Category Archives: award-winner

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: In Praise of “What If?”

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by Tara Campbell

“Did you know the average writer only makes $6,000 per year?”
These simple words from a fellow student marked the first time my desire to write smashed into the wall of the real world. It was 1988 in Anchorage, Alaska, and we were all about to graduate from high school. Most of us were heading to college, either in state or somewhere on the West Coast, the typical migratory path of the sprung Alaskan. But then my classmate John started asking what we wanted to do.
Huh. We had to decide that now? I simply liked school, and I liked writing, so… I don’t even remember saying the words, “I want to be a writer,” but his response etched itself into my brain. It was the first of many times I wondered if it would ever really happen.
My literary drug of choice had always been science fiction. From Asimov to Bradbury to Clarke and on down the alphabet, I was hooked on the question “what if?” Madeline L’Engle’s time- and space-bending A Swiftly Tilting Planet was a revelation to me. I was the nerd who put on a bathrobe and performed a book report on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the form of a monologue by Arthur Dent, timed to pre-taped responses from Zaphod Beeblebrox. For another book report I wrote and illustrated a complete issue of the Paszex Paper, in honor of Nor Crystal Tears(my green colored pencils were pretty worn down by the time I finished that edition). By the end of high school I had written the first few chapters of what would have been a truly cringe-worthy novel. That draft moved with me for decades, across the U.S., the Atlantic, and back, until I felt compelled to shred it a couple of years ago. I couldn’t stand the thought of that document ever possibly resurfacing after my death.
But back to high school: graduate we did, and off to college we went. John went on to become a doctor, and I wound up in a traditional trajectory for a liberal arts graduate: as a grad student getting another humanities degree. Subsequently, armed with an MA in German, I embarked on a career in international education and admissions. I was far from driving a Lexus, but at least I was making more than $6,000 a year. I turned to music and painting as creative outlets on the side, never even thinking about giving writing another go.
Then several years ago my partner (now my husband) and I were looking for something new to do together. We took an intro to fiction class at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda. For him it was an experiment with something new. For me, it was a return to joy, like picking right back up with a best friend you haven’t seen in years, and wondering how life came in between the two of you in the first place.
When that class ended, we kept working on our stories. We joined a couple of writer’s groups, and I began staying up until the wee hours to “just finish one scene,” or getting up early to write before work. I also started submitting stories. While many people write for themselves, I’m not ashamed to admit that seeing my work out in the world is a huge motivator for me. And when my first story got published—when I realized there was at least one other person out there who wanted to read the diary entries of a fat cell whose community was about to be rocked by liposuction—I was gratified to know there was still a place for weirdness in the world.
I’ve approached Washington DC as my workshop since then, taking more classes at the Writer’s Center and Politics and Prose, hitting up a million Meetup writing groups to continue improving my craft, participating in readings with lowercase and Inner Loop, writing reviews for the Washington Independent Review of Books, volunteering with children’s literacy organization 826DC, sampling the business end as a Politics and Prose bookseller, and experiencing the editorial side as an assistant editor with Barrelhouse. With my husband’s boundless support, I stepped away from my full time job to devote myself to writing. And this spring it all came full circle when I stepped up to the microphone at the Writer’s Center, where my writing career began, to read from my first novel, TreeVolution.
But as every author will tell you, getting a book published doesn’t magically change your life

(J.K. Rowling excepted). Our job as writers is to keep working and growing. As important as “what if?” is, “what now?” is even more vital. I’m stretching myself now, working on a completely different project in historical fiction, and completing my first year of the MFA program at American University. I came into the program ready to buckle down and cast sci-fi aside to become a more “serious” writer. But this year I’ve learned a delightful lesson: there is more than one way to create, and there are places where commitment to craft and a little weirdness can meet. Being “serious” doesn’t have to mean forgetting the wonder.

Being a writer means being part of an expansive community. It’s all right to bring in the strange. It’s okay to write about talking flowers, or a chlorophyll-based diet franchise, or an interstellar nursery, or frustrated teeth who abandon their human, or an urban genie in a failing relationship, or even genetically modified trees that learn to speak up and fight back—as long as you can create worlds readers want to inhabit and stories they want to hear. Straying from the realist path can be tricky, sure. And you certainly won’t make doctor’s wages. But as long as you can hold on to the “what ifs,” what more do you need?

