Category Archives: Nancy Stohlman

Journey to Planet Write: Happy Endings

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by Nancy Stohlman
I asked Gay Degani if I could have the final slot in Journey to Planet Write series for two reasons—one, because I want to properly thank her on behalf of everyone who has appeared in and enjoyed this series. Gay has done an incredible service to our community and created a space where we can all shine. We are grateful to you, Gay!

But there is a second reason. Exactly one year ago I was scheduled to appear in this column when a drunk driver going 90 mph crossed the median on the highway and made other plans for me.
Instead of my Journey to Planet Write, you got my “Interrupted Journey,” a beautiful tribute that Gay and others put together. It meant a lot to me to feel so loved during that process of shock and recovery and now, one year later, it seemed important to not only bring it all full circle and give you that column that never was, but also to end this Planet Write journey on a note of celebration, healing, and hope.
I was 9 years old, living on a military base in Zaragoza, Spain, when I told my mom I wanted to be an author. I wrote my first creation, “Superman: The Musical”, on my mother’s electric typewriter, loving the clack of the keys and the feeling that I was doing something important. Though I attempted to cast it from my class of fellow fifth graders and rehearse in the carport, the musical (including numbers like Lex Luthor’s “I’ll Rule the World”) never made it to the stage, but my confidence in myself as a creative was born.
That same year I discovered the library, and on Saturdays I would volunteer at the check-out desk, stamping people’s due dates. Being a military family we moved a lot, so books became my friends. Nancy Drew was always waiting for me in every library from Spain to Germany to Omaha. Books were a constant in a world that was constantly changing.
Later, when life got harder, books became a way to disassociate; I could leave my body in the midst of everyday reality, escape family meltdowns and divorces and worlds I didn’t want to be in. In college, I read in the dressing rooms of go-go clubs, getting through East of Eden and The Trial while other girls were giving lap dances.
After I dropped out of college, I started traveling the country with the Renaissance Fair, living in a van, putting on a bodice and an English accent to sell turkey legs and pewter goblets. I discovered lyrical songwriters like Bob Dylan and Tom Waits and I started journaling regularly with the idea that these were adventures I would want to remember and maybe someday write a book. Sadly most of those journals are gone. But when I eventually got off the road and moved to Denver to finish college, I did so as a writer.
Photo by Lynn Hough

My upbringing taught me two very different things: My military father taught me self-discipline. My artist mother taught me that making art is worthwhile. This combination has enabled to become a rare breed: a disciplined creative.

This story is true. But it’s not the whole story.
While 9-year-old Writer Nancy was stamping books at the library, 9-year-old Performer Nancy was learning the guitar and soloing in the church folk band. At 12 I was competing in pageants, at 15 I enrolled in the Nancy Bounds Modeling Agency, and at 18 I was runner-up for Miss Nebraska. I began college as a theater major, in love with the vulnerability of the stage, that instant gratification of connecting with an audience in the moment.
This story is also true. So how do these two Nancys, these twin passions, connect?
They connect in my art.
In acting school there is a thing called a triple threat: a person who can sing, dance, and act. Much of my own creative process has been finding the intersection of myself as a writer, performer and innovator. The sweet spot where my creative exhibitionist meets my inner world of silence and flow. My writing reflects this intersection and love of innovation—The Monster Opera is an avant garde mixture of performance and writing, a place where the novel metaphorically battles the opera on page and stage. Searching for Suzi: a flash novel was the first flash novel (called as such) and a term I coined in 2009. And perhaps that’s why in 2007 I fell in love and began writing flash fiction: there is an instant gratification akin to the stage that comes from these short, self-contained bursts of story. Here’s a link to a reading of The Fox.
As word-crafters we lay it bare on the page. As performers we reveal ourselves on the stage. They are flipsides of the same coin, the inner and the outer worlds of creation: the private incubation and the public genuflection.
In the end I see no reason why writers can’t also be rock stars. One of these days I will stage dive after a reading.
And that’s probably how this essay would have ended if you had read it last year. But on May 20 of last year, everything changed.

