Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (stories)

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She told him her only memory of her mother.  She was downtown, with her mother, on a winter day.  There was snow between the sidewalk and the street.  She had just learned how to tell time, and she looked up at the Post Office clock and saw that the moment had come for the soap opera she and her mother listened to every day on the radio.  She felt a deep concern, not because of missing the story but because she wondered what would happen to the people in the story, with the radio not turned on, and her mother and herself not listening.  It was more than concern she felt, it was horror, to think of the way things could be lost, could not happen, through some casual absence or chance. 
--From "Post and Beam," a short story by Alice Munro, published by The New Yorker (December 11, 2000) and reprinted in her collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (Knopf, 2001), pp. 188-218 in the Vintage Contemporaries paperback edition.

Two poems and a memoir by Tarn Wilson

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Late summer 1971, my father quit his job in Washington, D.C. as the Brookings Institution's first computer programmer, bought an old school bus with "Suck Nixon" painted on the side, and packed us off for British Columbia. 
        . . . Set loose in the primeval Canadian wilderness, my sister and I were to be educated by the land, released from shame, fear, insecurities, sexual hangups, and shallow social conventions imposed by a corrupt and repressive culture.  In our natural, unspoiled state, we'd be happy and free.

--From The Slow Farm, a memoir by Tarn Wilson (Ovenbird Books Nonfiction Series, 2014). 

 

 

Betsy's boyfriend dumped her this morning

and when she comes to the door

I am in my underpants, unable to console her. 

...

--From "Living Alone with Small Dogs," a poem by Matthew Siegel, Cimarron Review (Issue 181, Fall 2012), p. 14.   

 

 

She used the stadium. I would have
chosen the bridge. We’re not even

 

Division One. Our tailgate crowds
are mostly enthusiastic about beer. 

. . .

--From "Ready Regret," a poem by Lisa Olstein, Linebreak (July 22, 2014). 

Part of a memoir by Maxine Hong Kingston, stories told through papercuts and library cards, three pieces from Far Enough East, and a film

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The Metropolitan Police, the men, stood
in one-line formation. The women, we,
the demonstrators, drew one another close.
We were a bouquet knot of pink roses.
How can it be that all the cops are men,
and all for Peace women? I can't live
in such a world. I don't want to keep
living out the myth that men fight
and women mother. We regressed—the junior
high dance. One boy crossed
the wide floor, chose one girl,
escorted her back to the other side, where
he arrested her. . . .

--From I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, a memoir in verse by Maxine Hong Kingston (Knopf, 2011).  This segment is from Knopf's Poem-a-Day (April 21, 2012) and is available here on Tumblr. 

"Babcia," a papercut story by Marta Chudolinska, Broken Pencil, Issue 60 (August 27, 2013). 

 

"Due Date," a project by Molly Rideout, Driftwood Press, Volume 1, Issue 2.  This story consists of 36 library cards, each hand-written by a different woman.   

 

"Kumasi," a poem by Patrick Bahls, and "My Mother Had Two Voices," a poem by Steve Klepetar, Far Enough East, Issue 5.   

 

Inside his dream Kit is a child again, tanned and knock-kneed. He is a small boy in a starched cotton shirt and khaki Bermuda shorts. His mouth is flooded with the achingly comforting, artificial sweetness of fifteen-cent fishcake from the primary school tuck-shop. He is standing in a building that looks something like his old school. Paper cranes drip down from mouldy windows. They are folded from beer bottles. The wind moves and makes the trees outside stir and sway. His teeth start dropping out; clattering on his tongue, hard and small and troubling. He wonders if anyone has ever choked to death on his or her own teeth.

--From "Coast," a short story by Sharlene Teo, Far Enough East, Issue 5. 

 

Before Midnight (2013), the third film in the trilogy about Jesse and Celine; directed by Richard Linklater; written by Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy based on characters created by Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan; and starring Ethan Hawke as Jesse and Julie Delpy as Celine.

A few stories by Miranda July and Aimee Bender

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One looked like a woman but was too tall, or maybe it was just that the other one was so small, like a little boy.  I saw them around Portland all the time that summer.  Were they young or old?  Couldn't tell.  Were they from the present, or another era; i.e., time-travellers?  Wasn't sure.  They were in black and white, neckties and knickers.  A little dirty.  Always leaning on each other.   

--From "TV," a story by Miranda July, The New Yorker (June 9, 2014). 

 

I met Arlene in college, in the freshman dorm.  We were not roommates but suite-mates in the corner section of a squat brick house at the center of a small college campus in the middle of Ohio.  We both had moved from opposite coasts with the desire for a personalized liberal-arts college experience and had become friends due to proximity and availability more than compatibility.  For example, we had nothing in common.  She: Blue Ridge Mountain town.  Me: central Californian suburbs. She: declared international-relations major with three eclectic minors.  Me: not yet totally decided.  The men she liked were brutish jocks; I had located within two weeks every single soulful gentleman on campus who wrote poetry.  I found them by the length of their hair or the wear of their jeans.  She liked big-budget romantic movies; I saw every documentary I could find at the library, and if I’d had any retention ability, I would’ve stored a great deal of knowledge about the world.  She had a perpetual perm, because she felt it added volume to the thinness of her hair and gave her a look of energy; I was hard-pressed to use a brush because I preferred a ponytail, and part of trying to attract those poet-men was to look a little like I had wandered onto campus by accident after having spent ten years with the wolves behind some farmhouse, living off scraps and reveling in the pure air like a half-girl Mowgli, half-woman Thoreau. . . .

