Now Introducing, The Ochoco Review!

Collage by Nicholas D. inspired by Sherman Alexie's "Fire as Verb and Noun"

http://ochocoreview.blogspot.com

It's here, finally! The Online Student Literary Journal from Mount Bachelor Academy has just released its inaugural issue, featuring student poetry, flash fiction, nonfiction, reviews, and short films. The work is finished just in time for our December graduation.

Featuring:

Poetry: John A.// Jennifer B.//Michael L. //and Bradley C.

Flash Fiction: "Lucid Dreams" by Glenn E,/ "Backflip-it" by Andrew F, / "The Cliff" by Chris B,

Nonfiction: "The Kid" by Josh L, // "I Remember, I Wish, I Believe" by the Sophomore Class of Mount Bachelor Academy, // and "9/11, Five Years Later" an MBA student collage

Reviews: Megan J. reviews "The Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri // John A. reviews "Candide" by Voltaire // Alex P. reviews "The Godfather" by Mario Puzo

Short Films: “Entering, With All of Our Senses”// “The Watchtower: A Parody of American Xenophobia”

Disclaimer: The creative impulses, thoughts, opinions, etc. shared in this online-literary journal do not necessarily represent those of its sponsoring school— Mount Bachelor Academy, or its parent companies, Aspen Education Group, or CRC.

Logistical and content oversight for The Ochoco Review is provided by Lisa Fairman: Special Education Director of Mount Bachelor Academy. The Ochoco Review is a product of the Mount Bachelor Academy English Department.

Additionally, students' last names have been concealed to preserve their confidentiality to the public.


Check it out!

A Direct Quote From One of My Students

"You're a Master in Fine Arts? Wow, does that mean you know Kung Fu and shit?"

Hmm. Maybe that would be more useful....

Tupelo Press, the final chapter

Jeffrey Levine from Tupelo Press has sent me another warm-hearted letter, because he is both kind and generous. And alas, my book-length manuscrupt, "Jacob Wrestling" was not selected for publication.So, there you have it. A manuscript whose main theme grapples with the effects of being 'chosen' has yet to be chosen.

"Jacob Wrestling" is still up for the Transcontinental Prize from Pavement Saw Press and the Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press, but after the results come from these (in the Spring?) I believe that I will put the book up into some special place. After two years of entering beauty contests, it is time to give her a rest.

Many thanks to all of you friends who were supportive of me during this work. That is worth more to me than the heartfelt content of those pages.

Now it's time to create something new...

Love,

Jim C-D

T-minus 3 days and Counting

My students and I leave for Eastern Europe in three short days. We will explore simplicity, striking out on our own, and meditate on the fragility of life. First a stay in Romanian village, Villae Populi, helping at an orphanage, seeing Bucharest, Ploesti and perhaps Brasav in Transylvania, then take the train to Krakow, Poland. There we will visit Auschwitz, and be still. We will meditate, write, and remember where we have come from and reflect on where we are going.

I think of one of my students who will not be with us. His grandmother was a survivor of Auschwitz. She was going to meet us and her grandson in Krakow. She would have shared her story with us, and with her grandson. It would have been an honor to be a witness to such a story, of a grandmother who survived so much, before, during and after the Holocaust.

My student fell apart on a recent home visit. His girlfriend broke up with him and so, devastated, he got drunk, smoked pot and did coke to excess. His addictions are running rampant, and so he is now getting the help he needs at another placement for the next 50 or so days. He reminds me of one of my students that I lost to a drug overdose. I still haven’t and maybe never will get over losing her.

His voice is growing so strong, his sense of himself in a larger more important story growing equally strong. But his demons, so strong as well. He is the hero of his story, and has all the makings of a tragic hero. We are rooting for him, so personally invested in him now.

I will miss not having him with me overseas. My friend, my little brother. Such an empty spot, so rooted inside of me.
Indeed life is a fragile gift, and I am thankful for it. So full and so fragile, and hopefully so enduring; an undying hymn of praise.

Tupelo Press

Before too long I will hear news about which manuscripts were chosen by Tupelo Press during their open submission period this summer. Last year, I received a lovely and encouraging letter from Jeffrey Levine, and later became a semi-finalist in the ‘05 Dorset Prize competition.