Naked
The scissors slide easily through the thick denim of my favorite blue jeans, from ankle to waist, ankle to waist, as one leg then the other falls away. He slices up the middle of my thin cotton shirt like tissue paper, unwraps me, my pink Victoria’s Secret bra a final ribbon snipped and spilling to the ground, leaving me naked. Exposed.
Are you having trouble breathing? He asks with kind brown eyes.
A little, on one side, I whisper.
We’ll be there soon, he says, gently placing an oxygen mask as the ambulance sirens rattle the warm evening air.

People ask me about my accident a lot. It’s so hard to respond, so mostly I avoid the conversation. But I will tell you here that something happened to me in those moments as they were ripping the car open with the Jaws of Life. Somewhere between the ambulance and the emergency room I had the most important realization of my life: I’m still here.
By the time they were inflating my lung I knew I’d been given a gift—as they were pulling chunks of glass out of my arm I had a choice: become a victim or become a bigger version of myself. Could I learn to be grateful in the midst of such an injustice?
Yes. I had to. I had no other choice.
So this story and my Journey to Planet Write have Happy Endings. I’m here to write another day. But aren’t we all? We’ve all been given this same gift of today. No matter how disappointing or unpredictable or infuriating the world may be, no matter how tragic or even euphoric our lives become, we are here one more day, to write. Our books, our words, our ideas are the friends that accompany us on the journey. And spaces like Journey to Planet Write remind us that we are not alone.
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Nancy Stohlman’s books include The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories(2014), The Monster Opera (2013), Searching for Suzi:a flash novel (2009), Live From Palestine(2003), and three anthologies of flash fiction including Fast Forward: The Mix Tape (2010), a finalist for a 2011 Colorado Book Award. She is the creator and curator of The F-Bomb Flash Fiction ReadingSeries in Denver, a founding member of Fast Forward Press, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.



Photo by Lynn Hough

By night Nancy straps on stilettos and becomes the lead singer of the lounge metal band Kinky Mink. She dreams of one day becoming a pirate.




















This is the last episode in the series of Journeys that began in January of 2016. Other Journeys may appear sporadically in the future.  If you are a writer and want to share your Journey, please submit to gaydegani@gmail.com.

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: It’s Always Pouring In My Kingdom

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By Anne Elizabeth Weisgerber

I remember one of my childhood nuns, Sister Margaret Mary, as very Irish.  She pronounced laughter LAHWt-rr. She was mean, crabby, quick to knuckle-up with the ruler, but man, I loved how she said that word.  She insisted. 


My favorite teacher as a child was Mme. Pearl Phillippe.  She would let me visit with her after school, and she would teach me French words and phrases.  She made me hand-copy poems into a book and illustrate them.  Not a hugger, she would sometimes touch my hair to move it behind my ear. I still love her for all those things.  

In second grade, I was moved up for being precocious, and soon learned (for self-preservation reasons) to pretend that I could not read.  The third graders didn’t want a baby around, and my old classmates thought, Jersey-style, she thinks who she is.  Publicly, I would stumble over the word ocean: privately, never.  Happily demoted, I read a lot at recess.  My favorite books involved building undersea cities, and Ezra Jack Keats illustrations.  I was glad when my parents transferred my brother, sister, and me to public school for seventh grade. 
Although I was in junior high school with comedienne Janeane Garofalo (a very nice girl from a respectable home on the hill), I got voted class clown.  I remember making Janeane laugh once when, at the lunch table, I wondered aloud who had manhandled my banana.  It was good old LAHWt-rr to the rescue over and over for me.  I wrote a lot of terrible poetry, which I still have in hand-made books with green felt covers.  I still like the drawings my old self did, but not the poetry so much.  

