Month: May 2015

Flash Fiction: A Rich Little Poor Girl

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 6 Comments

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It’s flash fiction time as I ponder another challenge from Carrot Ranch. Charli’s May 27, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story, using the above photo. You can make it a garden party or an international spy thriller. Who is there and why? Does the backdrop scenery make an impact or is it ignored? The place is on an island, if you wish to make use of that. Go where the photograph leads you this week.

The stunning locale first suggested a tale of romantic suspense, like those so beautifully evoked by mistress of the genre Mary Stewart in The Moonspinners or This Rough Magic. A boat landing on a remote mountain estate seemed a perfect setting for a flash about a chance meeting between a smart, independent (and yes, attractive) young woman and a generic tall, handsome, initially-suspect-but-ultimately-kind-and-sympathetic love interest. After all, it was authors like Stewart and Victoria Holt, whom I read voraciously through my teens, that compelled me to pursue my own foreign and romantic adventures upon reaching the age of burning freedom myself.

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But then, a real-life story came to mind.

I heard the tale last July in Florida during a visit to a long-lost cousin of my husband’s. We’ll call him Billy. Affable, hard-drinking Billy had done very well for himself, not only in his career as an attorney but in his marriage to a wealthy sparrow of a woman with camellia skin and fair wispy curls, whom we shall call Savannah. On the patio of their luxury home, after a dip in the saltwater pool, I listened with deep fascination to Savannah’s story.

She had not been born into wealth. Rather, the youngest of seven children in a hardscrabble West Virginia family headed by a down-and-out alcoholic widower, the trajectory of her life had been radically redirected when a rich, local attorney adopted her as a young child. Overnight penury and hunger and squalor gave way to the privilege and trapping of a lonely, wealthy man’s only child.

Savannah never returned to the shack she’d shared with her rag-tag siblings, only visiting her father a few times before his death two decades later. Still, her wealth had not brought great happiness, or a love deepened by shared struggle, or health. Savannah told me her story in a thin whisper, conserving the breath now imperiled by her lung cancer. And during the six hours we spent there, Billy followed up on the libations he’d clearly imbibed before our arrival, downing beer after beer after beer.

The Lake House

Savannah surfaced and gulped the sweet, heavy air. It’s a dream, she thought. This lake, the blue mountains, the murmurings in the pines and skimming dragonflies.

She bobbed for a moment, then hoisted herself up the metal ladder. No, it was real, these wooden stairs, this path, the big house just ahead.

Clean, sweet-smelling New Papa was waiting there. She didn’t know why Real Papa had let New Papa take her away after Mama died. Or why New Papa hadn’t chosen one of the others.

A prayer beat inside her. Let me stay. Let me stay. Let me stay.

 

Wednesday Word of the Week 4

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ Leave a comment

Into Thin Air

Word of the Week 4: Laggard(ly)

Welcome back to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week’s word comes from Jon Krakauer’s harrowing and controversial account of the disastrous 1996 ascent of Mount Everest, Into Thin Air.

Contracted by Outside magazine to join and write an article about a guided ascent of Mount Everest in May of that year, Krakauer got much more than he bargained for when a wicked convergence of circumstances—human error, poor judgment, and damnably bad luck with the weather—conspired to bring about the worst mountaineering disaster on record. By the time he descended to Base Camp, nine climbers from four expeditions had perished, three more would succumb shortly, and at least two were left severely maimed from frostbite.

What makes Krakauer’s account so grippingly enjoyable is not only his insider’s informed take on alpine climbing, but his Valkyrian (another great word employed in this book) command of the language. Here, in a passage describing a second attempt to reach Camp Three, is this week’s example:

“A thousand feet up the immense slant of the Lhotse Face, I ascended a faded nylon rope that seemed to go on forever, and the higher I got, the more laggardly I moved.”

Having pulled this book off my shelf for a quick study in grabbing the reader’s attention from the first paragraph, filling in historical and personal detail without bogging down into an “information dump,” and crafting dynamic and memorable characters, my earlier hunch that this was a book to be savored once a decade was reaffirmed.

