So. The blog will stay put.

Thanks to washwords, Koe Whitton-Williams, tricia, Dori, Karen, Bobby Revell, Jennifer D., Melinda, Lorenzo, Candy, Ashe.Selah, lydia, timethief, SmallWorldReads, John Folk-Williams, and Jim for your encouraging words and comments. Your support makes the difference.

Here's a bit of writing inspired by the prompt "Alright, fine. Let's hear your explanation." Well, inspired by that and by reading my grandmother's burn notebooks, written during my grandfather's long hospitalization, where her anger over his vices and infidelities comes through, clear and Mercurochrome-bitter. I couldn't bring myself to change the names; they are too good to be fictional.



I just went to the track to look at the horses, to watch them ripple around the oval, to see their hooves beat the dust into red clouds. But once I got there, the action sucked me in. Before I knew what my feet were doing, I was standing in front of Les’s booth to place my bets. The air was heavy with money and I was feeling lucky. I’d win enough to pay off the rest of Atlee’s mortgage or maybe just enough to buy a smooth fifth of whiskey. Or even score a downpayment on a new washing machine for you, Vi.

Then I ran into Williard, who had a full flask and offered me a swig or three. Maybe the alcohol clouded my judgment. Maybe I couldn't see what an amateur that jockey was, but I think the race was rigged, that somebody paid him out to fall off the horse. Or maybe they slipped the little guy a Mickey, I don’t know. The end result is that I lost. The flask made a few more visits to my lips and I didn’t feel like going home just yet anyways.

You and the girls were at the cottage and I was planning on sleeping at the empty Tuxedo Park house, but then I remembered Molly. Molly with the blonde hair and long legs, Molly from the Tip Top Club in Salem, a nice easy-going girl. The Mustang knew the way from the track to the bar. It’s no coincidence that they call that car a Mustang. It has all the bucking power and smarts of a horse. It knows where to find the watering holes, knows the trail back home, too.

After I left the Tip Top, I was exhausted, so I took a snooze in my ride. That’s where I was last night, sleeping in the Mustang.

You can ask Molly if you don't believe me.

Tags: The long goodbye, writing prompt, blogging, Joe Jackson, faction, blogging break, grandfather, grandmother, burn injuries, friends in the blogosphere

The auditions were on a muggy spring Saturday in 1981. I couldn’t sleep the night before. Nerves. My mother and I walked into a theater smelling of preadolescent sweat, each kid tingling with nervous energy, wondering how they would do on stage. Someone called my name in low, deep voice. I pushed myself up and wobbled down the aisle, a skinny eleven-year-old with long frizzy hair and a preternaturally serious demeanor. At that moment, my mind was dusty as chalk. Up on stage, though, I pulled it together and gave a sufficiently melodramatic reading from Beauty and the Beast. The fall before I'd played the female lead in a children's theater production.

"Beast! Beast! I love you, Beast!" Beauty cries over the dying brute. In the small theater production, the handsome high school boy who played the Beast was made up to look like a proper monster. His delicate Italian features were obscured by a greenish-yellow gelatinous substance, his hair a hawk’s nest of detritus. Whatever was on his cheeks stuck to my lips as I bestowed the chaste kiss that eventually returned him to his princely state. That boy wasn’t on stage with me for the audition, but I faked it well enough. I got my acceptance letter for drama camp six weeks later.

It was the summer I considered myself twelve, in between sixth and seventh grades. The camp was made up of ambitious 11–14 year olds. For two hot July weeks we took acting classes together on the campus of Goucher College, culminating in a production of Free to Be You and Me. Most of my memories are about the dorms, where I discovered a love of dark chocolate, developed an aversion to public showers, and shared giggles with the girl in the next room over. But the main flavor of those two weeks was an overwhelming feeling of awkwardness, a sense of being quiet and overly polite, to the strange boy who pursued me by the salad bar, to the other girls on my floor.

On our last night, the camp counselors put together a dance, the soundtrack heavy on 1970s rock lightly flavored with disco. The evening wrapped up with a final song: Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd. It was the first time I'd heard it. The strange boy found me across the darkened dining hall and held out his hand. We danced close. I felt a longing for what wasn't quite over yet.

