Creative Writing

So here is what I submitted for my final creative writing assignment.... click on the title to open it.

Short Story - The Picnic

After work on Friday afternoon on what was arguably the hottest day of the year, at the busiest intersection in the city and she still had to stop at the grocery store to pick up a few items for the office picnic tomorrow. Not that she was looking forward to the picnic in the first place. It usually turned into a boring collection of clickish groups with seemingly little in common. There was the new parent group with their incessant goings on about what little Mikey did this week and the young up and coming employees too pleased with themselves and their glowing youth proudly displayed in short shorts or absent tee-shirts. She usually ended up with the other middle-aged women who seemed never to get enough of less than flattering talk of their husbands or of whom so-and-so was seen with at the only posh restaurant in town. She needed a change of scenery, maybe a new job or even a new town.

The light turned green and she followed the line of cars turning into the store parking lot. John had 6 years to go before he could retire from the power plant. He, too, seemed restless lately, but when she asked he would just brush it off, “It is nothing, just the heat,” he would say. Twenty-five years they had been together, best friends and lovers. Both of their children were grown, and nearly through college. It was just the two of them now in that big house they had mended and fixed and grown into. Could she really leave this place? Could John? It was his hometown; she came to live here after they were married. It seemed she never quite fit in as one of the locals. That’s the problem with small towns she would tell him.

Once in the grocery store she tried to focus on what she needed to get for the potato salad she was going to fix for the picnic; a bag of red potatoes, green and red peppers, red onion, sweet pickles, mustard, mayonnaise and eggs. Everybody seemed to be at the grocery store this afternoon, the checkout isles were all open and all had several people at each queue.
“Kathy, wait up!” came a voice from one of the isles. Kathy turned and saw Mary waving at her intently. What is it now, she thought. Mary always had some minor catastrophe she was in the middle of, but she turned and walked back towards her.

“I’m so glad I caught you,” Mary said. “The Arts committee met last night and your name came up as someone who knows about web design.” Oh God here it comes, Kathy thought. Why can’t people just leave me be for awhile. I’m tired of being pulled every which way. “Steve, the fellow that had been taking care of it is leaving and we have to get the changes to the web page before the show next week. We’d sure appreciate it if you would take a look and let us know if you can manage it for us,” she finished.

“Well, I don’t know,” Kathy said.

“You’re our last hope on this Kathy, no one else is familiar with the web stuff, we really need your help,” she pleaded.

“Ok, I suppose I can have a look,” Kathy conceded. “Can we meet at my place Sunday?”
“Sure that’d be great. I can be at your place at 1:00. Thanks Kathy, you’re great!” She beamed and spun around down the next isle.

What was it that so seemed to be closing in around her. Was it this place, or her job, or the constant pull on her time, or the concern about John’s health. Some days she just felt trapped.

We are moving on from poems. Actually, I've sort of enjoyed the poetry work, it has been interesting trying to get ideas into very structured formats.

So this week our exercise is to come up with a monologue. Frank gives us a list of personas to choose from, all of them look like they would be tough as they are pretty far out most of them. I landed on the prostitute. So given the persona the formula for the monologue is as follows:

You are in a room looking out of a window
You stop looking out of the window, but you’re still in the room.
Something happens either in the room or outside
You have a recollection
You leave the room.
You wish for something

The Result:


Chrome Kitchen

City lights gleam and shimmer in the dark night outside the large window. The view from the twenty-fifth floor is mesmerizing. Golden streetlights glow in the distance, red taillights and yellow headlights pulse in the veins of the streets far below. The cold clear window in front of me mutes the vibrant sounds of life.

I turn slowly from the window; the bedroom around me is dark and silent. I pull the silky robe more tightly around my shoulders, but the chill comes from inside me. Across the room, neatly draped over the back of the chair is the fine new royal blue dress, tailored so that it hugs my body as if made just for me. Fine clothes and shoes and sparkling jewelry fill the wardrobe and dressing table in the corner.

In the kitchen the kettle begins to whistle. He rolls over, the sheets rustle softly, but he doesn’t wake. The bedroom dissolves around me into the kitchen of my childhood; rough, paint-chipped cupboards, two mismatched chairs askew by the chrome trimmed kitchen table, and the little kettle on the gas stove, whistling demanding attention. Mom, in her dress, faded and frayed at the cuffs, tells me to go wake my younger sisters or they will be late for school. Mom’s new boyfriend sits at the table smoking a cigarette. He smiles and watches as I walk past.

We share the same bed, my two sisters and I. Sometimes, when Mom is alone, I creep in beside her in the dark of the night frightened by dreams or memories. She died so young; old before her time, worn down by years of struggle and disappointment. I no longer want for a new pair of shoes or a full meal. But I do wish I could crawl in beside my mother one more time and hear her whisper to me everything will be all right.

