Coming July 5th: "Dismembered"

“She had beautiful legs. I wanted to keep those legs.”

One by one, investigators found the women’s bodies. Each one carefully posed. Each one brutally mutilated. An arm here. A leg there. ... The killer was cutting his victims to pieces…

“At that point, I pretty much went for the head.”

For ten years in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the killings went on. Women of slight stature were hunted down, bludgeoned and strangled. And what the killer did with their bodies in the privacy of his car, his home, his kitchen, and his shower—was beyond anything police could imagine.

“I was pure evil.”

When investigators finally caught mild-mannered, Star Trek fan Sean Vincent Gillis, he couldn’t wait to tell his story. In the presence of shocked veteran detectives, Sean told them every detail of his killings, everything he did with the bodies.... And he smiled the whole time…

Susan D. Mustafa

Dismembered, the chilling true story of Baton Rouge serial killer Sean Vincent Gillis, will be in bookstores July 5. Gillis confessed to killing and mutilating eight women in the Baton Rouge area and is currently serving three life sentences at Angola. Written by Susan D. Mustafa and Sue Israel, authors of Blood Bath , which is the true story of serial killer Derrick Todd Lee story, this book is so disturbing that its publisher (Kensington Books) placed a warning label for readers on the back cover.

A book signing with Susan D. Mustafa and Sue Israel will be held July 30 at 6:00 p.m. at Barnes & Noble at Citiplace in Baton Rouge. The authors will present their thoughts on this killer, along with detectives who worked the case.

Read The Redman Writing Project interview with Susan here.
Purchase Dismembered online here.

Remembering the King of Greenwich Village

Maxwell Bodenheim: A flash of brilliance

Today is the birthday of Maxwell “Bogie” Bodenheim (May 26, 1892 – February 6, 1954), a poet and novelist who was known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians. Relatively obscure today, he was widely known internationally during the Jazz Age of the 1920s for his erotic poetry and prose and scandalous womanizing. But by the 1940s he was a homeless wino who wrote hasty poems and sold them for drinks. He was shot dead in 1954 by a mentally disturbed man involved in a sordid tryst with Bodenheim’s wife, whom he also killed. (More on Bodenheim follows.)

We’re marking the occasion of the birth of Bodenheim here with two of his poems:

Songs to a Woman
By Maxwell Bodenheim

                         I
You are like startled song-wings against my heart
Which flutters like a harp-string wounded
By too much quivering music.
You cover me with a blue dream-robe
Whose silk ripples out like imaged water ....
And when, for a moment, you leave,
I am a black sky awaiting its moon.

                       II
If I could be moon-light scattered out
Over the blowing dark-blue hair
Of kneeling, flowing crystal breezes
Breathing a litany of pale odors,
If I could be moonlight scattered out
Over the whispers meeting in your heart,
The marriage of our souls would be
No more complete than now.

                      III
Like a delicately absent-minded guest,
Your smile sometimes lingers after
Your lips are solemn.
And once I saw a tear in your eye
Playing hide-and-go-seek with some leaping, dimpled memory.
These things, to me, are like scattered perfume
Wavering down upon my heart.

                     IV
The struggle of a smile craving birth
Invades her little weeping faun’s face,
And even makes her tear-drops leap ....
She smiles as only grief can smile:
A smile like ashes caught within
A tiny whirlwind of light;
When the light goes, the ashes drape her face
Till even her lips seen grey.

                   V
Wave your veils to pallid gavottes,
Blow them on with dimly-spiced laughs,
And catch them breathlessly against your breast!
You have prayed too long in you sinking temple --
Night has come, with her fumbling release,
Her moment in which you may play with sad thoughts.
So, wave your veils to pallid gavottes,
Blow them on with dimly-spiced laughs
And catch them breathlessly against your breast.

“Songs to a Woman” by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1919. Public domain.

The Rear-Porches of an Apartment-Building
By Maxwell Bodenheim

A sky that has never known sun, moon or stars,
A sky that is like a dead, kind face,
Would have the color of your eyes,
O servant-girl, singing of pear-trees in the sun,
And scraping the yellow fruit you once picked
When your lavender-white eyes were alive. . . .
On the porch above you are two women,
Whose faces have the color of brown earth that has never felt rain.
The still wet basins of ponds that have been drained
Are their eyes.
They knit gray rosettes and nibble cakes. . . .
And on the top-porch are three children
Gravely kissing each others' foreheads
And an ample nurse with a huge red fan. . . .
The passing of the afternoon to them
Is but the lengthening of blue-black shadows on brick walls.

“The Rear-Porches of an Apartment-Building,” by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1917. Public domain.



Poet Maxwell Bodenheim and his wife, Ruth Fagan, having breakfast of tomato juice and sandwiches in their apartment on New York's Bleecker Street, awaiting eviction.

World-Telegram photo, 1952.

Born Maxwell Bodenheimer in Hermanville, Mississippi, near Vicksburg, the family moved to Chicago in 1900, when he was eight years old. Bodenheim had no formal education and was booted out of school by the age of 16. He enlisted in the Army in 1910, but was soon jailed and dishonorably discharged for insubordination after reportedly hitting an officer with the butt of his rifle because the officer ridiculed Bodenheim as a Jew.

Bodenheim met writer Ben Hecht in 1912 in Chicago and they maintained a love/hate relationship to the end. Together they founded The Chicago Literary Times. The Chicago literary group also included Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters, among others. Bodenheim was dispatched to Greenwich Village as the magazine’s eastern correspondent, which, according to writer Jeff Kisseloff, set into motion Bodenheim’s long trail of “empty bottles and broken hearts.”

Ben Hect offers a glimpse into Bodenheim’s mania in Hect’s memoir, Letters from Bohemia . Here he describes a dinner party during which Bodenheim became irritable that he was not the center of attention. Writes Hect:

“Having emptied his tenth wineglass, he proceeded to eat it. He bit chunks of his fragile goblet, chewed and swallowed the bits of glass as if they were the finest of desserts... ‘Good God,’ someone said, ‘You're a poet, not a circus freak.’ ‘Every poet is both,’ Bodenheim answered aloofly... He continued to talk of poetry, and to recite some of his own latest work, holding the diners fascinated by the stream of blood and words from his mouth.”

Bodenheim wrote several novels: Georgia May, Replenishing Jessica, Naked on Roller Skates, the most well-known. They were, in the words of Ben Hect, “hack work with flashes of tenderness, wit, and truth in them, and some verbal fireworks in every chapter.”

In 1926, Bodenheim was hauled into court on obscenity for his novel Replenishing Jessica, whose heroine found "the simple feat of keeping her legs crossed…a structural impossibility." The case was dismissed, but the notoriety bolstered Bodenheim’s reputation and made his novel a bestseller.

