Author: Kelley

The writing days of summer

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my experience of 41 Days of Story.

The background for those of you scratching your heads: I’m the Board Chair of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. This past summer, to raise money for CW, I accepted donations and wrote a new piece of fiction to a prompt supplied by the donor. I did this every day for 41 days in a row.

Thank you to all of you who donated, and read the pieces, and left encouraging comments. You made a difference to Clarion West, and to me. I will always be grateful.

    For those who like the numbers:

  • I raised more than $2,500 for Clarion West.
  • I wrote 32,000 words of fiction, plus another 8,000-10,000 of editorial commentary at Sterling Editing.
  • At least 6 of these pieces are conscious opening or early scenes of a novel (meaning that I saw a much longer work when I was writing them).
  • 34 of them are stories. Of those 33, at least 12 could conceivably be the genesis of a longer work (novella or novel) if I wanted to develop them along those lines.
  • There’s one piece that is not a story: a prose poem, maybe?
  • I would classify 9 to 12 of the pieces as speculative fiction.
  • 7 of the pieces are YA fiction.

And then there were the days themselves. Getting up every morning and sitting down to a sentence or two of prompt, and a big blank screen, and then…writing.

It was brutal. It was absolutely fucking terrifying. It was exhilarating. It was deeply surprising. And it was occasionally ecstatic. But I keep trying to talk about it beyond hanging these tags on it, and I just…can’t. I don’t really know how to make anyone understand what it means to me that I did this thing. Because, you know, people write new fiction all the time. Lots of people write 32,000 words in six weeks. It’s not particularly impressive to the outside world, and it feels pretentious to process about it in public as if it were important to anyone but me. But I just wanted you to know that it mattered to me, and that it has changed me deeply and forever in ways that are exciting, and not entirely comfortable.

However, I would really appreciate your input about what the hell I should do with this stuff. Because my head is overfull of ideas. I could e-publish them as unedited flash fiction (explaining in the introduction the Clarion West/prompt context — I could even give the prompts). I could publish them with the Sterling Editing commentary appended. I could dig in and write one of those novels. I could polish/expand some of the better stories and publish them individually or in a small collection. I could put a nail gun to my forehead and end my indecision that way, although that seems counterproductive…

Your ideas? What would you do with too many options and not enough time? I would also love to know from those of you who read the pieces what your favorites were, and perhaps why?

I am not accustomed to crowd-sourcing my career (and, to be fair, I’m not leaving the decision up to the crowd), but any feedback is a gift right now, and I would appreciate any input you care to offer.

Enjoy your day, and thanks.

Albert Nobbs

A poverty-stricken woman in 1860s Ireland disguises herself as a man to gain employment as a waiter in a Dublin hotel. As she settles into her new role in society, she gets increasingly confused about her identity, courting a maid while pretending to be a man and revealing her secret to a hotel guest.

 
Glenn Close is awesome at a molecular level, and I very much hope this film is too.

Enjoy your day.

To all the invincible women

Last week, my mother’s sister Gaylia and her husband Al came to Seattle for a visit. It’s been a while since we all saw each other. The wine and conversation flowed. And my Aunt Gay brought me an unexpected present that surprised me so much, and touched me so deeply, that I began to cry at the restaurant table. Drip drip drip into my salmon…

Gaylia brought me a locket that belonged to my great-grandmother Margie, our Nana.

Nana was an amazing woman. Amazing. A little woman with small bones and a high, light voice like a bird. A fierce and questing soul. Guts by the barrelful. When Nana was 15, she walked from her home in the Midwest (Oklahoma?) all the way to New Orleans to avoid an arranged marriage to a much older man. When she was forced to marry him anyway, she made the best life for him and his kids that she could, and she held him in her arms when he died. And then she lived alone for the rest of her life. She painted small oil and watercolor pictures on scraps of paper and the backs of greeting cards, and gave them away. She loved cats, and her garden, and her independence, and she loved my mother and Gaylia and me. She knew a lot about pain and a lot about joy. I hope there’s a lot of her in me.

So this was Nana’s locket. I would treasure it for that alone, but then Gaylia opened it and showed me what was inside.
 

On the bottom (left, below) is my mother Sharon at about 17-18. On the top (right, below) is Gaylia, about 13-14. These were taken at the beach somewhere in Southern California.


 
Aren’t they beautiful?

Here’s the thing: I know they were both having hard lives at that point, for a variety of reasons. But here they are, on a summer’s day, together, smiling… well, I admire them both extremely, and I am struck again (and again, and again!) by the power of the human spirit to find joy wherever it can, no matter what.

Albert Camus said, In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer. My Nana was invincible. Sharon and Gaylia are too. And me, well, I’m trying.

Enjoy your day. Go invince.

Bloggers of the world….

… please, for the love of all that’s holy, do not not not write your entire blog in teeny white letters on a black background. Or teeny gray letters on a purple background. Or any other goddamned fancy color combination. My head is about to explode.

BOOM!

What was that?

Oh my sweet Jesus, Martha, that Kelley Eskridge’s brains just blew out all over the internet!

That is all.

In which people say nice things

Catching up on reviews… Many thank to Ian Sales for these kind words about about Solitaire, and to Christopher East for this recent lovely review of Dangerous Space and this earlier review of Solitaire.

I am always so grateful when people take the time to read and comment this way, to consider my writing in the context of how it has connected with them. That matters to me. I think it does to all writers. It’s a gift: thank you to all who give it.

To life

I was utterly determined not to blog about the 9/11 anniversary, especially since I’ve been so long absent from my own blog that returning to talk of other people’s pain seemed…. Well. It seemed unseemly. And so I will talk instead of how deeply touched I am by the National September 11 Memorial that was unveiled today at the site of the World Trade Towers.

Click the photo to see the entire slideshow.

The thing about these photos that makes me weep is not the images of the families, although they are powerful and evocative. No, it’s the captions and what they taught me about the design of the memorial. It’s so thoughtful. It’s all about human things. The sound of ever-flowing water is designed to be a comfort to visitors. The names of the dead are arranged in affinity groups — co-workers, friends, remembered together. The pools are deep and wide, like life. There is room for everyone.

I don’t particularly want a grave. I don’t need there to be a place where the last of me lies, where people can visit. But when Nicola and I go to the park, we sit on a bench that someone paid for in memory of a loved one. We look out at the water and the sky, and we talk about life. That bench gives us comfort, and perspective, and a place to acknowledge the beauty of the world. And around the bench, life goes on.

Here’s to life.
 


Nicola took this photo from the bench.

One day workshops with amazing writers!

Calling all writers! Come on down to a series of one-day writing workshops in Seattle this fall.

The one-day workshops are a brand new program from Clarion West. Not everyone can carve six weeks out for a writing workshop, so we’re finding other ways to bring the learning. We have three world-class professional writers offering focused, intensive instruction in crafting better fiction. Molly Gloss will teach a day on setting and character; Mark Teppo will help you jumpstart your novel; and Nancy Kress will help you focus on your first scene (including in-class critique).

We are jazzed. We want to jazz you too. Come spend a day with us learning, connecting, and making your writing better! Space is limited, so register now!