Excerpt: from “We Are Twenty-Six” in Chicago Literati
Marko’s teeth swayed. They twisted and rocked and eased themselves out of his gums while he, heavy with that evening’s vodka, grunted and snored in his bed.
On nights when Marko gagged and wheezed in the grips of drink, his teeth longed for their mothers, the baby teeth that had come before them, the first ones to work their way into and out of young Marko’s mouth. The little mothers lived together in the small, plastic box in which the tooth fairy had collected them, and which Marko’s parents gave to him long after he had stopped believing in the legend of the tooth fairy.
And so that night, as a much older Marko slept, his teeth tumbled out of his mouth. 
Click hereto continue reading


__________________________________

With a BA in English and an MA in German, Tara Campbell has a demonstrated aversion to money and power. She was the grateful recipient of two awards from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities in 2016: the  Larry Neal Writers’ Award in Fiction, and the  Mayor’s Arts Award for Outstanding New Artist. Her first novel, TreeVolution, was released by Lillicat Publishers in 2016. Her second book, Circe’s Bicycle, will be published by LitFest Press in fall 2017.

MY JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: A Way Towards Me

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by Christopher Allen


When I was 10, my piano instructor—a dour stickperson named Eva Jo Alpress, who told me I was going to be a concert pianist one day—quit. She “discharged” me in a long, painstakingly written letter that outlined my mother’s shortcomings and mine. I wish I still had the letter. What a gem. While almost all of it is lost, one phrase does resonate down through the decades: “Your son is an arrogant opinionated juvenile.” We had a good laugh at that. Eva Jo certainly had a knack for unwittingly hitting nails on heads. She thought she was telling me what a little dickhead I was, but she was actually telling me that I was a person with something to say. 

The reason Eva Jo discharged me: I wanted to trade études for ABBA. I wanted to play keyboards in a band. It was 1974. I wanted to shake my groove thang. I can still see my teacher’s eyes when I pulled out the sheet music to “Take a Chance on Me.” Horror? Disdain? That moment when you’re not sure if you need to sneeze or vomit? We got the letter the next day. There would be no Good Will Hunting end to the story.

I have to give Eva Jo credit, though, for spotting the truth in this situation. The keyboard part of “Take a Chance on Me” is really easy, especially for a ten-year-old apparently destined for Carnegie Hall. Without the band and a few Swedes “Take a Chance on Me” was boring.

I’m telling you this not only because it’s a fun story, but also because it’s one of a hundred formative experiences that have led me to where I am today: sitting in my office in Munich, writing about writing, wondering who I am. Who knows what moments are more important than others? I was going to be a musician when I was ten. That’s important. I was a little dickhead. That’s also important. In many ways I’m still that little dickhead.

But before all that, I was going to be an oceanographer. I was fascinated by the thought of living on the ocean floor in a never-ending labyrinthine sprawl of modular, pressurized compartments. I expanded my underwater city every day in my third-grade class. I’m sure the drawings were absolute crap. I can’t draw, not even a stickman. Point is, I was obsessed by the idea of slipping myself into a little world—or maybe I just needed to escape to where it was quiet, maybe it was a Jungian thing. I don’t know. I hate the water now, haven’t been swimming in decades. We also drew the flags of the world, which I was much better at.

At university I studied music until the end of my sophomore year when, in the hospital with mononucleosis, I missed my juries and all my finals. I also missed several weeks of my first professional singing gig in a gospel quartet—a ridiculous summer. When I got back on my feet I didn’t want to study music anymore, so I changed majors to music business. All the cool kids were there I guess or maybe just all the kids who understood the worthlessness of a music degree. Maybe both. And, yes, you’ve just noticed that I skipped my entire adolescence. I knew I wouldn’t get away with it. I was hoping you’d ignore the leap, maybe accept the gap, like the lost years of Christ. I find it hard to talk or write about that time. How about we leave it at this: from 1976 to 1982 I spent most of my time hating myself for being gay, praying to be delivered from being gay, and ending up being abused by the minister of music at my church—book forthcoming.

But did those years of depression, suicidal feelings, and fear that someone could figure out who I really was lead me to write? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’ve tried to write that novel several times, and it’s just not happening yet. Sometimes I think all this writing is just practice, that I’m groping around in the dark for the voice that will finally tell my story the right way, that all these stories aren’t me but maybe a way towards me.

