Michael J. Sahno’s Whizzers is #224 in the never-ending series called INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION

 *The images in this specific piece are granted copyright:  Public Domain, GNU Free Documentation Licenses, Fair Use Under The United States Copyright Law.

The other images are granted copyright permission by the copyright holder, which is identified beneath each photo. 

**Some of the links will have to be copied and then posted in your search engine in order to pull up properly

***The CRC Blog welcomes submissions from published and unpublished fiction genre (including screenwriters and playwrights) for INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION.  Contact CRC Blog via email at caccoop@aol.com or personal Facebook messaging at https://www.facebook.com/car.cooper.7 

****Michael J. Sahno’s Whizzers is #224 in the never-ending series called INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific excerpt from a fiction genre and how that fiction writer wrote that specific excerpt.  

What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? Oddly, I began this novel sometime around 2000, but then set it aside. I had the first few chapters of Whizzers and Miles of Files going around the same time, and eventually put all my effort into finishing Miles of Files. It wasn’t until I’d finished and published my first three novels—Brothers’ Hand, Jana, and Miles of Files—that I committed to completing Whizzers. So even though the first few chapters date all the way back to 2000, the majority of the book was written between 2018 and 2019.

Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work?  And please describe in detail.  And can you please include a photo?  Since I began running Sahno Publishing full-time in 2016, I’ve worked entirely from my home office on an iMac. With the exception of those first few chapters mentioned above, written in another location, all or Whizzers came to being here. Not much to describe, either. It’s a pretty bare-bones setup facing away from the window in order to avoid distractions! 

What were your writing habits while writing this work—did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I listen to instrumental music almost all the time when writing fiction—typically jazz, ambient, or electronic. If it’s morning, I might be drinking coffee; afternoon, anything from water to Thai tea. Although I composed my first couple novels by hand before transferring them to print, I wrote both Miles of Files and Whizzers entirely on iMac.  

My wheelhouse for composition runs from afternoon through mid-evening, but I do my best editing in the morning and have been known to write the occasional bit of a scene right before bedtime.

Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference.  This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. This scene runs from pp. 163-68 of Whizzers. I feel like it should include a trigger warning: bullying, homophobic slurs, profanity, etc. It’s the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever written, but it was even more heartbreaking when I experienced the abuse in the scene.

I can’t see any point in hanging around here longer than necessary, so I just go for the door right away. It opens onto a scene I never expected. Instead of a generic parking lot for a standard issue hotel, outside the door is a church. The room I’m leaving is within a school, as if it were a classroom. It makes no sense, but then, not much seems to make sense anymore. I haven’t even shaken off the experience in the hospital, and now this.

Even more shocking, I’m instantly aware it’s winter here and I’m dressed in a heavy coat, pants, gloves, and hat. I wasn’t wearing them a moment ago—was I? I don’t think so. The jarring effect of the view of the church and the school behind me almost makes me dizzy. I feel sick. I try to open the door again, retreat into the room, but it’s locked.

I know the school, of course. I know the church. It’s St. Joseph’s, Bristol, Connecticut. I don’t even have to guess the timeframe or reason: it’s late 1977 or early 1978. This was my junior high. That church, St. Joseph’s, has a small cemetery attached to it. I can see a few headstones from here. Another six or seven years from this time and my grandmother and grandfather will be buried here.

My breath comes in short bursts of steam as the wave of sadness and rage comes over me. I already know exactly why I’m here, although there’s not a soul around. I’m going to see, and maybe try to somehow comfort, the thirteen-year-old version of myself.

Early adolescence can be the hardest, most turbulent time in life, and mine was no exception. It was incredibly painful because I made a simple error in judgment: after I discovered masturbation, I told another kid about it.

He took my confiding in him as some kind of sexual threat. He decided I must be gay to make such a confession. And when he told all the other boys in the class, they believed him.

This is the time I’m revisiting now. I’m sure of it. Within the space of a few days, I go from a friendly, popular kid to an absolute pariah. Every boy in that class knows me as the masturbator—none of them do it, of course—and they’re convinced I’m gay as well.

Denying it means it must be true. Denying it only makes things worse. I’m attacked in class, attacked on the blacktop basketball court.

I have to fight for my life.

When another of the building’s metal doors flies open and boys pour out onto the cold blacktop in their white shirts and green pants and ties, I stand watching in silence. I’m not usually invisible in these visits to the past, but today I can’t help thinking I must be. What purpose could it serve otherwise? I doubt I’m going to be the adult breaking up children fighting.

Sure enough, this is it—the day I’m attacked on the playground. Ironic word in this situation. There’s no play here, and the ground is covered by this hard, icy blacktop beneath our feet. The boys spill out into a whirling dervish of malice. The shape of this mob is like that of an octopus, swarming and falling in on itself. I hear the words, words misapplied to me, and my outrage rises far beyond just for myself. It’s for all the abused, all the broken, all the damned.

“Fucking faggot.”

“You’re a fucking pussy, man.”

