February 20, 2012
She didn’t call; she didn’t halt again. She climbed the stairs and didn’t look around as she came up; she faced ahead. Ahead, was the bathroom, with the door open. It was clean and empty. She turned at the top of the stairs toward the Weebles’ bedroom. She had never been in this house before, but she knew where that would be. It would be the extended room at the front, with the wide window overlooking the street.
The door of that room was open.
Peg came downstairs and left the house by the kitchen, the utility room, the side door. Her footprints showed on the carpet and on the linoleum tiles, and outside on the snow. She closed the door after herself.
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The Efficacy of Empty Space
The excerpt above from Alice Munro’s short story “Fits” is a potent example of what can be accomplished in the careful handling of scene. Munro knows very well what narrative information she is responsible for, and even in this passage so devoid of telling, those aspects are handled with the utmost precision and restraint. The first sentence “She didn’t call; she didn’t halt again” has a musical quality in the anaphoric repetition of “she didn’t,” and even in the use of “again,” a resolute iamb. In one moment in this first sentence, Munro does away with any measures Peg might take to mitigate the momentum of the rest of this passage, as the reader knows she will not be calling out, nor stopping her ascent. By ending the second sentence with “ahead” and then starting the third with the same word, Munro creates a mimetic moment; the reader must move with Peg from one step to another. The moment the two “ahead”s capture is like the brief second when a person’s weight is equal on two steps, one foot on each step as the shift of weight occurs, and a shift most definitely occurs in the narrative here when she sees the bathroom door for the first time. Later we find out the traumatic importance of what was in the bathroom, and Peg’s later account of what she saw differs from the account of other sources. But here we already infer the significance of the open door and what she must have seen, from the fraught silence, the omission of information, the white space of a section break that follows.
In the space between the two sections, the reader is left to wonder what happened. What happened upstairs? And this is even more effective because Munro remains in scene mode. Peg’s step-by-step departure asks the reader to leave the scene just as he or she entered it: by moving with Peg. Great tension is kindled in the empty space and the two very physically close passages on either side because the reader is very much with Peg in the aforesaid sections. Munro’s choice to keep the reader blind even in lockstep accompaniment with Peg makes the reader’s ignorance even more more blatant, more provocative.
–Kaiyuh Cornberg, Class of 2013
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A Good Read is an effort to unlock some of the secrets to good writing. Each posting consists of a “found” piece—it could be the opening stanza of a poem or the closing jingle of a television commercial—and a brief discussion of an interesting detail, strategy, or technique at work. We want to know specifically how the language functions, and we aren’t expecting essays, technical jargon, or perfection. If a piece deals with an excerpt from a larger work, we ask that you include a short summary for context. To submit, please consult the Submission Guidelines, submit in the Features category, and include “A Good Read” in the subject line of your piece.
February 14, 2012
Beginning this week, we at TBPO will be updating the Features Blog more or less weekly, and each post will be written (and directed) by one of our editors! We think you’ll really enjoy what’s ahead!
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For the first two weeks of our second semester, we read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek together. The book was wonderful and inspiring, not least so in its vocabulary. Throughout our ‘intensive’ (as we call this traditional semester-opening reading period), we compiled a list of the unusual words we found in the book, and our assignment every day was to write either a piece using as many of the most recent chapters’ vocabulary words as we could, or to write a piece of flash fiction (50-100 words) based on one of the words.
The following are five short stories inspired by their title-words’ definitions and etymologies. They were written by Emily Kessler, our Features Co-Editor, Class of 2014.
Bream
The bay and the dockies stopped churning late that night; Roscoe took the ships’ stillness as a measure of personal triumph, so upon their listing moonlit calm he saw reason to hunt recompense. On his way up the dock his shoulder twitched. He felt a heat close to his back that defied the coldness of the dark. He whirled round on his left big toe to find the dock lamplight orange and disembodied, fuzzing in what was clearly meant to be human posture: the ghosts were more than stories. Roscoe realized how the hulls had always turned out so clean. His eyeballs melted shortly after.