A couple of years later he again achieved notoriety, this time as the Great Lover, when a series of spurned lovers attempted suicide after being rejected by Bodenheim.

By the early 1930s, Bodenheim quit writing novels altogether and became largely known as a character – the king of Greenwich Village bohemians. Soon the book royalties started drying up and by the start of the Second World War, he was homeless and a raging alcoholic.

Writes Hect: “The Greenwich Village Bodenheim had no allure for me. I preferred to remember the Chicago version. One rainy day I ran into Bogie on Broadway. His face was gaunt, most of his teeth were gone. But there were some things unchanged about him. He was wearing the same army overcoat, carrying the same worn and bulging brief case; and his eyelids still fluttered disdainfully when he spoke.”

Time magazine in 1952 described Bodenheim’s itinerate life at that time: “He flapped disconsolately around the Village resting up periodically in the Bellevue alcoholic ward, sleeping in gutters, hallways and subways.” It was during that period he took up a third wife, Ruth Fagan, a former teacher with a history of mental illness. They were inseparable as they tramped around the Village from one flop house to another and oftentimes Fagan would pick up men for a place to sleep. One such “friendship” with a mentally unstable dishwasher, Harold “Charlie” Weinberg, went terribly wrong.

After a night of heavy drinking with Weinberg, the Bodenheims accepted an invitation to go to Weinberg's room. What happened after that is uncertain. Weinberg may have tried to rape Ruth and Bodenheim may have intervened. Or Weinberg and Ruth may have agreed to have sex and Bodenheim, who had been asleep, may have woken up and objected. Either way, the result was that Weinberg shot and killed Bodenheim and then stabbed Ruth to death.

In the end, Bodenheim had written a total of ten books of verse and thirteen novels, as well as a partly ghost-written memoir called My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village. Once the envy of the literary world, the king of Greenwich Village, the Great Lover, today Bodenheim is rarely read and his work has nearly faded from memory.

Emily Hahn, author of an "informal history of bohemianism in America," attempted to sum up his life: "Bodenheim's novels were not immortal. It is for his life and death he is remembered. These were lurid in exactly the fashion Philistines felt they had a right to expect of Bohemians."

Recommended reading:
“MAD MAX: Death of a Bohemian King” by Alan Bisbort

Village Rogue: The poetic life of Maxwell Bodenheim

Passage about Maxwell Bodenheim by Ben Hecht, from Hecht's memoir, Letters from Bohemia (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co, 1964)

Naked on Roller Skates: A Tribute to Maxwell Bodenheim

Time magazine’s account of his murder:

Brains, Books and Boudreaux – A techno geek’s venture into children's literature



Stephanie Purser
Photograph by Chad Purser



 Author spices up Cajun lore with 'How Hot Sauce Came to Lousianne.'



Stephanie Purser is an elementary education teacher in Slidell, Louisiana with a passion for teaching, literature and technology and she has successfully combined all three with a new e-book, How Hot Sauce Came to Lousianne.

The story is a pourqoui tale, a fictional yarn explaining how something came about. In this case, Stephanie has created a very colorful Cajun whose over-the-top temper leads to the creation of a Louisiana staple.



“This initial book idea came at a time when I least expected it,” Stephanie explains. “I was actually participating at a teacher’s technology training. We were asked to brainstorm a word bank of Louisiana terms, and then use those words to create an e-book using new educational software. I had actually just finished a reading/writing study on pourquoi tales with my fourth graders, and decided to give my story that same pourquoi twist.



“It wasn’t until September of 2005—after evacuating due to Hurricane Katrina—that I began the process of transforming this rough, short story into a children’s book. The world’s spotlight was on our little part of Louisiana. Many became intrigued about our southern traditions and way of life. With all the culture and state information I had injected into my book, I felt that it was the right time to move forward.”

While still hoping to attract a publisher, Stephanie has not let the story sit idle. She published it as an e-book and continues using it today in the classroom as a teaching device.

Synopsis:

“I’m gonna fric-a-see a salesman, me!

Wit’ cayenne, tasso, and gra-vy!”

-Mista Boudreaux

Mista Boudreaux (BOO-dro) was a giant of a man, who stood well over seven feet tall. But as big-sized as he was, he was known for being twice as mean! And if there was one thing that really cooked his goose, it was when some poor ol’ body mispronounced his name.
In this fictional Cajun tale, three traveling salesmen make that very mistake. How Hot Sauce Came to Lousianne (buy it here) depicts several comical encounters between this ill-tempered crawfish farmer and each of the three traveling salesmen. Stirred together and peppered with Cajun lingo, these chance-meetings lead to the creation of “Lousianne Hot Sauce,” which turns out to be Boudreaux’s temper, all bottled up and “swishing ‘round on the inside.”
This 6-page porquoi twist written in Cajun vernacular makes How Hot Sauce Came to Lousianne a unique addition to any library. The intended read-aloud audience for this book is readers ages 5-10, although this clever story will be enjoyed by all ages.
Although the goal of the story is to entertain, it is often utilized by educators teaching units on the Southeast. Throughout the book, there are references to the state flower, bird, crustacean, etc. Furthermore, the story's setting and Cajun lingo paint a beautiful portrait of the bayou region of Louisiana.

The Redman Writing Project (RWP) recently caught up with Stephanie for an interview.

RWP: Tell us how you came to write How Hot Sauce Came to Lousianne.

Stephanie Purser – Creative writing has been a hobby of mine, and with my experience as an elementary educator, I’ve developed a true appreciation for children’s literature. How Hot Sauce Came to Lousianne started out as a short story written entirely in Cajun dialect, making it a fun read-aloud for adults to share with little ones, but difficult for children to read independently. After several challenging revisions, I think I’ve created a child-friendly story suitable for readers of all ages, while maintaining the Cajun narration experience.

RWP: You chose to publish How Hot Sauce Came to Lousianne as an e-book. Why did you decide to go that route?

Stephanie Purser – I actually had begun the publishing process with a popular children’s book publisher. We had gone through the revision process together, and I made the final changes that were requested. As we were about to take the last step and begin the publication process however, things fell through, as they often do. I decided that I would publish online to get my work “out there” and see if this book would be unique and interesting enough to draw a reading audience. Also, with the obvious increase in the use of mobile reading devices, I believe that more authors will consider publishing their works in this easily accessible format.

RWP: While on that subject, what impact do you think e-readers will have on the future of book publishing?

Stephanie Purser – I have already begun using iBooks and Kindle books, as have other teachers within my school and district. The availability and affordability of the devices and books has actually made it more cost effective for schools to use digital books. These books are often less expensive, able to be loaded on several devices, and their “pages” don’t rip or wear out. These advantages, combined with the portability of large amounts of reading material, make digital books a viable option for 21st century reading.

RWP: Had you written anything previous to How Hot Sauce Came to Lousianne?

