Relief: A Christian Literary Expression » Guest Blog

John Matthew Fox’s “Requiem for a Daughter”

Guest Blogger — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 17:47:22 +0000

John Fox

John Matthew Fox joins the blog to share how he came to write “Requiem for a Daughter,” the Editor’s Choice in fiction that will be appearing in Relief 4.1.

I wrote “Requiem for a Daughter” in 2005, or maybe it was earlier, or later. It depends whether you count the living, the thinking, the drafting, or the revision. Deborah Eisenberg said that she took eight years to write the eight stories in her collection, “The Twilight of the Superheroes,” and even though I’d like to be faster, there’s a process you can’t rush.

For this story, the tri-part structure of the college, daughter, and student arrived at once, in my first draft, but the rest took more effort. After I’d had it down for a few years, I rewrote it as a short screenplay, and reimagining it in a different medium helped me better understand the story.

The ending–with the bittersweet dialogue–was influenced by Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Decalogue,” specifically film two in the ten-part series, where a doctor confronts a moral dilemma. Kieslowski’s last lines shoehorn an enormous amount of emotional complexity into few words. Of all my influences from film, he’s made the biggest impact–I watch “The Decalogue” and his trilogy “Three Colors” on an annual basis.

Writing “Transistor Radio: A Story of Love and Technology”

Guest Blogger — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:00:31 +0000

Thomas Allbaugh

Thomas Allbaugh joins the blog to discuss how he crafted his story “Transistor Radio: A Story of Love and Technology.” After, you can read a snippet from his story that will be appearing in Relief 4.1.

I think there’s a story in how I wrote this story.

First, for about four months, I had only this phrase:

“I discovered the unconditional love of the transistor radio.”

Then came the approach of our university sponsored “Writers Read,” a fall semester reading of faculty and student writing. As the “read” usually works well in showcasing poetry and short prose, I think of it as an opportunity to test and play with ideas in short forms before an appreciative, critical audience. This time, I decided to explore the phrase above. As I did so, I began to detail a “top forty” world I had known as an eighth grader. Out of this exploration of a time when I owned a transistor radio, an account of first love emerged, and I wrote the story in one sitting. Though the love story seemed telescoped in the first draft, I read it for the reading, and hearing it and seeing audience responses to it, I was encouraged to expand on the characters and a few of the episodes. I often find that hearing a story helps me to see what is wrong with it, what is working. I was encouraged even more when Relief accepted it for publication.

Though editor Chris Fisher rightly wanted the narrative to move more quickly to the love interest than it did at first—and he is right that the love story is the real core of this one—I also was grateful that he chose to retain the details of the narrator’s growing sense of his family’s sinking economic status in comparison with the continuing prosperity of his peers around him. So this story really benefited from his editorial insights.

Here is a small piece from “Transistor Radio: A Story of Love and Technology”:

“Thanks.” She slouched on her right leg, her left foot in pointed black shoes aimed at me, her left knee bent. Though she had not developed breasts yet, her legs were wonderfully curved and slender from playing in sports.
“I mean it. That was great.”
She just nodded.
Standing next to her for the first time, seeing the deep brown strands of her hair parted across her olive forehead and her retainer against her close, full front teeth, I wanted to tell her how great her band was. I wanted to lie, to tell her that I played something cool like the guitar. ”Mike plays violin,” Nick said. He was across the room, unplugging the PA system.
Carmina looked up then, as if noticing me for the first time, “Really?”
I wanted to deny this. I wanted to run. As always, my failures to meet the criteria set by my peer group were made crystal clear.
“Well,” I said. ”I sorta used to.” This was as true as I could make it.
Nick looped a microphone cord nearly around his hand and elbow. ”We should have him helps us with some Emerson Lake & Palmer. Or the Moody Blues. You know them, right Mike?”
I smiled. ”Yes.” I had never heard of Emerson Lake & Palmer. Or the Moody Blues. Neither had been on late-night transistor radio.

***

Thomas Allbaugh has published both fiction and nonfiction in Blue Moon Review,Mars Hill Review, Perspectives, and Writing on the Edge. He teaches writing at Azusa Pacific University, where he also coordinates the first year writing program. His first year composition textbook Pretexts for Writing was published by Kendall/Hunt in 2009. He lives in Southern California with his wife of almost 21 years and their four children.

