winning

As a writer I sometimes feel like Ella crooning Born to Lose, but not as soulful sounding: all those frustrating hours at the keyboard, all those anonymous rejections in my inbox. But just this month, like an early birthday present, I got an email from Our Stories saying I’d won. My latest short story, ‘The Hasselblad’ placed first in their annual Richard Bausch story Award, and *winning* rung like Charlie Sheen’s voice in my head.

A week later and already the feeling of elation has burned off, and I am left humbly with all my old hopes and fears about writing. I figure though, it’s probably better not to have tiger’s blood. Better to sing to blues, and off key, and keep at it until you learn to love the deep, jagged wound your own small voice makes.

Nonetheless, it is nice to win, every once in a while.

The story, a early breakout of a version of The novel, starts like this:

THE RAIN FALLS HARD LIKE QUARTERS. Cold drops pelt Jodi’s hair, soak her button-down until it clings to her. Her knapsack, canvas and sadly not waterproof, darkens in a rash pattern under her grasp. She’s put it on front-ways, curled it against her narrow chest so fiercely that her shoulder muscles ache. The bag holds her camera: her Hasselblad, angular and precious like a mechanical heart.

‘If a car stops for me, if my camera isn’t ruined, then I will find Aisha, then we will both be saved.’ Jodi says this like wagering when you can’t afford to lose.

Read the rest at Our Stories site, here

open city, a novel where nothing happens

In a world of bestselling books where **everything** happens, all at once, where just vampires are not nearly enough, I am contrarily smitten with Teju Cole’s acclaimed debut novel, Open City, where nothing really happens.

Cole’s novel is part memory, part history, part ethical meditation, and much walking through public urban spaces. His protagonist is erudite and isolated: a Nigerian-American psychiatrist, recently broken-up and long ago estranged or separated from family. This novel takes place in the narrator’s head, and in the narrow conversations he happens onto, mostly with strangers. A security guard from a Museum. A cab driver. A man who shines shoes.

It is said that people want books for adventure, for escape, but Cole’s book engages me for its understated brilliance, like a shard of glass glinting light. It rings true, this particular view of the lonely and thoughtful way we live. I’m glad to have found this book, where almost nothing happens, except in me, the reader.

Check out Cole’s (understated) site here.
What unexpected books are you reading these days?

end of elementary art exhibit

Photos by Papa Johnson.

The thing about teaching elementary art is that you have the same students for years. In all of their work, you can see, if you look closely, the struggle and joy of their younger selves.

Last month, our fifth graders came out to enjoy the 2nd annual final art show at Billy’s studio. The event promised snacks, a slideshow, and art from each student up on white walls. Family, friends, and teachers peered thoughtfully at the work, paused to read the accompanying artist statements.

As their art teacher, all these years, I wonder what will happen in the future, what these soon-to-be graduates will go on to do. What will they remember, about the challenge and satisfaction of making things? Will they keep at it? Will they continue to try?

Special thanks to Billy Hunt, The Art Box and Creative Framing, and all the families who helped out and attended.

empire state o’ mind

Will’s drawing, peering from our hotel window

Spring Break, we took the train to New York, with William, with my folks, saw but did not ascent the Empire State. Chomped bagels. Traversed Central Park; took taxis and ventured underground. Simple travels for a family like ours.

play time

On floor, with Flor, we build. Finally, William and I have found a use for that colorful stack of Flor samples, left over from my intermittent obsessions with modular, modern carpeting: this is our Dino-car-port.

Snap shots by me.

sunny with a chance of bombs + other drawings

More Monster drawings, from William, with his own original titles.

‘Feel the Ink’(below)

fancy cameras

Billy films Lady Arm Wrestlers and Tahitian Dancers, whilst reviewing his new 5d Mark III. Edu-tainment, at its finish.

book of monsters

Drawing on themes: 'Machines', 'Spooked', and 'Weapons'

Flip-book of monsters

In recent months, William has drawn hundreds of monsters, either focusing his attention or else sketching while watching Saturday morning cartoons. He has saved and sorted them, and I, his mother, have clipped them into themed booklets.