Only time will tell if this is the closest I will ever get to getting the book out into the world. But for now, I must be obedient to the vision, and keep submitting.

BendFilm

Independent films all day with a friend, we laugh out loud about our recent zombie movie, our latest collaboration. We run into his theater buddies all over town. He is trying to convince me to try out for “The Full Monty” which will audition in March. He tells this to all of the friends we meet. Pressure’s on.

Before oyster shooters in the Deschutes Brewery, C. Thomas Howell walks by, looking at us, amused by our slow celebrity recognition radar. Then at dusk, we huddle next to a patio campfire at an outdoor cigar bar sipping whiskey on the rocks, talking about future creative projects, while sparks crackle and swirl into the unknown sky.

Family Weekend

We finally found a weekend away, camping at the nearby Prineville Reservoir. Fishing at dusk with no luck, wading in the rapidly cooling reservoir, mud castles, swordfights in the grass under a forest of Juniper trees. Campfires, S’mores and Yahtzee by candlelight. Jaedon, groans like a man who bets and loses on the ponies, while the dice crackle in their plastic cup, “How about a Yahtzee, already?”

Balls

Trinity has lost interest in throwing the baseball around for several weeks now. It’s all been about football. So this is our game of catch nowadays: Jaedon is my halfback/center. He hikes it, takes handoffs from me, and Trinity runs the receiver patterns that my stepfather taught me when I was Trinity’s age; the buttonhook, the streak, the square-out, the corner-fake-dipsy-do, the long bomb curl…

Trinity has soft hands for his age, his body movement is growing more in synch with where he wants it to go, and Jaedon gleefully tackles the hell out of him on the lawn.
Meanwhile, I still carry Beth’s baseball with me in my backpack.

Reflecting on the therapeutic value of writing

From my teaching journal, one year ago:

Over the last few weeks I have been reflecting on the text, “Writing as a Way of Healing” by Louise DeSalvo. It has inspired me to use the two units that are most dear to me for my classes. I am concurrently implementing “Character Maps: Navigating toward Personal Transformation” in my Sophomore English Class and “A Master Class in Poetry” for my senior English class. I have been deeply affected by DeSalvo’s text, and have recently been able to put words around why it has given me a haunting sense of déjà vu. The journey she takes her readers on very closely parallels my creative experience during my four semesters in the Goddard MFA Program, and the manuscript that was birthed from it. On page 22, DeSalvo quotes James Pennebaker (in italics) and extrapolates with her response:

To improve health, we must write detailed accounts, linking feelings with events. The more writing succeeds as narrative—by being detailed, organized, compelling, vivid, lucid—the more health and emotional benefits are derived from writing. (DeSalvo, p.22)

This was very true for me in the creative process. My first semester MFA advisor, Kenny Fries, confronted me with the reality that whenever I was taking steps toward a significant emotional truth in my writing, I would veer off into safe, ambiguous and larger than life metaphors, and squander the opportunity for truth telling. “What are you afraid of?" "What are you hiding from?" and "What are you waiting for?” were ferocious mantras continually spoken by Kenny to challenge me.” I was afraid that if I told the truth, it would devour me and everyone around me, and I would alienate everyone I cared about. I wasn’t trusting and didn’t feel safe enough to venture out without guilding the truth into something that could be ‘useful’ for my audience.

In my following semesters, advised by Elena Georgiou (one of the very Hunter students mentioned by DeSalvo in her book (xi) ) my courage to step out of my self-imposed cave led to the most important breakthroughs in my writing (and my emotional well-being) as I diligently worked to be as vivid and lucid as possible, sparing nothing in my writing.

Following my work with Elena, I worked with Laura Fargas for my final semester. During a time where students usually do not produce new work, Laura noticed a ‘gap, or a shadow’ in my manuscript, intuiting that there was something I had not put on the page. Just when I thought I had gone as deep as I could go, Laura helped me to come up with work surrounding my mother; perhaps the most salient in the manuscript.

As Desalvo, and Pennebaker had mentioned, my emotional well-being, rather than being consumed, gave me an empowering perspective over my past. Telling the truth in vivid detail was exhausting but liberating, as DeSalvo recalls how Henry Miller put it (p.?) on how his wounds were in the open air, clean and no longer festering. These were wounds that could heal. This is what I want for my students, as they begin to write their own narratives.

