a very important aspect of this project, and this workshop series represents an opportunity to make that aspect more formal and explicit. This weekend’s workshop features five very short stories by the writer and d.l. dayeyhoule. He asks for any thoughts, support, or criticism you can give him. I thank him greatly for entrusting his work to us, and I thank you all in advance for your kind participation. — D.C.
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Serrano
—-In a forgotten stone cathedral off Michigan Avenue, Felicia attended a photography lecture sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art. She was looking for some insight into “art” or “life” – something to take her outside herself for the evening. What she got instead were beautiful, oversized color pictures of bodily fluids, corpses, and old, naked Hungarian women smoking crooked cigarettes. That the lecture was staged in a house of worship was supposed to lend a modicum of “gravity” or “reverence” to the sensational subject matter. Instead, the setting merely added insult to everything the usual Sunday morning faithful accepted as sacred and holy. But, Felicia figured, that was the point all along.
Crybaby
—-On the verge of his twelfth birthday, puberty was already turning Billy into something he wasn’t, but as his eyes bulged all heavy and clear in the bathroom mirror, Billy was turning into something he vowed he’d never be again: a crybaby.
The Dappled Oaks Assisted Living Retirement Community
—-Rose Dennison was a crow. And like a crow her eyes could bully. A small, severe woman – stooped over, rail thin, all hard angles – it was Rose who’d spread the rumor that Earl Kramer poisoned his late wife, Bethany, then blew the insurance money on the slots before he fell down the basement stairs and his children brought him here: The Dappled Oaks Assisted Living Retirement Community. But what Rose and her tar pit eyes were now proposing even her henpecked septuagenarian boyfriend Walter Kern could not abide. She wanted Earl dead.
—-When Walter refused to go along with her plan, she cawed. Rose thrust her head up and cawed.
The Dead Uncles
They were arranged, the kid’s dead uncles were, from left to right by order of death rather than birth order.
—-The first, a medium shot of a ten-year old George straddling a brown- and white-spotted horse, was the only color print. Squinting under a wide-brimmed hat, George leaned forward, bracing himself with his hands on either side of the horse’s thickly muscled neck. His eyes focused on something off the left side of the frame. A slight curl in one corner of his mouth could have been a smile, though it easily could have been a wince from the bright afternoon sunshine. George lay down on some railroad tracks when he was thirteen.
—-Next to him was a standard holiday portrait of Earl posed in front of a Christmas tree. He stared straight at the lens, his unlined child’s face unmoved by the camera’s attention. A striped turtleneck crept up his neck and seemed to push out his ears, both of which poked through the sides of an awful bowl haircut. At fourteen Earl hanged himself from the rafters of the rickety barn Grandma Clara soon thereafter burned to the ground.
—-Uncle Billy was the kid’s favorite photo of the four, not least because the then-twelve-year-old most resembled the kid at that age. Billy’s was a headshot, tight, lots of negative space, with only half his face crowding the grainy right side of the frame. His one visible eye was partially closed, caught in quarter-blink. The slur of freckles across his nose would disappear by the time Billy was sixteen and he threw himself off the Portage Dam two towns over.
—-Jack, though first-born, was the last uncle to die. In the only wide shot of the four, Jack sat hugging his knees to his chest on the front stoop of the uncles’ tiny boyhood home. It was late autumn judging by the skeletal maple tree dominating the foreground. The kid always felt a chill standing before these family ghosts, and Jack’s figure, a seeming afterthought in his photograph, made it worse. Jack put a gun in his mouth a week before his eighteenth birthday.
—-The four-by-six-inch dead uncles lined a darkened, seldom-used hallway leading from the laundry room to the kid’s father’s locked den. Each print was mounted between two thin rectangles of glass then hung from thin-gauged wire on its own clear thumbtack. This precarious presentation always struck the kid as angry, as if his father – who created the tableau – was just waiting for these memories to shatter, was asking for an excuse to duct tape the garage shut and then start the car.