In about three weeks, the contract for writing to survive's web hosting is up for renewal. I have decided not to renew (though I am conflicted about this. Is it worth $100/year to keep this blog out there? I'd love your thoughts.) Leaving is scary. In the past year and a half, I've become friends with a few people scattered across the world. This place has been my virtual support system as I grappled with my past and figured out what it means to be a writer. I will miss the conversations with my blogging friends here, but hope to keep on commenting and interacting in the blogosphere. Just because the blog is disappearing doesn’t mean that I am, too.

I haven't quite decided what is next, but I know that I need to devote my energy to writing. That's scary, too, to take it on without the wonderful instant feedback, knowing I'll be alone, typing in my little room, writing stuff that maybe NO ONE WILL EVER READ! But I think that the words will grow in that environment, where it's just me and them, without worries about posting or commenting or dropping zillions of Entrecards.

My Free Bird moment is coming and I'm feeling a bit melancholy about it. Before the last dance however, I'll have a heap of appreciation for the people who have kept me afloat in the blogosphere. If you want to skip out now, that's fine, but I hope you stick around until the end.

Tags: Free Bird, Beauty & the Beast, End of the blog, Lynyrd Skynyrd, drama camp, The long goodbye

Illustration by Ed Harriss.

I was born with a stork bite on my neck, an egg-shaped mark pink as a salmon fillet. On some children this mark fades, but on me it spread down and around my neck, a two-inch wide necklace of permanent blush. “That’s a natural piece of jewelry,” Mom would say, “Some people pay good money to have that kind of thing tattooed on their skin.” Those people didn’t live in my town. The people in my town thought my neck band was the mark of the Beast. After twenty turtleneck winters and dickey summers, I finally had a plastic surgeon burn that thing off of me. It was worth every cent, every painful minute.

People think that calling them stork bites is cute. Like the stork doesn’t exist and, even if he did (yes, it’s the males that you have to worry about), he wouldn’t nip an innocent baby on the nape of the neck! What do they know about storks? Those birds are aggressive as hell. There’s nothing cute or funny about them or their predilections. That’s the brain stem, you know. One chomp there and you’re paralyzed for life. Dead before you even get a chance to give out a second wail of hello to the world. My parents turned their backs on me for five seconds … five seconds … and that nasty stork took his opportunity.

Still, I’m one of the lucky ones. My father had a younger brother, Cole was his name (they did name him). He was born at home. After the exhaustion of a 33-hour labor, his mother took a nap. The midwife was in the bathroom, and Grandpa — well, Grandpa wasn’t known for hanging out at the scene of a birth or death. By the time the midwife came back into the room, the stork’s work was done. Missy waved that bottle at Cole's face, tried to coax the nipple between bluing lips. When she turned him over, she saw it. This was no salmon mark, but a clear bloodless bite, a chunk of the baby’s neck gone missing.

So. You think the stork brings life, carries babies to their mamas in a soft muslin hammock, all pure and sweet and accommodating? No. Babies are born through blood and sweat and pushing, through exertion, the body like a machine that just keeps going until that thing is out. Then you have to keep watch, for the stork waiting to make his mark, for the death that can creep into the room on innocent-looking sleep, for the deadly cough that you can’t hear from down the hall.

Keep your babies close.

Tags: writing prompt, the stork, birth, birthmarks, Death, stork bites

Part of the front page of the notebooks my grandmother kept after my grandfather was burned.

After my grandfather was burned over 80% of his body in a flash fire at the Dupont Holly Run paint plant, my grandmother started keeping a diary. I have the copies, four small looseleaf notebooks with her remarks on his hospitalization, dating from the accident on 11 June 1966 until his release from the hospital on 24 February 1967. There are tallies of blood transfusions (38 pints of blood between June and December), of skin grafts (26; the last one is on 22 December, with the note "last - if all take"). I'd missed the fact that he actually had four operations on his right foot before they finally amputated it (28 September: "Little toe came off in dressing.").

It's slow going. Mom-mom's handwriting is hard to read and the first six months are a roller-coaster ride of medical emergencies, infections, and mourning for what was lost. Doctors gave him a 50-50 chance of making it. No one knew that the fire wouldn't kill him for another 24 years, when he finally succumbed to skin cancer at the age of 78. The "girls" -- my aunt, 20 at the time, and my mother, 16 -- don't get much mention. What it was like for them? I may ask my mother, but don't expect to get very much information and it might not be necessary for my purposes.

