Memoirous

 The Waterfalls of Oregon   Multnomah Falls Alsea Koosah Bridal Veil Fairy Cascade Salt Creek waterfalls everywhere from all the rain snowmelt over moss-soft stones giant cedar logs swift currents tumbling down down down   Then there is this: waterfalls of spring petals from the trees white, red, fuchsia pink scattered all around shaken by the wind in pools on the street falling falling falling   Last night riding my bike home in the chain-oil rain when suddenly a rainbow a spray of pink a waterfall of petals a shower of color

Anatomy of a Good/Bad Day   The outline begins with line A Wake up, tea, stretch, a little music --pull the bike out and begin to ride --in the cold morning air, uphill Arrive, line B Begin watching my grandson --who smiles, tries to roll over --achieves, tummy to back --we both look up at the ceiling --hours pass Lunch, line C He gets a bottle, I heat up pizza Line D repeats line B --add walks, story time --Dad comes home from hospital, showers Dinner, line E At my house! --rush home, stir fry chicken --add cashew crème and curry --yum! --someone says let’s go get a designer dounut Line F Walk downtown with baby in front carrier --strangers smile at us, a family on an evening stroll --purchase crazy-named donuts sprinkled with Cap’tain Crunch,Oreos Etc, etc, etc!! Later, line G Ride bike to Washington Park for birthday/bike polo gathering --talk and tell stories until the arc lamps extinguish themselves --left in darkne...

  What She Heard                            for Jack   Is that the chimes outside my window, singing in the wind or   is it a squirrel chatting on a fence post, his orange-brown fur so soft   or   is it a raven on the high wires, his caw-caw heard loud and lonely   or   is it the garbage truck trawling the alley looking for whom it may devour, its mechanical arms reaching and shaking heavy barrels into hungry jaws   or   is it the wind in the tall-tall fir trees whooshing and swaying the boughs—             sounds I hear every morning                         before moving...

 Flash back to  Monday, March 5, 2018 Weird Jobs I've Had 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 ...

Nabokov in  Speak, Memory  describes memory as brief intervals of flashes. “In probing my childhood (which is the next best to probing one’s eternity)I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.” One) brilliant and Two) how did this guy coming to English as a second language become so proficient? We all come to memory via differing triggers, but usually our earliest memories have a tenuous connection to speech. We have to know the  name  of something in order to attach the memory. The name can be gibberish, a native tongue, or a perceived name, but it is tied to verbalization, the concept that a thing is a thing. Outside of us. I had a flash memory the other day. Perhaps I am reliving my daughter’s childhood as I hold my grandson and try to understand what’s going on in that little head of his. I can bet it’s one ...

I heard I’d been awarded a DCASE grant from the city of Chicago, for an individual artist. Essentially this is money in and money out. When I applied at the end of 2020, recognizably a terrible year, I wanted to set my sights, hopes on 2021. There is not much agency a poor artist/writer has except dreams. I thought what can I do if awarded this grant, a big if, and went for another big if: the Novel-in-a-Year program out of Story Studio a Chicago literary institution. I’d been aware of Story Studio for the past 17 years since it was started by Jill Pollack and had writer envy when studying the catalog, but, alas, it was a bit too pricey for me. Again, I’d had friends and colleagues take classes and rave about how it was JUST THE THING, a boost to their writing/professional life. It was a way to broaden contacts and network with fellow writers. So at the end of a dreary pandemic-filled year, a year of impending doom and real-life death, I applied for both the DCASE and a slot in th...

When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; ... "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (also commonly known as "Daffodils") by William Wordsworth. After getting my first dose of the vaccine I went on an evening bike ride and, of course, I wandered too far. I followed the Willamette River into Springfield and beyond on the Middle Fork bike path ducking in out of groves of trees and dusty sunlight. Sunlight at a slant and then receding. At one point, not surprisingly, I got a bit lost. The bike path seemed to track through an apartment complex parking lot. Then I turned a corner— There was the river, an enchanting park with couples and babies, dogs. And spritely patches of tiny daisies. A young couple lounged on a blanket of them. It was a bit Monet-ish. Splotches of white upon green next to a rushing river. It was poster happiness—made life-size. I didn’t stop as I knew the sun was going to go down soon and I had miles to go, but the scene filled my he...

Remember. Squint your eyes and think back, back to that feeling of having stepped off a cliff. It was right around St. Patrick’s Day 2020. When the world shut down. Of course we’d been hearing about the virus and seen pictures of exhausted doctors and nurses and the staggering death toll in Italy. But here in the US, with our walls and borders and nationalistic superiority, we were immune. Then the first case, second, third. A death. Then it was everywhere. No one knew how to stop it. I remember sitting and thinking in a detached sort of way that people I knew were probably going to get it. People I knew might die. I might die. So I had to let go. Still the next day, waking up after the shut down, I had nowhere to go and no to-do list. It had all been obliterated. I get my energy from doing and I knew I wouldn’t last long anyway at my age, so I volunteered to go over to the shelter to cook lunch. I decided I wanted to die with my boots on. So many people who worked at...

 National English honor Society: https://www.nehs.us/writing/challenge.shtml Continuing with the success of last year’s Poetry Challenge in mind, the NEHS writing challenge for the 2020-2021 school year will be Flash Fiction in multiple, brief forms. Writers will be challenged to create narratives that make impacts on readers using very limited words or characters. While some view the form as a relatively new phenomenon, brief fiction dates from centuries ago in ancient tales including Aesop’s Fables. Many famous authors, including Hemingway, Vonnegut, Chopin, among others, have written flash fiction, albeit under a variety of names. In the UK June 6 is celebrated as National Flash Fiction Day. https://www.nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/ Start conjuring up now entries! There is still time for YOUTH to submit to this: https://fingerscommatoes.wordpress.com/nffd-youth/ NFFD Youth Competition About the 2021 NFFD Youth Competition: Submission period: 15 February to 15 April 2021 unpubli...

Blink Ink http://www.blink-ink.org/ Home to the finest in contemporary 50 word fiction. Archived in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Blink Ink is a quarterly print journal publishing the best in stories of approximately 50 words since 2009. The current prompt or theme is water. http://www.blink-ink.org/submissions/ Journal of Compressed Arts http://matterpress.com/journal/ https://matter.submittable.com/submit The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts is a non-profit publisher of compressed creative arts, such as micro fiction, flash fiction, prose poetry, compressed poetry & visual arts, and whatever other forms compression might take. Matter pays authors $50 for their accepted pieces. We publish weekly bursts of compression & decompression and make as many varied word-plays on matter as we can. We also blog at FlashFiction.Net .   Though submissions are currently closed until mid-September they do something called topical Thurs...

  https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/03/09/cicadas-broodx-environment/ Brood X, the last time they appeared in hordes was in 2004. In a few months these monstrous looking bugs will burrow out of their 17-year hiatus and attach themselves to Everything. They will be everywhere, leaving exoskeletons and nesting in trees. If you miss seeing them—don’t worry—you will hear them as the average male mating song can reach 100 decibels, on par with living with a leaf blower. I mention all this as the 17-year cicada makes an appearance in my book Cloud of Witnesses. Roland comes out of his family’s trailer to find his bicycle covered with winged locusts, big-eyed bugs. Later Granny will fry some up to eat in her black-iron skillet. “Tastes like bacon,” she’ll inform Roland.   I pulled my bike out of the rack in front of the school and shook half a dozen cicadas off the seat. They had begun to hatch earlier in the week, googly red-eyed insects the size of...