Friday Fiction
Postcards 1

The door to her father’s house opened before Tiggy could raise the brass knocker.

“Oh, great,” said her father. “You’re just in time to cook me breakfast. Come in. Come in,” He stood aside to let her pass and she pecked a kiss at his cheek as she hurried by, overnight bag in the hand closer to him. Tiggy held her breath as she went. She knew the smell emanating from her father would be as ripe as it was during her last visit, if not worse.

“I’ll make you breakfast in a moment, dad. I’ll just take these upstairs first.”

When she came down, her post-drive ablutions completed, she went straight to the kitchen. Her father sat at the breakfast table, restless fingers playing the piano of the table top in arrhythmic Morse Code messages.

“At last,” her father muttered. “Where have you been?”

“Just tidying up, dad,” Tiggy smiled. “You know it’s a long drive.”

“I want scrambled eggs. On toast. Make them like your mother used to.”

Tiggy thought of the dry overcooked eggs her mother used to scrape out of the burnt to a crisp saucepan and sighed. Her almost-liquid, cordon bleu divinity was the real thing. Scrambled eggs, indeed. And so much salt. More like bacalao, dried salt cod with a little bit of yellow to imitate an egg.

Tiggy picked up a saucepan for the eggs. Filthy. She went to the sink and started to scrub it.

“You don’t need to do that,” her father said. “It’s clean.”

“It’ll be cleaner when I’ve finished, dad. Don’t you worry.”

“Here,” her father handed her some plates. “You might as well wash these as well. They won’t be clean enough for you.”

Greasy films layered the plates where yesterday’s bacon had solidified. Hard lumps of egg stuck to the cracks that road-mapped the plates’ surface.

“I’ll look after it, dad. You sit down and rest. I’m home now.”

“At last,” Tiggy’s father grunted.

Tiggy took in her father’s face. He had put on weight and red veins ran red and blue tattoos across the unshaven surface. He breathed with difficulty, but she knew he angered with ease. She also knew she must tread with care.

Tiggy looked for and found the end of a roll of paper towels, the same one she had bought on her last visit, and she dried saucepan, plates, and cutlery, putting the saucepan on the stove and laying cutlery and plates neatly in a space she created on the cluttered table. Her father pushed his setting aside and struggled to his feet.

“Here, let me help you.”

“That’d be great, dad. You do the toast, I’ll get the eggs,” Tiggy walked to the fridge, searched in vain for some butter, and carefully selected three large brown eggs.

Her father followed her to the fridge.

“Here, use up this cracked one,” he handed her a white egg with a large crack that mapped a thin contour from big end to little end.

Tiggy reached for the egg. She grasped it and felt the cold icy creep of the army of white camouflaged maggots that seethed along the crack. She shuddered and the egg slipped from her fingers, dropping to the kitchen’s flagstone floor where it shattered. A rich, ripe stench arose and ghosted through the air to tickle Tiggy’s nostrils. Her stomach heaved.

Having washed her hands, she cracked each of the three eggs individually into a saucer, checked each one, then put it into the saucepan. Next, she took a wooden spoon from the drawer and started to blend the eggs.

Meanwhile, her father sat back down at the table, toast forgotten, and recommenced his Morse Code save my soul messages.

Tiggy opened one cupboard, then another, in search of bread. Finally, she found the remains of a sliced loaf in a dark corner and brought it out into the light. The first slice she extracted from the bag reminded her of a painting from Picasso’s Blue Period. Lots of penicillin, but toast for scrambled eggs?

“I know,” her father said. “I’ve eaten it before. Just scrape the blue stuff off. It’ll be fine. I eat it all the time.”

“You can’t eat that,” Tiggy threw the bread in the garbage. “I’ll just serve you the eggs on the plate.”

Tiggy scraped the burnt, dry eggs onto her father’s plate.

“Lovely,” he said. “Just like your mum’s.”

Dydd Dewi Sant Hapus
Happy St. David’s Day

March the First, St. David’s Day:  and here, in Island View, the snow gradually accumulates and I can hardly see the trees at the bottom of the garden. A squirrel gnaws at the sunflower seeds put out by my beloved on the step by the sliding window so that Princess Squiffy, the house cat, can have her morning cartoon show, her Squiff and Squirrel, through the glass of the sliding door. Nose to nose, cat and squirrel, separated only by a thin layer of glass, stare at each other, like Roman gladiators.

