Narrative Magazine's free iPhone app debuts in early 2010. To celebrate their launch, they've created the iStory, 150 words of dramatic fiction or nonfiction, and are soliciting submissions now. Narrative pays $250 for each iStory accepted. (Check out the guidelines here.)I’ve been incommunicado of late, huddled at my computer, struggling with the opening of my new book – a contemporary story set in Elko, Nevada. I’ve only come up for air twice this week, once to visit Grandma Allie in the hospital, and once to thumb through this month’s The Writer, which features a story by Kurt Chandler on essayist Michael Perry. Chandler makes Perry’s book, Population: 485 – Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, sound like so much fun, I instantly ordered it from the library. (If I like it I’ll buy it, then read it again – Standard Operating Procedure.)
Chandler offers a para:
In the surrounding countryside, farmsteads with little red barns have been pretty much kicked in the head, replaced with monster dairies, turkey sheds, and vinyl-sided prefabs. … There is a sense of decline. Or worse, of dormancy in the wake of decline. But we are not dead here. We still have Friday-night football games. Polka dances. Bowling. If you know who to ask, you can still get yourself some moonshine, although methamphetamine has become the favored homebrew.Check out Michael Perry’s website – his new book is Truck: A Love Story, which Chandler calls “…clever, poignant and often hilarious…”
Please bird, please don’t sing…
Performed by Carly Simon
Rearranged by Renee
Steve and I just returned from four days in South Texas, where he hunted quail and I took notes. I had no idea quail hunting was so complicated. We took two trucks of five hunters each, and at one point during the shoot, one of the hunters turned to me and said, “This thing runs like a finely tuned Swiss watch,” which astonished me, given I was thinking along the lines of “organized chaos.” But the more I watched, the more I came to understand there is a method to the madness – that it takes skill, patience, and solid experience to avoid shooting your companion, your dogs, your dogs’ handlers, or the person in the truck taking notes.
We had a great time, and in addition to hunting, Steve took some nice photographs of the region’s birds while I walked the ranch, encountering a rattlesnake. I heard it before I saw it, its rattle warning me I’d gotten too close. I backpedaled at once, taking the long way back instead of the shortcut I’d planned on.
Later that afternoon, Steve took this pic of a wild tom turkey on the ranch.
The annual Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC), sponsored by the National Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, will be held February 15-18, just two weeks away. During the event, bird watchers of all ages and expertise count birds for four days to help scientists determine the distribution and abundance of birds throughout the U.S. and Canada. Prior to the count, bird watchers can print a checklist for the birds in their area from www.birdcount.org. We’re asked to count birds in our backyards, or at local parks, ponds, marshes, or wildlife refuges, keeping a separate list of counts for each day, and then entering the results via a link on the website.
Last year, birders submitted 81,003 checklists tallying 11,082,387 birds and 613 species.
The 10 most commonly reported species were:
1 – Northern Cardinal
2 – Dark-eyed Junco
3 – Mourning Dove
4 – Blue Jay
5 – Downy Woodpecker
6 – American Goldfinch
7 – House Finch
8 – Tufted Titmouse
9 – American Crow
10 – House Sparrow
I’ve downloaded my checklist, and though I can’t wait to get started, I promise to hold off until February 15!
Tomorrow, February 2, is World Wetlands Day, and as I walk the trails in the middle of the suburbs in Folsom, California, I am reminded of the importance of ponds and marshes to our local wildlife. A muskrat is a frequent visitor to a pond adjacent to the footbridge I cross every day, and a pair of beavers occupies another pond near a suite of offices with a man-made waterfall.
I’m curious about beavers, and thanks to an IMAX documentary, I’ve learned a few things about them. Here is a sampling:
They are 3-4 feet long and weigh 40-60 pounds.
They eat the bark and leaves of trees such as cottonwoods, oaks, willows, aspens and alders.
They can remain under water for up to fifteen minutes.
They’re nocturnal.
Bears, coyotes and bobcats prey on them.
They do a fair amount of wrestling – a sort of rigorous face-to-face embrace – and they talk to one another, making amusing little noises similar to baby grunts.
Two beavers can topple over 400 aspens in one year’s time, which makes me worry for them, here in the suburbs. All the more reason to protect our environment from overzealous development, and to financially support our state and national parks.
I was reading The Sacramento Bee recently, which featured a piece on Roger McGuinn, the founding member of the folk-rock band The Byrds. I was interested in the story because McGuinn commented that the folk-music establishment in the '60s viewed the Byrds as little more than “barbarians at the gate” because they weren’t purists. McGuinn attributed the folk establishment's attitude to a “kind of snobbishness.” Which got me thinking that this is sometimes how writers of literary fiction view writers of commercial fiction. Which got me thinking about those of us who fall between those categories; who write commercial fiction with literary qualities. Which got me thinking we need a new category for this genre, and that we ought to call it Litcomm.
I Googled “litcomm” to see what was out there, and it appears the term is most often used as an abbreviation for “literary comments” or “liturgy committee” or “liturgical commission.” A search for “genre litcomm” brought up no hits (none!) while “genre litcom” brought up “literary community” and not much more. There was nothing anywhere about a market inhabited by the likes of Larry McMurtry, Pete Fromm, Ron Carlson, Dennis Lehane, and, well, me. (Why should boys have all the fun?)
And get this. Type in www.litcom.com and you’ll find that the domain name is parked, but available for $4,350. (Why stop there? Why not shoot for $5,000?) Oddly, www.litcomm.com has been purchased by a guy in Wappingers Falls, NY, though this name too is parked. Why? Is he a writer? And if not, what’s he’s going to do with it? Type in www.litcom.net however and you’ll see that it is a parking space reserved (gereserveered) for (voor) a Scandinavian company providing “services.” And then there’s www.litcom.org -- which is ahem, best left alone.
I’m curious about other writers’ feelings on this. Is anyone willing to share? Are you a litcomm writer, and if so, should we band together and form a group and maybe march on Washington? Or at the very least, New York City? Let publishers know we’ve got a voice and wish to be heard and that dammit our numbers are huge? Or are there only five of us, one of us unpublished? In the words of Scout Finch, “Shoot me a beet, Pete,” and let’s see where we go.
I was reading DRY RAIN STORIES by Pete Fromm, and had gotten almost through "Sage and Salt," when the protagonist hears the "lunatic yippings and laughings of coyotes" and then realizes he isn't hearing coyotes at all, but shouting and laughing, coming from a park.
About a week after our family moved onto Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in south Texas, Jena (who was 13 at the time), came busting into the house at dusk, complaining that a bunch of partiers were whooping it up at the Overlook, which had closed at sunset and was therefore off-limits to visitors. Steve stepped out of the house and walked down the dirt road to investigate, returning a few minutes later, smiling. Turned out the revelers weren’t trespassers at all, but a bunch of coyotes. We all laughed at that. We still recollect that story sometimes -- how funny it is that coyotes and humans sound so much alike.
