Winter 2009

Congratulations to Corinna Rosendahl, Shala Erlich and Stacey Panek, whose work was chosen from the Hugo Writing Classes winter end-of-term reading. Each quarter, we highlight the work of two or three of our talented students.

Corinna Rosendahl wrote "All That Life" in Judith Roche's poetry class, "Issues of Craft." The poem was inspired by a story told to Corinna by a close friend, who was almost in an accident. Corinna was immediately drawn into the frightening realization that this person she cared for greatly could have never existed.

All That Life

You are telling me a story from when you lived back home
before you moved here, before I'd met you, about a time
when you were driving your motorcycle down the street
and a car came out in front of you, your story spreading out for me
like a waking body, as you are speaking, I imagine
the scene is not too hot, but sunny and I see you clearly,
wind slathering your skin as you steer steady
before lurching, the motorcycle heaving abruptly backward
then forward, when that driver did not think,
to look for you, how you almost flew, not like a bird, but your
whole body light and bright like a banner, you said it took three minutes
before you knew what had happened to you, as if your body had been
hooked, suspended in air and it took that long to
come back to, and in that time you said you had
forgotten yourself, left your body behind, not as if you were an angel, but
the halo hovering above it, hanging and almost holy before
spilling back inside your human self, you said you breathed so heavy your
heart full and furiously thumping, a drum in an empty room
echoing, how you could not stop, kept on picturing your body thrown up
and thrown down onto the ground, your flesh like milk
skimmed down, your bones backward and broken, you saw yourself
frozen, motionless like a mural up against the ground, obsessed with
how you had been so close to death, and I wondered, for a moment, if you
had wanted the potency of it, once you were safe from it, you said you could not stop
going back, repeating this possible crash, as if a Son of God kneeling,
praying and pleading, again and again for some
small understanding of righteousness, and now after listening to you, I cannot help but
bring myself back there too, this scene in slow motion, like three thousand
bees swarming, covering me as if
those bees made up my body, though this happened to you
long before I met you, it is as if being told your child in a past life
was stolen from you, as I am standing before you, I cannot stop thinking, oh
God, what if, what could have been and I think of you then, still
so young, buried in the same town you grew up in, like a child dying
in the mother's womb, and for a moment I have to
hate those careless people who could have killed you, could have
kept me from ever knowing you, for how much, for all that
life they almost took from you.

Shala Erlich wrote a memoir/essay, “Scraps,” while taking Eli Hastings's class, “Truth or Consequences,” on the blurry limits of creative license in nonfiction stories.  The essay does not push those limits very far, but was inspired by all the controversial and imperfect ways we can tell stories that have pieces missing.

Excerpt from "Scraps"

The last time I stayed at my grandmother's house, the number of padlocks had multiplied.  There were waist-high piles of newspaper lining the hall.  A dirty track marked the carpet between the bedroom and the bathroom.  The bedroom was a grotto of clutter.  The bathroom looked like a ransacked drugstore.  I was staying upstairs in my father's childhood bedroom, now two-thirds full of boxes.  The faucets in the upstairs sink were broken, the enamel stained.   When was the last time anyone had been up there?

Downstairs we sat together on the couch.  I gave my grandmother the present I'd brought.  It was a framed picture of me holding my half-brother's new baby, my nephew, who was, strictly speaking, unrelated to her.

"Oh honey, how wonderful!" she said, cradling the picture to her chest and then holding it out at arms' length to admire it.  "When you were born, your mother became a mother, and I became a grandmother. So when she becomes a grandmother, that makes me a great grandmother, right?"

 "Absolutely," I said.

Here was the perfect reasoning I expected from her: an expression of love, acceptance and her knowing, clever loopiness of logic.
 

But half an hour later, she fluttered around like a singed moth, getting ready for a beauty parlor appointment.
  
"I'll drive you there," I offered.  It filled me with dread that she still drove that whale of a Cadillac.

"No, no, no! If no one stays to watch the house, Saba that bastard and his whore will fly in between the bars of the windows and make love on the living room couch!"

"Um, doesn't that sound a little silly to you, Savta?"  I was reaching for that perfectly sane Savta I'd been talking to a minute ago.

"No, not at all, sweetheart," she said.

She went into her bedroom to look for her keys and came back whipping her wedding contract through the air, threatening to burn it.  We found the keys on the dining room table and that's where she left the wedding contract when she went out.