He draws machines, too. Weapons. Technology. Mazes. Sometimes, in his enormous sketchpad, William and I collaborate, our coffee tin of sharpies tilting, the paper sprawling on the bed between us.

writer’s eye

The docent asked, ‘What was the artist trying to show in this painting?’ ‘It looks like an X-ray,’ someone ventured, ‘inside and out.’ ‘Yes,’ the docent said, ‘The Aboriginal artist who painted this kangeroo probably had dissected a real kangeroo at some point in his life.’

I got the idea for my super short story, ‘Dissected’ from an this exchange, as part of a visit to UVA art museum. We were hunkered in front of Johnny Liwangu’s Wind Story, which in the style of dots and dashes, showed a Kangaroo. ‘Dissected’ placed second in the adult category of the museum’s annual Writer’s Eye contest, which combines two things I love: art and writing. My story begins:

Nina hasn’t been the same since she saw the scan: the core of her own body,translucent as a ghost, milky shapes floating in it. The oncologist smelled slightly of tobacco.

‘Here is your liver, your stomach,’ he said. ‘Your lungs, of course. Your heart.’

Nina thought she looked so mysterious on film; she wondered how this man could so readily name her parts.

The doctor leaned toward the image, tapped a bright hazy spot the size of a walnut. ‘And here it is. Here. It might be nothing or…’ His voice trailed off. ‘The biopsy today should tell us.’

The screening room was too cold and the nurse’s shoes squeaked. ‘Keep your phone nearby, honey,’ she said after Nina was dressed…

Read the rest of the story, here.

Charlottesville has a great Aboriginal art treasure thanks to the Kluge Museum. Check it out here.

standing your ground: the tragedy of trayvon martin & goerge zimmerman

I’ve been thinking a lot about teenager Trayvon Martin, who was shot and killed by self appointed nieghborhood watchman, Goerge Zimmerman. It seems the ‘Stand your Ground’ law, evoked in defense of the shooter, more readily applies to the victim: Trayvon himself.

The Florida law — part of a cluster of pro-NRA bills— seems aimed at promoting and protecting gun-wielding vigilantes like Zimmerman. It states:

A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity, and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

But didn’t 17-year old Trayvon have as much right to be walking in the gated community that evening, as Zimmerman did? (He was guest there, returning from buying snacks at a convenience store.)

Wasn’t Trayvon the one who was pursued? Wasn’t Trayvon the one, who at some point, feared for his life when he saw the older, larger Zimmerman following?

After fatally shooting the boy, Zimmerman claimed self-defense, saying Trayvon ran at him. But this is difficult to imagine: We know Zimmerman, in his own words, thought this black teenager walking looked ‘real suspicious.’ ‘They always get away,’ Zimmerman had said moments before to 911. We know it was Zimmerman who followed, even as he was advised not to. It was Zimmerman who had his gun ready, even as police were on the way.

What I imagine, what seems more consistent with the evidence we have heard so far, is that that Trayvon did not attack with deadly force the stranger who was following him. More likely, Trayvon was running away. But, maybe, at some point, Trayvon Martin, turned and stood his ground. Maybe this simple act, in Zimmerman’s perspective, was as audacious, as threatening, as Emmett Till ‘talking to a white lady’ in Mississipi in 1955.

Trayvon is not here on this earth to tell what happened. We know that Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, and police put his body in the morgue. We know his family is devastated by what happened to their teenaged son.

All this, every terrible detail, seems so avoidable, so irresponsible on Zimmerman’s part. But what puts salt into wounds is how local law enforcement responded: that Zimmerman has not been charged with doing anything wrong.

Who am I to say: but I think, tragically, the police, the prosecutors, got it all wrong.
I think it was Trayvon who needed our protection: this young man who perhaps tried to stand his ground.

Florida’s law was the first and 17 states now have a version of this law, many with virtually identical language.REad more about Trayvon Martin here.

Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi on August 24, 1955 when he reportedly flirted with a white cashier at a grocery store. Four days later, two white men kidnapped Till, beat him, and shot him in the head. The men were tried for murder, but an all-white, male jury acquitted them. Till’s murder and open casket funeral galvanized the emerging civil rights movement.