Pets & peeves



"Insomnia in a small town," Duncan, BC, 2007 © Len Langevin

Pet: the word “clean” to mean “empty.”  Last night our train made an unscheduled stop in Weldon, North Carolina, so the crew could manually set a switch. It had been raining, and the town was darkly shiny, pink-amber from sodium vapor lights. A woman sitting behind me showed her daughter. “Look it,” she said. “The streets is so clean. They’s nobody out, not a single body out there.”
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Peeve: when a writer, of all people, uses “verbal” to mean “oral.”
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Peeve: stories about children who disappear never to be found again and the narrator knows what happened to them but withholds the information in order to build suspense. This is what Raymond Carver called a cheap trick.
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Peeve: stories about children who disappear never to be found again and not even the writer knows what happened to them.

Why I'm going to AWP

An editor talked me into it. She said, "The first question to ask yourself isn't, can I survive on 4 hours' sleep, can I afford this, what about my real job, etc. It’s, do I like cocktails?"

I have my warm coat, my comfortable shoes, and a new journal. I have business cards and a pocket full of hard candy. I'm a midlife writer ready for adventure.



AWP Conference schedule

Happy without cause

What you can't tell is, there's glitter in her lipstick.

Byrd, chapter one

Dear Byrd,

This is how I told your father.

We climbed up on his roof — he lived at the beach; we could see the ocean, wrinkles of light in the distance. I was wearing a billowy cotton skirt. I wanted to look soft, unthreatening, unselfconsciously pretty.  I wanted your father to love me.  My legs were pale, not used to sun in February. I had painted my toenails lavender.  I wanted him to be a little sorry he hadn't loved me all along.

He had a mustache and his hair was cut in what we called a mullet — short in front, long in back. He was tanned and lean. Long arms, long flat fingers. He was glad to see me, he said.  He didn’t ask why I’d come back so soon.

The roof of his apartment was flat, asphalt.  All grit and sparkle.

He unfolded an orange blanket from his sofabed and we laid out our picnic, a lavish spread: smoothies, crinkle-cut fries from his favorite stand on the beach, canned peaches from his kitchen, and barbecue I’d brought from home, packed on dry ice in a travel cooler.  So much food.  I had to make myself eat.  I chewed slowly, counting to thirty with each bite, the way they say you’re supposed to.

There was a warm breeze blowing. It ruffled my skirt.

Your father offered to spike my smoothie.

No, I said, and covered my cup with my hand.

I wish I could tell you we were young, inexperienced, not yet grownups or ready to be.  That's the story you're expecting, isn't it?  In fact we were thirty-two. We’d grown up together. Everything about that afternoon — our picnic, the roof, the sun, the salty air, your father's pilled orange blanket, him sitting beside me close and warm — had been coming all my life.

After we’d eaten, when I couldn’t put it off any longer, I told him my news, the news I had carried across the country to deliver in person. I’d thought if I could see him when I told him, I would know what to do.

I was delicate, telling him. Artful, as I’d practiced. So artful he didn’t understand at first what I was saying. He blinked like the sun was hurting his eyes. The big white California sun, dazzling, warm even in February, constant, as if it knew already, and forgave, as I never will, everything that had happened between us, everything that was about to happen.

painting: Anna Podris

Arthur Rimbaud

He did not change my life the way he changed Patti Smith's or Bob Dylan's, though after reading A Season in Hell and Illuminations I was inspired to write some prose poems. I was getting into a rhythm, writing prose poems like I'd invented the form myself, when I came across an interview with a journal editor who said she'd been getting so many prose poems she'd decided to quit publishing them altogether.

Birthday books!

The Book of Small / Emily Carr
Memory Wall / Anthony Doerr
The Thieves of Manhattan / Adam Langer

Bear

He has been awake all night, ever since the bear took the lid off the can of bird seed, peeked in, shrugged, then stood down and stared at him through the porch door. (He thinks bear; he doesn’t know the word raccoon.) The curious black eyes fascinated him, the mask, the delicate fingers and toes, the way the bear stood on his hind legs, the striped tail big as his own. He whimpered through the screen door. The bear didn’t answer but went lumping up the hill, into the night. He tried to follow, ran from window to window, whimpering.

Now the sun is up and so are the people, wanting to play with him, but he’s sleepy and frustrated and hot. It’s summer; his fur is thick. The man brushes him. He does not want to be brushed. He does not want to be thick and orange. He wants to be gray like the bear, with small round ears. He wants delicate fingers and toes, not big tufted feet. He wants to be wild, to disappear into the night. He wants a mask. The man keeps stroking him with the stupid plastic brush.

He hisses.