pen ink river

In memoriam to Kurt Vonnegut who died on April 11, 2007 at the age of 84, I'm posting eight rules for writing short stories, from his book, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Posted by peninkriver at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Monday, April 9th, my poem, The Cat Lady is to be featured on Grassroots Bookstore's Poem-A-Day e-mail and web site, their offering for National Poetry Month. I was pleased because the project editor liked its truth-telling and, given the subject matter, that came as a surprise.

The Cat Lady

The woman next door says she’s clairvoyant.
She hasn’t had a night’s peace in years.
You want to ask her who it was
who found his body,
how long he was left hanging
but you stare instead
beyond to the leaf pile under the tree.
She fiddles with her buttons. You could
tarry for hours and still not be privy to where
his ashes were scattered or who got to keep the cars.

Time to assemble your gratitude and move on.
As if proxy for revelations, she offers
a painted cat she pulls from her pocket.
Once his, she says, brushing away lint.

She’ll go back into her house,
spoon food onto saucers for the cats,
nameless because they come and they go,
something she’s already told you,
something you already know.

Posted by peninkriver at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some mornings, it is a good idea to check e-mail. This morning, unexpectedly, a message arrived from M.E. Hope, the chair of the Oregon State Poetry Association's Spring 2007 contest informing me I'd won an Honorable Mention in the Members Only category for my poem, "Leda Before the Swan." This is the category that requires a poem of six to twelve lines, no more, no less but it can be any form and on any subject. Maybe this poem appeals because it is a bit of a poet's poem, an homage to William Butler Yeats' classic, Leda and the Swan, long a favorite of mine in spite of its subject matter: Zeus appearing to Leda as a swan and then raping her.

Below is my offering on the subject:

Leda Before the Swan

Before his shuddering fall into her arms,
his wings thrusting, their edgy caress,

she saw not the feathers, not the Olympian swagger,
but bathtubs and goat skins, her husband’s nightly pursuit.

Later, she’ll say that’s why she didn’t hear
the whirr, the dizzy miles he soared across the Aegean.

She was singing herself a song and threading
her braid into a coil at the nape of her neck.

She dabbed attar on wrists, weighty with their bangles,
and settled into the hammock for her afternoon nap.

Posted by peninkriver at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)