Writing 

I write short stories. Some. Most are short. Really short. Let’s call them ‘short shorts’ for short. One is a ‘long story’ which I excerpted below.

Just Staff: a 4-page short short, a new novelist observes how his personally centered behavior affects a stranger. READ

Stump Tales: a 55-page ghost story about death and spirits from hurricanes in the Adirondacks that spans Oct 1954 to Oct 2022. See it as a flip book. It is fun to see the pages bend like paper, but is best viewed on a tablet or computer and in full screen mode the X icon (full screen option perhaps not available on your phone).

Like a Christmas Tree: a short short for the winter (start of 2022) Like a Christmas Tree  and here’s an Audio reading by me.

Zen Stories: In this collection, More (than) Zen Stories: New sprouts from old tales I take five old Zen stories and continue them with a sequel that, I believe, brings new inspirations and insights.

• The Hermit of Moon Village
• Not Enough Cups
• There is Seed and There is Seed
• Twenty Years and Nothing
• The Invitation

Short Short Collection

Storm Coming: Short and Stormy Stories

(Read now as a flip book)

• Storm Coming
• Memorial Day
• Driftwood
• Song and Dance
• A Little Stitching
• Silverado
• Fair Game
• Waxing Gibbous
• Peeling Paint
• Recycling
• Mr. Kim’s Apartment
• Audio Diary, July 5, 2031
• Margery’s Pot
• The Harvest
• Inquiry on the Green Experiment
• Last Night

Centerfold: a long story

In 2020, that first COVIDian year when a tiny beast targeted the human community, I focused on writing a novela or long short story of some thirty thousand words (75 pages). It is Centerfold. I have not yet published it. But I think the opening two pieces of it are fun, so I put that here for your enjoyment.

This is How it Goes: an AllegAwry (Illustrated)

Jan 6, 2022, I wrote and published my reading of this on my YouTube channel (@phelpstk). It was, of course, the first anniversary of the January 6 coup attempt, democracy being stolen. I have now illustrated it and formatted is as a book that can be printed at Staples for a small fee. It is in YouTube and Flipbook

Three dozen semi-randomized ‘facts’ about setting and character.

See the tool on Google.

It is a spreadsheet I invented. It is licensed for sharing with Creative Commons.

Here is an example of an opening I wrote based on a prompt from my spreadsheet tool.

     Under the brush to her left, that being the place she had put down her head and her worries once the gibbous moon had sunk behind Mount Flammable, so named for its periodic forest rages that make it glow day and night for about a week—under that dense bit of brush, itself turning into a red flame this late in the season, under that, there came a sound.
     Of course, sounds. All night, all day, sounds. It was the slick and stop, prickle and stop of this sound that made her—let’s know her as Irvin—shoot out of her dream and lie still as a snake. A snake being the most probable source of the sound. Slick and stop.
     It came up to her sleeping bag, tapped her forehead, looked in her eye, tongue flickering. And back down to her neck, then inside, under the tender upper arm where it joins the chest, and went still. Irvin did not appreciate the coolness right at that moment. Or right at that place. Yet. Yet, to be told, this was kindness, and she smiled to receive it.
     The sun was yet to show through the high canopy, and she had nothing to do this day. And so she went back to her dream. Back to her mother’s secret bank vault in Kyev and the day she took out her fortune and disappeared into the forest.

Daffodils Cut as a flipbook. It works OK on a cellphone, but is great on a computer or table.

I write poems. They are short, too, even shorter than my ‘short short’ stories. As you would think. As for ‘writing’ poems. I don’t know…Mostly I seem to midwife them, midwife not the words for the most part, but the essential drop, the idea, that some muse-like phenomenon has sort of dropped on the top of my head when I am not looking at the sky. I am looking at the world, yes indeed. But the the poem comes into that from the side or something. Say, isn’t it amazing how rarely a bird drops its digestive refuse on our heads? Those little beings must be watching us.

OK. That’s my view. Now here is a short selection of a few of my poems, starting with one looking at what poems can be for us: windows for us to see out of and others to peek into. True of all fine arts. The selection ends with one about flowers being cut in order to save them from passing. That is also a metaphor for poems.

Poems Our Windows

When making them
we try to look outside
the rooms we live in
peek through curtains
raise the shades
to see a new or needed thing

Poems cut
into the membrane
nature made to
seal safe our earthmost
thoughts from others
peel it back a moment
like a dreamer at the window
wearing nightclothes
maybe naked
dancing eyes wet

A child wrapped in towels
for an evening bath jumps
at the window pointing
past a blue black sky with Sirius
rising to exclaim the
new half moon

What Loon at Night

What is the dream
that from within it
calls the dawn
What is the wailing
from the woods
that breaks the windows
locked in ice
and rips away the bed
to get you up in time to
wrap the children still asleep and run?

Global Egg

I can only participate!
My finger prints on everything.
No way I can remove the stain.

I drive. I buy. I eat.
And when I do,
I whip and rape
People I will never meet.

Every step my body takes
A thousand other bodies break.
A global egg so intricate
My finest moves are all mistake.

Comment: I wrote this as a Thanksgiving before-meal blessing with my family in 2003. Each year it gets even more wickedly true. The coal burning to make the electricity I am using to type this–and you to read it–is choking to death a colony of corral somewhere, a polar bear losing ground.