At the beginning of the nineties, a very close friend of mine was killed in a plane crash. His death changed my life and my priorities. I moved to Los Angeles to get away from Nashville and the music industry. He’d been a keyboard player for an A-list country singer, and I was a studio singer. Everyone I knew was in the music industry, and it was just too sad. When I later returned to Nashville, I’d decided to become a writer; and because I wasn’t sure what that meant I enrolled in a master’s program to learn everything I didn’t know about literature—because by then I’d figured out that having an opinion about everything was a sure sign that I knew almost nothing. Realizing how little I knew was a giant leap towards understanding myself.

In graduate school, while I was reading everything Henry James wrote, I wrote a screenplay partly about my friend’s death, a poignant road-trip movie in the vein of This-Will-Never-Be-Publishable. Also while in graduate school, I published my first short story, “Air-Conditioned Souls,” which one of my professors said “made no sense.” I also published my first two (and last two) poems: “The End All” and “last night I dreamed we dreamed a poem.”

Then I moved to Germany and spent the following ten years trying to write and rewrite that screenplay. Then I wrote and rewrote a novel manuscript: “The Sure-Shot Rabbit Association.” And then I wrote another one: “What You Don’t Know.” And another: “Three-Handed Bridge.” And another: “Conversations with S. Teri O’Type.” And another: “The Lambent Light,” finally trying to tackle my own story. And a screenplay manuscript: “Almost Ophelia.” Except for Conversations with S. Teri O’Type, an experimental and episodic work of linked flash fiction that I self-published in 2012, I’ve pretty much walked away from all of these manuscripts. They terrify me because they are not perfect. They are all massive derelict buildings.

At some point in the middle of all these construction sites I joined an online writing workshop called Urbis. What an intense time of learning that was. I remember getting up at 4 a.m. every morning to read and write reviews. That workshop forced me to think about my writing objectively. It taught me to write economically, to write competitively (in a good way), and not to settle for a boring phrase. Lots of stories that I workshopped in Urbis ended up published. Urbis gave me the push I needed towards becoming a writer.

In 2009 I started editing at the daily litzine Metazen and became the managing editor there. Sadly, Metazen came to an end in 2014. In the same year I joined the team at SmokeLong Quarterly. The journal is a big part of my life. When I love a thing, I love it big.

I feel all grown up now, but I still need to disappear into my little worlds. I still feed on sarcasm. I still need music. And I still feel incomplete. So I suppose my Planet Write is some amorphous gas planet or maybe some inchoate hunk of volcanic chaos—very much a work in progress. And that’s fine. I just love being at the party.


Here’s a link to one of Christopher Allen’s award-winning stories:
“Everything We Had”
Semi-finalist for The Best Small Fictions 2017

First published by The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts


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Christopher Allen is a freelance editor, translator and writer living somewhere in Europe. His work has appeared in more than a hundred journals and anthologies both online and in print including Indiana Review, Juked, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and others. He’s been a finalist at Glimmer Train, a finalist and semi-finalist for The Best Small Fictions 2017, and he’s won some awards too. Allen is the managing editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, the author of the episodic satire Conversations with S. Teri O’Type, and the curator of the travel blog I Must Be Off!which sponsors an annual travel writing competition.


JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: From Peanuts to Programming to Plotting

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by Sybil Johnson


The first thing I remember wanting to be was a cartoonist. I spent hours drawing the Peanuts gang, copying what I saw every day in the comics of the newspaper, dreaming about creating my own strip one day.

As a kid, I never once thought about writing as a career. Sure, I enjoyed the creative writing assignments in grade school and junior high. I even worked on the school newspaper. But that was only a fun thing to do, not a potential career choice.

Still, the few stories I wrote must have been important to me since I saved them, stashing them away in a box of memorabilia. When I found them recently among the report cards, autograph books and miscellany I’d collected, I discovered I gravitated toward crime stories even then. I remember reading a lot of mysteries, but hadn’t realized I liked to write them as well.

The older of the two stories I found, “Sleepy Toes and Fido,” featured a donkey (Sleepy Toes), a hippie dog (Fido) and a jewelry theft. By the end of the (very) short story, the jewelry had been returned and all was well. The second story, “Murder in Catville,” involved cats, a murder, a ghost, a seance and a secret panel in the wall. At the end, the murderer is caught and peace restored to Catville. Both of these stories end well, so I can see at a young age I was more inclined toward cozies than noir. That’s still true today. Most of the mystery reading and writing I do is on the cozy end of the spectrum, although I occasionally channel my dark side in short stories.

