Category Archives: memoirist

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: Late to the Game

by Nina Rota

Today we have a special treat. Here is the YouTube video Nina Rota created for Words in Place‘s “Journey to Planet Write!”

Excerpt from THE SHADOW TEMPLE

Nina Rota

something outside intrudes. rolling sound and flashing light arrive together soaking a pair of thin curtains. streetlight and electric hum. a second layer of thick curtain reduces the constant sound of tires cornering to a crackly hush, like walking on gravel in the countryside. streaking headlights, now muted, crawl slowly across the room.

inside, one cone of light from a swivel wall sconce. i barely see his dark eyes. sitting on the bed, i take his slender hips and pull him to me, between my open legs. i bury my head in his middle and wrap myself tightly around him, taking full possession. he surrenders.

my hand trails across his buttock and down the back of his thigh. my shoulders lift and my middle expands. reaching for a breath that was easy moments ago.

i undo his low hanging pants and rub my face across his belly, his soft skin. i move down and reach for him, then take him into my mouth. building fire with each stroke, i am completely sated till the next level of desire. he stays hard, pliable.

i stand up and move behind him, i reach around him. my hand still holds him. i push my face into his long hair and lean in. push into him. my entire body lights up. my arms are weightless, lifted. every cell rises, lighter than itself, and separates, till i am totally transparent. thoughtless. unaware except for his body. ecstatic.

slowly, my heartbeat grows louder. feelings rush back in, pleasure, longing. i untangle myself and move him to the bed, on his stomach. take off my pants and crawl over his back. slide a pillow under his belly, and enter him. my cheek in the curve of his neck, i spread my legs and go deeper. sink into him. i slide my arms under his shoulders, glue myself to his body, and thrust.

my core muscles pull in and up, arching my back, pulling my head down. my forehead digs into his spine as breath sharpens and turns in on itself. shoulders roll forward and constrict my chest further. thighs grab, every nerve online, till i reach the edge and, finally, lift off. flying on uncontrollable pulses passing through me nonstop. release and escape.

Note on Personals Wall in The Shadow Temple

fag identified dyke looking for someone to play out a scene between an older man and a much younger man,

please find me if interested, Nina

Andrew and I crossed paths on our way to The Shadow Temple. This was our second try at doing the scene. Andrew missed the first one choosing to take a workshop instead. Now we had less than an hour before the closing ceremony began. We exchanged embarrassed smiles.

Dust kicked up over the back of my sandals and bugs crawled everywhere. Andrew walked ahead moving effortlessly in his small dancer’s body.

We opened the screen door and walked into the living room. It was full of mismatched chairs and a few sofas. There was a ratty shag carpet in the middle of the room. Andrew looked around then looked shyly at me, “Let’s go upstairs.”

The upstairs room was empty except for three equally spaced beds. It was dead quiet in a way that was almost loud. I wanted to drown the quiet with music, but there wasn’t any. Bright sunlight pierced the room from windows at each end. Outside, sparse New Mexico ranch land stretched out until interrupted by mountains in the distance. I couldn’t stand it. I had to close the walls and bring in some night. “I need to shut the blinds.”

“Okay,” Andrew said with a slight question mark. It felt like early evening in the shadow of the blinds. In the close darkness of my fantasy, I was protected by traffic noise and thick curtains. Here, I was exposed.

Andrew walked over to the center bed and climbed up until he was kneeling in the middle of the bed, facing away from me. As I walked towards him, I stumbled over my sandals. I sat down on the edge of the bed and removed them.

I turned and watched him. His breathing was even but very deep, his body still. I was jumpy and chaotic. Cells pinged off the inner walls of my body and smashed into each other nonstop. I dropped my head into my hands and looked at my naked feet. You’re the one who set this scene up. You wanted to seduce a younger man. Now do something! I lifted my shoulders and took a deep breath, then turned around. I crawled up behind him and opened my knees until my chest was just a few inches from his back. “May I touch you?”

He lifted his chin slightly in assent. I placed a shaky hand on the middle of his back. I moved it along his spine up to the nape of his neck. “Your hair is so beautiful.” I brushed my hand up the back of his head, lifting the short blonde hairs, feeling every bone and bump. His head moved forward and away slowly, passively.

When I reached the crown of his head, I held my hand there to calm myself. His head felt so small. We’d started to breathe together.