I'd love to talk to my grandmother about that time for her, too, though the notebooks conjure her up. Ultimately, though, I'm looking at these books to get a better understanding of my grandfather, who went from being an active man in his fifties who loved jazz and waterskiing and driving fast in his '65 Mustang to a dependent, almost-deaf burn victim. He didn't get behind the wheel of a car again until 1981.

During his hospitalization, he suffered, really suffered. Being burned is painful, but so is the treatment, borrowing healthy skin to graft onto exposed flesh, having your raw body immersed in a whirlpool once or twice a day. Even the necessary turning ("Dressings wet. Al begged not to be turned."), which probably happened at least four times a day, sounds like a horror. And then there is the debridement, the sloughing off of dead skin and muscle that had to be done on a regular basis. Things surely have gotten better for burn victims since the 60s, but there is no getting around the pain. It's no wonder that my grandfather was scared of his hospital bed in those first six months. It must have seemed like a torture chamber.

Pop-pop and Greta in 1978, 12 years after the industrial accident.

Pop-pop suffered and hovered close to death, lost his hearing and a foot. His once-smooth skin tightened and scarred. Then he got out of the hospital, had a home nurse for another nine months, and went back to work (a desk job this time). He retired and taught himself how to build furniture and make Canada goose and mallard whirligigs to sell at Nickerson's Fruit and Vegetable Stand. He built the Little House and put a new wood shop on the beach cottage, as well as a new family room. His interest in model trains intensified and the old wood shop became the setting for a huge train set with two separate tracks, a couple of tunnels, and a tree-covered mountain range. It was the kind of thing that neighborhood kids and grown-ups would come over to admire, though he would always remind me that these small trains weren't toys.

I'm working on a piece that is about him, but not quite about him, fiction informed by imagined experience. I want to figure out what was forged by flame.

Tags: grandfather, Dupont, Holly Run, Newport, Delaware, grandmother, fire, 1960s, burn injuries, notebook, diary, hospital

Butterfly in our backyard sour grass.

The February rains came. They cannonballed out of the clouds, burst against packed soil, strong-armed flowers and soft green leaves out of lifeless bushes. Our sour grass exploded. The backyard is now electric with it, lemon-drop yellow and neon green as it spreads over bare spots where the sprinkler didn't reach last summer. A few days into my blogging break the rains knocked out our internet service, though we're not completely sure how they did it. Water is wily.

Thanks to the wireless connections of two neighbors, we weren't totally internet free (I do not recommend sneaking onto someone else's wifi network, but desperate times call for such measures. It's a bit of an addiction, this internet thing.), but mainly we enjoyed the sudden stretch of time to fill. When the man from AT&T finally fixed the problem, he had to skitter into the crawl space, between the house and the mud, to put in a dedicated jack for the DSL. It was fixed just in time for my break to be over.

Here's what I did over my winter blogcation.



READ: I read Living with the Truth, by Jim Murdoch (I'm not going to write a review here, much as I would enjoy a chance for Aggie and Shuggie to discuss it on Jim's blog, but I suggest you order it); A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini (good, but brutal), and started Nothing to be Frightened Of, a kind of memoir by Julian Barnes (how have I missed his fiction?).

The shorter 'do.

TRIMMED: Is ten months too long to go between haircuts? I got my hair cut for the first time since last April, thinking of Karen, my blogging hair stylist friend, as I finally picked up the phone to set it up. The answer is, yes, ten months between haircuts is way too long. This time, I made an appointment before leaving the salon.

THOUGHTS ON WRITING: It's all about the questions and the quest. In the March/April edition of Poets & Writers, poet Lucia Perillo says she writes assuming there is no reader. Is this really possible? Is she being disingenuous or am I misunderstanding her point? If we assume no audience, I think it would be impossible to write. This might be worth a post, if I can liven it up a bit.