And then I see myself, the teenaged me, in the middle of that savage group of thirteen. The dreadful bowl haircut so popular to the time, and a look in my eyes that I can’t describe as anything other than devastated.

“Leave me alone,” I hear Michael say. “You guys are full of shit.”

Not a single adult around, not even a nun. They have turned this little mob loose outside without a thought of supervision. This must be their only respite from them, a fifteen-minute recess where the little monsters can do as they like. The girls in our class are nowhere to be seen, and I suppose that meant they had a separate recess from us boys. I don’t recall anything about it. So much my mind has blocked, mercifully.

The mob swirls around, and at length I see a boy hit me. My own adult body winces in sympathy pain. It was horrific enough to be that victim, surrounded by a group, in the full knowledge there wasn’t a single friend among them. Yet watching it happen is somehow worse. The outrage in my heart makes the ringing in my ears jump from an eight to a ten.

Michael hits back, but without success. The kid is rangy, taller, longer arms. He’s outmatched, like a boxer with a shorter reach. The mob is almost irrelevant, I can see, though I know it didn’t feel that way.

I step forward, meaning to intervene if I can somehow. And in that moment, I feel a small hand up against my leg.

It’s David, appearing to me for the first time in this brutal tableau, though I have no idea how long he’s been here. He holds up the hand and shakes his head no. I see him mouth the words, It’s okay.

It’s not okay. But I understand now—I can’t move. I’m frozen here, powerless to intervene. I can’t change the course of history one iota. For once, I can’t even talk to any of them.

My heart pounds as I look back to the awful scene before me. Like so many teenage fights, the mob is egging it on, but no one cheers for Michael. The kid hits him again, and then they tussle, an ugly flurry of hooded jackets and flying arms. I know what’s coming, but when it happens, it’s still a shock: the bully pulls Michael’s hood, my hood, over my face. Blows rain down, blows unseen.

But now I see them as they happen. And I see what I couldn’t have seen at the time: the ugly mob of jeering boys cheers the bully on as he fights dirtier. Fists pumping into the air.

“Yeah, get him. Fuck him up.”

I watch the small body sag as little Michael surrenders. He falls, every last bit of fight bullied, beaten, out of him.

The crowd scatters. Back to normal. Who cares? Forget that kid.

At last, David’s hand drops. I look at him and notice that he’s translucent again.

And so am I.

David nods, and I understand somehow what I have to do. It’s the only thing I can do.

I walk to the boy, the small, crumpled figure. His face is red—distorted with rage, shame, silent tears. I hold my translucent hand up and wipe the tears from his eyes. I wrap my arms around him in a hug that he can neither feel nor return.

Then I, too, begin to cry.

Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write?  And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? This scene recreates an incident from seventh grade, when I was not only bullied, but surrounded by all my male classmates, egging on the boy who started the fight. Rarely had I ever felt so alone and despairing. It was, quite literally, me against all of them.

By the time I finished Whizzers, I’d already completed three novels and a short story collection, but never with an autobiographical scene as potent as this. When I finished the first draft of the scene, I broke down and cried. And when I first edited the book from start to finish, this scene made me cry again. For context, I don’t typically cry more than once or twice every few years.

Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything like that. My editor made a few punctuation suggestions, but nothing that would really be interesting to see.

Anything you would like to add? I appreciate the opportunity to share this, and I'm always happy to answer additional questions from readers if I can.

Before he became a publisher or even a writer, Mike Sahno was a speaker. "I started talking at a very young age, and would engage strangers in conversation from my perch in the shopping cart," he says with a chuckle. "They'd look at my mother and say, How old is he?"

Sahno began reading before he'd even been taught his ABCs, much to the surprise of his family.

"My parents were always great about reading to me, and I guess I decoded the language from looking at the words," he explains. "This was in an era when they didn't teach you to read until first grade – it was See Spot run, 'Dick and Jane,' all that stuff.

"One night my grandmother was reading the newspaper, and I started reading an article about the Cincinnati Reds out loud to her. She thought I was making it up until she looked down and saw I was reading it word for word. That got everyone's attention."

Sahno also began writing stories at an early age. In high school and college, he was Editor-in-Chief of the campus literary magazine. The quality of his work led to multiple awards and honors. After earning his Bachelor’s from Lynchburg College, he went on to complete his Master’s in English from Binghamton University at the age of 24.

Sahno served in management positions for several companies, including Director at a market research firm, and Assistant Vice President at a Tampa mortgage company. He also taught composition at the college level.

He became a full-time professional writer in 2001 and, in the following years, wrote more than 1,000 marketing articles on a wide range of topics. His delivery of quality copy put him in high demand across the southeastern United States, and several of his articles won Addy Awards in 2008 and 2010.