Snow continues to fall. Softly, gently, it fills the hoof prints left in yesterday’s old snow by the hungry deer who come each night to empty the bird feeders.  Gone, all gone, everything that squirrel and bird have left behind. Seven deer visit us. They troop through the garden every night, moving from tree line to feeder along regular pathways trodden down by their hooves. Sometimes I see them, late at night or early in the morning. They cast shadows beneath the moon and startle if I move too fast and they spy me at a window. If I am quiet, I see their delicate muzzles, their long black tongues reaching out to lap up the precious seeds that will keep them going through this long, hard Canadian winter, a winter made even harder this year with its incredible changes, its highs and lows, its rains and snows, its fogs and thaws, its icy rain, then plummeting temperatures with black ice threatening again and again.

St. David’s Day/ Dydd Dewi Sant. In Cardiff, Caer Dydd, the daffodils blow their trumpets beneath already flourishing trees. The Feeder Brook, also known as the Black Weir,  flows steadily to join the Taff and the Taff runs out to join the Severn, and the Severn flows out into the Irish Sea, and that joins the Atlantic, and the Atlantic flows into the Bay of Fundy, and the River St. John flows past the end of my road to eventually join the Bay of Fundy and then the Atlantic Ocean, and now, on St. David’s Day, we hold hands in a great North Atlantic Wave and we are all united, from snowy sea to shiny sea. My day-dreams carry me back to Cymru / Wales, that land of song where the wind conducts the daffodils and their pale, brass voices are raised in a hymn of hope that all will be well, that their spring, that was once my spring, will join this spring, that is now my spring, and that sunshine and flowers will triumph and that brighter days will soon return …

Not that these days aren’t bright. A new snake skin of snow covers the ground and the old, sloughed skin gradually disappears as a blank, fresh page invites new footprints.  A new month, a new page, a new beginning.  The signatures of crow and squirrel, Blue Jay and Chickadee, cat and dog appear as if by magic in the garden’s autograph album. A mysterious finger traces those special words Dydd Dewi Sant Hapus and the snow continues falling, blanking out tall memories from my old man’s mind.

Narrative and Transition
Wednesday Workshop
28 February 2018

Narrative and film have much in common. How do we tell a story? How do we tell it in words? How do we tell it in pictures? How do we tell it when we combine words and pictures? There is so much to learn about narrative from film.

I am watching a very “amateur” film on tv. The script editor is fallible and strange things are happening.  The protagonist’s car, covered in snow, turns a corner and comes out shiny black, not a snow flake on it. Hey: who are you kidding? We live in Canada. The back seat of the car is piled with luggage. The passenger turns and takes a set of files from an otherwise empty back seat. The two occupants arrive at their destination and each takes one bag from that same back seat, passenger side and driver side, leaving the back seat empty: no piled luggage.

I think you get the picture. A narrative needs smooth and logical transitions, unless the narrative demands the opposite. But even then, the transition must have a certain logic, even within the realms of surreal illogicality, a reality that has its own internal demands, often dream-like and thematic.

We are the creators of the universe we create. We determine its logic. We must have confidence in our own creative powers, and in the internal logic of the actions of our characters. We develop our instincts as we write and we learn to trust those instincts the more we write. Alas, very little work or thought was put into the movie I was watching before I broke off to write this.

As for the film transitions  themselves: (1) change of place; (2) change of speaker; (3) flashbacks; (4) dream-world; (5) change of camera angle on speakers; (6) close-ups; (7) middle distance; (8) wider panning … others are easily observable. To these, for our own written narratives, we can add (1) change of tense; (2) change of narrator; (3) change of point of view; (4) speeding up narrative; (5) slowing down narrative; (6) change of imagery / metaphor; (7) even, from time to time, a change of language, of print type, of  punctuation etc etc.

More important than anything, though, is the internal logic of the piece we are writing, be it long or short, poetry or prose. Another consideration is that of rhythm: all writing has its own rhythm and the rhythmic flow of transitions is almost as important as the magical flow of words.