The whistle of the kettle wrenches me back to my bedroom and another faceless man in my bed. Quietly I slide into the warm slippers next to the dressing table and go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. My kitchen has a chrome lined dining table and matching chairs. Faceless men pay well for my company.

I take the warm cup of tea and move to the window next to the table. The window is cool against my shoulder as I lean into it, searching the horizon for signs of dawn. The sounds of the city drift up from the pulsing streets far below. In the chrome kitchen I hear only the rustle of sheets.

The second exercise fo the week was to take a poem that was written in class, each student taking the last word from the line before, not knowing what that line had said, and adding a line, they really made little sense when done. The assignment was to take something from the poem use that as a starting point. The poem I ended up to work with was...

Take the soap dish and break it.
Take it back and fix it.
Peripatetic pitfalls look like crab cakes,
Crispy crispy crab cakes
With dressing and capers on top
Climbing down is always harder than climbing up
Until you soil you knickers
Time to grow up.

Sheesh... what to make of that.... So I took the first, second and sixth lines and came up with:

Rose Petal Dish

Take the soap dish and break it.
Fragile blue and yellow rose petal dish
Kept for a lifetime next to the little glass.
Distantly one beside the other.

Years swept away by time.
Time for words now lost.
Rose petal memories drift softly by.
Old thorns prick tender skin.

Climb up on the chair to wash dirty hands.
The climb down always harder.
Roses the soap smelled of
In the blue and yellow soap dish.

Crab cakes for dinner, go wash your hands.
Mud pies for lunch, go wash your hands.
Always in the kitchen in a blue and yellow apron.
Yellow roses in a blue vase dress the table.

Now the house is old and damp and silent.
Lovely yellow rose garden a weed patch.
Faded blue curtains hang limp over the window.
The blue vase empty.

Place the shattered dish into a box.
Time can mend rose petal memories.
Words unsaid clutched tightly
Still smell of roses.

This exercise was to take a paragraph or two from some source, newspaper, magazine, etc., cut the words out and put them back together into a poem. I used the text from some of the research I had done for Art History. The result:

Growing Unease

Greater danger even understanding must sense.
Pleasurable Eden, increasing exploitation
Even now inexhaustible resources number.
Only one world.

Preoccupied with war, violating Nature
Seems trivial, influential views persuade.
Growing unease. Recent changing currents
Must prevail.

A sestina ...


In a traditional Sestina:

-The lines are grouped into six sestets and a concluding tercet. Thus a Sestina has 39 lines.
-Lines may be of any length. Their length is usually consistent in a single poem.
-The six words that end each of the lines of the first stanza are repeated in a different order at the end of lines in each of the subsequent five stanzas. The particular pattern is given below. (This kind of recurrent pattern is "lexical repetition".)
-The repeated words are unrhymed.
-The first line of each sestet after the first ends with the same word as the one that ended the last line of the sestet before it.
-In the closing tercet, each of the six words are used.
-The pattern of word-repetition is as follows, where the words that end the lines of the first sestet are represented by the numbers "1 2 3 4 5 6": 6 1 5 2 4 3: 3 6 4 1 2 5 and so forth.

My words: hour team fire camp fatigue hot


Fighting Fires and Fatigue

The call comes at a late hour.
Dispatch again calling the team
To a wildland fire.
My mission is to setup camp
By tomorrow afternoon despite the fatigue
I feel. August has been hot

This year. The mountain west is hot
And tinder dry. In three hours
I must be on the road, despite the fatigue
In my body. The rest of the team
Is feeling the grind too. We left our last camp
Only yesterday, another mission fighting fire

In our forest. This has been a bad fire
Year for our state. The hot
Weather means many fires to fight and many fire camps
To manage. The hours
Are adding up for the 50 people on the incident team.
We love our job though, even when the fatigue

Begins to weigh heavy. My green and yellow fatigues
Are packed, along with a small tent, in my fire
Bag. We must be ready when called. Team
Four, my team, will be on the road again soon, hot
On the trail of our new mission. The long hours
Are just part of the job. Setting up camp

Is only one small piece of what we do. A fire camp
Is really a small tent city. Excitement quenches my fatigue,
If only for a while. We all work long hours
For several days, building camp, fighting the fire,
Providing for the needs and safety of the hot
And exhausted firefighters. It works because our team

Works well together. So we will meet up before dawn and team
Up for the long drive. We will arrive at the new camp
Not far from a small town the fire threatens. The afternoon will be hot
And a couple hundred firefighters will be feeling the fatigue
Of long hours battling the blaze on the mountain without a break. This is a fire
Started by a careless hiker’s campfire in the late afternoon hours

Just days ago. It is for the firefighters, hot, hungry, and exhausted
Who risk so much to protect others property and wild lands
That I am excited to leave my warm bed now, fatigue be damned.

Wood’s wind, bird’s song,
Steady tempo beat by feet;
Footpath symphony.

Thundering hoof beats
Tail raised high, nose in the air
Drink in a new dawn.