“El Niño”

Mowing on Sunday

Here on my backyard deckdeck
__somewhere on the coastal swath
__cleansed of the old time stories
I hear them break the placid
Sunday air
Mowing

Yet hear how many
__as in their fathers’ time
Hold back their labors until noon
Have they stood there long
__at the backyard door
__holding the pull cord
Listening for the midday bells
Bells that peel back the pall
That held god’s ghost in town this morning

Bells that let it out like a cloud of bats
__so it might sleep in the distant trees
__and never have to see them
__bent so hard at their moaning machines
Cutting

Closed for Winter

From a cluster of rounds
Dry gray
A creeking river of wood
The trunk of a winter lilac
Pepper gray like the hair in my hat

Come up its pathward rise
Past the branching
The splitting thins
To face a sudden nest of twigs
The ends

A congregation of buds
Upfolded hands
Prayed to the sun
Enfolding the memory
Holding the future of blossom

“Adirondack Winter, 1”

Prologue Again

When the melt of April in this part of
Mother Earth has come to free us from the
Grip of cold that held us by the fire and
Sent us out to look for wood, then happy
Children press their faces to the glass to
See the sun burn off the last of snow and
Tumble past each other down the stairs and
Out the back door with no shoes on running
To the warming arms of mud or earth, while
Men and women rise from bed still wet with
Dreams and drink their coffee at the window
Opened now to let the newborn breezes
Clean the house of winter. Then a hunger
Will awaken for fresh pilgrimages.

Comment: I play with the opening 12 lines of iambic pentameter in the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. “Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote…Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages”

Life of an Oak and Maple

An oak and maple live, an aging pair,
beside the garden. The branches brush our
roof, and their rugged trunks hold our hammock.
They mesh leaves like old friends slapping shoulders.

Each year, in October, with no reason
I can see, the maple lets loose her leaves,
like a dress dropped to the floor while thinking.
The oak is fine. The maple looks like death.

The rusty nest of dry oak leaves, like a
colony of sleeping rafter bats, holds
on until a rainwind, down from winter,
strips them off in clumps. Grieving every one.

Then these two stand mute and gray like graveyard
lovers. Sometimes in a sun and breeze they
click their ice coat limbs together. Only
God knows what they’re up to in their rootspace.

“Waiting for the Hammock”

GuanYin and Boy

A mother sits
with her boy
on the bus
in Taipei.
Snips a bit from
a loaf of raisin bread
placing it in her open palm near his lap.
He takes it
not needing to look
dreaming
out the window
yet keeps two fingers
arched on the pulse point of her wrist
to hold her there
as she puts
another raisin
on her open
upturned palm
still as the Buddha’s.

Comment: I saw this on the seats across the aisle from me on the bus from Taipei to the airport October 2016. I hope to capture how still and gracious the mother was, dedicated to the simple need of her son.

“Mountains of Central Taiwan”

The Current Flow of Night Rain

There the rains
And on the roof and on the streets
Rains on wind and wind
Night has squinted out the lights
Clouds the olding moon
Cry the ones who cradle in the rooms
Cribs with mothers bent above
Loving into dreams
Why the lingering of water
In the fall the hurricanes
But now the darkened hushing
Winds on panes

Comment: This is a poem of sound, where meaning is let free to be whatever I or the reader makes or leaves of it. Like what we do (or view) widely in the visual arts.

“Alpha Lock, 11”

Daffodils Cut

I cut them from their plant at night
When they had bent
In an April snow
Their newborn heads laden
__to the earth
__to their sleep
__to burn in the ice
Such bursts of optimism
I had to kill to bring indoors

“Daffodils Cut”

I made a spreadsheet to roll word dice for some fun or seriously good writing prompts. It gives little provocative phrases based on the day or your name or birthday. The spreadsheet is in Excel and uses nothing hidden or macros.

DOWNLOAD: Writer’s Blocks by Celia Landman

Here’s an example of my use the Landman dice (pictured here) that my spreadsheet plays with:

This winter (2015, a hard one in northeast US), I looked out my window for a writing subject and thought of one of the oak trees out there in the snow. I rolled the dice and got faith (one of the 48 inspirational words on the eight metal, hand-made dice by Celia Landman). That word inspired a thought about the inner strength and life of a tree, specifically the cambium layer under the bark. I then wrote a poem.

How We Can Stand It

When I am wavering bent
from the wind dimmed in fog covered in snow
I look at the oak at the edge of the field
how it stands
without clothing there in the winter
and I think of what I cannot see
that hibernating green
skin as thin as my wrist skin
but its bark armor rugged and thick as a wolf growl
I think of that cambium layer held
firm by a century of corewood
pithwood heartwood sapwood
a trickling stream sourced a hundred feet
below the frost
flowing to the sky against all gravity
not fueled by anything we can see
but fueled by what the botanists found because
they had to know
as we all do
how this can ever happen
how a tree
how any of us
can stand it
stand without clothing in the winter
how we can ever warm our branching arms
blood syrup pulsing out and out and up into each of our fingers
scratching at the sun

Lessons from the Heart : Five memoir-based observations I wrote 15 years after my heart attack

Learning Scarlet : hunting a rat in the garage with my brothers and father as a boy

The Cure for Panic : an appalling exercise by the swimming coach last day of high school

How Thin the Thread : example of the mysterious events we all experience, here meeting my wife

Nandi Plays the Lottery : unexplainable sequence with the national lottery, watch this one closely…

An Actor Recalls : short parody as if the first page of the biography of an actor, an Australian goose

Boxed in the Eye : my childhood experience with cruel backyard fighting

House Samurai : defending my house from attacks

The Knife and the Visitor : my childhood experience of an intruder in the night

My Breakfast : remembering Midnight our cat in days before he died