Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Smart Billy: Prologue

Witness a man, a 19th century trapper, violently shivering in a snow cave with his dog. The dog has shared her heat with the man, has positioned herself between the man and the cave opening, protecting the man from the elements, because she is a good dog.

But now, just now she is dead, heat escaping her body.

Witness the man, buried and shivering in a snow cave up high, near Heaven’s Gate on Mt. Hood. His dead dog is his only company. Wind howls over the mountain, burning with snow in relentless curtains. For the moment, ignore the impulse to wonder why this trapper is so high upon this lifeless slope. Instead, wonder at his body, his sinewy skeleton loosely draped in blotchy pale skin.

Behold the man, the man whose shivering now stops. He strips away his beaver pelts, delirious and warm. He is chanting with graveled breaths, incomprehensible, swaying forward and back, forward and back. Behold the preconceived syllables of his language. The groaning vowels, the gravelly aspirates, the whiny whistle in each breath.

Behold the man’s pink face, freckled and burning through frizzy shocks of a chest-length, auburn beard. Behold the dried and broken blisters on his sharply cut nose, the wild green eyes, and closer, to his right eye, with broken capillaries slowly pooling with blood, just below the cornea’s surface. Behold the caked mucous at the lashes. The whitened salt-stained lower lid from dried tears—

Gaze into his eye, some reddening cloud that could swallow the moon— Look closer. Behold the muscular green filaments twitching in unison, now growing sluggish, failing, as they begin to give way to the pupil, a growing shadow swirling inward. Lean closer. Hear his whistling whisper in a final plume of breath— then stillness.

Wait. You heard something. Let your mind register it. You are correct. A final word, no, a name escaping the trapper’s rapidly cooling lips—

Billy.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

The Ochoco Review: Summer 2007!




Haven't been writing much lately. Most of my creative gas has been used to get our student work online. Come see it! I bet you won't be disappointed. We even have a section for Spoken Word. And soon we will have a short film which will be featured on the SciFi Channel's website!

The English Teacher's Kid


Tuesday, January 30, 2007

A New Freewriting Journal

Warning! Total garbage. Do not read beyond this point!

1/22/07 9:23 a.m. PST

Blank Page. So many pages to fill. A formal looking book. Sturdy. Austere. I must be mindful with my permission to write freely, without worry of coherence or of posterity. How do I do this, when this is the beginning? The first impression to the invisible reader over my shoulder?

Reader over my shoulder, forgive me. You may find nothing here worth reading. Nothing that matters. Danger. It may take hours away from your life which you will never get back. Believe me. I take your time seriously. I understand that you are dying a little bit every day . I don’t want to waste your time.

Reader over my shoulder, bliss be yours.
Reader over my shoulder. I am tragically uninteresting. My voice is not the one you should sell your soul for, to give away your hours for.

But have you heard the voices of my children? Chirps and giggles, and fights like warring angels. And soul. So much soul. Reader over my shoulder, my wounded shoulder. Go in peace.

1/24/07 9:42 a.m. PST

Active analysis of lethal doses of attention, getting to the root of my swarthy sweat. Attention, attention, body mechanic must play out the story for which white paper is too distracting. Cymbal high hat, warping bass beat, bubbles of attention perforated burst creative impulse- verge of supernova, merge onto a single thread of conscious thought, tiny red ribbon thoroughfare through electric cables spiking, arcing spiderwebs overhead.

Stay on the course of a quiet shy girl’s voice, murmuring in a windstorm; focus: clear, the beats of wind, the beating wind of pigeons scattering at the clap of approaching footsteps.

Focus on the shy girl’s voice, clear the storm. Let gravity obey your fingertips, funneling into you from tip to tip, draw the chaos into you until there is nothing but the flutter of butterfly wings, and the sound of a shy girls voice, singing in delicate spiderwebs, growing more sure in their tensile strength.

1/25/07 9:31 a.m.

Respect equals Respect- Respect: n a value for the other person’s personhood. I-Thou, hallowed sacred other-someone not to be trifled with-to see their gifts, to see the haloes in another dimension of light. Respect- a foreign language that must be learned, syllable by syllable.
I’m dancing around what is singing in my spine, humming there, angry. I have slost this language-the words cleave to my mouth my mind, searching through days where the students, users take over, anarchy, misguided protests locking themselves into a crowded dorm room to honor Martin Luther King Jr.

$10,000 worth of damage to trashed walls and a shattered toilet.

Respect: I-Thou withers inside of me- allowing me to be a casualty. Respect Equals Respect- and I am losing this language. I am losing myself- Hardened, we all are polarized each to our opposite sides, convinced that we are right.

But I am not a user. I am not that selfish. There is a job to be done. I don’t care if you’ve had a hard day. Overused dilemma. Shore yourself up. Get the job done, I’ll cry with you later. Compartmentalize: this is the real world.

See to the children. Pay the bills. Rest when it is time. Do not call in sick.

Get Up…


1/29/07

Outside, students are breaking up the ice that has melted into a polished fan-like sheen outside of my classroom. We are the icy delta of the chronic melt and refreeze of the snow runoff. This is how I damaged my shoulder, nearly three weeks ago: the same ice powdered with a thin skiff of snow. Powdered sugar on whale snot on an iceberg, someone said.

If only it would just snow and stay. It’s January for Chrissake.

We’re listening to the Shins new CD “Wincing the Night Away” Trying to silence the shaking of my classroom with each out-of-rhythm pound into the ice. I’m grateful for these work project students coming to our aide, though difficult to concentrate. Disrupting the house of cards that is my attention span.

Through my peripheral vision, I see one of my students looking out the window, scratching his tightly shorn afro with his fingernails then looking right at me writing, wondering probably how long I will prolong this protracted freewriting torture. He shrugs audibly into the back of his seat. I can’t blame him. It’s impossible to write today.