Can you tell me …

…
why a man
walks out of his house,
and never returns?

…
why a woman abandons her child,
turns her back on her lover,
and looks silent at the wall?

…
why errant stars fall,
leaving their constellations
to wander the skies alone?

…
why an incoming tide
is an invasion of white water?

…
why each wave separates,
thrives for a little while,
then perishes on the beach,
wrapped up
in its lacy shroud of foam?

I have received several comments on these piece from various sources. So, following the lines of thought of my readers, to whom I am most grateful, here is the same poem, but with the verses re-arranged. If anyone would like to comment on the differences between the two versions, and which they prefer, I would be most interested (and grateful).

Revised Version
Can you tell me …

…
why an incoming tide
is an invasion of white water?…

…
why a woman abandons her child,
turns her back on her lover,
and looks silent at the wall?

…
why errant stars fall,
leaving their constellations
to wander the skies alone?

…
why a man
walks out of his house,
and never returns?

…
why each wave separates,
thrives for a little while,
then perishes on the beach,
wrapped up
in its lacy shroud of foam?

Letter to a friend

The Beetle Crusher

Railway tracks:
two parallel lines
joining together
in that impossible distance:
the single line
a mathematical mystery.

 Boys crossed the tracks
walking here and there
on Sunday outings,
or cross-country runs.

Nobody ever saw it,
but they all knew it was there,
that unexpected train,
the one that crushed the beetles,
too slow to get off the rails.

 One boy swore
he heard it once,
the Beetle Crusher.

 He said it had
the cobwebbed hoot
and whistling wail
of a ghost train
entering a scary tunnel.

Crows

commas
full stops
exclamations
periods
rain
drops

blossoms blur
censers
those branch ends
bending
beneath water

Van Gogh
flourishes
yellow
orange
red berries
distorted
on the rowan

black streaks
the crows
clogged
their wing
flaps

flying
from what
corn field
glistening
with gold

Telling a Tale
Wednesday Workshop

21 February 2018

Story telling: we all tell stories. We have told stories for thousands of years. Later we learned, as intelligent human beings, how to remember our stories by writing them down. People tell stories. They also sing stories. The singer of songs. The teller of tales. But we must never forget the oral tradition.

The oral tradition is fascinating because it is not a fixed medium: it is a very flexible one. As each tale is told, repeated from mouth to mouth, so it changes, a bit at a time. Do you remember the old story of the British soldiers in the trenches of WWI? They passed their orders whispering from man to man, mouth to ear. Legend has it that the original order “Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance” was all too easily corrupted into “Send three and four pence, we’re going to a dance.”

The oral tradition may be said to corrupt its stories. Singers who claim that they always sing their songs exactly the same way have been shown, by the objectivity of tape recordings, to alter their words at different times in different performances. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, that famous Spanish medievalist, proposed the term poeta-pueblo, the people as a poet, for the oral transformation of poems, especially the ballads / romances of the romancero, that were revised and polished and improved as they circulated orally.

Several people that I have spoken to recently (or corresponded with online) have suggested that they have problems writing their stories down. They confuse the writing process, a very slow one, with the telling process, a much quicker one, and one that is amenable to rapid revision. So, a suggestion: if you are having problems writing your story, try thinking it through, plotting it in your head, not on the page. Think before you ink. And repeat constantly so that when you write, you know what you want to write.

 Using this very simple, very traditional method, stories can be told, revised, polished … and then they can be written down. It takes some practice, but practice makes perfect, and thousands of years of literary and creative history must be respected. Become a story teller once more. And when you have told your tale, multiple times if necessary, write it down.

Whatever you do, do not confuse telling a story with the critical adage “show don’t tell”. Once you have told your tale, once it is on the page, then you can rewrite, revise, restructure, layer, improve, polish, intensify or simplify to your heart’s content. Remember: you can do this on the page (long and slow) or in your head (fast and furious). Personally, I use a combination of both methods. Try the oral method: you may like it.

Keep experimenting. Remember, you must choose what is best for you. Best wishes. Keep writing. Don’t get off the bus.