Memoirous

This is a terrible tragedy. One cannot help but feel sorry for those campers and the families who lost their children. It’s almost too much to bear. There was a similar storm and flood in July 31-August 1, 1976 , along the Big Thompson River in Colorado that killed about 114, some of which were Campus Crusade for Christ student staff at a camp. I remember this because my sister Nancy was involved with the group while in college and lost acquaintances in this disaster. The flood captured my imagination back then and I’d never forgotten it or another random flooding, this one intentional by the US Army Corp of Engineers, the damming of Caesar Creek and submersion of New Burlington, Ohio in order to create a recreational lake/reservoir. Anyway, I combined these two events from my memory to write a story. Actually, Big Thompson was a disaster of a story as I wrote it, lost it or erased it from computer, and then re-wrote it. Using resource and archived material I recreated the flood...

This story, Big Thompson, was something I had on my mind for awhile--in a couple different pieces. Listening to Rebecca Makkai at OCWW talk about how she composed a few of the stories in her collection Music for Wartime I went home and tried to do the same thing. She wrote down two of her strongest ideas and then tried to tie them together into one plot. For example, the collection ends with “The Museum of the Dearly Departed,” a story that focuses on an apartment house that had a gas leak which killed almost all of its inhabitants, save one couple—who also survived the Holocaust. Relatives move into the apartments, and one of the new residents is an artist who is creating a project—a dollhouse structure using found and donated objects from each apartment. Record albums serve as a focal point for each miniature room: Glenn Gould, Maria Callas, Joe Cocker. Whew! This could all seem like such a jumble--but under a deft hand it can all come together. So I combines images of water ...

I recently had an excerpt of my chapbook Bright Invisible in Utterance Journal A short story will be out soon in THINK journal It is titled Big Thompson and I used a method laid out by Rebecca Makkai author of The Great Believer and a finalist for the Pultizer Prize. She was teaching a class a few years ago at OCWW where she said when trying to come up with ideas for a short story she sometimes let her ideas collide--for instance news of a recent gas leak/explosion and Holocaust survivors. She has a penchant for putting together incongruous scenarios and constructing a story. I thought: Why not?  I'd had in mind several loose threads that had to do with water: New Burlington, Ohio that was abandoned and flooded to make way for a reservoir ( Caesar Creek State Park ) and a flood that occurred in Colorado along the Big Thompson in 1976. Adding other tidbits, I wove together a 5,000 word story. Forthcoming--Big Thompson. Finally, Stoneboat a print journal contacted me ...