I moved my other arm around his body and stroked his cheek with the back of my hand. “Your skin is soft, smooth. May I hold you?” His body moved up and back. I took that as a yes and moved forward putting both arms around his chest. My thighs opened further and hugged the flesh at his hips.

In my fantasy I always felt raw sexual desire, I could do whatever I wanted with him. He was anonymous. Now there was a breathing body next to mine, I found myself asking permission for the smallest move.

A loud crashing sound startled me and made him jump. He looked in the direction of the noise then turned to me and lowered his head, smiling demurely. “Maybe someone is spying on us.”

A cascade of shame lit my face and burned down the front of my chest. Was a disapproving stranger looking on? Shame gave way to a flush of warmth that confused me. The possibility of prying eyes was turning me on. I smiled to myself. Instead of paralyzing me, my deepest fears were now feeding my desire. Finally, I was beginning to settle into my body. I could continue. “Probably a branch falling off a dead tree.”

I laid my head on Andrew’s shoulder and breathed out through pursed lips. He turned his head towards mine, so I took the opportunity to put my hands on his hips and move him around.

Now he was facing me, and I placed both hands on his white t-shirt. As I ran them across his chest, his body moved into me. I continued down to his belly and across the fly on his jeans. He flinched and pulled his stomach in. His breath shortened.

He was still kneeling and his hands were resting on his legs. I separated my hands and pulled them across his thighs, brushing the top ofhis hands. His jeans were rough and patchy with tears above the knees. I wrapped my hands around his legs and squeezed the exposed skin. My whole body tightened and the fire started up again. I had to open my eyes to gather my breath.

His body tightened too and I felt bad about being rough. I took one of his hands in mine and kissed his palm. Then I pulled him down by his forearms until his head reached my lap.

I leaned forward and covered his body with mine, my arms draped over his lower torso. I reached down and lifted the bottom of his shirt. He shifted slightly, then pulled his hands back to his side and underneath him. His breath shortened further as I moved my fingers across the bony skin on the small of his back, and down to his buttocks. Then inside his jeans.

I heard him make a low humming noise, but as it got louder I realized I was hearing someone blow a conch horn. The closing ceremony was beginning. Andrew sat up quickly, almost hitting my chin with the crown of his head. “We’d better go,” he said, and jumped off the bed.

“Oh. Okay. I’ll be along soon.”

I walked to the window and opened the slats to horizontal. More sound outside – voices of campers on their way to the closing ceremony. I strapped on my sandals and walked downstairs.

In the living room, one wall was covered with cork board and my note was pinned there. I took it down and looked at it. I put the note in my pocket and walked out of The Shadow Temple.

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Nina Rota is a writer and filmmaker. Her writing can be found in Witness Magazine, Red Fez, and Diverse Voices Quarterly, among others. Her short films have appeared in Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time project and Anthology Film Archives. She is currently working on a book of essays titled Walls Crumble Before Me. You can find her at Facebook.com/ninarota and ninarota.com.

Here is the link to the YouTube video Nina Rota created for Words in Place‘s “Journey to Planet Write!”

https://youtu.be/UAOd_iqlmas

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: Late in the Game

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Here is the link to the YouTube video Nina Rota created for Words in Place‘s “Journey to Planet Write!”

https://youtu.be/UAOd_iqlmas

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: Treading Water Even in the Dryer Seasons

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by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

No matter where I am, people ask me for directions. I could be in New York, where I have lived for 18 years, or on the streets of Paris, where I have spent six days, and someone will approach me for help. I rarely know, for I am a tourist even in my own city. But I must look as though I have a terrific sense of direction. Or perhaps I always appear to belong, or I’m someone who knows where she’s going and how to get there.

Cub reporters were once told they needed five years of experience to get a decent job. I got mine at the Ocean City, Maryland, bureau of the Baltimore Sun. I was the only employee of said bureau, i.e. a desk I fashioned out of motel-style end tables in my rented living room. Ocean City was laid out like an aircraft carrier: one long strip of cement. The streets were numbered and reached into the hundreds, so no one asked me for directions. You could drive in circles and find your destination. Among my many scoops was the story of a kid who drove very fast and backward in a parking lot one night. He was “doing donuts,” and drove himself into the ocean.