At the time I wrote “Murder in Catville,” my interests had turned to more academic subjects like math and history. When I entered college, I was considering math as a major, but hadn’t fully committed to it. Then, on the campus of the University of Southern California, I discovered Computer Science and fell in love with programming. The major was fairly new at the time (the IBM PC came out the year I graduated) and, as you might guess, male-dominated. Of the 100 or so students majoring in CS, few of us were female. I don’t remember the exact number, but I think it was around five.

My first job out of college was at Xerox where I worked on software for the 6085 computer system and its predecessor, the Xerox Star, the first commercial system to incorporate technologies such as a bitmapped display, graphical user interface, Ethernet networking, icons, folders and a mouse.


It was an exciting and fun time. I consider myself fortunate to have worked with and been around so many talented people and to have been involved with such cutting edge technology. Over the years, I worked on a number of other projects in various roles—programmer, software development manager, technical program manager. The only writing I did during this time was technical documentation.

Fast forward twenty years. I woke up one morning with the image of a young woman finding the body of her painting teacher in her garden. That image stuck in my brain and wouldn’t go away. I was coming to the end of a contract and looking for a new challenge. Even though I’d always thought writing a mystery would be too hard, I decided to give it a shot. I pulled up my big girl pants, sucked in my breath and plunged in.

It hasn’t been an easy path. I lost track of the number of times I considered quitting. But, every time I thought about it, something inside me urged me to keep writing. I kept on reminding myself I was learning a new skill. It would take time.

I wrote, took a couple online courses on writing mysteries and wrote some more. I was ecstatic when I got an Honorable Mention in a Writer’s Digest short story contest and over the moon when my first short story was published.

While I was writing short stories, I was also working on the idea that had got me started down this path in the first place. I wrote a version of the book, decided it wasn’t good enough, and started over again. Ten or fifteen years later, I felt I had something a publisher might find interesting. In 2013, I attended the California Crime Writers conference, a mystery writer’s convention that I had co-chaired in 2011. There I met the managing editor of Henery Press. After some modifications, they expressed an interest in buying the story and the Aurora Anderson mystery series was born. The first book, Fatal Brushstroke, was published in 2014 followed by Paint the Town Dead and the recently published A Palette for Murder.


I still find writing hard, the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But it’s also the most rewarding. The satisfaction I get from crafting a story out of thin air more than makes up for the difficulty.

_______________________________



After a rewarding career in the computer industry, Sybil Johnson turned to a life of crime writing. Her short fiction has appeared in Mysterical-E and Spinetingler Magazine among others. She wields pen and paint brush from her home in Southern California where she writes the Aurora Anderson mystery series set in the world of tole/decorative painting (Fatal Brushstroke, Paint the Town Dead and the recently published, A Palette for Murder). Visit her at www.authorsybiljohnson.com or check out Type M for Murder (typem4murder.blogspot.com) where she posts every other Wednesday.




_______________________________


Sybil Johnson is a member of the Los Angeles chapter of Sisters in Crime.



June 10 & 11, 2017 (Saturday & Sunday)

At DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Los Angeles – Westside,
6161 West Centinela Avenue, Culver City, California 


Sisters in Crime/Los Angeles and SoCal Mystery Writers of America invite emerging and established mystery writers for a weekend of invaluable guidance, insight, and community at the 2017 California Crime Writers Conference. Whether your novel is brewing in your imagination, ready to publish, or you already have several published books under your belt, our workshops, presented by agents, editors, award-winning authors, and crime investigation professionals, are geared to elevate your mystery writing skills and foster relationships on your path to publication and beyond. 

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: Of Produce & Poetry

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by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

I was a 14-year-old male. Which is to say: I was an asshole.

I was also working my first job as clean up boy of the Produce Place, a small grocer in my hometown of Nashville, TN. And I was doing a lousy job.

My mopped floors were dirtier than those unmopped. I could clean a clean window dirty in seconds. Flies were multiplying like flies.

