WRITING on NARROW ROADS to a FESTIVAL

By El Ochiis

A college friend, Droad, decided to make a film that we’d enter into a festival to win some prize money. I’d write the story in route – it didn’t matter where, specifically. Droad owned a Paillard-Bolex H16 Deluxe Cinema Camera that he inherited from his grandfather, who once worked on the set of a famous movie.

Our group consisted of five of college students: two with two part-time jobs; one was from a filthy rich family, one from a middle-income family and I had driving and map reading skills.

“I can ask ‘grams’ to loan us the chauffer, it’s a university project,” Bonn volunteered, gazing out into the crowd, with vague interest.

His grandmother, the matriarch with the cash, told him he would have to have a normal life with ordinary friends if he wanted to inherit any of her money; we were his social experiment.

“The whole point was for us to make a film, a story about doing college kids’ stuff,” lamented Seville, who had a crush on Bonn so big, it hurt to watch.

We all knew Bonn was going to marry a society chick from the Upper East Side. Seville was a vegan from the Lower East Side who played the saxophone. Bonn only knew she was alive when she would lug her horn to his dorm room and insist he listen to real music, like Coltrane instead of rock. I think they made out a couple of times.

“We should go to Park City Utah, my grandpa might be able to hook us up at an independent festival called Sundance,” Droad piped.

“What, no way, Bonn protested. “Too far, I can’t ride in some rented car, for, like a million miles across the whole country.”

“Seville wants to blow her sax in a national park, Droad has a real movie camera, I can write while someone helps with driving and you can go skiing.” I affirmed.

“But, I want to relax, on plush leather,” whined Bonn

“It would impress your grams, think about it,” I inveigled.

It was settled, we would hit the road for fourteen days, and, roughly 5,300 miles.

Bonn bailed on us for an airplane to Salt Lake City before we reached Cleveland, leaving one of gram’s credit cards for road expenses.

Seville’s first music score was for a film whose final scenes ended in Zion National Park, entitled: Narrow Roads. I wrote the script, Droad shot the footage and Bonn was the leading man. It was about relationships that were hard to navigate, like the many two-lane highways we’d trekked across Cleveland, to Nebraska, through Wyoming, into Utah – more of a metaphor for Seville and Bonn – Bonn and us. Bonn moved to Budapest; Seville shacked up with a punk rocker; I left for Paris and Droad took an apprenticeship on a movie set in Stockholm - it was our last road trip together. Our film didn’t make it into the festival – which had to be submitted months in advance – an official at the event said Droad was a natural born filmmaker and I had real writing talent – that counted towards widening the roads, a bit.

A VALEDICTION

By Sharon May

Kentucky author, Ed McClanahan died November 27, 2021. Known for his bawdy sense of humor, he was a character in his own right. After meeting Ken Kesey at Stanford, he became a “Merry Prankster,” which was depicted in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He was considered one of the Commonwealth’s best writers, but I knew him better as my first and only creative writing professor, in 1978, my junior year of college. It was dumb luck that I met Ed.

During that first class, I knew he was different from us common folk. He stood at least six feet tall, and his curly shock of blondish/brown hair made him seem even taller. His bushy mustache could not hide his perpetual grin, as if planning his next joke. I can still hear his explosive voice, ricocheting around the small seminar room and blasting its way into the hall. He claimed his volume was the result of dropping a lot of acid.

Usually he read stories aloud, primarily Flannery O’Connor and occasionally Raymond Carver, saying that reading informs writing, and I learned how to listen for the rhythm of the words on the page.

I’m not the first person to have praised him for his ability to create community and inspire other writers. The first words Ed spoke to me beyond roll call were very motivating – “Your writing reminds me of Larry McMurtry. Have you read The Last Picture Show?” In the 1970s, we could hang out with professors at one of the many bars that surrounded campus without a ruckus. Ed had a favorite, and would invite students to continue our discussions about writing over a beer and a bite to eat.

Fellow Kentucky writer and “Merry Prankster,” Gurney Norman came to class for a visit. Much to my surprise, Ed asked him to read aloud my first attempt at a short story. I received high praise for my attempt as well as discussion of strengths and weaknesses, mainly pointing out that I needed to “slow down and let the story tell itself.”

Ed also shared his own writing in class, starting with the short story, “Ennis the Penis,” published in Playboy. He also read parts of his work-in-progress, which would become the novel The Natural Man, a coming of age story of a high school basketball player where the game reigns supreme. That novel took 20 years from inception to publication, driving home for me that sometimes good writing takes more time and effort than we can imagine and that we shouldn’t give up on the stories we are driven to tell.

He didn’t put much stock in evaluations by students, saying we wouldn’t know for years how the course impacted us. I knew then the class provided me with fabulous learning opportunities, but it was quite a while before I realized how he inspired me to keep writing and helped me accept my Kentucky voice.