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—-Why the father never followed in the footsteps of his dead brothers the kid didn’t know; the father was tight-lipped about so many things. If once it was to spare Grandma Clara from yet another loss, she was long gone now and wouldn’t know the difference. Maybe growing up with all that death made the father appreciate life that much more. Maybe he lacked the internal resolve needed to overwhelm one’s will to live – that primordial battle’s a real struggle. Or maybe the father simply loved the kid too much to do that to him.
The Eighteenth Arrondissement
Or
The Novel I Would Write If I Were a More Talented and Serious Writer
—-The novel I would write if I were a more talented and serious writer would be 325 or 340 or 415 pages long, i.e., substantial but still tight, long enough to be considered seriously yet not so long to be considered “bloated” or “in need of an editor.” It would make a beefy, but not unwieldy, slab of a trade paperback (no hardcover edition; trade paperback only – like American Psycho). The spare, elegant cover design would feature a photograph with lots of negative space or a “naïve” line drawing with lots of negative space, both tastefully paired with either a sans serif typeface or some “naïve” hand-drawn lettering:
Down the road, instead of a movie tie-in redesign featuring stills from the film or the official movie poster, we’d keep the original, iconic cover but add a “Now a Major Motion Picture” sticker that essentially markets the novel’s silver screen incarnation while still allowing the serious reader to peel off any reminder that she’s being marketed to. Incidentally, the film adaptation – both a domestic and international sleeper hit – will perfectly compliment the book; that is, it’ll stand on its own as a work of cinematic art, à la The Silence of the Lambs (also, like Lambs, nabbing the big four Academy Awards, plus Best Adapted Screenplay), but not detract from the detail and nuance and beauty inherent in reading a fully-imagined 325- or 340- or 415-page novel.
—-After several million copies sold, the novel I would write if I were a more talented and serious writer would receive the mass-market paperback makeover. It would be sold in drugstores and airports. That, after all, proves your book has really made it.
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p.s. Hey. So, I’ve pretty much laid out how I hope the workshop will work up above. I’ll just add that while the closer your attention is and the more detailed your responses are to daveyhoule’s stories, the better, of course, even a simple acknowledgment that you read the work and/or any thoughts you can share at all, however brief, would obviously be great and would mean a lot to the author. Thanks a lot for your attentiveness and participation. Like I said above, I’ll add my thoughts in the comments arena towards the end of the weekend. ** Misanthrope, Well, at least with news on the internet, you make choices, and you have be active and do things, and it’s a lot harder to sequester yourself with a single slant ‘cos the internet encourages you to move from place to place, keep moving, and you can check different perspectives so easily, even at the same time, unlike with cable TV news where you’re encouraged to be almost totally passive, pick one of the few channels, and let it flow into you. On American TV news, there’s barely any distinction between serious and celebrity news anymore. Gingrich loses his shit in a debate, and almost all you hear about the debate is how he lost his shit filtered through infinite spin about whether that’s good or bad, and the only real difference between Gingrich losing his shit and a Kardashian losing her shit is that you’re told that the former was a more substantive wack attack because he’s running for President, but it’s not more substantive, it’s just a guy in politics losing his shit. I don’t know. If you’re not in America all the time right now, America seems insane, almost lock, stock, and barrel. ** Kyler, Hey. I enjoyed the story a lot. It’s very sharp, and that sharpness has a lot going on in it, and yet it’s all very clear, and yet the poetry inside isn’t weeded out by the sharpness. Kudos, man. ** Ratty St. John, Hey! Ooh, nice sentence. That first one, or, wait, second one, i.e. ‘ … subjecting the norm to flakes of my freak’. That’s super good. So, you do mostly write fiction or you think of it that way. It’s especially hard to make the distinction when you’ve only heard someone’s work read aloud like I have with yours. Have you published your writing anywhere? I don’t need to tell you, I’m sure, to be wary of people who have issues with poetic passages in others’ work. They should be so gifted. There