I invite other examples of a particularly adept use of “laggard” or “laggardly,” or other words like it. Comment here if you are not feeling too laggardly yourself.

The Writing Life: Sublime Transports and Ethical Pitfalls

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ Leave a comment
Mark Twain
“There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.”          Mark Twain

Ah the writing life, the pure enjoyment of words and language, the sense that we have set out on some hallowed road trodden before us by our greatest literary precursors. My small efforts pale in the brilliance of those luminaries, and yet, I too can aspire to strike against a small truth, brush against what the eminent literary critic Harold Bloom, in his new book, The Daemon Knows,  calls “the strong ­transports of sublimity.” After all, as Hemingway said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. “

So I gather up my journals, written over the course of three decades, scan them for gems that may still glow. I delve into nesting folders on old flash drives for half-finished stories and books in the hopes that one or two may call out to be made whole. I take satisfaction in having written a book for someone else. I blog, explore flash fiction and mini memoirs; pen book reviews; pass on my own hard-won writing tips. I count myself a fringe member of a noble literary fraternity (or, as Virginia would have it, sorority).

Then I come up against harsh Necessity. Most of my writing tasks do not pay the bills.

That makes writing a brilliant late career choice, since one of my favorite things to worry about is money. I don’t blame the wagons to which I have hitched myself; what does one expect from artists, musicians and philosophers? Even the one money man I married denied me the security I sought, playing the markets as he did with a reckless alacrity. I blame myself. Money and I have always been in an on-again off-again relationship. Maybe it’s the frisson of unease I crave.

This week, a client’s late payment sent me into a fit of money angst. Words like “insolvency” and “penury” knocked against my rattled brain (ridiculous, I know, for a rather firmly entrenched bourgeoise.) Feeling impotent, I importuned the oracle of the Internet for wise counsel. I googled and yahooed the magic SEO tags, “writing jobs”; “freelance writing”; etc. One article on Careers in Writing from Britain’s the Guardian gave me hope that I might at least fashion a small career as a hack. Two others I found at Freelance Writing Jobs invited submission of a cover letter and resume. Desperate for some sort of action, I spent a precious couple of hours conjuring up the dead language of old job applications.

The next morning I got a reply and a link from a site named “Writers Careers” inviting me to interview over Skype. I should have known from the labels that had attracted me—”scholarly,” “academic”—”that it was a paper mill disguised as a freelance writing resource. Why I should find such deception shocking eludes me, since getting round the rules—”cheating—”has become the modus operandi of our age. Still, as an educator, life-long student and writer, I consider such “services” an egregious affront not just to the clients who so easily barter the development of their mental faculties for a passing grade, and their teachers, who are being swindled out of precious time and effort, but to anyone who cares about writing as a vocation and a profession.

So, I tip my hat to the struggle that is eking out an essay or story or blog post one word and one line at a time. I may scrape along financially; I may in the long run harvest a negative return on my efforts. But at least I won’t sell my hard-won research and writing skills as so much pulp for the mill. Hell, I’ll even look beyond the small securities of business writing and editing. After all, as Edmund White quipped, “It always seemed much better to be a writer—a Real Writer—than a successful hack.”

Wednesday Word of the Week 3

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ Leave a comment

TheMidwichCuckoos

Word of the Week 3: Nugatory

Welcome to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading. (And note that I am not providing the definitions here in the hopes that 1) readers may already recognize the word, or 2) readers will be stimulated to look it up after attempting first to identify the meaning from context.)

This week I am reminded of the literature I read in my teens and early twenties, what academics refer to as the “canon”: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, George Elliot, Anthony Trollope, the Romantic poets. How I thrilled to the language, the phrasings, the settings (moors and heaths and bowling-greens; manors, coach houses and lodges). Later I pilgrimaged even farther back to Milton and Pope, William Blake and John Donne, all those illustrious pillars over which towers the greatest of them all—Shakespeare.

