Memoirous

Fall 2018 Cloud of Witnesses by Jane Hertenstein www.goldenalleypress.com/ ISBN 978-1-7320276-2-6

Fall 2018 Cloud of Witnesses by Jane Hertenstein www.goldenalleypress.com/ ISBN 978-1-7320276-2-6

the power of 50 words Read my latest published flash at 50-Word Stories.

Uptown, A Walk Through I am the tarnished penny abandoned on the sidewalk the lone glove left on the fence post the key-shaped pacifier gathering grit on the park path I am that plastic bag floating, caught in the shrubs the empty Starbucks cup blown into the curb the scratch-off littering the pavement in front of the 7/11 the limp condom by the loading docks behind Ace Hardware I am the footprint in the snow between The House of Prayer and the House of Hair.

I remember going to the lakeshore with my daughter on a weekend day. The brightness, the blue, the dizzying crowd as we unfurled blankets, set up chairs, dumped sand toys from a plastic bag. I watched as she darted to the edge of the water and back again, making sure I was watching. Then sometime during this game I slacked, I looked away—lost her. Just as water seeks its own level, people flowed in and surrounded her. For an absolute second everything stopped, time and space peeled away. My senses lurched, razor-sharp. That’s a lot to remember, yet still to this day, I recall relief when at last a blonde head bobbed, she, squealing in delight.

Recently been working on edits with my editor Nancy Sayre at Golden Alley Press for my upcoming novel Cloud of Witnesses (FALL 2018). This is one side of my brain. Also been working on a hybrid poetry slash prose chapbook about Art Week at Great Spruce Head Island. A project that has almost no future as a niche work. BUT if you know someone who loves the New York School of Poets and appreciates quotidian observations laced with melancholy let me know. I’m looking for a reader/critiquer/breathing person to give feedback. Maybe @Eileen Myles?! Then there’s also You Are Here: A Flash Memoir—that’s getting little to no traction. I produce enough work to keep a single critique group in motion. Yet this has been the year where I struggle to find that group. After several years of maintaining a circle of readers, I’ve suddenly been floundering. There have been some nibbles and false starts, but so far nothing has gelled. Still waiting to hear if “Arriving at Night” advances...

When I first came to Chicago in early 1980s there was a recession. The homeless I was used to seeing were single men and women down on their luck. But the first summer I was in Chicago and working at a church mission was when I was introduced to whole families being homeless. Often we discovered they were living in their cars. One of my first jobs was driving around to pick up ”donos”: donations, but also used to refer to doughnut donations. We’d pull up in our station wagon and load in sacks of day-old doughnuts. By the time we got back to the mission it had become one giant day-old doughnut. The glazed had congealed together. We were volunteers meaning we made no salary. We were basically working for room and board, and the experience. Much like interns do today—except we didn’t go into debt.  We had NO money. On days off we got as token to ride the train and went to the end of the line. Up to Wilmette to the Bahá'í Temple or downtown. Since we had no money we window sh...

I remember, growing up in Centerville, Ohio, near Dayton, going to department stores. You could spend the day shopping at Rike’s, then have lunch in their restaurant and get your hair done at the store salon. Elder-Berman was possibly one step down, but a notch up from J.C. Penny. Unbelievably places where you placed orders and had the products delivered was not considered as classy as actually shopping. I still have a fancy hand-painted hairclip manufactured in France that I bought at Rikes one day on a whim. Rike’s have now gone the way of Field’s, consolidated into a Macy’s. Which will probably go the way of all things. One day there will just be Amazon. To shop local we went to the hardware store. The hardware store was where we bought most of our stuff. I was reminded of this when someone wanted to know where they could buy some ice skates. I bought my Huffy bicycle and ice skates at PK Hardware where my mother worked as a cashier and, thus, we got a store discoun...

I’ve done a lot of crazy things for money. Collected bottles and cans for cash, There was the usual: babysitting, mowing grass, cleaning the kitty litter, and shoveling snow. I got up at 4 in the morning to deliver newspapers. One summer me and the neighborhood kids built an amusement park in the backyard and charged admission. We sold Zagnut and Zero bars at our concession stand. The weirdest thing I’ve ever done was answer an ad looking for someone to dress up in a broccoli costume and walk around the mall offering samples of raw vegetables. It seemed surreal—probably because I was sleep deprived. It was my final semester of college, I needed a few extra bucks. But surreal in the sense that I, a vegetable, was asking people to eat me, to eat my fellow vegetables. It felt cannibalistic. Obviously, I was overthinking the job. Whenever I see broccoli on the salad bar line I’m reminded of that time in my life—and usually skip it.

I recently got a chance to hear Stuart Dybek (The Coast of Chicago) talk at OCWW, Off Campus Writers Workshop, the oldest continuing writer’s workshop in the US. The topic of discussion was re-visioning our revisions. I know, not sexy. It was incredible to look at a marked-up copy of “Pet Milk”, The New Yorker, August 13, 1984. Can you imagine the highs and lows. A story accepted by The New Yorker! They need a few clarifications and copy edits, no problem! Only what Dybek gets back in the mail looks like algebra. Oh my God, he thinks—is it this bad. The copy he hands out to us is insightful—the editor asked Dybek to go deeper, re-imagining his story. I’ve written here in a much earlier post about “Pet Milk” and how it is a story launched from a flash memory. Dybek more than substantiated that theory in the class. Of course it was and wasn’t him, more who he wished he were. “The author thinks back to a time when he was sixteen . . . .” We can imagine ourselves on that EL platfo...