Perpetual Semihysterical Holiday

Despite hours of editing, my writing sample for my creative thesis proposal is going very slowly. Compare this opening of Archangel (title to be changed) to the new third-person narration:

There is a Guatemalan man in the high desert outside of the Mojave who is waiting for his surrogate daughter. His daughter arrives on a Sunday night in mid-March. He is on the roof crafting bags for the Los Angeles flea market, surrounded by cloth, garden lamps, and old-t-shirts. Her headlights hit him from behind, casting his shadow across the trashscapes, his backyard bicycle pieces bent around with strange light. She emerges from the driver’s side window without opening the door and vomits on the driveway. The engine is still running. Maybe she’s drunk.

“Little Felicia” he says climbing down the ladder, “you’re home.”

Her body flexes on the gravel as she heaves. He walks down the driveway and stops in front of her. He checks his watch. It’s half-past midnight.

“What have you been drinking?” he says.

Felicia paws her own face and inhales deeply.

“Do you need help?”

She stops sobbing for a moment, then shrieks loud enough to rent open a hole in the desert. He looks into her mouth while she wails. The inside of her cheek is bright coral. Her voice hums on into the night after she closes her mouth, echoing off of distant walls and nearby pavement.

He slides his arms under her ribs and thighs, leaning his head against her ear. He lumbers the girl up the driveway and into the house, to the bed she used to sleep in. She falls in. He brings in the comforter from his bed and lumps it over her.

“Dad?” she says, opening her eyes. She hiccups once and falls into a deep sleep. He turns off the car, goes back on the roof, and sews.

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During the night Felicia’s father stays on the roof. He positions the radio as far as the cord will let it go. The cord is attached to several extensions leading directly through Felicia’s window into her room and behind her toy-box.

The girl has not lived with him for five years, but returns during times of desperation. He receives her phone calls as she merges on the I-5 from Los Angeles, San Francisco, wherever she comes from. Every few months, she arrives during the early hours of a late night. This time she drove in from the east, from Virginia. The phone call came in at around six earlier that evening. He answered it expecting a bill-collector.

While he sews the radio is going and he can hear the news – the primaries are on, New Hampshire is the next big swing state, Obama could win.

I don’t know if the third-person adds pressure to keep the story in real-time (which is very, very difficult for me) and whether this is ultimately to my benefit or disadvantage. Will the committee be happy to see I don’t have woefully wrinkled chronology? Or will I be dismissed for uninteresting prose? I think the language gets more interesting in first-person narration. There’s something to be said for having a straight-forward narration. I want to write clearly, so I have to think clearly. In fact, I think fiction might be the most rewarding placement of clarity of thought. If only it wasn’t the distillment of intense sorrow. (Take that, ironic youth culture! Sincerity and Spite motivate my days!)

Blink Once for Yes

Have I completely forgotten you? No – I’ve just completely immersed myself in thesis preparation. In less than ten days I will be presenting my thesis ideas to the English department. I have two applications: an analytical thesis application and a creative thesis application. Ideally I will be writing a creative thesis this year, but there are no guarantees. A creative thesis requires real talent. I have been editing Archangel for my creative application. The story, about a man waiting for his step-daughter to return from her perilous obsessive travel, is being completely overhauled. I’m eager to turn in a completely reworked (but recognizable) copy of Archangel because my creative thesis proposal is about traveling generally. I want to write a few stories about characters in exile, travelers, those that are lost, people in the wrong places without their normal tools. Paco’s, the narrator of Archangel, struck me as one of the tenderest character I’ve had the chance to work with, and I want to expand on his loss.

While not editing my own work and reading Dan Savage’s fascinating book on gay marriage, The Commitment, I’ve been nursing minor addictions to coffee and second-hand smoke. I also went to Bishop’s on Hawthorne yesterday and rearranged the dead blue cells on my head. I’m pleased with the haircut.

New fangled hipster.

New work will be delayed as I focus on my proposal. Summer’s ending and I have a lot of work to do.

Moto Perpetuo

My temporary disappearance was due to a few things, but most importantly the acquiring of my American passport. In case you don’t already know, I became an American citizen this past March after having lived in the United States for (most) of the past thirteen years. This document will allow me to leave the country in December in search of my brother and to look at British graduate programmes. Inside it has a picture of me with freshly coloured blue hair. I am listed as a Canadian by birth and an American by naturalization. This passport expires on August 3rd 2018. I will be 30 years old. I am currently a triple citizen (Canada, El Salvador, United States). I hopefully will have retained these titles if not gained others by the time this passport expires.

I’m in the process of writing a new story, about a hitchhiker with a dog stranded in a New England suburb. Locations are important to my writing, and so is music. Music informs the language I use and the overall tone of the story. So here’s some songs I’ve been listening to, for your downloading pleasure. See if you can tell where this story is going before I do.

Midnight Runner – Cut Copy

Go Slowly – Radiohead

| Against | – Jedi Mind Tricks

Run – Air

End of the World – Shocking Pink

Martha Avenue Love Song – Innocence Mission

Distant Lights – Burial

Night of Olivian Spectres: My Stay at Hotel Clavijo

The best song to play on the piano when you’re wasting the night away in a New England college town is Chopin’s Waltz in B Minor. Jhon Clavijo, a Columbian photographer/film-maker, was the coordinator for Project Eye-to-Eye at Brown University until he graduated recently. Now he kicks it with actors, artists, musicians, and sometimes writers like me (when he’s not taking artistic pictures of his crotch and posting them to facebook).

A cool collaborative opportunity Jhon and I are considering: filming my trip to Berlin to find my brother, making a short documentary about the experience. I’m in the process of looking into creative grants that might fund or cover any of the expenses.

I’m waiting in Boston’s Logan Airport to take my flight back home. I’m stopping in Philadelphia. I have a new story in the making that I will be working on during the flight. Today Charlie Szuber, the template for every lead male character physically (see Charlie Without Violins) in my writing, would have been 19.

I’m excited to welcome anyone who has found me here at Forgets through my reading for Project Eye-to-Eye. I now have an airplane to get on.

Providence

Providence so far has been stunning just visually. The architecture and finishing on the buildings makes me a bit heady. I love old shit – we know this. But this isn’t just old shit. Some of the this is this the old shit dreams are made of. Old fireplaces. Old kitchens. Old drain pipes and gargoyles. Old columns. Old doors. Simple, gorgeous old shit. Old shit they tell you about when you read about Benjamin Franklin and white people getting angry because their tea is too expensive. That’s the kind of old shit I’m into. I wonder what my reaction will be to Europe if this is how much I appreciate New England, at least architecturally.

Also, I gave my reading last night. Slow and deliberate. Short. Shaky at first but I told it like a conversation and I’m always a bit shaky talking to strangers, and a crowd (the first time you speak to it, the first time it’s assembled a particular way in front of you) is a stranger. People will really nice, and there was a standing ovation. Not only that, but I had the honour of being the opening act for New Street Poets, a play written by several Rutgers graduates and contemporaries of the area, including the very friendly LeDerick Horne. Great things have been happening here. I’ll leaving for Portland tomorrow.

Soon to be coming: a page for Self-Advocacy and my experience with Project Eye-to-Eye.