Baseball and The Ochoco Review

Lately, I’ve been working doggedly on a blog-based online literary journal for Mount Bachelor Academy. Issues with expense and a lack of administrative support had aborted two of my previous attempts this year, with countless hours involved. I am spending countless new hours on this new (free, and less sexy) approach, which will debut in December as The Ochoco Review.

Hopefully it will ramp up enough support from MBA, as well as its Aspen family of boarding schools and wilderness programs, which could in turn create future funding for a more versatile and flash enabled website. Regardless of the outcome or level support, I am toying with the idea of creating an online student journal with submissions from the larger public. I will give this project a year to help gain the much-needed experience to accomplish this.

No updates on the baseball talisman. I am still holding the ball with the quote from Beth Thorpe. It stays with me, and I have no need to move on from it yet.

P.S. The Oakland Raiders piss me off. I wish I could root for another team, but my blood, my blood is no longer red.

Baseball Talisman(s) Weeks 4 & 5

This week's ball was a joy to carry. I want to keep this baseball with me for several weeks, meditating on the quotes, mantra-like. They were given by Ilya Kaminsky in a workshop. The first:

"Because I found Hitler inside of me..."
Mother Teresa, when asked why she chose a life of service to the poor.

and

"Argument with others is rhetoric. Argument with oneself is poetry."
William Butler Yeats

I will continue with this ball in my backback as a subtle reminder of two quotes that will need to stick with me for the rest of my life.

The one I spin, twirl and carry with me today, however, for week 5, is a recent excerpt from the lovely Elizabeth Thorpe:

I want to write about baseball, like others have and will. There is something about baseball that is incorruptible, no matter how many Barry Bondses break records. No matter how many little kids get baseballs signed because they are the loudest instead of the most polite. No matter how much the players make. The core of baseball, a large core, is solid, made of the finest materials. We are fibers in the string that wraps the core, intertwined in our love and fear and disappointment, in the buildup of details that make history. It matters that my cat was named for Tony Pena. It matters that I watched the victory parade, that I saw the trash cans piled over with styrofoam Dunkin cups on an early morning when we didn't have to drag ourselves out of bed. It matters that one of my most enduring memories from childhood is watching the Red Sox with my mom, the sound of the fans going in the windows, a mixing bowl of popcorn between us. Someday I will be able to write about New England and the Red Sox in a way that will make me feel I finally got it right.

Amen, sista, you're wicked pissa.

I'm beginning to think that I should compile these someday, and title the collection, "Jim Churchill-Dicks and His Balls" Anyone? Anyone?

Baseball Talisman Week 3

The first quote was in a letter from the great poet, James Wright to his son Franz, who had completed a poem that he could finally send to his father.

"So, you're a poet. Welcome to Hell."


The second is from a letter I sent to E-Rod, one of my talented former students, who was having difficulty finding the time to write anything he was passionate about. I told him that if he didn't have to express something through writing, then he shouldn't have to worry about it. People live completely normal lives without writing, I told him. I told him to live a little. And then I warned:

"But if writing is survival to you-- If it is what keeps you out of trouble... If that creative impulse is what gives meaning and purpose to your life-- then for fuck sake, you'd better write, you little bastard."

Yes, profanity again, mixed with love and worry; my curse. As I spun and twirled this ball around for a week, I wanted to get rid of it. It felt like how I sometimes feel of myself-- beyond redemption.

Trinity and I played a long game of catch with the ball on a hot Saturday afternoon at Davidson Field -the old 1911 ball field half a block away, with those old-school covered bleachers. A stadium that will probably be bulldozed to make way for a much needed community pool. So much for historical preservation, so much for religious relics. We played catch, Trinity and I, on this endangered field, in an endangered moment of catch between father and son, with time against us as Trinity's baby teeth continue to give way to those gorgeously awkward adult chompers.

Trinity has still been afraid of the ball, still frozen in fear by the hard ball. My last baseballs have been of the spongier coach-pitch variety, which have done wonders for Trinity's courage. He has asked me every night to play catch with him in the fading light after an 11 hour work day. What a way to end it.