are people who are scared of the poetic or think that it surely must be some kind of mistake by the writer because, well, their imaginations are either losers or fascists, ha ha. If they only knew. ** Empty Frame, Hey. I’m cool, just *cue broken record* too busy. That’s going to be my lot for the next month at least. Michael S. does start crying in interviews sometimes. He’s very into it. He really cares about literature. I have a cuckoo clock in my LA pad. Well, it’s my pal/roommate Joel’s. From his grandma, and it doesn’t work, but I’m hoping some of those links on the post might help him figure out how to begin to fix it, which is easy for me to say since I wouldn’t have to hear it go off hourly. Cool that you scored that very well placed hotel. The ticketed events … You can buy tickets now. I’m going to add the ‘buy’ links when I post the final schedule. I don’t think you need to worry about tickets yet, at least for ‘Them’. Let me find out the score on that stuff once I start working full-time at the Pompidou late next week. I love Steven Millhauser. He’s definitely one of my favorite American writers. His recent short story book was on my 2011 ‘best of’ list. I think he’s wonderful. A great, unique writer. Porn film, interesting. You don’t know what genre? Hm, very intriguing. Sneak more info to me as you learn it if you can. ** David Ehrenstein, ‘Celine and Julie’ are on youtube! That is a new development, right? Happy Birthday to Federico! ** Casey McKinney, Hey, Casey, old buddy! You awesome? Thanks about the cuckoo clock post. It had some of my sweat and blood in it. Mousetrap Day: You mean, like, the game ‘Mousetrap’? The one where you build that kind of Rube Goldberg-esque plastic toy labyrinth with the rolling ball and all that? I love that game. Is that what you mean? I will totally try to do a Day on that. Or do you mean on mousetraps that, like, trap mice? That could be edgy. Man, it’s awfully nice to see you! ** Kiddiepunk, M-ster! Those new animal spirit things of yours fucking rock, man! Ooh, pre-production! So, having Bene out of the house slaving over dolls has had a good side, it seems? Want to see you. I’ll call you today. Also, nachos must be eaten by me soon while in the company of illustrious guests like you, don’t you think? ** Sypha, Hi, James. Oh, right, Bieber’s a serious Christian, right? And a Republican, anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, the whole right wing shebang but without the insane lunatic fringe part, right? I think I read that. ** Alan, Hey. Yeah, I do know about that book, but I didn’t know it was out until you presented that link. Bill Mohr, the author, was in the LA poetry scene, and he was one of the few older, old school poets who liked and hung out with us young rebel types. He’s been working on that book for at least a decade. I think he interviewed me for it ages ago. I’m actually quite excited to read that book. A lot of us have been hoping for a serious book about the history of LA poetry for forever, and I’m pretty sure Bill has done a great job at realizing that kind of book. Thank you a lot! ** A.r., Hi, A. The AV Festival, cool. I’ll look that up. It sounds really fantastic, actually! March 17th. I’ll probably be preoccupied dismantling the ‘Teenage Hallucination’ festival then, but I’m going to see if there’s any way I can go to that. Cool thanks, my man. Great weekend of heavily gilded etc. to you. ** Todd (once IF), Hey, Todd! Wow, really great to see you! Awesome news there on your end all the way around! That’s really, really happy making. Yeah, I saw an email from you in my box this morning before I was caffeined enough to see straight much less read, and I’ll get to it and write to you about all that this weekend for sure. Cool sounding agent there. Man, yeah, lovely to see you, my friend, and more soon from me, and, yeah, just great all around, Todd! ** MANCY, Oh, man, thank you for the links and info ‘cos I did decide that, yeah, I want to do a French BM post of some sort, and that’ll be a super huge help. I’ll try to do it justice. I’ll hope that my semi-virginal approach will lead to something interesting. Yeah, I really, really appreciate that! Awesome news about the zine and the other RA-destined thing. Yes, please, alert me when it’s up, and if by any chance you want to use the blog to help let people know about the zine, I would be very happy to have a post here doing just that. Just say the word and we can sort it out, if that’s of any interest. ** Allesfliesst, I’m going to try with the Pompidou. I’m not sure if I’ll lay out the craziness that could result from such a booking first thing, though. I can tell just from the big hassle surrounding the dead animal component in ‘Them’ going on right now that