Stephanie Purser – I had actually published Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) standardized test practice material and I’m writing a how-to book about teaching with technology, but this is my first literary work.

RWP: I understand you are working on another book. Please tell us about it.

Stephanie Purser – Well, without giving too much away, I’ll say that the spice salesman who you met in How Hot Sauce Came to Lousianne attempts to take his new product on the road, when he ends up stranded among an eerie group of settlers in a remote part of the swamp. Don’t worry, though. It looks like the spice salesman may stir up this community and make something bitter into something tasty in the end—and profitable, too!

RWP: Let’s go back to when you were a kid, a teenager, did you write when you were younger? Did you enter any writing or poetry contests in school? What did you do to foster the writing bug?

Stephanie Purser – I actually wrote my first poem as a fourth grader. My teacher submitted it to the Baton Rouge The Advocate daily newspaper, where it was published. This was probably the jump-start to my aspirations of one day becoming a published author. In high school, I continued writing poetry and short stories while serving on the school newspaper’s staff.

RWP: What are your interests? How do you incorporate your interests into your writing or how have they influenced your writing?

Stephanie Purser – I am a teacher by occupation, but also by choice. I am passionate about finding “out-of-the-box” ways to present information and engage my students. I love to read just about anything, I’m goal-driven in all that I do, and I enjoy working with and learning about the latest technology.
I think I closely relate to the spice salesman in my book. He is an original thinker who comes up with an out-of-the-box solution to that mean Mista Boudreaux’s temper. And his sense of accomplishment at the end of the story reminds me of that competitive side of myself—that victorious feeling of accomplishing a goal.

RWP: List five of your favorite authors:

Stephanie Purser: I’m going to go with children’s book authors:
1. Rick Riordan
2. Lemony Snicket
3. Robert San Souci
4. Max Lucado
5. C.S. Lewis

RWP: List ten books you’ve read that you’ll never forget:

Stephanie Purser:
1. Diary of Anne Frank
2. Gone With the Wind
3. I Know this Much is True
4. The Five People You Meet in Heaven
5. To Kill a Mockingbird
6. A Child Called It
7. Where the Heart Is
8. Tara Road
9. Redeeming Love
10. The Bible

RWP: What are you reading right now?

Stephanie Purser – I am actually just beginning a juvenile fiction series that is very popular, called The Sisters Grimm, by Michael Buckley. These books are a twist of mystery and fairytale. I try to weave juvenile literature into my reading time so that I can keep abreast of the latest, most popular works available. This is advantageous to me as an elementary teacher and a children’s author, as well.

RWP: Where can people find your work and where can they follow you?

Stephanie Purser – My book can be found at www.amazon.com (here) and at http://www.bn.com/ (here). I plan to begin an author website in the near future, which will have activities for children, and lesson plan units for teachers to use along with my book.


More About The Author: Stephanie Purser currently teaches a class of fourth graders at Bonne Ecole Elementary School, and also leads the St. Tammany Parish School Board’s writing curriculum – “Write...from the Beginning” – and INTECH, an instructional technology course offered to teachers. A veteran educator with more than a decade of experience in Louisiana, Stephanie’s professional work and dedication to her field have been widely heralded across the state. She’s been named St. Tammany Parish Teacher of the Year; Louisiana Association of Computer Using Educators (LACUE) Educator of the Year; and PTA Educator of Distinction.

She resides in Slidell, Louisiana with her husband Chad Purser and their two children.

About The Photographer: Chad Purser is an aerospace engineer, but his passion is photography. He created the cover art for How Hot Sauce Came to Lousianne from an old boathouse he captured in his lens years ago. His photography has appeared on two other book covers, a CD album, and on a popular ABC sitcom. More of his images can be found at http://www.chadpurser.com/.

Copyright 2011 Donald G. Redman. All rights reserved. Photo copyright 2011 Chad Purser. Reprinted here with permission.

"when walking on earth is miracle enough" - a poem by Dennis Formento

when walking on earth is miracle itself
by Dennis Formento
(printed with permission)

when walking on earth is miracle itself
when cities are heat islands
where will you be, ten years on?
          if you know what's coming
          can you hope?
can you say so, can you say so
if you know what's coming
         and will anyone believe you?
         can you say so?
if you don't know what's coming and you act anyway
          is that hope? or the moment calling?

     maybe hope is
a work of many voices, all of them one voice
     the vision of many eyes, all of them one eye
when you see with one eye you see further
    “you live with your people as well as your ghosts.”

To keep your footing in the tidal wave,
     get used to the water,
take a ride down Carr Drive.

      Objects gathered on Carr Drive:
a wooden pelican, a weedy shrub grown in a concrete crevice,
          a child's life preserver,
a pair of pink goggles, a hard hat, and half a St. Joe brick.
          a morning glory twined around a tall weed
one nearly perfect pair of women's sandals.

Bridge up, bridge down, the train approaching, the expanse of water growing wider,
the acceptance of change, and the readiness to move on,
     strategy for survival-

maybe hope is the quality of non-expectation radiating love
struggle as if every second counts, or the line goes slack, & you're lost,

doesn't the earth create and maintain the conditions of life?
doesn't the moon rise and counter the steady sun?
where will you be, ten years from now?
where are you now?

what act restores the asylum
when walking on earth is miracle enough?

         Cities are heat islands
radiating deep into the night
         I woke up early,
quit driving by ten,
         the day bicycled under shade trees.

Is hope the desire
          for the arrival of
          the ideal state of things,
          the better day, tomorrow?
          Today
          Is.


(From “Blow,” commemorating the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, 8-29-07, commissioned by the St. Tammany Parish Arts Association.)

About Dennis Formento: He is a poet and performer with free jazz/free verse band, the Frank Zappatistas, and a publisher of Surregional Press. A New Orleans native, he now lives in Slidell, LA, with his wife, visual artist, Patricia Hart. His most recent book, Looking for an Out Place, was published in January of 2010 by FootHills Publishing of Kanona, NY (buy it here). His first cd of poetry and music has just been released, recorded with guitarist Ed Barrett as the duo Vecchio Frak (“old tail coat”).

Dictators make for lousy writers ...

Qaddafi wrote disturbing children's books like "The Astronaut's Suicide"; Saddam Hussein penned novels laden with profanity and laced with bestiality; Stalin wrote uninspiring poetry; and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini wrote shockingly secular poetry. In all, dictators make for lousy writers.

A fun article examining the literary aspirations of some of the world's ruthless dictators can be found here.

Here is a quick sampling of their writings:

“Morning”

By Joseph Stalin

The pinkish bud has opened,

Rushing to the pale-blue violet

And, stirred by a light breeze,

The lily of the valley has bent over the grass.

The lark has sung in the dark blue,

Flying higher than the clouds

And the sweet-sounding nightingale

Has sung a song to children from the bushes.

Flower, oh my Georgia!