I almost left this #3 baseball at home on that Saturday, not wanting to corrupt one of the last sacred interchanges of my life, but out of stubborn duty to the commitment I have made, I included this ball too. And on this day, Trinity begged me to throw it as high as I could, and by God, he was catching them effortlessly, squealing with victory at first, then later, acting as if it were all just business as usual. And he was whipping the ball back to me, hard and on target.

Beside home plate was his bat, and his batting helmet, the one I spray painted gold, and added a metal facemask to, to protect that horsy smile. It was there just to be there, like a saddle and blanket to a spooked horse, getting used to the old equipment again.

The week before, we went to his old little league ball field to try our first batting practice since the time he was beaned twice in a row by an errant coach. He got the helmet on, stretched on his batting glove, got toward the batter's box, and proceeded to tell me that he couldn't do it, his head was too itchy...he wasn't ready. For once, I took the soft approach. I was the "baseball whisperer. " I patted him on the helmet, and drove him home.

But on this Saturday afternoon, he eventually asked, "So how about a little batting practice?"
I didn't get my hopes up. I watched him put on his gear, that same helmet, that glove, that bat, and he tentatively strode to the batter's box. He was in. I put on my best poker face, calm and steady. My inner voice whispered, "If you fuck this up, you have no right to be this boy's father." I grabbed a bucket full of soft core balls.

"O.K." I said. " Just stand in the box in your batting stance and watch the ball all the way. Don't worry about having to swing. Just get used to the ball coming to the plate." He nodded slightly.
"This is it" I thought, "Make sure you don't kill your son." I wound up, and threw it six feet outside. The second pitch was the same result. Trinity smirked that sarcastic smirk that I used to see on my father's face when he was a young pilot. "You're gonna have to do better than that, Dad," he chortled. I smiled, shook my head and stuffed another ball into my glove. He giggled a little more and got back into his stance.

I pitched a few good ones in a row, and he took swings at each of them, with growing confidence, timing and fluidity. I had one ball left in the bucket. The one with the quotes.

No shit.

I pitched--

he swung--

he pooped that damned ball right over my head.

What a shot!

Instead of looking where the ball went, I looked at him, jumping up and down, giggling like a dork. He was a frozen animal who had shed his icy skin, cold glass breaking all around him, a newly warm-blooded boy who trusted his father again.

You're damn right that's the way it happened, and I know that it pisses you off.

Sure, it's too perfect, and smacks of an overly-crafted revisionist's smarmy American ending. Well, it is what it is. And we were redeemed in that moment. If that's not artistic enough for you MFA types, then you can go piss off somewhere.

A Celtic Phoenix: What Really Really happened to Jimmy “Sweet Rolls” Sullivan

"Love left me like a coal upon the floor, Like a half - burned sod!"
Douglas Hyde

Shitdamn, it’s hot in here—slow cooking in this tight-assed whiskey barrel, thick boggy air like where my ancient ancestors were buried, where they remain perfectly preserved in their bronze-peat graveyard. There is CADEYRN’s severed head, turned to me, smiling, his half-moon eyes and that toothless gummy grin, like dirty Al Capone preparing to burn his dirty secrets.

Jesus, it’s hot, Jesus—

you poor bearded fuck, you fell in love with the world- God’s enemy, didn't you? I know just how you feel. Whiskey remnants buzz from these boards, crackle in this heat, dizzy as Hell, I can’t rest my head against these smoldering boards.

Capone, you sonofabitch, you’re probably fanning yourself in that cooled movie theater where you found Mae and I making sloe love in the projection booth while La Boheme flitted to a popcorned crowd below.

Here is my dirty secret: I loved her more than you possibly could have.

But as your goons toss this barrel into the furnace, know this: These shackles blistered into my wrists and ankles—I am dripping out of them, dripping into ashes. There sluices one eyebrow, and then the next—

My nose caves into the tongue your wife adored, she moaned like a pentacostal.
There goes my neck… my spine. I surrender my bowels, my balls, and everything down to my toenails until I am this pile of smoldering ashes—

Now I am coming for you.

Baseball Talisman Week 2

Here are the two quotes from my new ball. One given to me by one of my students and the other from poet Suji Kwock Kim in her poem "The Tree of Knowledge"

Be who you are and say what you feel
because those who mind don’t matter
and those who matter don’t mind.

Dr. Seuss

O Ghost Brother, Ghost Sister
Silence like nothing but not nothing.
Dream vowel, implaceable O-
Lie to me. Say you forgive me
for being born.

