Summer 2009

Congratulations to Jamila Johnson, Nancy Dahlberg, Thaddeus Gunn, Stephanie Trinneer and Keith Curtis, whose work was chosen from the Hugo Writing Classes summer end-of-term reading. Each quarter, we highlight the work of several of our talented students.

This excerpt is from a piece Jamila Johnson is now working (and reworking). It came from a five-minute writing exercise on the last day of The Art and Craft of the Short Story, where instructor Midge Raymond put a list of things on the white board and asked the students to identify with one, explaining the identification in prose. This piece came from autumn leaves. Jamila wrote the first two paragraphs in class, then played with them a bit at home, which is when she came up with the excerpt that she read at the student reading.

For most of my life, 20 years in fact, when the autumn leaves fell to be crunched by my impractical shoes, it was time to purchase office supplies. The first hardened leaf to wedge itself beneath my clogs signaled yellow highlighters to my brain, and my heart would soar.

The second leaf to wedge itself between my heel and my flip-flop would provide the Morse code: I needed lime green flags or yellow Post-Its the way a coke addict needs to lick the inside of a baggie. I'd be short of breath feeling my lungs swollen in anticipation.

The year the leaves of autumn told me nothing I tried to coerce a bit of communication from the rigor mortis by pacing over a pile of leaves in front of Office Depot.     Unsuccessful, I bought black pumps, went to work, entered an empty elevator and plummeted to my death.

In the United States, elevators kill about 30 people every year. The other 29 people to have died in 1997 are in this room. They've been in this room with me ever since.  The room is gray, white and yellow and smells of Hawaiian Punch and lavender. I once told Chester—a dry man who had the misfortune of dying in a freight elevator in Trenton New Jersey—I told Chester I felt a bit cheated.

All those years of school and no one ever mentioned this as a possibility, I said.

I went to church each Sunday for 40 years. You feel bad that this subject didn't come up in school, he said.

Chester is a plump man.  With age, little skin pillows had begun to form under his beady dark eyes. His mouth drooped and his skin was a worn ash color. He was the first one here, and as the second to the last one here I wonder what it was like to have been alone.

I never went to church, I said.

These are fighting words around here. This statement resulted in a look from May Belle from Mobile, Alabama and Fredrick from Boulder, Colorado. They died in the same elevator while on vacation separately in Chicago. Intellectually I understand their concern.

Maybe you belong here then, Chester said.

That's an awful thing to say, I said back.

I still felt the eyes of May Belle and Fredrick. I've been feeling them ever since. I understand that they lived a certain way for many more years than I did. I forget sometimes that it's harder for them: learning that how you live your life is irrelevant and that it is all about how you die. Gray, white, yellow and 30 people in a room. I see their concern.

Especially since it happened.

When it happened the first time, I was sitting on a yellow cot. The one thing I can say about all these years is that there are good, comfortable pillows. I think the feathers inside the pillows are from ducks. I've had some time to contemplate ducks. They make good pillows.  I was on the cot and Chester's drooping mouth was twitching and I was thinking about my pillow. Then Chester was gone, and May Belle was screaming, her gray sphere eyes howling. Chester's cot was empty.

Nancy Dahlberg wrote "My Tribe" in Paul Nelson's Keeping Your Hand (Foot, Spleen) In It poetry workshop.  "My Tribe" was the result of an assignment to write about one's forebears using poet Ed Dorn's "Tribe" as an example. Nancy wrote about her mother and father's background and their coming together to raise a family.

My Tribe
By Nancy Dahlberg

... English stiff upper lip
and German don't give an inch
mixed with blackberry schnapps
crazy in the spray of Niagara Falls
New York side of get out
while the getting's good
run away, enlist underage,
be a doughboy in the Great War
ride cavalry along the Rhine
leave no footprints, drift
into accounting Chicago-style
for easy bucks before the crash.
My father, big bootstraps, strong
arms, seventh grade education,
passed master plumber's exam,
set up shop on Halsted off Elston
insisted on pay in cash,
married a DAR coulda-been
God helps those... school teacher
from Scots-Irish, Prussian backyard
farmers outskirts of Evansville,
southern Indiana to become northwest
Chicago suburban and nuclear,
fish on Fridays, Jesus Sunday mornings,
Lake and McHenry county bar-hop
play the slots Sunday afternoons. 
Summer picnics Dam #4 Des Plaines River,
rowboats on Lake Zurich, pickled herring,
lentils, onion sandwiches, never enough Schlitz,
Pabst or Four Roses. If you answer the phone,
say your father's not home.

This is an excerpt from a short work-in-progress by Thaddeus Gunn written as an assignment for Rebecca Agiewich's Understanding Story Structure and the Magic of the Outline class. The narrator is a fighter who has what he believes to be a religious awakening after he gets knocked out and wakes up with a broken neck.  While not specifically autobiographical, the piece is informed by Thaddeus' personal experiences with kickboxing, Buddhism and domestic violence.