What can I say? I was making $3.15 an hour, I was more interested in Amanda Hardaway’s hair than cleaning floors, and I was a 14-year-old male, which is to say…

So the boss, this dude named Steve who lived at the top of the hill south of my house and who’d tried to date my older sister a few times and whose kid brother, Chris, hadn’t yet died in a tragic accident—Steve approaches me and is like:

Hey. Andy. Can we talk a minute.

Hey. Steve. Uh. Sure.

Uh. OK… So, Andy, you’re doing a shitty job, and you suck overall. Jusy sayin’.

That was the gist of it anyway.

The Produce Place was set in an early 20thCentury bungalow on Murphy Road just off I-40 a ten-minute bike ride from my house. At the time, the entire sales floor consisted of produce bins: four rows of jonagold apples and kiwis and exotic lettuces. All types of beans in the summer. Tomatoes. Tomatoes. Tomatoes. Did I mention tomatoes? And kale. And six different varietals of onion. And cherries. And Rainier cherries. And rainbow chard. And and and.

The Produce Place helped turn around the neighborhood.

Built on a landfill after the Second World War, Nashville’s Sylvan Park of the 80s and early 90s was a ghetto. A neighborhood where men beat their wives and their kids, and their kids went out into the neighborhood to beat each other and to become men. White kids called black kids niggers and black kids called white kids all sorts of shit. Kids smoking dope and kids having kids. That was the law and word of the place.

But the Produce Place was different. The Produce Place was a place where kids could get jobs, where boys becoming men could be rewarded for their bodies rather than punished.

And as the Produce Place went, went the neighborhood.

The Produce Place thrived and so did Sylvan Park. Today, I couldn’t afford my parent’s house, let alone the land it sits on. Today, there are all sorts of jobs available to the kids in the neighborhood. Bars. Restaurants. Lawn care. Baby sitting. Etc. Etc.

Here’s the thing. There are no kids in Sylvan Park. Families with children can’t afford to live there. And if they can, their kids don’t work.

So the Produce Place was the only gig in town. Luckily, I had an in. My sister was one of their first employees. It was only natural I work there when I came of age. But it was also only natural that they demand I do my job. There were plenty of kids who didn’t have sister-ins ready to take my spot. If I couldn’t cut it, why keep me around?

One particularly important item on the list of ways I could do a “less shitty job and keep my job” was to “actually sweep up under the goddamn bins” under which rogue fruits and vegetables fell and quickly set up and quickly started attracting “all the fucking flies” that were buzzing around our heads.

So there I was, sweeping under the bins. When I got to the corn bins, out wobbled this old, rotted ear of corn. And as I was looking down at it, mid-sweep, out of nowhere, the line came: “What if I were this piece of corn?” And when that line came to me, I felt compelled to stop my labors and write it down. Thus I pulled out my Sharpie and grabbed the nearest corn crate and upon its surface scribed my line. And the brilliance? The brilliance continued from there.

At the end of it, I had a poem. I had no idea what it was or why I had written it down but there it was in all its awful glory. After that, I was writing poetry. Day in and day out. And I’ve never stopped. 

What I wrote was wonderfully awful then, and what I write is wonderfully awful now. But, for some reason, I keep at it, and it becomes less awful. I’ve tried to quit a few times to no avail. Poetry makes life present. When I’m writing poems, I’m at my best. The rest of the time? I’m alright.

We don’t know why or what we are doing here.

That is why we are here.


_______________________________________





Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is an award-winning freelance editor, writer, and lecturer at the University of Colorado. He is also acquisitions editor for Upper Rubber Boot Books, founder and editor of PoemoftheWeek.org, founder of the Colorado Writers’ Workshop, founder and editor of The Floodgate Poetry Series, and editor of two anthologies. His first book of poems, Ghost Gear, was a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize, the Colorado Book Award, and the INDIEFAB. His second book, Marysarias, is a Finalist for the National Poetry Series, 2016. Read and learn more at AndrewMK.com.



JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: Of Produce & Poetry

3 Replies
by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

I was a 14-year-old male. Which is to say: I was an asshole.

I was also working my first job as clean up boy of the Produce Place, a small grocer in my hometown of Nashville, TN. And I was doing a lousy job.

My mopped floors were dirtier than those unmopped. I could clean a clean window dirty in seconds. Flies were multiplying like flies.