it’s probably best to get the Pompidou excited without introducing the possibility of reservations first. Well, please do participate in the writers workshop, obviously. If you want more pressure, give me a hint about how to apply it respectfully. I love the jellos. I ‘liked’ them, and I like them, and I want to eat them, even that murky one. Murk is good when it wiggles. ** Wolf, You did, you did! I can’t wait to hang out too. And the falafel thing is already RSVPed. Or it is now. Gosh, okay, I’ll see what I can coax out of Stephen in terms of a musical portrayal of his brain in your private regard. He’s in a good mood right now, so heads up. Skiing! You skiing! You know, why the hell not? I am impressed. That’s the God’s truth. I was just reading yesterday that there’s going to be this new amusement park built here in France near Paris called Napoleonland. Yes, it’s true. And I mention this because the ride they’re hyping the most is some thing where you’ll fake ski down some mountain through piles of bodies of dead soldiers representing the soldiers killed by Napoleon and his military dudes at some battle that I think took place on the land where the amusement park is going to be built. Can you believe that shit? I am, duh, excited. ** Pisycaca, Hi, Montse! Oh, I see, that makes sense. It’s lame of me, but I always forget about the War and the unbelievable toll that took on Spanish culture. Anyway, Val del Omar is obviously really special, so I imagine he’ll be a lot better known within a few years. Thank you so much again for yesterday and for all it wrought. Great weekend to you with much love attached. ** Statictick, Okay, cool, about the questions, no problem. I’m just blanking on what Minus is, but I guess I’ll find out. Cool that you Matthew are going to meet, and, yes, Jack is a pip among pips, that Jack. And cool about your approach to the workshop, of course. ** Rewritedept, Oh, shit, that’s the name of a strip club there? Busted? No, I don’t know what the zipline is. The name suggests certain properties, but I’ll google it. I haven’t been to Vegas in, god, 7 years maybe? Whoa. I think Siegfried & Roy were still in one piece. I think Cirque de Soleil was still a cool, underground thing to go see. That long ago. I think your clothes thing sounds totally legit and non-rank. Nice busy day you had there, or, is it today? It’s hard to tell with the time difference sometimes. Enjoy or enjoyed as the case may be. Excellent weekend to you as well. ** Frank Jaffe, Hey Frank! 400 is a real crowd crowd, and, yeah, I still get stage fright, or at least whenever I can see the audience from the podium or whatever. When they’re blacked out, I’m usually okay. Yeah, I got the email and awesome! #2 looks possibly even greater than #1, to judge by the samples. One thing: When is the zine coming out? In other words, for when should I schedule the post? Tell me, and it will be yours. Thank you! I did Ecstacy a fair bit, but not since the mid-90s, I don’t think. If I’ve done MDMA, I didn’t know it. For me, Ecstacy was great for being in stimulating environments and having fun more than, say, for hanging out and watch TV or something. Actually, I had an amazing time being on Ecstacy at Disneyland, but a friend of mine who was also with me and was on Ecstacy had a bad time and got paranoid and stuff. Dancing is a good way to spend it, obviously. Just be sure to stay hydrated. Yury has done MDMA a bunch of times, and I think he would caution you not to take too much of it. He overdid it a couple of times and had really bad experiences. Anyway, that’s the extent of my knowledge/advice for now, I guess. Very cool weekend, F-ster! ** STOVALLSTOVALL, Hey. You’re back where you came from, safe and sound. Well, I guess it’s not where you came from, it’s where you … usually don’t leave? I’m pushing it with the thinking things out angle here. Sorry. Cool about the classes except for that gsi. It has been raining here too. I know there must be some way to walk around holding an umbrella over your head that doesn’t feel like you’re just missing out on seeing stuff. You probably don’t use umbrellas, right? I don’t know why I think that. I see you taking the hood approach or just letting the sky happen to you unabated. Maybe I have this weird idea in my head that people in the Bay Area don’t use umbrellas, I have no idea why. Or why I’m even talking about that, ha ha. Fine weekend on your end, I sincerely hope. ** Right. Please let your kind attention, concentration, and thoughts/ comments of all sorts rain down on our pal daveyhoule this weekend, okay? Thank you very much. And I’ll see you in the comments area once Sunday is on its last legs, at least here in Paris.
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