Let peace reign in my native land!

And may you, friends, make renowned

Our Motherland by study!

The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini  wrote this unnamed poem I've dubbed "Tavern." It's actually not that bad and quite surprising considering the subject matter.

“The Tavern”
By Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini

Open the door of the tavern and let us go there day and night,
For I am sick and tired of the mosque and seminary.
I have torn off the garb of asceticism and hypocrisy,
Putting on the cloak of the tavern-hunting shaykh and becoming aware.
The city preacher has so tormented me with his advice
That I have sought aid from the breath of the wine-drenched profligate.
Leave me alone to remember the idol-temple,
I who have been awakened by the hand of the tavern's idol.

And finally, an excerpt of Saddam’s Zabiba and the King

Even an animal respects a man's desire, if it wants to copulate with him. Doesn't a female bear try to please a herdsman when she drags him into the mountains as it happens in the North of Iraq? She drags him into her den, so that he, obeying her desire, would copulate with her? Doesn't she bring him nuts, gathering them from the trees or picking them from the bushes? Doesn't she climb into the houses of farmers in order to steal some cheese, nuts and even raisins, so that she can feed the man and awake in him the desire to have her?

 (The book's English translator believes the bear is supposed to represent Russia.)

"American Spring Song" by Sherwood Anderson

American Spring Song

By Sherwood Anderson

In the spring, when the winds blew and farmers were plowing fields,
It came into my mind to be glad because of my brutality.

Along a street I went and over a bridge.
I went through many streets in my city and over many bridges.
Men and women I struck with my fists, and my hands began to
     bleed.

Under a bridge I crawled, and stood trembling with joy
At the river’s edge.
Because it was spring and soft sunlight came through the cracks
     of the bridge,
I tried to understand myself.

Out of the mud at the river’s edge I molded myself a god –
A grotesque little god with a twisted face,
A god for myself and my men.

You see now, brother, how it was.

I was a man with clothes made by a Jewish tailor;
Cunningly wrought clothes, made for a nameless one.
I wore a white collar and someone had given me a jeweled pin
To wear at my throat.
That amused and hurt me too.

No one knew that I knelt in the mud beneath the bridge
In the city of Chicago.

You see I am whispering my secret to you.

I want you to believe in my insanity and to understand that I love
     God –
That’s what I want.

And then, you see, it was spring,
And the soft sunlight came through the cracks of the bridge.
I had been long alone in a strange place where no gods came.

Creep, men, and kiss the twisted face of my mud god.
I’ll not hit you with my bleeding fists –
I’m a twisted God myself.

It is spring and love has come to me.
Love has come to me and to my men.


American Spring Song, by Sherwood Anderson. Public Domain



Portrait of Sherwood Anderson

by Carl Van Vechten (1933)

Sherwood Anderson

(September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941)

Sherwood Anderson was a writer best known for his short stories, most notably the collection Winesburg, Ohio, which he began writing in 1919. Critics trace his influence on several American authors including Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and John Steinbeck. In fact, it was through his influence that first books of both Faulkner and Hemingway were published.

A native of Ohio, Anderson forever endeared himself to the Arts community when, on Nov. 28, 1912, he "left business for literature," simply walking out of his office as president of the Anderson Manufacturing Co. in Elyria, Ohio, not only giving up a dream of becoming rich in American business, but also abandoning his responsibilities as a middle-class citizen, including a wife and three small children.

He and by-then his third wife, Elizabeth Prall, moved to New Orleans in 1924, settling briefly into the historic Pontalba Apartments adjoining Jackson Square. He quickly became part of New Orleans's vibrant literary and artistic scene, drinking with the likes of writers, William Faulkner, Lyle Saxon, Hamilton Basso, and artists William Spratling, Caroline Durieux and Ellsworth Woodward. Visitors like John Dos Passos, Carl Sandburg and Anita Loos dropped in now and then. Faulkner lived with Spratling for a time, and together they wrote and published Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles in 1926. Anderson wrote of Faulkner in his short story A Meeting South.

According to writers Robert Phelps and Peter Deane in their tome, The Literary Life: A Scrapbook Almanac of the Anglo-American Literary Scene from 1900 to 1950, Sherwood Anderson was responsible for encouraging Faulkner to complete his first novel in 1925:

“En route to Europe for the first time, Willliam Faulkner stops over in New Orleans, meets Sherwood Anderson, and lingers for six months, during which he completes his first novel, Soldier’s Pay. A little later, reportedly in gratitude for not having been asked to read the manuscript, Anderson recommends it to his own publisher.”

During this period, Sherwood Anderson wrote Many Marriages (1923) and Dark Laughter (1925). F. Scott Fitzgerald praised Many Marriages, saying it was Anderson’s finest work. Dark Laughter, a novel rooted in his New Orleans experience and Anderson's only best-seller, was famously satirized by Ernest Hemingway in his novel The Torrents of Spring.

The poem “American Spring Song” was published in 1918 in a collection of his poetry, Mid-American Chants.

Sherwood Anderson died of peritonitis on a trip to Panama when a broken toothpick perforated his intestines, aged 64. He was buried at Round Hill Cemetery in Marion, Virginia. His epitaph reads, "Life Not Death is the Great Adventure".

A detailed account of his life can be found here.

(Portrait of Sherwood Anderson by Carl Van Vechten (1933) Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection, reproduction number LOT 12735, no. 52.)

Nature Poems in a Post-Natural Age

Poet Gary Snyder thinks the landscape of contemporary poetry should include wildflowers . . . and highway fast food joints.


By John Felstiner

Reprinted with permission

Poetry Media Services

Gary Snyder. Photo by Leon Borensztei.

One of the original voices of the Beat Generation, Gary Snyder has been publishing poems for over 50 years. In addition to writing poems, Snyder has had a firm commitment to sustainability, a concern that is echoed in both his poems and essays.

John Felstiner: Do you remember some moment in your recent or remote past when you got the connection between poetry and environmental consciousness, where you felt it as a kind of absolute truth?

Gary Snyder: I grew up with it. Beginning when I was four years old, five years old, in the countryside, in a wooded landscape north of Seattle, back in the days when kids weren’t programmed. We just ran loose around the family dairy farm and went through the gap in the fence and right back into the woods. I felt as welcome and as much at home in the forest, second-growth forest growing back, as I did anyplace else, and I was comforted by it. I was always easy being alone. And if I went with a friend, that was fine too.

JF: How would one distinguish an environmental poem from what is sometimes called an ecological poem?

GS: Look at the words. “Environment” means the surroundings. The surroundings can include an oil refinery, can include all of Los Angeles and the I-5 strip. That’s the environment too, whatever surrounds us.

JF: So there’s an “us” in “environment.”