What can I say? I was making $3.15 an hour, I was more interested in Amanda Hardaway’s hair than cleaning floors, and I was a 14-year-old male, which is to say…

So the boss, this dude named Steve who lived at the top of the hill south of my house and who’d tried to date my older sister a few times and whose kid brother, Chris, hadn’t yet died in a tragic accident—Steve approaches me and is like:

Hey. Andy. Can we talk a minute.

Hey. Steve. Uh. Sure.

Uh. OK… So, Andy, you’re doing a shitty job, and you suck overall. Jusy sayin’.

That was the gist of it anyway.

The Produce Place was set in an early 20thCentury bungalow on Murphy Road just off I-40 a ten-minute bike ride from my house. At the time, the entire sales floor consisted of produce bins: four rows of jonagold apples and kiwis and exotic lettuces. All types of beans in the summer. Tomatoes. Tomatoes. Tomatoes. Did I mention tomatoes? And kale. And six different varietals of onion. And cherries. And Rainier cherries. And rainbow chard. And and and.

The Produce Place helped turn around the neighborhood.

Built on a landfill after the Second World War, Nashville’s Sylvan Park of the 80s and early 90s was a ghetto. A neighborhood where men beat their wives and their kids, and their kids went out into the neighborhood to beat each other and to become men. White kids called black kids niggers and black kids called white kids all sorts of shit. Kids smoking dope and kids having kids. That was the law and word of the place.

But the Produce Place was different. The Produce Place was a place where kids could get jobs, where boys becoming men could be rewarded for their bodies rather than punished.

And as the Produce Place went, went the neighborhood.

The Produce Place thrived and so did Sylvan Park. Today, I couldn’t afford my parent’s house, let alone the land it sits on. Today, there are all sorts of jobs available to the kids in the neighborhood. Bars. Restaurants. Lawn care. Baby sitting. Etc. Etc.

Here’s the thing. There are no kids in Sylvan Park. Families with children can’t afford to live there. And if they can, their kids don’t work.

So the Produce Place was the only gig in town. Luckily, I had an in. My sister was one of their first employees. It was only natural I work there when I came of age. But it was also only natural that they demand I do my job. There were plenty of kids who didn’t have sister-ins ready to take my spot. If I couldn’t cut it, why keep me around?


One particularly important item on the list of ways I could do a “less shitty job and keep my job” was to “actually sweep up under the goddamn bins” under which rogue fruits and vegetables fell and quickly set up and quickly started attracting “all the fucking flies” that were buzzing around our heads.

So there I was, sweeping under the bins. When I got to the corn bins, out wobbled this old, rotted ear of corn. And as I was looking down at it, mid-sweep, out of nowhere, the line came: “What if I were this piece of corn?” And when that line came to me, I felt compelled to stop my labors and write it down. Thus I pulled out my Sharpie and grabbed the nearest corn crate and upon its surface scribed my line. And the brilliance? The brilliance continued from there.

At the end of it, I had a poem. I had no idea what it was or why I had written it down but there it was in all its awful glory. After that, I was writing poetry. Day in and day out. And I’ve never stopped. 

What I wrote was wonderfully awful then, and what I write is wonderfully awful now. But, for some reason, I keep at it, and it becomes less awful. I’ve tried to quit a few times to no avail. Poetry makes life present. When I’m writing poems, I’m at my best. The rest of the time? I’m alright.

We don’t know why or what we are doing here.

That is why we are here.


_______________________________________





Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is an award-winning freelance editor, writer, and lecturer at the University of Colorado. He is also acquisitions editor for Upper Rubber Boot Books, founder and editor of PoemoftheWeek.org, founder of the Colorado Writers’ Workshop, founder and editor of The Floodgate Poetry Series, and editor of two anthologies. His first book of poems, Ghost Gear, was a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize, the Colorado Book Award, and the INDIEFAB. His second book, Marysarias, is a Finalist for the National Poetry Series, 2016. Read and learn more at AndrewMK.com.



JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: Channeling Benjamin-The Data Made Me Do It

4 Replies
by Linda Wastila
On January 2, 2016, I marked my ten-year anniversary of–writing. How do I recall so clearly when I began writing? And, after a decade of pen to paper, much of it devoted to two-and-a-half novels that remain unpublished, why do I even bother?
Let’s back up. By day, I’m a scientist, first trained as a pharmacist in the bucolic kingdom of Chapel Hill. I started down the pharmacy path as a means to medical school but discovered I didn’t want to deal with warts, ear infections, and patients’ poor lifestyle choices. I turned to public health, where I learned a lot, including the sad fact that after five years of an undergraduate curriculum studded with science classes and multiple choice exams, I didn’t know how to string together a sentence. My thesis advisor mandated I get a writing tutor. Which I did.
My first job was at a Boston think tank. My office overlooked the entrance to the emergency room at New England Medical Center. It was loud, distracting, fascinating existence. There, I wrote nothing you’d be interested in: passive voice, peer-reviewed manuscripts filled with science jargon. Shortly into my first gig, I realized I wanted to run my own studies, which meant I needed a Piled Higher and Deeper. I returned to another bucolic campus—Brandeis University. It was there I fell in love with… numbers.
Fast forward to Baltimore, 2005. As a Research Professor at the University of Maryland, my job was to grow our department’s research endeavor. My salary was 100% covered by me. Which meant a LOT of grant writing. Fortunately, I was good at grant writing and had several studies, almost all involving gigabytes of data that required massage and analysis using sexy techniques like negative binomial regression. But I acquired one unusual project that required me to look both back in time and into the future regarding psychiatric medication development. The study required both analysis and reading about drug discovery, theories on illness manifestation, and how chemicals alter psychiatric maladies.
I read at night, crunched numbers by day. One afternoon, while studying data on health care costs among mentally ill people, I noticed several individual points scattered far from the bulk of the others. The outliers. And it occurred to me, for the first time, that those data points were people. Real people. Individuals with serious and expensive mental and physical health problems. Which made me ponder those dots of data, ponderings that didn’t make themselves known to me until…
I woke up one morning and my first thought was, “Who is Benjamin Michael Taylor and why is he in trouble?”
I got out of bed, went to my computer, and wrote a short, incoherent paragraph about Benjamin. I shut the file, went to work, and forgot about him.
Until six months later when, in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I stumbled across the file I’d named ‘benmich’. As I read my notes, his entire story tumbled before me.
Benjamin consumed me during the holidays—What did he look like? Did he believe in God? What music did he listen to? I didn’t know what to do with the information. I believed myself mad—crazy mad—because Benjamin became an obsession: I saw him in the streets, I dreamt about his tattoo, I woke at night and worried about him locked up in the loony bin.
On January 2, 2006, after not listing ‘writing a book’ on my list of New Year’s resolutions, I began to type out the words stuck in my head. At first, I wrote tentatively—what if I got stuck? What if my words sounded ridiculous? But the writing came easily—I was in ‘flow’—and continued until I finished Ben’s story five months and 183,000 words later.
During those five months, it felt as though I was a medium and someone else channeled words through my hands onto the keyboard and onto the screen. I worried my protagonist and I shared a common malady—bipolar disorder. What else explained my extreme focus and productivity? Much later, I found out frenzied writing is a medical condition called hypergraphia, a compulsion to write. An incredibly heady and empowering experience. I believe if my first foray into writing had been ponderous and tedious whether I’d still be at it because, as I’ve since discovered, writing IS hard. Damn hard.
I continue to spend every morning, often in the dark, writing for 30-40 minutes before my family wakes and the day swallows me. I pluck away minute by minute, word by word, because in those blessed hypergraphic months I discovered I love the journey of creating with words almost more than the creation itself.
Ten years later, my sad-lad literary creation BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT is exactly half as long as the first draft. I’ve continued Benjamin’s adventures in PURE, a novel of academic malfeasance. I’m marketing my novels in hopes of finding a sympathetic agent or editor who wishes to help me launch my babies into the world. My third novel, THE MINISTER’S WIFE, started three years ago for my Master’s thesis, remains a glorious mess.
As it should be—novels are beasts. And it’s this challenge—and pleasure—that compel me to write.
In the end, data drove me to write. I wrote what “I knew” and discovered the people behind the data points have stories to tell. So I try to tell them. Over the decade, these problems have become personal, affecting friends and family, but these experiences only fuel my need to write their stories, to bring to light my take on my world.  
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LJ Wastila writes from Baltimore, where she professes, mothers, and gives a damn. Her Pushcart- and Best-of-the-Net stories and poems have been published at Smokelong Quarterly, Monkeybicycle, Flash Frontier, Scissors and Spackle, MiCrow, The Sun, Blue Five Notebook, The Poet’s Market 2013, Hoot, Camroc Press Review, Every Day Fiction, and Nanoism, among others. In 2015, she received her MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins. She currently serves as Senior Fiction Editor at jmww. In between sentences, she blogs at Leftbrainwrite.