Tom Noe’s Poems

Guest Blogger — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:00:11 +0000

Tom Noe’s poems “The Soul for Sale on eBay,” “Hiroshima,” “Awakening Next to My Wife,” “A New Kingdom of the Old,” and “The Lecher and the Wise Man” will all be appearing in Relief 4.1. Below is a note from Tom followed by his poem “Hiroshima.”

In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More says that God intends for a human person to serve him “wittingly, in the tangle of his mind.” In writing poetry–the tangled interplay of word, image, sound, evocation and association–the mind probes the complexities of the heart in order to create and communicate beauty. For me, the best poem would be a coherent marriage of beautiful images, beautiful words and beautiful ideas. That’s the goal I strive for.

Hiroshima

World War True
pursued its end
in sins of the flash
hydrogenising,
rendering Homo Icarus a skeleton
before his splash.

No matter whether or when
its fire devours you
or wind explodes you
please take the turning
either left or right
into no matter
it is all
unto filmed ruination.

No time to flip coins
hoping the reverse
of the future
comes up.

These facts dissolve the breath
quoted in Genesis 1: –1
in a quadrillionth of a second
when the blind saw the dying
as the phosphorescence
of a smoking white jewel
its silting folds of lightning fog
reflecting whispers of lit faces
the cloud a pearl in the shell
of earth’s verticality of beauty.

Open your eyes
to become blind
part your lips unless
there is time left to sing
words to bear the displaced weight
of what can’t be spoken.

A rising continent of superheated air
shrouded in the jewel
and the accrual of death
steaming the skin of the sea off.

We will make a star
so that the scent of death
reaches, touches every face.

***

Tom Noe is a professional editor and writer whose book publishing credits include: The Sixth Day (for children), Into the Lions’ Den and A Friend in God.His most recent project was the libretto for an opera based on the story of Eros and Psyche from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He’s currently working on a new play set in a Catholic Worker house of hospitality. His poetry can be found in Relief issue 4.1

The Story of Amy Frykholm’s Creative Nonfiction Story

Guest Blogger — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:00:55 +0000

Amy Frykholm

Amy Frykholm joins the blog to discuss how she came to write her essay “The Flesh of Strangers.” After, you can read the first few paragraphs from her piece.

I wrote the first draft of this essay more than 15 years ago while I was still living in Estonia. I started a series of stories about my encounters there in a notebook with thick graph paper that a friend’s cat had peed on. I was so frugal in those days that I didn’t think to replace the notebook; I just dried it out. Or maybe that particular stink was stimulating to my creativity. I don’t know.

I wrote and re-wrote the essay for years, trying to figure out what it was about. Should I add a long section on the history of saunas? Should I put it in the broader context of my experience in Estonia? It languished.

Then three things happened in the course of one year. I met Lisa Ohlen Harris, non-fiction editor for Relief, at a conference and heard her read from some of her own work about living in Syria and Jordan. A light bulb of recognition went on. Then, while at Duke University for another conference, I saw an exhibit of Jennette Williams’ photographs taken in bathhouses in Hungary and Turkey. (link to Jennette William’s page; link to my review on the Century website) I felt another “click.” These bodies move me in a powerful way. Finally, I read a book by Varda Polak-Sahm, called The House of Secrets about the Jewish women’s bathing practices.

I began to see that the essay was about the mysterious process by which “I” have come to inhabit my body. Essentially, this is a story about incarnation, about the uneasy relationship between body and spirit. I was able to finish the essay, and I immediately sent it to Lisa, who had been a kind steward of the process. I am so glad that the essay has finally found a home after so many years of wandering. Thanks, Relief!