GS: Everything surrounds everything else. Yes. What is “ecological”? Etymologically, the "household of nature" is what's being called up. “Ecological” refers to the systems of biological nature, which include energy, and mineral and chemical transformations and pathways. “The environment” is used more commonly to also include human and technological productions. And it’s not an absolute, hard and fast separation. . . .

JF: Have you written poems that could be qualified as one way or the other, or as both together—environmental and ecological?

GS: The best example is in this little book right here, Danger on Peaks.
“In the Santa Clarita Valley”: That is the first valley north of the San Fernando Valley on Interstate 5. There’s a little river there, and it has become almost entirely suburban development now. Here's the poem:

Like skinny wildweed flowers sticking up

hexagonal “Denny’s” sign
starry “Carl’s”
loopy “McDonald’s”
eight-petaled yellow “Shell”
blue-and-white “Mobil” with a big red “O”

growing in the asphalt riparian zone
by the soft roar of the flow
of Interstate 5.

This is playing with the possibility that we might look at the human, physical, made environment as if it were natural environment.

JF: So we move from “Mobil” into a “riparian zone.”

GS: Yeah.

JF: And hear that word “flow” for the highway.

GS: Right, it’s ironic. I comment when I read this in meetings, that this is to help prepare us for a post-natural age. For writing nature poems in a post-natural age.

JF: We were speaking of (William Carlos) Williams’ “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” In 1950 or so he took his Western tour, and he came to Reed, where you were with your poet friends. Is there anything specific you remember about that event?

GS: What stayed with me was how he said ultimately the poet, the artist, brings to society and to the world "conviviality.” That surprised me and stayed with me: conviviality. He said art is about conviviality. I saw instantly that this goes past the idea of the solitary, romantic, lonely artist suffering for his art, which I never trusted. And the acknowledgment that artists have a role in society, which is to contribute to the community — to the heart of the community.
Take Williams’ statement that people “die for lack of what is found there,” I think this means lack of open-heartedness, lack of sweetness and tenderness to each other. But then a little later I saw that meaning also as ecological, that openness not just for the human community but for the natural community; it’s for our immediate neighborhood of all the other species, all of us passing through time. I get angered when the bears eat my apples right off the tree. But I can say well, okay, they got to them first; they must have enjoyed them.

John Felstiner’s translations and critical work have been widely published and awarded. He teaches at Stanford. John's newest book, So Much Depends, dealing with poetry and environmental urgency, will be published by Yale University Press in 2008.
© 2007 by John Felstiner. All rights reserved.
Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

Creating Fresh Imagery

Here’s an exercise I use in my creative writing classes that I’ve found to be effective for creating very unique, fresh and powerful images:

Draw a line down the center of a piece of notebook paper. On the left side of the page, list tangible, concrete nouns: brick, shovel, river, mountain, etc....

On the right side of the page, list intangible nouns: trouble, love, sorrow, desire...

(Just flip open the dictionary if your mind gets stuck)

Now combine the tangibles with the intangibles in a phrase like this: “a shovel full of sorrow,” or “a river of trouble.” Let yourself get carried away with this, and you will come up with some very powerful images.

Here’s an example I’ve created for illustrative purposes:

TANGIBLE               INTANGIBLE
1. Pebble                    Anger
2. River                      Sorrow
3. Mountain                Grief
4. Street                     Fear
5. knife                       Happiness
6. Shoe                      Greed
7. Spoon                    Jealousy
8. Chalice                   Hate
9. Thorn                     Loathing
10. Mirror                  Joy
11. Bus                      Glee
12. Fist                      Merriment
13. Pothole                Trouble
14. Weeds                 Woe
15. Lake                    Guilt
16. House                  Wisdom
17. Train                    Intelligence
18. Boat                    Despair
19. Shovel                 Sensitivity
20. Cup                     Regret
21. Gourd                  Loss
22. Missile                 Anguish
23. Silo                      Insanity
24. Mouthful              Foolishness
25. Beach                  Depression

Now just start playing with it ...

A pothole of depression...a train of trouble...a beach of sorrow... a busload of hate...a shovel of regret...(pricked by) the thorn of jealousy...a spoonful of greed....weeds of regret... (storing) a silo of anger... a lake of grief...a chalice of sorrow... a cup of joy... a fist of wisdom... shoes of glee... a mirror of loathing...a street of woe...a cup of fear ... a river of insanity... a pothole of wisdom... a river of sorrow... a cup of depression... a mountain of woe... a missile of insanity... a house of (pick it)... a pebble of happiness.... a pothole of happiness.... a river of despair... a mountain of anguish ... (greeted by) a fist of happiness.... a mouthful of foolishness.... a mouthful of anger... a silo of guilt...

You can be the judge, but personally, I’ve identified several intriguing combinations that I think make for creative images.

Have fun.

Noche de Cita: A poem by Donald G. Redman

Noche de Cita
(Date Night)
by Donald G. Redman

Corona in yellow neon
illuminates the window
next to our corner table,
bathing us in a warm glow.

I’ve been drinking and I’m in love.
I weave my arm through the clutter
of plates and bottles and glasses
and grab your hand like a lecher.

I give you a tawdry wink
but you are too gracious to mock.
You smile conspiratorially
and turn to read the cactus clock.

I crave your neck in that moment,
with lemons and blue agave
and the saltiness of your flesh;
your intoxicating bouquet.

Neon peppers like red lips
peck the yellow wall behind you
and I think of Klimt’s “The Kiss”
and of making love to you.

Our waitress returns, busing our
plates littered with taco debris,
diced tomatoes, lettuce, grains of
Spanish rice and guacamole.

She asks if we want something else.
“A margarita, por favor.”
She turns to leave but you stop her,
telling her, “No más. No more.”

We’ve had enough; it’s time to leave.
You’re right, of course, we should go
but I want to stay here and keep
drinking you and José Cuervo.

Your lips part for the last sip
of plum-red sangria wine.
You wink and whisper the kids aren’t
home and we may still have time.

We stroll out like young lovers,
your hand inside mine like a glove
and I’m blue with happiness.
I’ve been drinking and I’m in love.


Copyright 2011 Donald G. Redman All Rights Reserved. Photo illustration by Donald G. Redman

Thinking in Images

by Donald G. Redman

We tend to think of images as objects seen, but the term also applies to our other senses: sounds, texture, odors and taste. Of the three genres that interest me most (poetry, fiction, playwriting) it is poetry that is most dependent upon images for impact. Indeed, sense perception is crucial for the poet and plays a vitally important role in the poetic creative process, more so than any other textual form of art.

All good writers are keen observers of their environs, but poets in particular seem to be more in tune with the senses and possess the ability to see, hear, feel, smell and taste more than the average person. While most of us usually gloss over our surroundings, poets are able to harvest powerful images from the mundane, be they spider webs; a leaf-clogged gutter; a dead squirrel in the middle of the street; arthritic hands; or a store display of red slippers:

Red Slippers
By Amy Lowell

Red slippers in a shop-window; and outside in the street, flaws of gray, windy sleet!