Twentieth-century British literature later offered equally satisfying linguistic gems, not to mention psychological insights. I won’t tally them here but as a quick example take the wicked wit of Evelyn Waugh or the randy, cutting humor of Kingsley Amos. Brilliant story-tellers all, but for me, not the least of the pleasure derived from reading British literature has been the “smashing” command of the mother tongue, the rich complex phrasings, and the delightful and unexpected variety of word choice.

Which brings me to this week’s book, from 1957, The Midwich Cuckoos by John Beynon Harris, written under the pseudonym of John Wyndham. Readers may be familiar with the film version of this classic science fiction tale, Village of the Damned. (This is not the place to decry Hollywood’s maddening habit of substituting strategically coined book titles with sensationalistic schlock; still it must be noted that the infiltrating habits of the cuckoo birds provide an important analogy.)

On an ordinary fall day in the sleepy postwar English village of Midwich, a mysterious phenomenon renders the entire population unconscious for one day. Aerial surveillance reveals a cigar-shaped silvery craft situated smack in the center of the zone affected, which disappears as the effects wear off. Shortly thereafter, all the women of child-bearing age discover themselves pregnant. When the children born of this presumed xenogenesis exhibit frightening shared traits, central citizens of the town must confront the terrifying possibility of an alien invasion designed to destroy Western civilization from within.

American SF writer Damon Knight excoriated the book for its “layers of polite restraint, sentimentality . . . and women’s-magazine masochism,” but for me, these elements paint a rich portrait of English village life on the threshold of obsolescence. Altogether, they present a reading experience that is refreshingly un-PC and add a bit of “jolly good fun” to the chilling plot.

It’s just one of those chauvinistic elements that gives us today’s example.

The Reverend Leebody, determined that the radio program he is listening to on the “Pre-Sophoclean Conception of the Oedipus Complex” should not be drowned out by the “piffle” of his wife Dora’s telephone conversation, advances the volume knob another five degrees.

“He could not be blamed for failing to guess that what now struck him as a particularly nugatory exchange of feminine concerns would subsequently prove to be of importance.”

Thanks to my husband, aka The Professor, for suggesting yet another great novel from his always-evolving List of Best Science Fiction Novels.

I invite other examples of a particularly adept use of “nugatory.” Perhaps I could think of one employing it in an observation of my male relatives’ propensity for endless ESPN viewing.

 

A Dawn Concert for Margaret

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 5 Comments
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Margaret: An indomitable spirit.

Margaret Egger Belisle was her name. Loyal wife, loving mother of five, dedicated nurse, rheumatoid arthritic. She suffered from her illness from just after my birth in the mid 1950s until her death in 1975 at the age of 53.

While I was growing up, I was oblivious to the harsh reality of her condition. It was just was the normal state of affairs. By the time my memories began to stick, she already relied on a cane. Then crutches. When the first wheelchair appeared, it was a hoot to take it for a spin down the hallway of our ranch-style home. Apart from those aids, she was like other working mothers I knew. Off she went to care for her geriatric patients every morning at the nursing home she had established with my father in 1967.

Mother’s disease followed its due trajectory through my high school years, reaching its pitch just as freedom sounded its shrill whistle most insistently in my ear. I was a freshman in college by then, commuting to class from home. I longed to move away. But Mother was still at home, deteriorating in front of our eyes. Not that RA takes a person quickly; it dawdles, inflaming another knuckle here, twisting another joint there, conspiring with a wicked cocktail of drugs to render the body a desiccated skeleton draped in swollen, mottled flesh.

It was the first stroke that put her out of commission. It hit her at dinner. One moment she was hunched at the end of the table forcing down spaghetti. The next, the left side of her body went slack, she slumped, and food fell from her open mouth. Two more strokes followed, successively robbing her of her few remaining comforts: reading, speaking, sharing meals. Like the first two, the third one cruelly refused to deliver the merciful coup de grace.

She languished in the family nursing home through the long summer before my sophomore year at college. I grew accustomed to her limbo state. Like the rest of the family, I visited, but I grew careless, even callous. I wanted to be out in the world, not sitting in that sterile room watching the arthritis tighten the screws, watching her wince with every small shift, trying to decipher her garbled speech. After one visit, I sat in my car in the parking lot raging at God for his abject cruelty. Why, why, why wouldn’t he take her?