Benighted
The wall is so thin we can hear the scraping. Lucy stretches out her arms as far as the shackles allow and braces her bare feet against the wall. She heaves. Shale flakes from around the bases of her chains like birds startled from a tree.
“What are you thinking?” I ask. My throat is studded with dust and I cough. My body racks and bends with the cough and I can feel my own shackles lurch. “Do you want it to take us?”
Again she heaves, and breaks free. She charges down the tunnel; sunlight makes her a darkened dot.
I am swallowed whole.
Pellucid
You get it, right? You know, it’s hard not to get. You know, there are only so many words and so many hands and each hand has only so many cuticles to puncture and there is only so much blood in one spot, like people in a square. There are so many analogies for people, and analyses and anarchies and antagonists and not enough words. If there were enough words there would be so many people anananies and analalies and arraramies that people would be drowning in the blood of their own punctured cuticles.
Susurrus
It wasn’t the trees. For a moment he fancied himself a night-rabbit, stock-still, ears tipped to the moon, but just as soon he remembered that his ears were fissures, unimpressive and greased with slime.
The rustle again, closer. He edged deeper into the mud. His hops were noisier than a rabbit’s, his strides wider and more necessary. He gulped and felt his last two flies scudding around in his stomach, as if still alive. Mud seeped to his chin; moonlight made torches of his big eyes.
A wet night-rabbit burst through the underbrush, froze, bounded back again. The toad relaxed; mud swelled over him. He slept.
Frangible
Lying on my back in the park, my arms bristled with tranquil ants at night. I wondered, they being so fast, if they sensed things slower. They might watch stars like fireworks as they were born and burned and burst, and feel the Earth’s tilt, too, as it turned. I raised a hand to eye level. Some ants fell; others clung to the hairs or the little climbing rocks that must have been there on my skin all along. I wove grass through my fingers and imagined the planet lurching, as it did, and I held on. I flicked an ant to the horizon and wondered if it would think it was flying.
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Below is a list of words that one can find in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. If you come across a particularly exciting or inspiring word, we would love if you, too, would write and submit your own word-based piece for publication on the blog (see Submission Guidelines for details)!
Vocabulary from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
Deciduous Brome Tremulous Ruck Crevasse Oscillograph Vouchsafe Prerogative Apogee Lancet Eidetic Tinsnip Lambent Usurp Blinkered Spendthrift Profligate Idolatrous Chitin Excoriate Keening Loam Swain Concertina Hummock Vanguard Allayed Pileated Thralldom Bream Plew Scarp Pellucid Benighted Peradventure Geomancy Ultima Incursion Emendation Bole Sedge Lappet Memento mori Runnel Weft Shmoo Modicum Interstices Substratum Whelk Ovipositor Grunion Anathema Pelagic Turgid Phylactery Etiolate Susurrus Tramontane Frangible Bivouac Pinochle Insouciant Pupae Ganglia Ex Nihilo Sere Fjord Surcease Hara-Kiri Planarian Ribband Cataract Castellated Discalced Zephyr Suet Gibbous Oriflamme Skein Weft Frontispiece Subterfuge Cloacal Concertina Hillock Implacable Scry Encyst Fortuitous Jetsam Substratum Oxbow Diminuendo Stridulation Batting Hagiography Vanquish Tallith Purulent Doubloon Rufous Protean Atrophy Viceroy Acrid Festoon Intercessor Squill Fissure Fecundity Herpetologist Anchorite
February 3, 2012
Thanks to all who have submitted poems and works of fiction for the 2012 Elizabeth Bishop Prizes. There were several hundreds of submissions. You have sent some extraordinary work, and we on the editorial staff are very busy reading it and selecting finalists. A reminder: All submissions are read “blind” and we will not know the identity of the winners we choose until after selections have been made. We will notify winners and post the results here on March 15. Winners receive acknowledgment on our site, publication in our Spring 2012 issue, and a $3000 full tuition scholarship to the Walnut Hill School for the Arts Summer Writing Program in July.
All poetry and fiction that was submitted by students in 8th through 11th grades (or the equivalent overseas) before February 1 is eligible for Prize consideration. And all submissions, explicitly for the Bishop Prize or not, are considered for publication in the Spring issue of the magazine.