ACTUAL WRITING: I finished my stillbirth story and submitted it. While of course I am thinking positive, sugar-sweet, happy thoughts about getting it published on the second try, I'll probably have to keep on submitting. Maybe I'll need to give it another once- or twice-over, but I'll wait until I hear from this particular publication, just in case. Think good thoughts for me, please!

THE END OF THE BLOG?: Not yet. I won't be updating as much or getting as Entrecard-obsessed this time around. But I do want to get serious about my writing. That's why I've killed a chunk of the afternoon to write this post. Did I mention the internet is addictive?

Tags: blogging break, reading, The internet, haircuts, writing

Last week one of my writing prompts was "start with a question," and I ended up with the beginnings of this little bit of silliness. At the moment writing fiction, making an attempt to tell an interesting story, to tell it well and with grace, feels like practice for me. I need a lot of practice. The beginnings of the next great American novel this ain't, but that's OK.

Next post: what I did on my winter blogcation.

And by the way, I have nothing against chihuahuas.

chihuahua skull image from Skulls Unlimited.

Take John and Elise. John was in love with her, but clueless about the ways of women. Not as taciturn as his father, a slab of a man, thick and slow, who tended to talk only after having a few, John had learned little of relationships or communication. He tried, though, bought Elise a toaster oven. He researched and did price comparisons and found one that would fit over the counter. He matched it to her appliances, black and sleek, made sure Elise could cook those frozen tater tots that she loved so much in it.

“Happy Valentine’s Day!”

Elise was expecting flowers, maybe even a dozen red roses or some sort of singing Valentine. She wanted the cliché, craved it after seven arid manless years. There was so much expectation that when she unwrapped the box (how many roses could be in such a huge box? And so heavy?) she burst into tears. What in the hell was this? John, bless his naïve heart, thought she was crying with joy, until Elise ran out of the living room, opened her kitchen window and flung the toaster oven, still in its box, out into the warm California air.

Start with a question. Focus on intent. For John, love. For Elise, unmet expectation, a dry spell Hallmarked to death, broken by this practical, this unromantic man. But intent no longer mattered to Gary Flanagan, whose chihuahua was crushed under a toaster oven flung from a third story window. As soon as Elise heard Taquito’s truncated yelp and Gary’s shouts, she knew something bad had happened. She looked at John, still in shock himself at the strange turn the afternoon had taken, through the kitchen doorway and held a finger up to her lips, her bloodshot eyes widening in warning.

And then, she didn’t know why, she felt a surge of lust. Elise marched over to the couch and starting ripping John’s clothes off, pinned him against the flowery cushions. Caution be damned, they consummated their two-week relationship right then and there without saying a word.

In the confusion of expedited passion, her underwear went missing. Afterwards, John went on a hunt, made a big show of it, checked behind the huge ficus in the corner, rifled through the china cabinet, lifted Elise's hair and brushed the nape of her neck with his chapped lips. “Nope. No underwear there, either. Guess you’re just going to have to go commando,” he told her and she laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world. Like it was the first time she heard that one.

Elise picked up a takeout menu from the coffee table. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. Chinese?” she asked, waggling a flyer from Mr. Chen’s Vegan Delites. “Chinese!” John responded with a jocular wink as he tossed her bra across the room, just missing the trash can.

Below, on Broome Street, a crowd had gathered. Tacquito’s hind quarters were barely visible under the box and a trickle of blood from his mouth had formed a dark comma on the sidewalk. Laura Falcon from Apartment 16 had heard the impact. She had poked her head out of her window and called the police right away. After putting down the phone, she went out to comfort the victim, that sweet and single Gary Flanagan from the sixth floor, handed him a huge mug of coffee and some chocolate chip cookies. Together they waited, stared up at the bank of windows, row after row of shiny glass with ominous gaps, windows cranked out to catch the breeze. Curtains flapped, blinds shuddered. Potted plants teetering on windowsills had taken on a dangerous quality. "Rows of terrabombs," thought Gary, newly enlightened about the pitfalls of gravity.

There were too many possibilities. “Not a peep from up there. Not a peep.” Gary kept repeating, and Laura would give him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. To Gary it felt creepy, like she was enjoying this chance to make herself useful. Indispensible. After the police took a report, took little Taquito away, she invited Gary into her apartment. He refused. Fred, the condo building's maintenance man, sprayed down the sidewalk as Gary watched, still holding on to the chihuahua's six-foot black leather leash. The comma of blood turned into a rusty cloud and slowly dissipated, washed into the gutter. Gary went back to his one-bedroom, determined to get totally drunk.

