My interest in reading, and writing, short stories has been growing for years. It started with the five Dancing Priest novels, which provided an outlet for sections that were cut, or exploring ideas that were good in themselves but didn’t fit the larger story. In some cases, they were small spinoffs from that larger story. A few have appeared online; most have not.
But I found myself becoming increasingly interested in the short form of writing fiction. I’ve written several for the Cultivating Project. Recently, I began participating in a short story writing project, a simple, self-reporting tally every week of stories and word count (more on that next week).
Poets, and writers in general, write from their own lives, their own experiences. How we are shaped as individuals is reflected, consciously or unconsciously, in what we write. A Godless Ascends, the 2024 collection by Trish Hopkinson, kept punching that home in my head as I read.
Shew rites about her family, her childhood, and herself. She writes about her mother and her father. She says this about her father: “Truth is, / my dad’s book closed before he learned / to read, so he bult a burning house instead / & when a thief offered him gold, he didn’t fight or turn to run / but swallowed it whole, carried it like lead in his throat.” That may at first sound cruel or uncharitable, but it is precise, a daughter weighing what she finally understands.
My parents were both profoundly affected by the Great Depression. My father, graduating from high school, saw his hopes for college and a medical career disappear. My mother, whose family had been relatively well-to-do, was a child, her family reduced to a father hunting for food, her mother scrubbing floors in movie theaters, and days when there was nothing to eat in the house. You don’t “get over” an experience like that; you can come to terms with it, deal with it, and overcome it, but it leaves a deep impression. At the Coolidge Review, Alexander Field writes that the Great Depression did have a hidden economic miracle that almost no one realized at the time.
Most of us watched or read about the testimony of Dr. Anthony Facui before a Senate committee on Wednesday. Or the non-testimony. My own Missouri senator asked if Dr. Fauci could tell them the color of his tie or of the rug in the room. Both questions were met with Fauci pleading the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. The fact is, he was caught. Even with the pardon he received from former President Joe Biden, answering any question truthfully about the COVID-19 issue would be setting off multiple grenades, including for his own reputation. The general news media, almost on cue, circled the wagons; they’re as culpable as Dr. Fauci is, and the insistence that he “did the right thing” is almost beyond belief. Reporters who dared to question the received wisdom paid the price. By the way, Racket News has unlocked all its articles on Dr. Fauci; it’s providing the coverage that our mainstream media should be.
The mayor of New York City released the names of all the properties the city was defining as “second homes” which would result in an additional annual property tax. Except the list was never quality-checked or, apparently, reality-checked. It turns out that a lot of the listings are not what the city thought they were, as a reporter for The Free Press discovered when his 81-year-old mother was socked with an additional $55,000 assessment on her house. It’s not a second home. She owns no second home. But someone in the city decided her property qualified. But never fear; there’s an appeal process – dense, opaque, and all online, almost especially designed to mystify elderly people. She navigated it, or actually, her son did it for her (article unlocked).