Once again, the deadline for the Bishop Prizes is now passed. But, we are still reading and selecting work for our next issue. So keep sending your finest poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction prose, plays, and responses to our Features projects! It is an honor to read it.
December 22, 2011
Maximilian shocked himself and the bleachers of sweltering parents when he bounced off the ungiving finish line tape.
Kaiyuh Cornberg
It was the second time the kid let us go anywhere but McDonald’s, and after a bite into that twelve-dollar burger, she wiggled finger and thumb around in her mouth–my cloth-white napkin bloodied, a little window-gap in her smile.
Sophia Martins
The new-born lay on the table, wrapped in a sheet, still red and pulsing: a beating heart.
Allison Avila
She crept to the water’s edge, tenderly dipped her toes in, and yelped.
Adea Lennox
Her mother told her to make a list, said that she would feel better if she just got everything down on paper, but Martha Reamlin needed first to find paper and a pen, without which she couldn’t, just couldn’t.
Kaiyuh Cornberg
Inverted and soggy, the pie was unappetizing, but nonetheless an impressive feat for a five-year-old.
Courtney McCain
It is an acquired taste, the acid of dishonesty, and as soon as Harvey leaves the house, his spine and arms bristle with it.
Emily Kessler
Margaret Ackert heard the wet howls and first thought not of the newborn between her legs, but of Jack the tabby, who John had probably forgot to let in amid their rush the night before.
Kaiyuh Cornberg
It was something Virginia found in Mrs. Dalloway: a collection of words sufficing to enrapture, that collection of words I’ve here found sufficient as the door to a story, that she would buy the flowers…
Sophia Martins
Lost somewhere in the drunken countdown, in the blur of casual kisses, was Margaret–kneeling and searching for her other earring.
Courtney McCain
That classroom stayed barren and cheerless all year, and probably for all the years since; underneath its motley strew of sleek laminate and fallacious yellow stars are the same cold first-grade tiles, warping, now, with me.
Emily Kessler
Frightened and confused, Melvin realized that toga parties had nothing to do with Greek literature.
Courtney McCain
Every habitual repetition of task is in some way a comparison to the first time the action was conducted.
Casey Murtagh
First, stir together flour, baking soda, sugar — to preheat the oven to 350 degrees is the final instruction, after the mess is already blended.
Sophia Martins
Before I felt the strange white cold outside that morning, I thought the ground had swallowed up the grass and thrown up flour in its place.
Emily Kessler
They’d always wanted to, and finally, after their parents dozed off on opposite sides of the bed, they took the whipped cream can from the fridge and a feather from one of the couch cushions, then tiptoed upstairs, swirled the sweet foam into their father’s hand and tickled his nose with the feather.
Adea Lennox
We had just finished raking the last of the leaves when Jacob came running down the driveway, screaming, “I call jumping in first!”
Shelly Pires
He kicked and kicked and kicked, his foot searching for anything or nothing (no one knows) among the pastel blankets.
Renee Richard
The bride resented walking last, and with her father, no less.
Kaiyuh Cornberg
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These “pencil shavings,” in conjunction with our new web site, were composed and compiled by The Blue Pencil Editors.
A call for submissions: Please feel free to submit pencil shavings for our next topic: Punch.
Remember: A “pencil shaving” is a single sentence—silly or serious, narrative or declarative, poetic or frenetic—written in response to a topic chosen by the editors, such as “greetings” and “baldness” and “octopus salad.” From the collections of shavings submissions, the editors compile the most interesting assortments and post them here (all shavings are subject to editing).
To submit, please visit our electronic Submissions Manager, and review the guidelines pertaining to Features Submissions. Please limit your submission to five offerings. We look forward to reading you. Thanks!
December 15, 2011
Dear Readers, Welcome one, welcome all, to the newly-refurbished TBPO! The site that you are presently admiring is the product of much discussion and careful toil, and we are now quite pleased to rinse our hands of sweat, blood, and (joyful) tears to hand to you our wobbling little internet infant in its glossy new bonnet! It comes