While she was gone, I mooned around the house.  The kitchen clock ticked with loud reluctance.  I opened some cabinets in search of a snack and found one of my grandfather's notes under a jar of Trader Joe's raspberry jam.  It said:  I love you so much. Darling please let me come back.  I tucked this note away in my journal, along with my grandparents' wedding contract, a simple folded form, for safekeeping.

After she died--her heart was punctured during an unnecessary medical procedure she'd told no one about--my grandmother's car was found in the hospital parking lot aslant across two spaces.  In the days following the funeral, we went through the house, clearing it out to make it habitable for Saba to move back in.  There were slippery piles of cheap purses and unopened boxes containing miniature crystal vases, a knife sharpener, inlaid candy bowls.   We found fifty-dollar bills hidden in several volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the Talmud and a book of Romantic poets.   I absconded with some glittery lavender nail polish, a novel I'd given her (which was out on the coffee table in the den--had she been reading it?) and another paper scrap I'd found on her dressing table.  It was one side of a red-and-yellow Celestial Seasonings tea carton, with a quote printed next to a vase of sunflowers:

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to the stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart to bear on cheerfully, do all bravely, awaiting occasions, worry never, in a word to, like the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common.
 
On the bottom, she had written in a shaky version of her ornamental script, This one is so beautiful. It will calm you down. How could you be wrong?

Stacey Panek wrote this piece for Dickey Nesenger's class, "Setting: The Poetry of Place." After several weeks of exploring and experimenting with the function of setting in written work, Stacey found herself inspired by a very unusual bus ride home. She paid close attention to the richly chaotic setting and jotted down some notes, typing out a draft of this piece the moment she got home.

 
Mess of Men

The bus is a mess of men. Men in all sizes of big, barking and babbling, breathing and bustling over into the aisles with their big packs full of manly things. The bus driver is Sex, Himself. I rise the tall steps to greet him with my bus pass and there he is, Sex, with pale-blue Metro sleeves rolled button-tight over fierce biceps that will make the bus turn. "Damn, you're hot," I think, stumbling past to take my seat and watch the riders, the rivers, the vast torrents of men entering the bus. The heat is on way too high and the men keep coming, scarcely a woman among them. I'm outnumbered. I am no small amount scared. This bus drops off by the men's shelter. These are hardscrabble men, men befriended by bottles and brawls. Even when not hardscrabble, they're still men, coming on this bus in a hard pour, even if softer men with trendy shoes, iPods and calm in their eyes. I look at one. He looks at me. A dark man behind me has a black hat and a black scarf pulled high over his nose. He gestures to that man with long hair, wiry mustache, like they've got some low-down, no-good plan, and I know they aren't going to blow up the bus, and it's wrong to think it, but I think it nonetheless. That man next to me, he's clicking something, I don't know what, like a nail clipper—is he clipping his nails on the bus? What won't these men stop at, these boys? I look down at the sound of a clip and then regret it, not wanting to disturb his cap-gun-clicking, don't want to trounce his boyishness with my broad bourgeoisie. The boys I must endure. Suddenly, then, windows open and one of the multitude looks at my window and talks to the boy beside me--"Open that!" Men look at me, and hell, yeah! Let's open it. The bus is an oven. I always sweat like the boys at the gym.

Cool air comes in and makes some room.

The bus goes. The engine revs its muscles. The bus driver drives fast and stops faster. He announces his moves ahead of time. "Wide left then immediate right!" "Broad. Mercer. Valley."  "S-curve!" "Please hold on if you're standing up—pulling out."

His voice asserts the movement. He speaks over the multitudes. Everyone speaks. Everyone is living the life. One man says, "I hear you got a job for me?" One man talks to his phone. A newspaper speaks in hushed pops as a man crumples it. The Spanish language rolls. Then a woman calls out behind me, her voice like a child. Her voice says, "Get out the way."

It repeats: "Get out the way."

Get out the way. Get OUT the way!

Then: Floor it! Bring it!

The muscles rev. The boys bluster.

And so it goes till the bus tumbles over itself at my stop and ejects me to the night.

The night is quiet with the click of my tiny heels. It's cool.

The neighborhood houses are sleeping.

There's that terracotta vase that I always mistake for a cat.