John and Elise have never told John, Jr. about the night he was conceived. They’ve grown quite comfortable with each other’s foibles over the last twelve years. He’s better about flowers, and she understands that you show your love in the best way you can. Sometimes she wonders what would have happened if John had brought flowers. How long it would have taken them to get beyond their assumptions? They couldn't stop talking that night, about the past, about how childhood confusion solidifies into adult surety. Elise is glad he gave her the toaster oven. She wouldn't change what she did that afternoon, wouldn't even alter it even by one second. Without the toss, the truncated yelp, the immediate intimacy of being partners in a crime of happenstance, she and John would never have gotten this far. There would be no John, Jr. It was fate, all around.

The day after the toaster oven incident, John left Gary Flanagan an anonymous apology note stuffed with twenties. The police said it was no use dusting for prints, and it was true, John had worn gloves just in case. Couldn't they have at least tried? Was Taquito's life worth so little? Gary has another dog now, a minuscule mutt from the SPCA who trembles in cold weather, whose barks sound like an infant with whooping cough. Nowadays, he tends to leave the building by the back door, shuffles Pepin past the dumpster and parked cars. He avoids the scene of the crime.

Tags: fiction, writing prompt, Chihuahuas, love, Valentine's Day

Gabby Hyman, of Dr. Bob's Nightmare

For Ginsberg's was the syncopated flurry of Coltrane, a cool hipster rap sung in crowded bookstore reading rooms thick with tobacco smoke and a counterpoint of cheap Mexican weed. Bad Gerry was sung to Vivaldi played on a sturdy hi-fi set as you gazed out a dormer window across the Monongahela River where black sparrows alit like a puff of factory smoke in a tree laid nude by winter.

-- Gabby Hyman on poet Gerald Stern.

To find out what it means, you have to go back in time, not too far, just to early December of last year. There’s the first post of Gabby Hyman’s unusually-titled blog, Dr. Bob’s Nightmare: So, Why Not Me? Well, maybe the explanation isn’t spelled out for you here, either, in this short piece on Robert Holbrook Smith, aka Dr. Bob, one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, but it gives you a clue, a trail of words to follow. You can reach your own conclusions.

Gabby Hyman is a writer, plain and simple. He’s been a journalist, a professor of English, and a creator of content for various websites. He edits, he ghostwrites. You can download a copy of his book, Knives and Forks and other stories from Literary Road. But Gabby also writes a fantastic blog, a place for stories from aching memory, sometimes wryly funny, always lyrical.

These tales are told with a grace and a stretching language, all metaphor and rich description, but they also keep you going, wondering what happens next. That night that Gabby walks onstage as the Spirit of Christmas Present, does it go as planned? The final analysis may not be what you think. Who is Myoko Sakatani and how did she save his life? Enigmatic titles pull the reader in -- Last of the Mic-Mic Men? -- but Gabby’s fine writing does the rest: "The Beast was the gangsta-earthmother of the drive-by smile. In fact, she changed everything." The Beast? How did she change everything? You must read on.

Some of the stories are about a world about to be transformed, portraits of life in Southern California before the sixties were in full swing, when the bread man still delivered and milk came to box outside your front door. Others are about the immediate aftermath, the awkward mid-70s (Gabby's trip to the 1976 Democratic convention, for example), or his time as a graduate student in Alabama, where football was king. These pieces aren't necessarily nostalgic, but give a sense of the author presenting the past, remembering and working it over in his mind.

Good writing often leaves you with questions, with blanks to fill in. After reading several of Gabby's essays, I want to know more, to figure out how his circuitous path, which included stints in Alaska, Illinois, and Washington state, transpired, whether there was a plan or a pull or if those seemingly peripatetic days were a matter of controlled drifting, a person trying to find his place in the world. I don't mind these lacunae, these mysteries. The questions only make it more interesting.

So go. Read. Let the words pull you in, get you thinking. You'll be glad for it.

Tags: blog of the month