The last time I saw her alive may have been the visit that coincided with my brother Jack’s janitorial shift at the nursing home. Jack was the big man of the family. He had been Mother’s arms and legs for several years, lifting her in and out of her wheelchair and bed, in and out of the car. Jack made sure to see her everyday, stopping in several times on his rounds. When he saw me sitting there, he lit in. “Where have you been?” he said angrily. “When was the last time you came down to see her? Your mother’s dying and you can’t be bothered to get your ass down here?”

I think I shot up and went at him, lobbing fervid excuses in my defense, my fervor growing in proportion to my guilt. Then we both heard a distressed, even indignant, sound coming from her bed. I turned. Her hand was raised, her finger pointing at me. Her eyes flashed the old spirited anger. Clearly articulating the words, she said, “I like you.”

Jack got his reward though. The only one down at the nursing home the morning she died, he was the last to see her alive. But even he wasn’t at her side when she breathed her last; he had slipped out to mop another floor. It breaks my heart that she died without Dad or any of her children at her bedside, but it would be even sadder if it weren’t for one small detail. Once we’d all assembled there, it was plain to see. Gone were the traces of pain that had gripped her face for so long. Instead, a peaceful smile graced her lips.

It’s too late now to make amends to my mother. How I wish I could sit by her side now, read to her, play music for her, take her mottled, broken dove of a hand in my own and hold it. But I can’t. I can only roll the memories and regrets around in my head. I can only belatedly offer apologies to the air.

This post was prompted by Charli Mills’s May 13, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that shows a hard place and a connection.

A Dawn Concert

Four a.m. The pain a staccato knock. No going back to sleep. She pushed up on gnarled hands, scooted, let the sharp ache push her into the wheelchair.

She followed the grooves in the carpet, pushed past the girls’ rooms, imagined their young bodies. They looked like her, thirty years ago, before the arthritis made a crippled birch of her.

She parked at the kitchen table. No coffee until Dan rose to percolate it. She waited.

At last a pale lemony light washed through the window. The familiar room emerged. And the concert began.

The robins never forsook her.

 

 

Wednesday Word of the Week 2

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ Leave a comment

WhenTheAirHitsYourBrain

Word of the Week 2: Pummel

Welcome to my second post of Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week’s word comes from When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery by Frank Vertosick, Jr., M.D, a captivating yet shockingly funny account of the author’s neurosurgical residency.

Dr. Vertosick may belong to the rarest breed of doctors, but with his blue-color background, the story he tells is one of an everyman confronted with extraordinary challenges: the deaf, mute, obese, nicotine-addicted “trisomy 21” (i.e. Down Syndrome) patient; the stunningly beautiful, pregnant, fundamentalist Christian with a brain tumor who refuses chemotherapy to save her baby; the young female car-accident victim with both a fractured skull and a perforated heart; the infant with water on the brain.

It is in describing one of these patients, a young Nigerian foreign exchange student with a dramatic case of MS, that Dr. Vertosick wins his place in this post. After recounting how the young man’s arms and legs become uncontrollable, “flailing about like octopus tentacles,” he conjures up a powerful image of the effects of this terrible disease by using a word commonly employed in a very different context.

“His face was swollen from attempts to brush his teeth, attempts which resulted only in a self-inflicted pummeling.”

I am not sure what I expected when I delved into the genre of medical memoir, but it was hardly the brilliant metaphors, surpassingly poignant reflections on life, illness and death, and skillfully rendered characters that make When the Air Hits Your Brain a page turner to the last period. And while the book makes one glad for dedicated physicians like Dr. Vertosick, it also provokes some regret that the doctor is not a full-time author.

How might you use the word “pummel” in a context unrelated to fighting? Can you think of a similar example of a word used in a wildly different context from the one in which it is usually employed? What’s your word of the week? Feel free to share your thoughts here.