From "All things flash, all things flare"
By Thaddeus Gunn

Buddhism isn't all goodness and light, let's all make sure everybody's happy. Destruction is part of the dharma. That New Age pick-and-choose crap is the high-fructose corn syrup version of religion.

Before you take a Vow of Refuge, read the fine print. The Mahayana is about loving kindness for everybody. Everybody means everybody--including people you would otherwise choke the living shit out of. Easy enough when you're talking about somebody you don't know, like Bush, whatever. But try generating compassion for your best friend when he skips town with your girl. Or your cat when it shits in your laundry basket for the thirtieth time. Or your dad after he hits your moms in the face with a bottle of Cutty and takes out her teeth, and she says to you don't look at me, you're just like him, you'd do this to me too, you pinche feón.

Violent compassion. That's the term I was looking for.

The deity Mahakala, the defender of the Dharma. Ever seen that thangka? Dig what he's standing on? Corpses. Crown of five skulls. Nobody has to sit you down and teach you that he's here to fuck shit up. He ain't handing out hugs and kisses.

Burning is my style.

My dad took off one time. Don't know if he was gambling or had a sucia or what. I didn't know shit most of the time back then. My parents were rockets that arced and exploded over my head while I ran back and forth, avoiding the fallout. Their fights happened in the stratosphere, too high up for me to know anything about them but the detonation.

I had a brother too, but he was dead. He wasn't around for those fights. He died over a long time from leukemia but he laughed and smiled the whole time he was going down. Every day he was dying dragged my parents a little bit further into hell. When he was finally gone, they spent months shouting the rosary like they were screaming down the hole after him. Then they started screaming at each other. Once they started doing that it seemed like they never stopped.

When dad split that one time, my moms took all my dad's stuff: shirts, socks, pants, even their bed and their dresser and the mirror and everything, dragged all that shit out into the backyard. Took his stuff like cuff links and his bowling trophies, stuff that wouldn't even burn or so I thought, and heaped it all up. Put some gas on it from the lawn mower. Torched it. Nobody called the fire department even though the fire was so big it was throwing remnants of burnt underwear on people's roofs. Neighbors just came around and watched, partly because the fire was just so glorious, and partly because you just don't fuck with that crazy Hispanic lady when she's doing her thing. White people know better. Hell, even cops know better.

We were all poor in the neighborhood. We all had rage. My moms lit all her husbands stuff on fire--well shit, Black Natalie pushed her old man out the upstairs window. Didn't even get it right on the first try. Only pushed him out onto the roof of the front porch and he scrambled back in. Like, "please baby please baby please baby please". Dude was a living interpretation of a James Brown song. Once she got herself braced in the window frame and used both her legs though, he went down the slope and off the eaves like some fat-ass rain.

We all just stood around and watched that, too. Why? Because we all did violent shit like that. That was the way. It was like we were a colony of artists who took turns observing each other's work.  Anyway, no ambulance showed up, nobody pressed charges. The brother walked funny for the rest of his days but he never left Black Natalie. Even when she had that white guy move in, the brother never moved out. That's love right there. Black Natalie knew that to keep a man, you must be practiced in the art of defenestration.

On the day my moms burned all my dad's shit, people stuck around until the fire burned down to nothing and the street lights came on. It was kinda folksy, like camping or some shit. People sitting around, telling stories around the fire while my moms stirred the coals and made sure every last goddamn stitch of that man's goods were dust. Then my dad rolled in, just kinda sauntered up like you would at any other social gathering, maybe like he was looking for where the potato salad was at. Nobody moved except my moms. They didn't even look at each other. She just got up and went in the house. Dad sat down by me and put his arm around my shoulder. "Que onda, feón?" he said. That was practically the only Spanish he knew. He always said that to me. I never said anything back until that one day when I was sixteen and answered him with my right fist dead centered on his nose. He didn't say anything back except, "You got talent," and then went to have my moms put ice on the new stain on his shirt.

But that time, the time at the fire, we just sat there like pals and looked into the fire and after a while he got up and went in. I stayed out there until the neighbors all left and the ashes got cold. Then I went inside and crept up to my parent's bedroom door. They were laying on the bare floor, still in their clothes, entwined, at peace. 

Stephanie Trinneer wrote this piece in David Lasky and Greg Stump's Autobiographical Comics class  from a jumble of personal memories, newspaper clippings and diary entries. She put each element of the story on note cards, then created and drew the layouts for the pages based on the cards.

Rumblings
By Stephanie Trinneer

Keith Curtis wrote the first chapters of "Childhood Traumas" for David Lasky and Greg Stump's Comics and Autobiography class.  He was originally going to hand draw his final project, but ended up resorting to the comfort and speed of his trademark photo-comic style (fumetti).  From his own memory and family lore, he easily came up with a list of 73 serious injuries and cruel-arious circumstances from ages zero to 21, then went about creating short comic book stories depicting the life lessons and perhaps the scars received learning them.