PUBLISHED

YES! IT HAS FINALLY HAPPENED. I’m pretty sure my fourteen-year-old self is in tears. I haven’t been submitting hard core like so many other others but in a relatively short amount of time, I have achieved the status of PUBLISHED AUTHOR! It feels absolutely fantastic. There has been a shameless promotion in one of my classes which of course was embarrassing (Cheers to you, Carly). Literally started crying last night and had to rained it in (there was a little celebration with red wine of course).

Of Agrarian Advice is published in With Painted Words which is an online literary magazine. The premise is actually pretty frickin awesome. “Simply put this is a creative writing site that puts the adage, "a picture paints a thousand words" to the test. The premise is that, each month, an image will be given as a visual prompt and you will have up to one thousand words to tell the story that you are inspired to write ... using your imagination as the canvas and language as your brush.” They publish micro fiction (250-500 words), flash fiction (500 to 1,000 words) and poetry.

I feel so privileged and so much thanks go out to all those at With Painted Words. I hope the magazine increases in popularity and you continue to take chances on unpublished authors.

*The picture is from the October issue of With Painted Words and is the inspiration for all stories (and a poem) in the magazine. The artist is Chris Howard.

Lord of Shallot

A grasshopper bounces against the road side curb, attempting to reach the tall grasses and the waist high weeds. A cigarette butt is thrown from a red truck and it smolders in the ditch. The tobacco gives of the last puffs of sweet smoke into the breeze, never to a light a single blade of grass. And a young man sits in an apartment attempting to write a story about a fantastical universe. He looks up and sees a small field. Button tansy blossoms wave next rusty brown yarrow dead heads. He remembers they use to be so white when they were first in bloom. He crossed the road and picked a few to add some wild life to his studio. But that was months ago and where the summer had its numerous stories told, his pages remain blank, blank as snow.

Across from the field is a small stand of trees. Pines, beach, bitch and maple so densely grown together they give the illusion that a real forest stretches out from behind them. But the storyteller knows better. Beyond the field and the trees are not more trees and more fields but a subdivision. And behind that, a church, a mall, two gas stations and yet another subdivision.

He contemplates this as a vanilla scented incent stick burns away. Smoke twists and dissipates in front of him and the blinking cursor on the screen, but he is lost in thought and pays no attention to either smoke or computer.  He wants so much more than this repetitious stench of urban, suburban sprawl. And so he attempts to write in the words of his favorite author “I want it all to be true because the world really does need griffins and monopods and unicorns and fire-breathing dinosaurs and rivers of stone and impossible and beautiful stories in it. And so she wrote a book”. And so did he. Or at least he attempted to.

When not writing or attempting to write or thinking of amazing and awful things to write about, he tried to make his world as impossible and beautiful as they are in the fairy tales. He grew his hair long and got an apartment on the top story of a six floor building. Surly with his hair bushing his belt loops and with his desk by the window, this would attract a prince or two to come along and rescue him from the monotony of twenty-first century living. And really, it doesn’t even need to be a prince. The floor length mirror and tapestry would certainly be reminiscent of The Lady of Shallot. Gazing at the city in the distance, his Camelot, the stream two blocks over, the wild flowers and grasses with the amber seed heads. All of these reflected in the pages in books of poetry and prose upon his bookshelf.

And so he works by night and day, weaving stories and sending them to publishers to pay rent and student loan debt. Slowly altering his world to include all the wondrous thing which the pages in his books project into the theater of his mind. Perhaps one day, he will get up from his desk, break his mirror and leave the apartment. He will get a canoe and paddle down the stream, to the river and to a place where the world is new and fresh and renewing. Away from his Camelot and his high towers. If he can over come the curse the lady or all those princess who sleep forever and are incased in glass coffins. He will shatter all the glass and tear up all the pages and truly write something new.

He might find himself in the middle of a wooded glen, alive and not dead. Build a hut and raise chickens and a hog. A summer sun will shine through the canopy and autumnal leaves will church breath feet, cloven or otherwise and he will be happy; the baba yaga before she grew old and wicked. And perhaps he will give shelter to a hunter and will repay him with a stag and with his happily-ever-after love. And ivy will climb up the chimney and he will cut his hair and grow pumpkins, as big and as round as the moon.

Writers Block or Something Like It

This is the thing about writers block: it sucks! Although I’m not even sure if I necessary have writers block but perhaps its tortured cousin to it. Perhaps one would call it writers-back up.

It’s not that I don’t have ideas to write about, cause I do. I have several ideas for novels and just as many seeds of short stories tumbling inside my head. What happens is I will write about 200 some words of it and then… poop. Nothing. I’ve lost the spark. I can’t make plot point A connect to plot point B. It’s sad really cause I would love to see this stories and narratives complete themselves. 

I’ve gone back in my hard-drive to a folder entitled STORIES, which is where many a story goes rest for a while. I call it the cryogenic portion of its life. They are there, exactly how I left them. Here is a girl walks to the edge of a forest in search of a pumpkin. A man gives shelter to a sea-faring traveler and is attempting to dock the boat named Selkie. His arms have been pulling on that rope for over a year now. In another, a whale has invited a man to touch her slick skin under the light of a full moon. In another story a woman has been attempting to change her villages’ bigoted attitudes towards the family of satyrs who are her neighbors for quite some time now. 

And these are just the stories I started last year. Never mind the tales I’ve spun over this summer. The crow people and the woman with her cherries may never have the rest of their stories told. The boy who began to study under the wise-woman might never become a fully actualized individual. Who is the Queen of Crustaceans and will she ever reconcile with her sister the Duchess of Cephalopods? Two churches stand in the middle of an post-apocalyptic town and the people are learning to live in harmony with nature again. This is a solute to the Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk.

How many other pages will be born and laid to rest in this corner of my hard-drive till I liberate them from their slumber? When will I release them from the task I’ve left them with and find resolution? 

Perhaps, I just need an inspiration and a muse.