Beppu: A Flash Memoir for Spring

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 2 Comments
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A view of Beppu, Oita, Kyushu, Japan

Spring always pulls me back to 1988, a pivotal year in my life. It was the year of change, of pulling up stakes, cutting ties, forsaking my stable landed existence for a leap into the unknown. It was glorious.

I had been living in Los Angeles for eight years. My initially enchanting if bohemian neighborhood, a stone’s throw from the old Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, had deteriorated, become the scene of racial confrontations and sad decline.

The relationship I was in similarly suffered. Having recently crossed over from my carefree twenties into the tick-tock thirties, the latent issue of babies awoke and set to screaming. I had never wanted them, or so I had asserted, had chosen my mate (an artist) not only for the mad love he inspired in me but upon the basis of a shared commitment to freedom, the pursuit of art, and childlessness.

But in crept my doubts. My dissatisfactions. At the same time I asked myself, if I was foregoing children, why was I locked into an arrangement that felt so confining?

What then? I had always had a wanderlust. My career as an ESL teacher had promised ripe opportunities before: sweet apples I had failed to pluck, had left to rot on the tree.

But now another fruit fell into my open palm. Sweeter than I had any right to expect. A teaching position in Japan. And not a job at one of those fly-by-night, exploitative, street-front language joints in Tokyo or Osaka, but a lecturer’s position in English at a college in the hot spring fairyland of a place called Beppu.

My decision on whether to eat that sweet fruit or let it remain unplucked changed the course of my future.

This post is my response to Charli Mills’s May 6, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that is a snapshot of spring…We could think of it as “spring eternal.” Warm, renewing, new life, hope.

Currency Exchange

He sat in the chair, vigilant, funereal.

“The taxi’s below,” she said. “I’ll call when I get there tomorrow.”

He didn’t rise. She gathered the last bags and closed the door behind her.

Freedom revved in her chest, maintained its thrum through traffic and customs. On the plane she exhaled into a blissful inaccessibility. Not even his voice could intrude now. Already he seemed far away.

She deplaned at Narita, boarded the island hopper to Kyushu. On the descent, she peered out the window. April sunlight glinting on the Inland Sea was a newly minted coin, just for her spending.

Wednesday Word of the Week 1

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 2 Comments

Word of the Week 1: Yokelry

Welcome to my debut post of Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week’s word comes from Bring the Jubilee, Ward Moore’s 1953 alternative history in which the Confederacy won the “War of Southron Independence” after the surrender of the United States of America in 1864.

The year is 1940. Barbara, a brilliant beautiful physicist, cold-hearted cynic, and emotionally volatile polyandrist, has Hodge, the country rube of a protagonist and budding historian, in her grip. When Hodge questions the viability of Barbara’s scheme to translate matter-energy into terms of space-time, thus making time travel possible, Barbara strikes back with a typically brittle and demeaning observation:

“Thank you. It’s always nice to know one has amused the yokelry.”

Ouch! Kudos to the author, Ward Moore. I had not read him before but reveled in the power of his  Dickension vision of a defeated and impoverished United States in mid-twentieth century.

I invite other examples of a particularly adept use of “yokel” or “yokelry,” or other words like it. Have you encountered a use of a word or phrase that has stopped you in your reading tracks this week? If so, consider sharing it here.

 

Janisha: A Flash in the Vein of “Black Lives Matter”

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 1 Comment
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In managerial stance, 2013

 

A blog I have come to follow during the last year is Charli Mills’s Carrot Ranch. Designed along Charli’s “buckaroo” persona, the site is both a showcase for Charli’s own literary outpourings and a refreshing and inspiring “watering hole” for a small but growing literary community; Charli has branded that community her “Rough Writers.”

Charli hosts a flash fiction challenge on her blog, and each week she posts a writing prompt for her stable of Rough Writers. Triggered by events in the wider world or by the quiet dramas of the natural sphere that surrounds her in Elmira Idaho, the themes selected are always ones that provoke a far-ranging response. The strictures she places on word count–99 words, no more, no less–encourage a tightening of focus and a keen, almost poetic, attention to vocabulary.