WRITING MY WAY OUT of a CARDBOARD BOX

By Kasie Whitener

When I was in undergrad, the structure for a fiction workshop class at university was to read a dozen short stories and talk through them and then to try our hand at writing one. We would bring our own stories in, two students per class, and they’d be read aloud and torn apart by people who couldn’t write their way out of a cardboard box.

I hated it. I’ve been an educator for 17 years and tried to figure out if it was me, 20-year-old kid with a wide-eyed dream of becoming an author, or the class itself.

The flaw in this course design is that we began by reading Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood, and other fiction masters. Their stories were far-and-away better than what we were capable of. We didn’t really have any stories to tell. We were too young. Nothing had happened to us yet.

Short fiction was used in the fiction workshop for two reasons: 1) it’s an exercise in writing discipline to reduce a story to 3500 words or less, and 2) our professors didn’t want to read our poorly conceived novel-length tragedies.

There’s a wide gap between the MFA definition of good work and the commercially appealing fiction we consume like candy. A well-written, well-told story is tremendously satisfying.

One of our SCWA friends, crime novelist Raegan Teller, has recently turned to short fiction to work on her craft. She shared with my class that she finds the form challenging as she’s not allowed to include all the narrative that bloats a novel. She must be more selective with the details she includes.

Scarcity is the draw of flash fiction: can one write a complete story in less than 1000 words? They must be the right words. Their selectivity makes them special. And yet, often we find flash fiction simply omits important development or leaves too much to the reader that its meaning is difficult to discern.

Amazon’s foray into serialization is an indication that consumers are looking for bite-sized stories, something they can easily cram into a subway ride or a Starbucks queue. Short fiction has the draw of being easily digested by wordcount and economy. But the best short fiction stays with you long after you’ve finished the story. Haunts you like a memory that doesn’t really belong to you.

I write short fiction because I have ideas to metabolize. Thoughts and memories that need to be examined. Unlike that undergraduate workshop, I have time and distance on some of these events and can evaluate them without the sting of hurt feelings or the risk of open wounds.

The problem with that class was that we didn’t know what mattered, what to keep and what to edit out. We only knew we wanted to write and were hoping someone would teach us how. After many years of practice and polish, I now feel confident I can write my way out of a cardboard box. The real question is, how’d I get in there?

REAL MAGIC

By Lis Anna-Langston

Before I could write full-time, I worked at a greeting card company. Christmas started in May when catalogs and holiday material went to design. The novelty of snowflakes in summer was fun. Just when I thought holiday demand would disappear with the heat, it ramped up again. By October, my holiday cheer thinned out.

My family never celebrated holidays together, so a week before Christmas, I got in my Honda and drove. Asheville to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas. My dog and I stopped at roadside motels and drive thru coffee places. I jotted poems and stories on paper bags with stray fries hanging out in the bottom.

I was exhausted.

I remember sitting in a diner in Shreveport, eating French fries and realizing I didn’t know what day it was.

I kept going.

I plowed on across Texas, convinced somewhere in the world, meaning and miracles intersected. Charmed by the desert, that massive, waterless expanse of shrub and sand lit up my imagination. The further I drove, the more I started to form an idea for a story. Like, a real holiday story. A story about a little boy who finds something in the forest. It was right there. Pieces of a story, floating around inside the car. I swept through El Paso, passed the border and drove out to Deming, White Sands, to where Billy the Kid was jailed. I ate way too many avocados. I drove to old Indian sites and hiked up cliffs and down into caverns. I blazed my way through barrels of fresh salsa, red and green. I started to get the feeling that I was closer to Christmas than I’d ever been.

I bought a telescope and took it out into the desert. It wasn’t sophisticated, but it was portable. From a dirt road in the middle of New Mexico, I could see the moons of Jupiter. Seeing those moons locked in the pull of a planet so far away created a shift in me. A shift that pushed me closer to a magic I’d never been able to define. Not hocus-pocus magic. Real magic. The kind that exists when flowers turn to face the sun. Beyond science and stars and moons, out into the subatomic world of sheer possibility. I could feel it; like it was just around the corner, watching me.

I put my dog in the car and headed out towards Tucson. It was beautiful but not my destination. I headed north, towards Flagstaff.

The first time I saw the Grand Canyon was at 3AM, under the light of a full moon. It had just snowed. The streets were clear, but a white blanket covered the ground. Enormous elk stood under the moonlight, so huge their bellies came up to the top of my car. Coyotes roamed the wide-open spaces. The world was aglow and alive in that strange canyon. Cold and clear and perfect. I drove to a hotel and prayed they had a vacancy. While my dog sat in a chair staring out at that new world, I sat awake in bed and wrote down the beginning of this story, shaped by my winter in the desert. A story inspired by moons of Jupiter, life in other star systems, strange findings in the forest.