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Monday, November 23, 2009

New/old story: 'Relativity'

More than twenty years ago I lived in Japan for almost two years, teaching English in a provincial city, Niigata. After several months, my present wife Cris -- whom I had just met and fallen in love with the year before, and who was broken-hearted when I left to teach in Japan -- came out to join me, and we've been together ever since. But before Cris came to Niigata, Seiko, one of my students, a cheerful shopgirl who was enamored of everything American or British and who claimed to hate Japan, got a big crush on me. She flirted with me in her very subtle way, and one summer night during a local festival she came over to my apartment half-drunk. It would have been easy for me to take advantage of her, but something about the situation didn't feel right, and besides, Cris was about to arrive on vacation to see me for the first time in months. Instead of kissing Seiko, I just listened to some music with her and then let her go home. And I never did go to bed with a Japanese girl, much as I would have liked to; it was too hard for me to understand how to overcome the difficulties in communication.

The next year a new teacher came out to work in our school. He was in his late 30s, rather cheerless, balding and not very attractive, but not more than ten days after arriving, he had snagged a gorgeous girl, a staff person at a local gym, and was sleeping with her. Whatever compunctions I had that made it hard for me to get close to a girl who could hardly talk to me -- he had no such compunctions.

To understand this dynamic, and to illustrate some of the other confusing cultural norms I encountered in my sojourn in the Japanese city, I wrote a short story, Relativity. I don't claim it's a very good short story, but it does try to illustrate the ambivalence I felt then about taking advantage of someone.

technorati: Japan

Labels: Japan, short stories, teaching

Thursday, November 05, 2009

The Travelers Guide to Being 22 Years Old, and other states

The Words Without Borders blog has a post on a series of books published by Whereabouts Press, the Traveler Literary Companion series. These are guides to countries (mostly) and some cities containing stories set in those places. To their credit, an examination of the Table of Contents for some of the books suggests that their contents were all written by natives to those countries; the India guide has no E.M. Forester or even V.S. Naipaul, the Spain no Hemingway or Orwell.

A splendid idea. But what if the definition of travel guide were extended to states of being, or stages of life? Thus a Travelers Guide to Being 22 Years Old might contain selections from Goodbye, Columbus, The Graduate, and All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. The Travelers Guide to Homelessness would contain stories written only by people who had been (and maybe were still) homeless (voluntary homeless people need not apply -- again, no Orwell). The emphasis on authenticity might get a little dicey with, for example, The Travelers Guide to Mars -- but who could exclude Ray Bradbury from that collection?

technorati: travel books, books, youth

Labels: books, short stories, travel

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Read a new story, "Cleaning Up After the Champion"

I posted a short story to a new writers' website, Fictionaut. The story is called "Cleaning Up After the Champion," and is about how normal people react when their loved ones turn into superheroes.

It's either the first in a series of stories about superheroes, or the first chapter in a novel. Works either way. No other stories in the series, if there is one, have been completed, though I have started a couple of them.

Read "Cleaning Up After the Champion."

Labels: fiction, short stories, writing

Sunday, October 04, 2009

Read my short story 'Polar Bear'

Here's a short story, Polar Bear (PDF), which I spent a great deal of time working on several years ago, available for free from the Scribd website. (I'm not too sure just what the purpose of the Scribd website is, but for the moment I'll use it to share some of my writing.)

For those familiar with much of my work, this is not a story about sex and it doesn't really have any sex in it (though there is a cameo by a stripper). It's based on an anecdote told to me by a friend when I lived in Japan twenty years ago. She was a wealthy middle-aged lady who had a rich, depressed friend from college. He was so bored he wanted to kill himself, but she said to him, "Well, what if you just risked your life instead?" And took him hunting polar bears in the Arctic. I tried to imagine what that must have been like.

It's really one of my best short stories, a form which (outside of the realm of erotica) I have trouble with. So I hope you'll enjoy this, offered as a free PDF download.

Labels: fiction writing, Japan, short stories

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

New story: 'The Truth Hurts'

A few years ago a contact in the erotic writing ... um, it's not really a community, it's not a club, I'm not sure what to call it... Let me start over. An acquaintance of mine, a young woman who was a sex columnist for some time and also an editor of anthologies of erotic stories, sent me a call for submissions. She was doing an anthology of spanking stories, would I like to send something in? Sure, okay; I thought it was a somewhat limiting topic, but I did write a story that I had fun with, and sent it off to her.

She rejected it, saying the mere suggestion of incest made it verboten. Keep in mind no such behavior occurs in the story itself or offstage between the characters (unlike some of the stories already published in my books). The story I sent had just a whiff of intergenerational sexual energy. That was too much for her.

Time passed, and another acquaintance asked me if I had any stories. I sent her a couple and she bought the spanking story the first editor had rejected. And it's for an online publication, and it just went up. So here you go: "The Truth Hurts." (Caution, story contains explicit descriptions of sex.)

Labels: Bad Behavior, fiction writing, heterosexuality, sex, short stories

Thursday, August 09, 2007

I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

-- Flannery O'Connor,
rejecting a wild interpretation of her story "A Good Man is Hard to Find,"
from a letter dated 28 March 1961,
in "The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor"

This reminded me of an incident from my college days. I was a film criticism major, and being an undergraduate was much vexed by the grad students who tended to throw their weight around.

Two of them particularly annoyed me, Greg B. and Louis B. The latter once offered an interpretation of a classic film, whose director I later had the opportunity to speak to in person. When I described Louis' interpretation to him, he dismissed it and said there was nothing like that at all the scene. I dutifully reported this back to Louis, who scornfully said: "Well, you can talk about intentionality all you want, but..."

Louis is the main reason I wanted never to become a grad student.

technorati: Flannery O'Connor, literary theory

Labels: fiction, film criticism, literary theory, short stories