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: Awakening With No Memory of the Life Before

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by David S. Atkinson 


My story is one of those “character wakes up in a strange place with no memory of where he was before” type tales, because I don’t really remember when I came into writing. There must have been some particular moment, but I no longer remember what it was. I remember writing short stories, poems, and such at least as far back as fourth grade including a western mystery novel centering on the perpetrator possessing a brass knife that left a very distinctive wound, which fell apart when I couldn’t figure out at age 9 how a knife would leave a very distinctive wound. 

My parents were big into reading and writing, always encouraging my sister and I towards the same, so maybe I simply considered it to be something people did.

For a long time though, it was bad. Very bad. I was into a lot of science fiction and horror at the time, so I wanted to write it. That’s all fine. I adore a lot of science fiction and fantasy out there, but it has to be good. Mine wasn’t…for a very long time. Still, I kept at it. I submitted my first short story my junior year in high school, done up on a typewriter sitting in a spare room of the foster home I was at for a year. I had a lot to learn. For example, I learned that postal submissions wanted return envelopes and didn’t care for single spacing. I also learned that the science fiction and fantasy I was writing wasn’t coming out anything like the science fiction and fantasy I was reading. My Lovecraft pieces were the worst.


My tastes started leaning more literary as I focused more on trying to figure out why my stories weren’t working. I figured I had to get the elements down before I could build interesting things with those elements, since building interesting things alone hadn’t been working so well. I picked up a few writers’ workshop courses in undergrad. Those seemed to help what was wrong in my stories, so I decided to go back for more. Once I had my law degree down, I went back for a BA in English as preparation for an MFA. Going through both of those, I finally started seeing my stories come up to where they needed to be to function.


This is where my novel in story form, Bones Buried in the Dirt, came from. As part of that very literary realistic fiction, I’d been doing a few child narrator pieces focusing on the same character. I started thinking about a whole series, covering a single story arc, which never brought the child forward to adulthood but instead gave impressions of the adult he would become. That gelled early into my MFA program and my work on that as my thesis eventually gave form to the novel.
Bones Buried in the Dirt turned out so well that I finally felt that I could write stories. About that time, wild hairs started creeping into my writing. Since I could handle a story, I started to bring in more interesting elements.
However, The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes, though it fit that model of interesting things enhancing a solid story, was a bit of a frolic from my main path. Joseph Michael Owens recommended Donald Antrim’s The Verificationist and I got this really odd, greatly mistaken idea what the book was about. I told Joe about my mistake, and he told me to write that. I did, and it turned out to be one of the oddest writing projects I’ve ever gotten involved in, a young woman who may or may not be endlessly trapped in a Village Inn with her ex boyfriend and her ex-best friend, his current girlfriend.
Once I managed to get The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes out of my head, I found myself still going with those odder stories I’d been working on before. Going against the idea that myths are often supposed to explain the world, I was going with the idea that our lives are inherently inexplicable and wonderful and what we have to do is figure out how we are going to get along with that. The momentum I’d picked up carried me right through the end of Not Quite so Stories, where I find myself pretty much at the present.
The story doesn’t end there though. I started hanging around the monthly F-bomb Flash Fiction Series in Denver. Much of what I’d been working on up until then was too long for reading there, but I had a few pieces that were the right kind of length. They were really odd pieces, strangeness that made The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes seem like straightforward realism. Going to F-bomb regularly, I started working more on those pieces, writing in a form I hadn’t played with much previously. It’s growing into something, literally as people read this. What that will be isn’t clear yet, but I can only hope that it doesn’t doom us all.

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David S. Atkinson is the author of Not Quite so Stories, The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes (2015 National Indie Excellence Awards finalist in humor), and Bones Buried in the Dirt (2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist, First Novel). His writing has recently appeared in Wilderness House Literary Review; Bartleby Snopes; Apocrypha and Abstractions; Cease, Cows; and others. He coedits the book blog Eleven and a Half Years of Books and his writing website is http://davidsatkinsonwriting.com/.



Photos: Top, David, age 3 or 4, already committed to reading. Middle, Visiting the influential Balzac