--From "Bad Return," a short story by Aimee Bender, published by One Story (Issue 158, January 2011) and reprinted in her collection The Color Master (Doubleday/Random House/Anchor Books, 2013), trade paperback edition pp. 99-129.  

 

I can't remember the words of things.  The words for words.  I have lost my words.  What's this from?  Is it the Internet?  Texting?  E-mail?  I see it in kids, too; it's not an aging thing.  An aging issue.  I do know that at the supermarket yesterday, I asked the guy where the weighing thing was, the thing that weighs other things, flailing around with my hands, indicating, and he crumpled up his forehead and said, "You mean the scale?"

     "Yes"--I said, beaming, pumping his hand--"the scale!"  As if he was the winner of an SAT prize giveaway.  . . .

--From "Wordkeepers," a short story by Aimee Bender, published by McSweeney's (Issue 41, July 2012) and reprinted in her collection The Color Master (Doubleday/Random House/Anchor Books, 2013),  pp. 153-160.   

 

I was at the Bev with Sylv and we were eating Chinese food takeout from Panda Express . . . she was going on about how she'd checked her messages and Jack hadn't called even though he said he would but maybe he was caught in traffic.  Even though he has a phone?  But I'd never say that out loud.  Sylv's the first friend I've had in a long time who really is way high on the friend pyramid, and the way she dances!  She bops around really energetically but she's also still.  Like she's moving her torso but her feet don't move, and then sometimes she'll take one step, and it feels like a thesis statement.  Like it is a topic sentence about her butt.        

--From "Lemonade," a short story by Aimee Bender, published by Tin House (Issue 33, Fall 2007) and reprinted in her collection The Color Master (Doubleday/Random House/Anchor Books, 2013), pp. 85-97.   

The Poetry Storehouse

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The Poetry Storehouse is a collaborative venture; the goal is to marry poetry and other creative media.  It's fascinating to see how the same poem can be interpreted in such different ways through various readings and remixes.  Here are two of my favorites so far:     

Video remix: 'Weather' by Steve Klepetar from Nic Sebastian on Vimeo. Based on a poem from 'The Poetry Storehouse' (poetrystorehouse.com) - great contemporary poems for creative remix. Original Storehouse post and poem text by Steve Klepetar here: http://bit.ly/Qsw13I. Soundtrack by Setuniman (freesound.org/people/setuniman/).

Still image remix: 'Orchids' by Diane Lockward with art by Adam Martinakis from Nic Sebastian on Vimeo. Based on a poem from 'The Poetry Storehouse' (poetrystorehouse.com) - great contemporary poems for creative remix. Original Storehouse post and poem text by Diane Lockward here: http://bit.ly/1gjDvjV. Art by Adam Martinakis (adamakis.blogspot.com). Process notes here: http://bit.ly/1nVE7QW.

"Mother's Day" by David Young

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I see her doing something simple, paying bills,

or leafing through a magazine or book,

and wish that I could say, . . .
 --From "Mother's Day," a poem by David Young, continued on the website of the Academy of American Poets, reprinted from Field of Light and Shadow: Selected and New Poems by David Young (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).    

Two novels and an excerpt from a book-length poem

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        My father has a glum nature.  He retired three years ago, and he doesn't talk much.  Left to himself, he can remain silent for days.  When this happens, he begins brooding, he begins thinking strange thoughts.  Recently he told me that I was selfish, that I had always been selfish, that when I was a baby I would start to cry as soon as he turned on the TV.  I am forty and he is seventy-two.  When he said this, I began tickling him.  I was in my parents' house in New Jersey, on a sofa in their living room.  "Who's the sad baby?" I said.  "Who's the baby that cries all the time?"
        "Get away," he squeaked, as he fell back and tried to wriggle away.  "Stop being a joker.  I'm not kidding." 
--From Family Life, a novel by Akhil Sharma (W.W. Norton, 2014). 

        He is twenty-six, and for as long as he's lived in the north there has been only the Aleut woman. 
        Several evenings a week he comes to her door with a duck or a rabbit and she asks him in.  Not asks, exactly.  She opens the door and steps aside so he can enter.
        She lives in a frame house hammered together fast out of boards and tar paper, a house like all the others in Anchorage, except it isn't on First or Fourth or even Ninth Street; instead it is off to the east, marooned on the mud flats.  But she has things in it, like anyone else, a table and two chairs, flour and tea on a shelf, a hat hanging from a peg.  She wears a dress with buttons and she cooks at a stove, and the two of them eat before, and then after she sits cross-legged in the tub and smokes her pipe. 
--From The Seal Wife, a novel by Kathryn Harrison (Random House, 2002). 

Come, it's time to set the table,
dusk is bruised with rain, the water is alive
under the wind, evening is
upon us.  Outside, the animals make their
accommodation, the lake loses its reflection,
settles deeper.  Set down the brush
on the saucer, leave off the book,
open, with its words against the pillow. . . . 
--From Correspondences, a collaboration by poet Anne Michaels and artist Bernice Eisenstein (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).  An excerpt from the book-length poem was included in Knopf's Poem-a-Day newsletter, in honor of Poetry Month, on April 26, 2014.  The excerpted material is also available online as a printable  broadside.