Behind the polished glass the slippers hang in long threads of red, festooning from the ceiling like stalactites of blood, flooding the eyes of the passers-by with dripping color, jamming their crimson reflections against the windows of cabs and tram-cars, screaming their claret and salmon into the teeth of the sleet, plopping their little round maroon lights upon the tops of umbrellas.

The row of white, sparkling shop-front is gashed and bleeding, it bleeds red slippers. They spout under the electric light, fluid and fluctuating, a hot rain – and freeze again to red slippers, myriadly multiplied in the mirror side of the window.
They balance upon arched insteps like springing bridges of crimson lacquer; they swing up over curved heels like whirling tanagers sucked in a wind-pocket; they flatten out, heelless, like July ponds, flared and burnished by red rockets.
Snap, snap, they are cracker sparks of scarlet in the white monotonous block of shops.
They plunge the clangor of billions of vermillion trumpets into the crowd outside, and echo in faint rose over the pavement.

People hurry by, for these are only shoes, and in a window farther down is a big lotus bud of cardboard, whose petals open every few minutes and reveal a wax doll, with staring bead eyes and flaxen hair, lolling awkwardly in its flower chair.
One has often seen shoes, but whoever saw a cardboard lotus bud before?

The flaws of gray, windy sleet beat on the shop-window where there are only red slippers.

Lowell’s use of imagery is brilliant. Aside from the obvious visual contrast of red against gray, Lowell also uses sound imagery in very effective ways: “dripping,” “screaming,” “plopping,” “Snap, snap,” “cracker sparks,” “clangor” “trumpets,” “echo,” and the sound of “windy sleet” beating against the shop window.

Maxwell Bodenheim finds poetry on the rear balconies of an apartment complex. Take a quick moment to read Bodenheim’s “The Rear-Porches Of An Apartment-Building,” found here.

Again, a mundane scene, this one in the courtyard of an apartment complex, is described in vivid detail with color: yellow pears, lavender-white eyes, a red fan; sound: the girl’s singing, pears being peeled, and the unstated sounds of the urban setting beyond the confines of the apartment building; and taste: cakes and pears.

In the hands of a skillful poet, art exists in the ordinary. Alice Corbin’s “Sand Painting” captures a full day, from dawn to night, with exquisite imagery:

Sand Paintings
By Alice Corbin

The dawn breeze
Loosens the leaves
Of the trees;
The wide sky quivers
With awakened birds.

Two blue runners
Come from the east;
One has a scarf of silver,
One flings pine-boughs
Across the sky.

Noon-day stretched
In gigantic slumber –
Red copper cliffs
Rigid in sunlight.

An old man stoops
For a forgotten fagot –
Forehead of bronze
Between white locks
Bound with a rag of scarlet.

Where one door stands open,
The female moon
Beckons to darkness
And disappears.

I draw your attention to Corbin’s poem to highlight an important rule writers must always keep in mind– avoid clichés and tired phrases. Here, instead of writing “leaves rustled in the wind,” or “wind-blown leaves,” Corbin writes that the breeze has loosened the leaves. She also avoids writing about squawking birds or birds chirping by phrasing it as the sky quivering “with awakened birds.” Her description of the setting sun is also brilliantly detailed as an old man with:
“Forehead of bronze
Between white locks
Bound with a rag of scarlet.”

What beautiful imagery!

Charles Bukowski avoids the cliché in his poem, “The Crunch,” by brilliantly converting the ubiquitous “faceless strangers” into “strangers with faces like the backs of thumb tacks.”

For obvious reasons sight imagery is the tool most frequently employed by poets, but sound imagery can be equally effective in the development of a poem. Sound, or the imagined sound, in Amy Lowell’s “Red Slippers” was vital to creating an image of what certainly cannot be described as “quiet desperation,” but rather the internal rancor of ignored beauty.

Carl Sandburg uses the sound of a boat’s foghorn to great effect to describe the feeling of being lost.

Lost
By Carl Sandberg

Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where the fog trails and mist creeps,
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly,
Like some lost child
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbor’s breast
And the harbor’s eyes.

In using sounds, poets have to be much more creative than using broad generalities. The roar of the ocean, the roar of traffic, the rustling of leaves ... they’re exhausted phrases that mean very little to the reader. Instead, we must work harder to isolate the sounds and convey them in ways that are new and meaningful.

But what if our specific poem is indeed inspired by the sound of waves crashing against rocks or the pitter-patter of rainfall? I can only suggest that you keep it in the initial drafts and work with it until you find a new twist of a phrase or a better metaphor or simile.

In her poem “Fallen,” Alice Corbin uniquely describes the sound of an imagined wave washing over the body of a dying soldier: “The tide passed, and the waves came and whispered about his ankles.” Describing the faint sound of a dying wave rolling onto the beach – a sound I’m sure we all know so well – to express it as a whisper is simply brilliant.

Sights and sounds are on full display in Amy Lowell’s “1777 I. The Trumpet-Vine Arbour, II. The City of Falling Leaves”  (read it here).While the subject of the “Trumpet-Vine” may appear old fashioned – a tribute to the American Revolution – Lowell’s use of sound and color is nevertheless worthy of study. “The City of Falling Leaves” is simply gorgeous – a painting in words.

The remaining senses – touch, smell and taste – are even harder to express than sound, but deserve our consideration and effort. The imagery can be created from small observations like the feel of grains of salt spilled on the table; the scent of a child who has been playing outside; the smell and taste of a strawberry margarita with a freshly squeezed lime; the scent of pine or the tackiness of pinesap.

Lola Ridge’s “Iron Wine” assaults our senses of sight, smell and taste.

Iron Wine
By Lola Ridge

The ore in the crucible is pungent, smelling like acrid wine,
It is dusky red, like the ebb of poppies,
And purple, like the blood of elderberries.
Surely it is a strong wine - juice distilled of the fierce iron.
I am drunk of its fumes.
I feel its fiery flux
Diffusing, permeating,
Working some strange alchemy…
So that I turn aside from the goodly board,
So that I look askance upon the common cup,
And from the mouths of crucibles
Suck forth the acrid sap.

Accomplished poets rely on chance observations, but novice poets like me have to make it a habit to notice the sounds, odors, textures and sights around me, and to craft new ways to describe them that will be acknowledged by the reader.

Nicholson Baker Talks Poetry

Can a novel capture contemporary poetry’s (dour, curmudgeonly) zeitgeist?

Nicholson Baker interviewed by Jesse Nathan
Poetry Media Services

Paul Chowder—the protagonist of Baker’s latest novel, The Anthologist—is a minor poet. He writes forgettable verse. He is deeply enamored of rhyme and meter. He is suspicious of the waves of free verse that have flooded the last one hundred years of literary history.
The novel that unfolds centers on Chowder’s quest to finish a long-overdue introduction to an anthology of rhyming poetry he’s editing.
I called Nick at his home in Maine to have a conversation about all this. What follows is what followed.