Suji Kwock Kim

Centrum Resolution: (A letter to old and new friends)

I: What are your favorite poets?
J: Well, I love baseball.
I: Oh. Well who are your favorite poets?
J: Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you said sports…
Ilya and Jim on a Friday evening

Here is my goodbye:

On my first day back at school I found a baseball, hidden in the deep grass beside my classroom. Inscribed are the initials of a student no longer with us. I have been rolling, tossing, spinning the ball in my hand all morning, and have inscribed two quotes that move me.

Centrum Resolution: I will find or buy one baseball every week, and do the same with each. One week at a time, I will play catch with my sons, let the dirt and oil of our hands rub onto it in our act of giving, our game of catch – Mine, now yours, now mine, now yours—

One week at a time, I will carry an inscribed baseball with me wherever I go. It will be my talisman.

So, the two inscriptions of this first found baseball:

One is a quote from the character Jean Valjean, but the other is from our last night together at Centrum, Ilya’s question to Matt and I,

“Look at the stars—
Don’t they make you feel like you are missing something?”

Consider, Ilya, the field
where we all lay flat on our backs
under moonlight, the copper paper
of the madrona trees

and those promiscuous stars, streaking
as we stood upon the sky.

And here is my goodbye, my second baseball quote in the words of Jean Valjean:

“I must go. I stole something. I did. I stole happiness with you. I don’t mind paying.”

Love, Jim

Sunflowers

Today, on the way to work, I was greeted by an unexpected field of sunflowers, and spoke aloud my poem, Why Jesus Loved Sunflowers:

Their wide pregnant faces, bowed low with seed; prophet heads, awaiting harvest.

My mission in life: be more like John the Baptist, to be a voice crying in the wilderness, preparing the way for those greater than I, those who will rise up from their deathbeds to redeem their world.

(Bi)Polar Bear:

from A SeaWorld Education Department Resource

1.Adult polar bears have no natural predators. Males occasionally kill other males competing for mates. Males periodically kill females protecting cubs.

2.Cubs less than one year old sometimes are prey to adult male polar bears—

3.Newborn cubs may be cannibalized—


Attempting to hide my profanity. Dates between entries. The gaps between my physical highs and lows. Cave days. I am a dangerous bastard. Exhausted and hungry. I’ve (supposed to have) been living on salad, rice and tuna for weeks now.

I Am The Salad Shooter.

Two months ago, I helped my boss butcher a buffalo. For days, I imagined the meat under the skin of several people I’d talked to. Separating meat from bone always does that to me. Too many senses involved— buffalo blood on my hands, the sticky tallow, the predatory smell—

There is always this loss of innocence, combined with a greed and a fear, stocking up for my family, in case of disaster, in case of misfortune, in case I finally tell some power drunk people what I really think— Clichéd suburban father run amok by fear. My shadow self.

Trinity is hit again. Again with a hardball. This time it is at practice. This time from the coach’s hand. Hit twice in the batter’s box; one ball to each arm. They tell him to keep batting. I am not there to rescue him. He loses trust in adults. Days pass. We play catch on my day off. He ducks even my softest throws.

More days pass. It is practice again. I have to swallow my vomit, push him into the batter’s box for his own good, for his own safety. Aggressiveness in the box means less chance of injury, I think to my self. He doesn’t want to bat. I tell him that he has to. That he will thank me later. I know he will never thank me later.

Trinity says that his hair is so itchy under his helmet, that he can’t bat today. His mouth is dry. I keep nudging him to the plate. Gruffly, because that is what I do when I am afraid, and I have been afraid every day since his birth.

Trinity says in a sad whine that he feels like he is going to fall asleep. I tell him to face his fears, to get in there and to punish the ball. He begins to swing. Stiffly several times, backing out of the box. I praise him for trying to stay in there.

Trinity swings, finally fouls it, and tension is released. He even smiles at the catcher. His next swing pokes the next pitch into left field. Later he fields hits for his teammates, smiling and joking with his coach, but I know that I am not off the hook. I am afraid that I am cannibalizing his love for the game, and for me… and I don’t know any other way.

