I had the pleasure of writing pieces for Reed Magazine and The Chronicle Magazine back in the spring of 2011.

The Reed piece is a profile of the poet Elyse Fenton, “Rugby, Nails and Verse,” while the Chronicle piece, “Hunting Spiders,” is a review of the book, Silk & Venom, and a conversation with its author, Greta Binford. Have a read.

WORKS OF ART is an exercise in serial flash fiction, as part of Declaration Editing’s Super-Short Summer Serial Challenge (S4C). Part eight, SECOND FIG, is below.

“Second Fig”

The great idea — the one single great idea Fig had ever had was that none of this was happening. Of course he couldn’t prove it, seeing as he and everyone else was stuck in the same illusion. Through stillness, maybe. Through transcendence. But how does one transcend?

He stopped writing and looked up at the clock – after three, yet noise still carried on outside and downstairs. Perhaps getting out of time was the way to do it, but how the hell did that happen? Or walking through glass – he wondered if he could walk through one of the tall windows that faced out to Pen Boulevard.

He went back to scribbling, tried to jot down as much as he could before the thought was gone. Things came and went like that, especially in a world that wasn’t happening, where nothing existed including himself, the paper, the pen with which he was writing.

“So why write at all?” he said out loud. He stopped and looked up again. Someone was knocking. He ignored it. Then there was another one, accompanied with a shout.

He walked around from his booth and saw Syl at the main doors. Her face was nondescript, a blurry mix of pain, chemical imbalance and anxiety.

“I just jacked my ankle,” she said. She limped in and put her arms around Fig to keep from falling.

“How? Where?”

“The curb. I need to piss.”

“Restrooms – ”

“I know where the toilets are at, jackass. I can’t make the stairs.”

Fig helped her through the restaurant and into the kitchen. There was a standalone shower back there where the cooks rinsed off. Mostly it was for ringing mops. Fig walked her over. She dug her nails into his forearm and squatted.

“Are you gonna stare or what?”

“Sorry.” He looked the other way until he heard the trickle stop. Then he helped her up and walked her back to his booth.

“Nice setup for the nighttime janitor,” she sneered. “Glass of beer, roach in the ashtray. It’s a regular party in here.”

“I get by.”

“And what if our boss came in?”

“He never has.”

“What if?”

“What’s the point? None of us are here anyway.”

She didn’t know what he was talking about.

“I’m quitting in a month,” he went on.

“For what?”

“Career I guess.”

Syl slapped the table.

“Doing what?”

Fig shrugged.

“I’ll find it when I find it.”

She rolled her eyes and took a cigarette from his pack. Then she opened his notebook. Fig’s hand jerked to grab it. Then he remembered nothing was real. So he stopped. She was too drunk to read anyway.

“I need something to calm me down,” she said. “You got any ideas?”

Fig glanced at the ashtray roach.

“I mean something that’ll really knock me out.”

Or would it be “nakedly”? Not sure – either way, a new article is up and live in INUR Magazine.

Here’s a blurb, most of which is true:

You were naked today. I know you were. I was too. In fact I’m naked as I write this, taking what Benjamin Franklin would call an “air bath.” Anyone who’s seen Franklin’s chair in the Smithsonian should know that Old Ben used to sit around naked, especially when composing a letter, redrafting an article, or, as the Web site for the Nudist Resort likes to point out, “when doing mental work.” Perhaps it’s just me, but whenever I see a hundred-dollar bill—and as a writer, that’s not often—I picture Franklin wearing a coat, collared shirt, and nothing else.

Jump here to read the entire piece – and many thanks to the folks in L.A., the stranger from Craigslist, and me whyfe for the quotes.

Early February in Portland, Oregon isn’t typically a time of cascading blue skies, but today is one of those days where you need to be out doing anything but sitting in an office or even your house. Temperature is near 60 and a few clouds hang around so as to punctuate rather than threaten.

There’s a bit of sad irony for me today. I’ve just learned that a friend and fellow writer, Stanley Fisher, passed away suddenly. I don’t have details, don’t have the how or why, only know that he’s gone off to someplace else.

Stanley was a Guest Writer back in early December. He shared an essay he’d written entitled, “Blue Skies and Cotton-Puff Clouds”. The essay was an anchor for a larger project – he was collecting other peoples’ stories around the question, “What’s your simple pleasure?” Maybe someone’s asked you that question recently. Maybe Stanley asked. Maybe you sent him an essay explaining your simple pleasure. His simple pleasure had to do with a sky that looked very much like today’s.

I have an essay to send Stanley – it’s in my head, along with so many other things “I’ll get to” later. But I’ll do it. It’s about baseball, I think, somehow includes my father, brings it back home to boxscores and ends in a field. I’m not sure the best way to share it with him now. Write it and burn it? Read it out loud on a blue day? Not write it at all, just meditate on the thought of it?

Who knows?

I’d like to share Stanley’s essay now.

BLUE SKIES AND COTTON-PUFF CLOUDS

Blue skies.

With those two words the heart lightens, troubles ease and imagination expands to hold half of heaven. If only we could have blue skies all the time. For much of the year you can, if you enjoy living in deserts of sand, or ice.