Jesse Nathan: Why a novel?

Nicholson Baker: Because some lines of poetry make me happy. How do you capture that pleasure? A novel lets you write sloppily about the things you love. You can be as selective as you want to. It’s very freeing, and it’s truer to the way poems live in the mind.

JN: Poetry is the art form you can carry in your head, and you can give it to somebody by opening your mouth and reciting, or you can say a line aloud to yourself in an empty hayloft. You can’t do that with any other art form.

NB: It’s true. You can’t carry around a Turner landscape and recite bits of it. You can hum a Brahms piano piece, but it isn’t the same.

JN: Paul Chowder says there’s too much poetry being written.

NB: It’s a feeling of simple unmanageability. So many poems every year. And the fearful onslaught of this much production, combined with the knowledge that you can’t possibly know where to find the gems, can be overwhelming. You need to find a rock and sit still for a bit.

JN: Paul Chowder is alarmingly normal. Is he too normal to be a great poet?

NB: I think that’s his deep fear. And it’s certainly—well, how much to say?—it has certainly been a worry of my own. He thinks that to be a great poet, you have to have a life marred by some kind of great . . .

JN: Pain?

NB: Pain, yes. But of course he’s wrong. It’s a fallacy. Even if he were in terrible pain, it wouldn’t guarantee that he had what it took to be a great poet.

JN: Why does so much American verse sound like it’s been translated from another language?

NB: Maybe it’s that certain poems are looking for some identifying plumage in order to say, “I’m a poem. I may be read aloud and then you won’t be able to see any of the oddities of my layout, but still I am a poem, I am speaking to you with a recognizably translated-sounding accent.” It’s kind of what happened to Poe. If you read “The Bells” or “The Raven,” I mean, it’s just a chocolate-covered cherry of lyricism, it’s so sweet. And then people like Mallarmé seized on those poems and translated them into beautiful pure French prose, and that de-rhymed prose fed back into American Modernist poetry. I think it was Alice Corbin Henderson in Poetry, way back when, who first wrote about that phenomenon: Poe in French translation fueled Modernism in English.

JN: Has poetry been important to your novel-writing?

NB: Yes, poetry taught me to write prose. I don’t have the talent to be a poet, and that’s a disappointment, of course, but there are other ways to put truths down on the page. So I felt that I could recover from the shock.

JN: Paul Chowder meditates on Marinetti, the Italian poet and the father of Futurism, and he describes the way Marinetti’s writing made a fetish of destruction, and how it emphasized the need for hardness and coldness and machinelike attitudes toward everything.

NB: Right, and this in turn so obviously overstimulated people like Ezra Pound and Benito Mussolini—and I’m sure you can take it too far almost instantly, because there are a lot of other reasons why huge, horrifying political movements arise, but at the very beginning there’s Marinetti.

JN: Paul very directly traces Marinetti’s ideas to the rise of fascism.

NB: And in some ways the question about the violent beginnings of Modernism is answered directly, because during the war Ezra Pound went even further off the deep end than Marinetti ever had.

JN: What is the question at the beginning of Modernism?

NB: What’s the energy that motivates us? Is it the energy to make new, or is it simply the desire to break? If it’s just to break, if it’s just hostility, then it doesn’t get you very far. And in Marinetti and Pound there’s an awful lot of hostility, and a bossiness, of insisting that your way is the right way. A really good poem makes its case without making its case. It doesn’t insist that its way is the only way. That’s what’s so beautiful about “The Fish,” by Elizabeth Bishop. She just bends over the fish and looks it in the eye and then lets it go. Her description of what happened is just one description. She’s not insisting on something big. She’s not a manifesto writer. She’s a letter writer. Those are the two antipodes of Modernism, I think: manifestoes versus letters. A letter is anchored in a single day and is to a particular person and is not attempting to change anything.

Jesse Nathan is an associate editor at McSweeney’s Publishing in San Francisco, managing editor of the Best American Nonrequired Reading, and a contributing editor at theRumpus.net. His writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Tin House, Adbusters, and elsewhere. This article first appeared at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/.

Distributed by the Poetry Foundation.

Noche de Cita – a poem under construction

These are just my rough notes. I'm still adding to them. I intend to deconstruct and recononstruct in a more formalized poetic format.


Noche de Cita
(Date Night)
I’ve been drinking and I’m in love.
We’re nestled in the corner of the restaurante, sitting on straight back chairs flanking a small table set for two. Jalapeño peppers in green neon flicker against the ochre yellow wall behind you.
I sweep the beer bottles aside and reach across the table for your hand and give a tawdry wink. I think I’m being sexy. You are too gracious to laugh. Luscious lips form a knowing smile and you lower your gaze like an embarrassed schoolgirl.
Someone enters the restaurant and you lift your head to see if it’s someone we know.
I crave your regal neck in that moment. I imagine the faintly salty taste of your flesh with lemon and tequila. I am filled with agave and desire.
Our waitress returns and I lean back and finish my beer while she buses our table, removing plates smeared with red salsa and guacamole and littered with taco shards and lettuce and diced tomatoes and shredded yellow cheese.
She asks if I want something else. Dessert perhaps?
“Dos cervezas más,” I say, winking.
You cancel the order, saying we’ve had enough. You’re right, of course, but I want to stay where I am, bathed in the light of green neon jalapeños and red chili peppers, with cervezas and tequila coursing through my blood. I plead like a child resisting bedtime. You clasp my hand and look deeply into my eyes and wink.
I’ve been drinking and I’m in love.

Copyright 2011 Donald G. Redman All Rights Reserved

"Train" ... a story under contruction

The following is the first draft of a novella I’m currently writing. Well, I think it’ll be a novella. I’m working from a rough outline I wrote after awaking from a dream. I plan to publish excerpts of the story as it evolves. I have absolutely no idea for a working title, so for now I’m filing it simply as “Train.”...

Leonard Morris glanced up at the clock on the wall and then removed a pocket watch from his vest. He lifted his spectacles from his nose to read the watch face and determined that the two timepieces jived with one another. No doubt about it, the train was late – again!