Today, I am driving home from Bend. It’s raining like Hell, while I am trying to find rest; find my balanced self. I miss God more than I miss red meat. The blood, the sticky tallow, the predatory smell— I wish I could find God in one of those hundreds of churches that squat on every other city block in Central Oregon. Maybe I would find peace and quiet in one of those empty sanctuaries now, since their people are all holding picket signs in front of the theaters playing "The DaVinci Code."

I wish I had the time to make a sign protesting those signs. It would read,

“Jesus is on vacation. Why weren’t you invited?” or "The Passion Part 2: Dawn of the Dead"

But today, the only spiritual platitude that melts its way into me is on the bumper of a VW bus in front of me, splashing a rainbow of spray onto my windshield. It is a quote from my favorite movie, simply put—

“The Dude Abides…”

and abide I shall...

Seeing and Believing

Villae Populi, Romania: One year ago, on a pillowed green hillside overlooking a rural orphanage, our students were encouraged to think of an abstract — service— and to make it specific through their actions and observations. For the rest of the week we cuddled with babies, we played soccer on a makeshift field with the youth of the orphanage, and we worked to hand-pour a concrete bridge.

For me, there is one particular moment. Late afternoon, sun baking streaks of wet cement on our burning arms, we have poured our final concrete pillars into their metal reinforcement skeletons. A group of visiting Carmelite nuns begin to walk across the solid part of our bridge in a single file line, floating swans in their flowing white garments resembling that of Mother Theresa. The last nun in line strays from her group, lingers by me, and with both of her thin, ebony hands, cups my face to look me in the eye. She smiles. “Good Teacher” I hear her say, but her lips do not move; she hasn’t uttered a word.

An invocation. An undeserved harvest. More than the title of an educator of children. Her hands, soft and strong, bestow an anointing, as though I were divine. As divine as these lost children of Villae Populi, seeing instead, the face of the one she serves in each of them,

and now in me,

on that humble bridge, crossing an even humbler stream.

With Love, From the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Ashland Oregon:

At the Angus Bowman Theater with my students, watching The Diary of Anne Frank. I watch one student of mine, thoroughly absorbed in the performance. His grandmother was a survivor of Auschwitz.

It is the silence that frightens us most—

Afterward, rendered without words, we somberly follow the steps down to Lithia Park. Girls from another school, make catcalls to our boys, their heels clomping the wooden steps in unison behind us, like soldiers marching by a cramped, sacred hiding place.

The Natural

Blood is pulsing in my ears: ram, ram, ram,

Trinity is at home plate and is hit by a wild pitch which is way too fast for Little League Minors, -you heard it fffffffft toward Trinity's face, 'luckily' hitting his hand instead. “Part of the bat” the umpire yells, after lifting Trinity from the ground, checking for broken bones "Strike One" They couldn't let him take a base. Tears on his face, he’s given a choice to sit out, for an unshameful out, or get back into the batter's box. He flexes his hand, crying, looks back at me. I am clutching the chain link backstop. I want to scoop him up, take him home.

He connects to my sad eyes, and, why? gets back into the batter's box and, instead of cowering like me, swings like hell at two more pitches. He gimps back to the dugout, half-triumphant, chin still trembling, as both sides of the stands cheer loudly, on their feet, screaming whistles for the courage of the smallest kid on the field, pint-sized hero of the moment. This one will go down in history.

After the game, I sit him down, and while rubbing his hand, whisper something into his ear, something he may remember someday, for a story only he is able to tell...

PULLED FROM THE RUBBLE

Over the weekend of April 7-9, I had the privilege of traveling to Seattle to participate in the “Film, Faith and Justice” forum, sponsored by The Other Journal. It was a transformational series of keynote presentations, panel discussions, and documentaries culled from the Human Rights Watch traveling film festival.

What moved me most was exploring the interplay between justice and forgiveness, and how they are distinguished from a reactive worldview of justice based on atonement and revenge. What began this exploration was a documentary entitled Pulled From the Rubble, by Margaret Loescher. Here is the official film description:

In August 2003, Gil Loescher went to Baghdad on a humanitarian research trip. He and his colleagues were in a meeting with the head of the United Nations in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, when a truck full of explosives was driven into the side of the building. Gil was the only survivor from the most devastated section of the building. All of the other people in the meeting died. Through poignantly honest narration, and observational scenes of high emotion, his daughter records the family’s recovery during the months after the bombing. Filming becomes her way of dealing with the suddenness of the family’s changed reality, and a way of re-visiting the haunting images of the bomb site—a place of both horror and hope.
Film’s website http://www.pulledfromtherubble.com

One image buries itself into me, hidden there, a sacred stained glass image:

How after the explosion, shards of glass pierced deep into his flesh. Weeks passed, old skin sluffed to make way for the new. Shards of glass, burrowed closer to the surface, week by week, layer by layer, expelling the shards of glass, a sliver at a time, redeeming them from his body.