This week’s prompt, and the essay that precedes it, brilliantly conflate two recent devastating cataclysms, one natural and one social: the earthquake in Nepal and the racial turmoil in the United States that has seen a violent upswing in recent months in response to the anger unleashed by black communities over the deaths of black men at the hands of the police. Charli captures the fear, frustration, and helplessness many of us feel:

Like geological earthquakes, social ones rock the ground we stand upon. We feel ripped to pieces. We feel buried alive in the rubble of our riot-fueled angst. We feel the whole damn world is against us, no one understands.

What we need is common ground. To reach across the racial chasms we need to toss aside discomfort over “otherness.” Our first step is to recognize one race: human.

To toss aside otherness is a large order, one difficult to achieve even when the heart is willing. That being the case, the prompt this week is perhaps more challenging than most (and thanks to Charli for graciously allowing me to expand the word count.):

April 29, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that tackles racism. Think about common ground, about the things that rip us apart as humans. How we can recover our identities in a way that honors the identities of all individuals? What breaks the barrier of other-ness? Imagine a better tomorrow that doesn’t need expression in riots or taking sides on social media. As writers, think about genres, characters, tension and twists. We can rebuild.

As a member of the “dominant culture” in the States, I have had my own moments of reckoning over the years in regards to race. This flash piece (part memoir, part fiction) comes from one of them.

Janisha

Janisha planted herself before my desk. A bulwark, I thought.

“I want to talk to you,” she said.

Her tone conveyed a reprimand, not a request to a supervisor.

“Alright,” I said. “Have a seat.”

She ignored me. I looked uneasily behind her at the only door to my office and the empty hallway beyond.

“You might close the door,” I said, remembering the discrimination complaint she’d filed against another manager. I’d already gotten her play-by-play account of the incident, despite the dean’s warning not to discuss it.

I suppressed a sigh of defeat. Composed my face to its managerial mask. Wondered again what made this woman so bloody commanding: that throaty voice, those tight cornrows framing heavy brow and full purple lips. Her face belonged to some fierce Asian deity guarding a temple.

I cleared my throat. “You know it’s against policy for me to discuss your grievance,” I began.

Her face glistened like a polished stone. Glowering, I thought.

Then in a beat, she threw her head back, let out a full-throttle laugh.

“That’s not why I came in,” she said. And laid a plastic, motorized fan on my desk.

“Just gets so stinking hot back here.”

Testing the WordPress Waters

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ Leave a comment

acapulco_cliffs-20859

I’ve finally taken the plunge into WordPress. What pushed me off the cliff? It was a flash fiction piece I posted on Charli Mills’s Carrot Ranch site recently.

Charli invites her community of “Rough Writers” to compose on and post links to their own websites rather than create the flash in the comment section, but having grown frustrated with my Memoir Crafter blog, I have been posting my flashes in Charli’s comment box for weeks now.  When I included (in addition to an opening comment and a title) a quote at the top of yesterday’s flash piece, then notes at the bottom on certain subtleties relevant to the flash, my post unrolled down the page like an endless Asian scroll. The time to migrate over to WordPress had come.

I had put off this day for months. All those fears of being too tech-challenged; too undisciplined to ratchet up my writing practice; too time-squeezed to do it right. All excuses of course. I was simply loathe to park my bottom in the chair and work my way through those first mists of confusion. (Do I go WordPress.org or WordPress.com? Which host do I use if I opt for the .org? What about the theme? The plug-ins? Etc. Etc. Etc.) Thankfully, a review of a webinar I had taken some months back by writer and digital-age-publishing guru Jane Friedman provided the impetus and confidence I needed.

So, as of 4:30 PM MST on tax day, 2015, I am jeannelombardo.com. I am sure I’ll be riding this learning curve for some weeks, and making many changes, but I am happy to finally test the waters. And I am excited at the prospect of developing both my writing and my writing services on this highly regarded platform. Would love to hear anecdotes of your early experience with WordPress and how you made it work for you!