There was a drought that summer; the mainstream media was trafficking in the term “global warming” for the first time. Temperatures at the beach hit the 90s. I had brought my relatively new husband with me, which meant he was unemployed while I was on duty. We argued a lot about how I neglected him to I chase after fires, drunken boating accidents, and an NAACP boycott of the town. Hotels, restaurants, and amusement parks would not hire townies, a.k.a. African-American kids who lived on the mainland. Across the drawbridge, their roads were not always paved, and their access to public sewage systems not guaranteed. It was territory the Industrial Revolution and the Civil Rights movement apparently forgot, which made great copy for me, but a lot of misery for everyone else.

I was crossing a field of corn on a dirt road on an inky night when my car was either attacked or ran into some indeterminate yet vengeful force. It slammed against the windshield and the passenger-side door so fiercely I had to stop driving. When I dared to look through the windshield, I saw it was the only thing preventing me from drowning. Perhaps it was a flash flood, or that global warming business had reached critical mass, and the ocean was cresting into farmland. Or this was some kind of a test, a trial by water with a blindfold that also covered my common sense.

I realized through my disorientation and panic that the field, unlike most, was irrigated. I had hit a bank of water because the system had switched on. My job was a kind of trial too, to see if I worthy enough to transfer permanently to the Metropolitan desk. And right then, I knew the trial was over, and I’d lost. I knew because I would have rather been lost, under water and mud logged, than on my feet and on my way back to whatever I was working on. I wanted to savor this experience and mine it for its potential symbolism. It held more possibility and portent than all that transpired that summer, because I could make it mythic.

Indeed, I was demoted that December, and went onto other nowhere-newspaper jobs. I got divorced and enrolled in an MFA program. In my first year, I built a story around my watery encounter into the tale of a boy who thinks he got his skanky babysitter pregnant (waters of birth, a new beginning, etc.). Though it was not the most coherent story ever written, I had wrestled it out of my own ephemera. I won a fellowship for older women writers, and resolved to learn all of the shortcuts in the rural, suburban, and forested sprawl that surrounded the campus.

Soon enough, I was assigned an instructor convinced I was an insult to the intelligence of all sentient beings. I’m sure others have had this experience, but she amplified the humiliation she doled out during workshop by confiding to others how ardently she disapproved of me. Because one of my thesis committee members had heart surgery scheduled for the day of my defense, I had to include her on my committee. I managed to graduate (re-marry, move, and have a child) but found myself unable to write for many years afterward. When I had any doubts, I had her voice reminding me how I should indulge them.

I have since published a memoir; four volumes of poetry; and am in the midst of working on two others scheduled for publication. But I can barely navigate the grid system of Manhattan, though isn’t that what subways and a New York native for a daughter are for? I recently was relieved of a freelancing gig. The editor disagreed with my interpretation of the myth of Prometheus, whose theft of fire from Zeus – the equivalent of writing – earned him a lifetime of suffering. I can’t find an agent for my new novel, though one agent said in rejecting it: “Your writing is beautiful, and many of your sentences are so gorgeously crafted. You have a lot of writing talent,” and if I kept working on my craft, some day “you’re really going to knock our socks off.” I wonder if she knows I qualify for Social Security.

It’s been my failures that have defined my journey as a writer. The only thing certain is there will be more of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about Samuel Beckett and “failing better.” At this point, it could be mathematically proven that this maxim doesn’t apply to my case. I don’t particularly like Beckett, but I think he’s onto something about how bleak our alternatives become if we do nothing in the face of inevitability. If I don’t know why I subject myself to ever more monstrous failures, I need only look at the settings of his plays to see what awaits me should I quit. I am a lost soul who cannot help but look for meaning in my life. I’m headed where everyone is going, but I hope to take my time, and take notice, before I get there.

For Jane’s memoir, An Unsuitable Princess: A True Fantasy/AFantastical Memoir

For her website: Jane Rosenberg LaForge

For the new chapbook, In Remembrance of the Life

Facebook author page: Jane Rosenberg LaForge

Twitter: @JaneRLaForge

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Jane Rosenberg LaForge is the author of An Unsuitable Princess: A True Fantasy/A Fantastical Memoir (Jaded Ibis Press 2014) and four volumes of poetry: After Voices (Burning River 2009); Half-Life (Big Table Publishing 2011); With Apologies to Mick Jagger, Other Gods, and All Women (The Aldrich Press 2012) and The Navigation of Loss (Red Ochre Lit 2012). Her newest poetry collection is the chapbook In Remembrance of the Life (Spruce Alley Press 2016) and her full-length collection, Daphne and Her Discontents, is forthcoming from Ravenna Press.

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