Other things I remember from those years were that one of the teachers in my school was a Playboy centerfold.  Another teacher played pocket pool regularly in his tighty tweeds.  Another teacher dangled a troublemaker outside a second-story window. I had a letter published in the Aerosmith newsletter, Aero Knows.  I continued to write.  When a kind of famous neighbor died, my town paper, The Madison Eagle, published my poetic tribute to him, and I was asked to read it at his memorial service, but I was too shy.  I also remember sentence diagramming fondly.
In high school, I loved the art room.  It was quite the hangout, and it seemed we could help ourselves to any supplies.  India Ink, Speedball linoleum cutters, paper.  I am still friends with Anthony Vitale, art room buddy, who owns a wonderful music school.  We saw Queen and the Police in concert with our thrash-metal friend Eddie Trunk. I tell my sons about high school back then, and they can’t believe it.  

There was a used bookstore in town, The Chatham Bookseller, and when I was thirteen I read my way through the existentialists, 35-cents a pop.  I still have those copies of Huis Clos, Une Saison En Enfer, and Resistance, Rebellion, and Death.  Merci, Mme. Phillippe.  I got an award for creative writing, and was the editor of my school’s literary magazine for my junior and senior year.  Graduated.

In college, I met Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, and the Transcendentalists.  I stayed in touch with just one professor, Bill Doreski (he and I are coincidentally published together this month in Pure Slush FIVE.) I spent most of my creative energy in college DJing at the radio station.  It was a wonderful time for music – Talking Heads, Black Flag, New Order, Grandmaster Flash – and I think I still have the Beastie Boys’ “Cookie Puss” on vinyl somewhere.  I used to draw editorial cartoons for the school newspaper.  I graduated with my degree in English, having written my final paper on King Lear. 

Then, kind of like Matt Potter referenced in his essay for this column, I too distanced myself from writing. I managed creative agencies, ran a telemarketing center, traveled the world, won national sales awards, got an MBA.  My claim to fame was this 1990s thing called the “authorization check.”  I worked for the phone company, and we’d mail these $20 checks to customers who dropped our service for a competitor’s.  When people signed and cashed those checks, it authorized a switch back.  LOL. I was the audacious 1995 sales champ. But it was picking up a palette again, and standing in front of an easel, that reclaimed my creativity. Soon after, I found love. I met my artist husband, Paul (our first date is recounted in “How to Meet Marc Chagall.”) 
My employer offered severance money, so I bought a computer, a printer, and some file cabinets and started freelance writing.  The first feature I wrote won First Prize from the SPJ.  As I look back, I’ve always had a career that touched upon writing.  We have three bright, creative sons.  I gave up work for a few years to be home with the babies.  I continued freelancing, then helped run Ghost Tours in a nearby town.  I’ve interviewed Kissinger.  I won awards. That segued to being a public school teacher, where rereading classics brought me full circle to the path from which I’d strayed. 

Fifteen years later, I turned 50.  For me, this is my imaginary Annie Proulx line.  She did not start writing till later in life, but she did start writing after 50.  I too am coming to the craft later, and I am not rising from nothing.  The stories are pouring out.  My first publication was nominated for Best Small Fiction.  I’m 45K words into my first novel, and have finally discovered, after fretting about it all these years, that the love of my life, the English language, has waited for me, and blushes for me, and welcomes me with open arms to some kingdom I was sworn existed when I was very small.  I am the king of some rainy country, it seems, where stories pour all day and night.  I’m home.

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Look for Anne Elizabeth Weisgerber’s stories in New South, Tahoma Literary Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Vignette Review, Revolution John, andJellyfish Review. She is a freelance fiction editor, and her chapbook reviews appear in Change Seven Magazine; she reads fiction for Pithead Chapel.  She’s studied with Randall Brown, Kathy Fish, and Nancy Stohlman, and loves her writing squads: #fishtankwriters and #storytalk. When not teaching, she’s working on a novel that spans five generations, or looking out the kitchen window at her fascinating goats, Snapdragon and Socrates. Follow her @AEWeisgerber, or visit anneweisgerber.com