It’s not the blue sky itself that lightens some things and expands others; too much blue sky causes oxidation, wilt, sunburn. It’s the way the sky changes out of winter’s grey flannel into a new spring suit, or when it removes its rain clouds like taking off a broad-brimmed hat to show me its sunniest smile. And when that beautiful face is accessorized with a necklace and earrings made from huge clouds white as cotton puffs, I fall in love with the sky all over again.

My home state, Oregon, is a place immensely proud of its mythology and despite the pressures of truth and the inquiries of outsiders, meteorologists, and other doubters, we strive to preserve it. One of our greatest myths is that it rains here all the time. Another is that if you live here, you will grow webbed feet.

Truth is: the rain myth does not apply to the eastern two-thirds of the state. That Oregon is semi-arid high desert, a family secret of sorts hidden behind the slogan, “Cool Green Vacationland,” pressed into license plate frames and printed on travel brochures from the state’s department of propaganda and myth preservation.

But here in western Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the most populous part of the state, just ask anyone: it is oddly wet and blue skies are oddly rare. Cars don’t wear out here, they rust. And people don’t really get fat here they just absorb the atmospheric moisture and swell.

I have cousins in southern California; they wash their cars a lot. They like not having to think much about blue skies, they take them for granted. In Oregon we take grey skies for granted. We like not having to think much about washing cars; we know it’s going to rain.

When you’re a child you spend a lot of time looking down at the ground, at bugs and worms and things; and a lot of time looking up at clouds shaped like ships that turn into sharks that turn into ice cream sundaes. And in the middle of your life you spend a lot of time looking straight ahead.

Grey days and mid-life are much the same, a lot of looking straight ahead, cloudy with a chance of drizzle, not much momo to look up. Then it happens: one of those rare days to see ice cream sundaes in the clouds, one of those days to get wrapped in the embrace of bliss. The temperature draws me outside and my blue sky, home from some sunnier escape, presents herself bejeweled with cotton-puff clouds.

Rare days like that cover me like the lopsided boyhood tents built with sheets borrowed long ago from mom’s linen closet. Over cords strung from the top of dad’s favorite chair to a handle on the opposite cabinet hung a miniature sky of cotton percale and beneath it new worlds came and went.

Rare days like that nudge me off the course of myself and my own little world and my own brief life and make me look up and recall ships and sharks and connect with things greater. Whether it’s those fantastic scenes imagined beneath living room tents or today’s expansive reality, the effect is still the same. Calm hues, brilliant highlights, and soft shadows wash over me in currents that gather up troubles, fears, worries—and for a moment—sweep them away.

When one of those cotton puffs floats between the sun and I and day’s brightness suddenly darkens, it is the drawing shut of an eyelid in the sky. Heaven is winking. Someone, something, out there, seems to think I’m still worth flirting with.

Some tell stories about their “out-of-body” experiences. I’ve never had one of those but every time blue skies brush aside the usual grey backdrop and cotton-puff clouds distract me from the usual forward gaze, there’s an “out-of-me” experience that never lasts quite as long as I’d like. But as it departs it always does so cordially with a quiet promise of coming again another day.

And as real life reasserts itself I return to wherever I was before getting nudged off course; a little happier, a little saner and a little more certain it’s possible to face whatever troubles there may be by looking up at blue skies and cotton-puff clouds.

Evan Billups is a fifth-grader who’s been in the after-school writing program for two years. She wrote Moms Without Their Daily Coffee during winter break. I made very small grammatical edits to Evan’s original piece.

When moms don’t get their nice cup of coffee in the morning, it gets nasty. First they notice when they’re driving you to school.

“Oh no! I couldn’t get my coffee pot to work so I didn’t get my coffee!” Mom says.

“Oh, mom! Please get it later!” you say.

“No, no, and no! I have a terrible headache and I left my aspirins at home,” Mom says. She pulls off Woodstock Street and quickly drives to the nearest Starbucks. “Stay in here. This will take five minutes.”

“Yeah right,” you mutter.

She’s in there staring at the menu board. You can actually hear her asking, “Pike Place or French Roast?” After ten minutes, you get up and go in.

“It’s 8:10, Mom! I’m going to be late if you don’t hurry up.”

“Oh, well, I’ll get Pike Place then,” Mom says. “But please take your time, I don’t want it rushed or it will taste too light. I want extra bold coffee.”

So then the coffee-maker person takes lots of time and does five extra stirs. By then you give up about not being late. It’s 8:20 and Mom is searching for a five dollar bill. She finally finds it and then slowly walks out the door.

By the time you get to school, it’s 8:30. You walk in and explain to Carla at the front desk, “I was late because my mom wanted a perfect coffee.” She is about to write a running late slip, but then puts her pen down.

“Seems like a suitable excuse. Go to class now,” she says.

You walk down the hall congratulating yourself on not being counted late. You walk into Mrs. Yochim’s and Miss B’s. They start to say, “Where’s your late slip?” but you quickly say, “My mom wanted a perfect coffee.” Mrs. Yochim and Miss B. shrug and say, “Sounds like a suitable excuse. Now start reading the Reading Street books.”

I guess coffee is really important in grown ups’ lives.

I’m honored to have a short recollection, Decade Disc 1, Track 6 posted on BackFencePDX.com, based on their February theme, The Moment After.

The moment after I found out Leigh was dead, Neil Young’s voice came through the speakers upstairs, traveled like a ghost and hit me in the spot where my head and neck join. For the last 15-minutes I’d paced and tried to hope. Now I knew.

You can read the entire piece here.

Thanks –