He was not waiting to catch the train, in fact, Leonard Morris had never ridden on a train before, nor was he expecting anyone special to arrive by train, nor was he waiting for a delivery of any sort. No, Leonard Morris was simply a man who liked things to be in order. “A place for everything and everything in its place,” and so on....
On his fortieth birthday, after taking much ridicule for his lack of spontaneity, Leonard proclaimed to a gathering of his friends that he would henceforth adopt a devil-may-care attitude, and then he abruptly bade everyone a goodnight; it was nine o’clock after all, and a week night to boot.
The evening of his fortieth birthday nevertheless did have an impact on him and after much internal reflection, Leonard Morris vowed to be more spontaneous. Energized by the thought of adding more gusto to his otherwise tidy life, Leonard promptly set out to map, chart and schedule impromptu excursions like hikes up the mountain, trips to the zoo, spending sprees at the library’s used book sale and such. The calendar chock full of excitement, Leonard Morris was smugly satisfied that if he ever got the impulse to do something spontaneous, say on the eighteenth of March, he would be prepared for it.
It just so happened that on the eighteenth of March, which was just days away, Leonard had planned to spontaneously attend Lee Valley’s annual Spring Fling. For the occasion, he had dropped off his custom-made dancing boots at Tyler & Sons for resoling. They were due to be picked up that day, and Leonard quietly hoped that the cobblers did not operate their business like the Timberland Railroad Company of late.
“No way to run a railroad,” Leonard said out loud while returning the watch to his vest pocket. There was no one in the office to hear his complaint; it was Monday and his secretary Agnes, the only other person who occupied the office with Leonard, was at the post office collecting the mail.
It was a half past the hour, a sufficient passage of time, Leonard surmised, that freed him to grouse about the train being late without looking petulant. He had once overheard Agnes describe him to someone over the phone as “petty.” She was obviously still sore for being docked in pay after arriving fifteen minutes late to work, but it nonetheless hurt Leonard’s pride to be so summarily dismissed as a pettifogger. He was fastidious, perhaps, even persnickety, but never petty.
Leonard arose from behind his heavy, oak desk and grabbed his gabardine jacket and black fedora from the hall tree. He didn’t normally take a coffee break this early in the morning, but unexpected rains had dashed his impromptu hike through the forest and so he spent the weekend completing piles of paperwork, leaving him with very little to do at the moment. Besides, no one would ever imagine that he would show up at the Blue Mountain Coffeehouse before ten o’clock, and although it felt a bit scandalous, that was, after all, the whole point of being spontaneous.
He picked up a clock-shaped sign reading, “Will return,” and moved the little clock hands to 10:00 and placed it in the window where customers could read it. He gently shut the glass pane door to his office behind him and walked north on the sidewalk, passing Gloria’s Morning Glory flower shop. Gloria was at that moment attaching a flyer to the inside of her storefront window reminding customers that the annual Spring Fling was quickly approaching and that gentlemen may want to consider ordering corsages now for their dates.
“Morning, Gloria,” Leonard said, tipping his hat to florist. She smiled and mouthed something, but Leonard couldn’t hear it because of the glass separating them, but he was confident she was just responding to the greeting and walked onward.
Gloria’s voice from behind stopped him. “Leonard? Leonard?” she called out. He turned to face her. “Where are you going, Leonard?” she asked.
He was caught by surprise by such a question. “Why, I am going to get a cup of coffee.”
“Do you know what time it is?” she asked.
“I most certainly do,” Leonard said indignantly. He spun around and walked briskly to the corner of the block where he found the elderly Lars Jensen sweeping the entranceway to Jensen’s Hardware. Mr. Jensen was humming lightly to himself while he swept, his hunched back turned toward Leonard.
“Good morning, Mr. Jensen,” said Leonard.
“Whoa! Good grief, my boy!” said Mr. Jensen with a jump. “You scared me half to death, Leonard. What are you doing sneaking up on people?”
“I wasn’t sneaking up on any one, Mr. Jensen. I’m sorry I startled you, but I was on my way to the Blue Mountain and I saw you there and I only wanted to tell you good morning.”
“The Blue Mountain? It’s time for your coffee break already?” Mr. Jensen asked. “I must have got caught up in a daydream or something. I hope I’m not coming down with that Old Timers disease. What time is it anyway?”
“You’re not suffering from Old Timers, Mr. Jensen. I simply decided to break for coffee early, that’s all,” Leonard said, trying to keep a smile on his face.
“Well if that don’t beat all,” said Mr. Jensen. “I never took you for a loafer, but I guess you never really know people.”
Leonard’s smile slipped completely off his face. “I am not a loafer,” he said.
“It’s none of my business, Leonard,” Mr. Jensen said. “You can spend the whole day drinking coffee if you want and it won’t mean a thing to me. It’s a free country. But I have to tell you, I’m really disappointed in you, Leonard. All these years you’ve taken your coffee breaks exactly at ten in the morning and again at two in the afternoon. Just like clockwork. You used to be a hard worker, but now all of a sudden you’re taking a break whenever you feel like it, sneaking up on people...”
“I was not sneaking,” Leonard said.
“... scaring the wits out of folks. I think maybe you’re going through some sort of phase or something. It that it, Leonard? Are you going through the Middle Ages or something?”
“Have a nice day, Mr. Jensen,” Leonard said with a nod of his head. He turned and walked across East Main Street, stepped over the railroad tracks, and crossed West Main Street to reach another row of businesses.
It had always been to Leonard Morris’ considerable consternation that the founders of Lee Valley had decided to run a railroad right down the very center of town. The town’s main street was in effect two narrow roads bordering either side of the tracks, with East Main Street on one side and West Main Street on the other. They were one way streets: East Main Street ran north and West Main Street headed south. Of course, Leonard had complained in the past to other townsfolk, but they had merely shrugged their shoulders and sighed, “What can you do?”

Copyright Donald G. Redman 2011 All rights reserved

"A Song for December" -- by Donald G. Redman

A Song for December
by Donald G. Redman

“Turn it up, daddy!” she pleaded
as I pulled into the driveway.
Her “favorite” song was on the radio.
She has a million favorite songs.
I turned the volume up and eased the truck
to a stop and placed the gearshift in park.
“Wait!” she cried as I reached for the keys.
She wanted us to stay
until the song was over.
I turned the headlights off
and the night swallowed us whole.
I killed the engine but
left the radio on
so she could sing her
duet with Taylor Swift.
She sang with the abandon
only a nine-year-old can do –
unashamedly and without pretense.
She glanced up at me and smiled,
then closed her eyes to block me out
so I wouldn’t ruin the moment.
The cab was bathed
in the soft blue light of the radio.
The music was loud and my little girl
was singing her heart out.
And so was Taylor Swift:
“I'd go back to December, turn around and make it alright
I go back to December all the time...”
I wanted us to remain forever in that moment –
huddled together inside the truck
on a cold, moonless December night,
listening to music and singing.
But all too suddenly the concert was over.
The stage went black.
It was time to go home.
She opened her eyes, smiled
and hopped out of the truck.
I turned the radio off, grabbed the keys
and silently entered the house.
As time moves me further away from that night
I hope I’ll be able to find my way back
to the cab of that truck
and find my girl there
singing her little heart out.
If I could
I’d go back to December all the time.

 
Copyright 2011 Donald G. Redman All rights reserved