The Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated Awards Process

Here the poets go again, riding down the trail of words into that long and lonesome valley, carrying ballpoint pens and notebooks in order to describe the shadows that lie across their lives. Lingering ashes are evidence of those who went before, who scared the lizards lurking on warm sandstone, whose mounts’ hoofbeats have already echoed along the rocks.

There they go. Their horses are nervous, and out of shape. The Muses packed the riders’ saddlebags, and the poets won’t know the contents until they need them, until they reach for a memory or trophe, find it nestling comfortably in their palm, and look at it to say oh yes, that’s it, that’s what I meant to say.

It’s late morning when they leave the safety of the bunkhouse and nod decisively to Old Cookie, stirring his cauldron of coffee black as a heart of obsidian, cackling as they saddle up.

“You’ll be sorry!” he shouts after them. “Stay here! I’ll put up curtains in the bunkhouse and subscribe to National Geographic! No need to go ! There’s only sand and the taste of lime out there! The sun will drive you crazy as badgers!”

It’s true — the sun is hot. But in the saddlebags are memories of rain storms, winters, driving down roads slick with ice and the reflection of Christmas tree lights, down roads laden with pine shadows and the blood of unwary animals. Similes redolent of cinnamon and sweet amber, puns as prickly as hedgehogs, intricate words with Indo-European roots to be set, chiming, into sestinas.

Will they make camp this evening or press on into the darkness? The valley is always dark, always full of falling rocks and moaning winds. The horses shy at every sand dune, until at last the poets dismount and walk forward, carrying their saddles across their shoulders. It is their hope that, if they go far enough, they’ll find the place where fallen stars lie glimmering along the rocks, where the coyote’s call drips honey, where sand builds itself into castles, where light re-enters the valley and casts all their shadowed fears into bas-relief. There they’ll make their camp, pitch the tents made of long canvas stretches and ropes of human hair. There they’ll boil their coffee, sweeten it with handfuls of cactus needles, and sip with cautious lips.

The horses, freed, will run far away along mountain tops and reclaim their voices. Their hoof prints will glow red and gold along the chill rocks. The wind will braid their manes with clouds.

(Originally appeared in Sybil’s Garage)

As I said in class, I’ll be posting notes after each Wednesday session, which all three classes can use to ask questions about or comment on what we covered. I encourage the students to hop into the discussion here, but it’s also open to the public.

We started by talking about what makes a story and the idea of character(s) involved in a conflict with rising tension that moves to a resolution at the end. It’s a pretty classic model and Vonnegut says some useful things about it here. Everyone brought a two line description of the story they’d like to write, and we listened to those and talked about which would work as is for stories and which need some narrowing down.

In discussing how we know when a story will be good, we looked at the first few paragraphs of stories by Carol Emshwiller, Joe Hill, and Kurt Vonnegut. I asked you to, in the coming week, look particularly at how people begin stories, and for Week 2, people will be bringing in a story beginning by someone else that knocks their socks. I mentioned that there’s plenty of online magazines to find speculative fiction in and here’s a brief starter list for you (feel free to add recommendations in the comments): Abyss & Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com. One of the things I mentioned is that reading other people’s short fiction, particularly good stuff, is important: you’ll find more story ideas coming to you, you’ll learn new tricks from them, and you’ll become familiar with the markets you hope to sell to.

We also spent some time on writing process and the idea of timed writings, as taken from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and did some in class. Feel free to post yours here if you like it. I urged you to spend some time this week thinking about your writing process and perhaps trying to change it up a little: writing by hand instead of the keyboard, or in a place you don’t normally write.