His daughter Margaret sees, through the camera’s smooth glass eye, an image

“…at once Hell and hope… a death place and a birth place.”

Smith Rock Diaries

On the shoulders of Misery Ridge, overlooking the famed Monkey Face, there is a trace of either skunk or reefer. Up high, I am high-- but not that kind of high. Looking down, every thing is brown below. The water, dark green, olive-drab, is not yet reflected by a springtime sun. The fields below, last week, were burning. Today, a John Deere tractor is plowing under the ash. Spring is coming.

Black Butte's bald head in the distance is still a snowy skullcap. The rest of the Cascades are draped in windswept snow-filled clouds, still holding on with their last fingers, still icy.

Finally, I am getting back out into the wild, finding sanctuary, wheezing for oxygen, blood pistoning through my body, rapid fire. And I am beginning to remember heights from a long time ago; sacred heights in California, Washington, British Columbia. Today, standing on this Smith Rock precipice, I am beginning to remember how tall I used to feel, how high, raised upon the shoulders of sacred rocks, able to see further, like on the sturdy shoulders of my father--

This is my palace. This sanctuary. These rocks tower like any cathedral spires I've seen--

A whisper from the wind. Simple, no words, but truly some language, a chilled breath, breezing where it will. The syncopated rhythm of the wind.

Maybe there will be nothing to write from beyond Malibu, that British Columbia shoreline, mountains swelling up from salty inlets, sharply carved by ice for thousands of years, and swollen inside of me, calling out, carving out my past, on a reconnaissance mission to find something I may have misplaced, something I could have lost, even if it is merely the illusion of something I thought I had, but never had. Should I look into this well, once so stocked with treasures, to find them all evaporated--receded?

Oh, who cares? Who cares if I have anything to say anymore? I know how I feel, at this moment, and I know how it will shift into the next. 'Tis the season between seasons, the holding on, the letting go, the hope for a new tomorrow, the surrender of what lies behind. All make for temperamental weather. I know the lack of knowing in my journey. There is no need-- to ramble about it any further.

And there is my liberation. No more need to be important. Except to my sons, my wife, my family, my friends. But in the end, not even to them. Liberation and Grief. I am the small speck of an unimportant soul, someone who sneaks into the party unnoticed and uninvited.

So be it. Now I can write--

Prologue: Out of Silence

A blank page--

Not necessarily waiting to be filled.
I remember not being able to write for the six months after my first son was born.

I was stained into silence.

The air we breathed together, and the light--weighed in far too sacred for the commemoration of words; empty, ignorant words like Peter's on the mountain with the newly transfigured Christ.

And lately, there are the breaking of unholy, oppressive silences. The pent up; distressed words- words for myself and for others- that must rise up- so they do not die stillborn inside. These are words that I have scarcely even begun to notice, because it is an immense and dizzy world, and I am just waking up to it. My latest writing project, a book of poems entitled Jacob Wrestling, dips its toes into both of these silent territories. One of the longer poems, entitled "From These Stones" can currently be found in the online journal The Other Journal (http://www.theotherjournal.com/) while the title poem "Jacob Wrestling" is forthcoming in Fire Magazine out of the U.K. There may be a future for this little book, although it has served a full and healing purpose simply in the crafting of it. So why have I entered the blog community? Just this. I have been greatly served by the weblog of a dear friend (see Mercurial Dreams link) and from the consequent rabbit hole of links toward deep-thinking/feeling people with an artistry for communicating their experiences. One more voice to the chorus then. And more links that daily cleanse me of my middle-class suburban decay. In this blog you will most likely find the sacred wed to the profane, as I am both a sacred and profane individual. And ignorant. And luminous...

Good Night Nobody...

Goodnight noises everywhere,

Jim Churchill-Dicks