Here is a teaser from “The Flesh of Strangers”:

The heels of my black boots against the stone and snow of the street pounded out a rhythm. “I exist,” they said. ”I exist.” On a Friday afternoon of failing December light, I was a shadow against the fences of the houses in the Kivimäe neighborhood of Tallinn, Esonia. My boots were smart and sharp. They made me a taller, more polished version of myself. But my performance of crisp heels against cobblestone, the performance of my own existence, was for an audience of one. No one else was on the street. I struggled even to hear myself. ”I exist” was the mantra of my feet, but my mind preferred a less substantive existence, slipping along the back streets in the low light and the slugh of early winter, shade without form, unnoticeable.
Living in a foreign city, I had become increasingly timid. I wanted to be invisible, a false native, blending in as I skirted the ancient city wall on my way to teach English classes. When I went to the marketplace, I asked for a kilo of tomatoes first in Estonian and then, if I received a confused look, in Russian. I hated being noticed, and I hated my fear of being noticed. All of this pretending was a strain on my existence. I became less and less sure that I did exist, silent as I so often was, lurking like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man.
On this Friday afternoon, I was on my way to the sauna, a two-story building of crumbling Soviet concrete. Every Friday, when I finished teaching my last class at the Estonian Academy of Music, I packed a sponge, a change of underwear, shower shoes, and soap in a plastic bag emblazoned with a Miller Lite logo and walked a few blocks to the neighborhood sauna.
In my small flat on the edge of the city, a shower was no easy task. I had to turn on every spigot in the apartment full blast for forty-five minutes until a little steam would waft toward the ceiling of the red-tiled shower room. So I undertook the process rarely, preferring to heat a little water on my stove and bathe quickly in the hallway from the shadeless windows. By Friday, I was dirty.

***

Amy Frykholm is a staff writer for The Christian Century. She is the author of two books: the recently released Julian of Norwich: A Contemplative Biography(Paraclete) and Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (Oxford). She lives in Leadville, Colorado, the highest incorporated town in the United States.

“The Greatest Show on Earth”

Ian David Philpot — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 11:59:21 +0000

Gwen Weerts

Gwen Weerts, author of “The Greatest Show on Earth” which will be appearing soon in Relief 4.1, writes about how her Creative Nonfiction story began.

I began drafting “The Greatest Show on Earth” in response to a very underwhelming circus performance, which at first led to an inquiry into the nature of spectacle. Interestingly (at least I think it’s interesting), the first draft of the story was written in play/script format, with scene details in italics, and narrative commentary ascribed to a narrator or voice over. I loved the form for this essay, but as the story developed, it became more and more about wonderment, the terrific, the terrible, and less and less about the observer and the observed. The narrator, stage directions, and voiceovers also quickly subsumed the dialogue. As I began to revise the story, I twisted and contorted the storyline to justify the form, but in the end the story won. Still, I love the idea of using the form of a script to advance a narrative, and I’ve been waiting for just the right opportunity to revive it.

I’ve heard it’s a bit of a faux pas to share early drafts of unrevised work (after all, we revise for a reason), but to convention I say “Ha!” So here it is, the opening scene to “The Greatest Show on Earth,” as first conceived:

Act I

Scene One

A mountain vista in the background. This is Skyline Divide Trail on one of the last beautiful days of the fall. The low blueberry shrubs have changed into their late-autumn attire, a brilliant russet garment that transforms the alpine meadows from gold to ruby.

Voice Over: About Skyline Divide, the

Hiking Whatcom County

book says, “The hike is steep at first, then eases off in old-growth forest for 1.5 miles before reaching a small opening around 5,200 feet. The path soon crosses the wilderness boundary and meets the meadowy crest of the ridge, at one of those places where your whole body involuntarily just says ‘wow.’”

Four hikers enter, wearing packs.

Jen: So, how was the show?

Gwen: Mm, it was interesting. The drumming was fantastic.

Joshua: The contortionist was . . .

Kris: Pretty amazing?

Gwen: Uh, went on too long. The woman finishes his sentence, one of those irksome things that married people do.

***

Gwen Weerts has an MA in nonfiction creative writing from Western Washington University. She works as an editor for an optical engineering society, and after spending her days immersed in algorithms, debating the most judicious use of a hyphen in the present lens design textbook, she spends her evenings and weekends writing and speaking in run-on, but grammatically perfect, gibberish to her husband, dog, cat, chickens, garden, and anyone else who who will listen. Her essays have appeared in the quarterly publication Adventures Northwest, and she is working on a collection of stories from her year living and learning in sub-Saharan Africa. Her short story, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” can be found in Relief issue 4.1.