Since founding Sahno Publishing in 2015, he has gone on to achieve national and international recognition, gaining over 25,000 followers on Twitter and publishing and selling three novels both in the U.S. and abroad. Sahno has ghostwritten books for entrepreneurs in the U.S., and continues to electrify audiences with his story and his natural gift for entertaining while informing. He is available for professional speaking engagements upon request.

https://msahno.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sahno/

https://twitter.com/MikeSahno 

Paypal: info@msahno.com

Venmo: @Michael-Sahno

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07SNGWB9V

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Whizzers-Paperback-9781944173104/176408592

https://books.apple.com/us/book/x/id1467299561

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1131955183

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/whizzers-1

All of the Inside the Emotion of Fiction LIVE LINKS can be found at the VERY END of the below feature: 

http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/03/stephenson-holts-arranged-marriage-is.html 

Rye Aker’s “A Penance of Sundays” is #272 in the never-ending series called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM

 *The images in this specific piece are granted copyright:  Public Domain, GNU Free Documentation Licenses, Fair Use Under The United States Copyright Law.

The other images are granted copyright permission by the copyright holder, which is identified beneath each photo. 

**Some of the links will have to be copied and then posted in your search engine in order to pull up properly

*** The CRC Blog welcomes submissions from published and unpublished poets for BACKSTORY OF THE POEM series.  Contact CRC Blog via email at caccoop@aol.com or personal Facebook messaging at https://www.facebook.com/car.cooper.7

***Rye Aker’s “A Penance of Sundays” is #272 in the never-ending series called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific poem and how the poet wrote that specific poem.  All BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links are at the end of this piece. 

  

Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? I arrived in the beautiful city of Galway, Ireland in late 2019 to cover in poetry the European Capital of Culture programme for my publisher. My plan was to spend a year in marvel at the wonderful programme of events the Galway 2020 people had scheduled.  I made some great friends from a time when I was in Ireland in 2014, so they brought me to sport and culture and eating out and many nights drinking and singing. They told me I should go to Catholic Novena over nine days. There were three masses every day, but they did not say I only had to go to one each day, so in nine days I went to 27 masses. This made my friends laugh a lot.  But I got to meet many people who were elderly and I had tea and buttery scones in a cafe near the river after every Mass. The connection between this and my chosen poem A Penance of Sundays was the great faith they had and the concept of if you had any misfortune in life, you ‘offer it up’ as penance. There I got the name for it because Lockdown saw Ireland’s streets reduced to the silence there used to be 40 years earlier when nothing happened. It also gave me a sense of what these people would be missing during lockdown which helped me to write other poems.

In Ireland, people look back to the summer Sundays of childhood because they evoke memories of sunny days and Gaelic football matches with a commentator called Micheal O Hehir (Left) who had an inimitable high pitched voice. This voice and the mention of it, raises the memories for the Irish people. So too, did the concept of going to Mass and having a traditional dinner of potatoes and meat and peas and dessert of jelly.  The old Irish Sundays were timeless and represented a simpler time. The possibility of lockdown represented a throwback to those simpler times and I wanted my poem to mirror the reality of that. I think it succeeded.

Where were you when you started to actually write the poem?  And please describe the place in great detail. I was in my rented cottage in Galway. It is a very cosy place where the big fireplace dominates the room, throwing orange light around the room. I had just been talking on Skype to my friend Seamus and his wife Maureen and we were trying to encourage each other about the possibility to maintaining our sanity through the next ten weeks of lockdown, same day after same day. I think they were feeling sorry for me because I would be on my own with no event to go to. But I knew that I would be fine and that isolation would be good for me. Three months earlier, I put my mobile phone away and I knew that this would like a Robinson Crusoe time for me. When the solitude would spark inspiration in my mind. The Irish people have wonderful language, as in the the wonderful English words that give great meaning to their sayings. Like when they say “I will yeah,” that means “I won’t.” Or “I will in me hole,” means we won’t.

In the year since I have been here, I have found a richness in the words that I am keen to explore. I live a simple life. I eschew public readings and my telephone. I offer my poems to charity so that the karma of goodness will come back to me. And it has. I have been treated with wonderful kindness. I publish my books and I live on what they bring me. So I have an incentive to write and to sell and if they don’t I sense a failure as a failure of the words. So far, I have lived frugally and happily. Many people have thought that I was part of the European Capital of Culture programme, and not that I was an independent poet who came to record the momentous year. Alas, many of the events did not happen so I had to find myself a different purpose for being here in Galway.  I have written poems for national organisations and books while I have been here. So my work is resonating, I think. (Above Left: Catholic Novena.)

What month and year did you start writing this poem? I started the poem on March 29 and wrote it over one night. I recall going to sleep happy with it and in the morning I took to it again and then a few hours later, I posted it on my twitter account and went for a walk. When I came back I was amazed with the response. I had more than 10,000 views by the end of that day. I do that with all of my poems. I make my notes and my research and then I start the writing of it. My friends, let me tell you, get rid of your phones and the words will flow. I love to interact with my readers online, but I discipline myself to shut it off as soon as my purpose of posting my poem is complete. (Right: Dublin at Lockdown)

How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) I had just the one draft. Any changes in the morning were just stylistic. I do not do many drafts. I like my poems to be written with a sense of just baked, you see. I have compiled a collection of more than 400 Irish sayings and expressions. I think that some day I might write about these in a book because they are funny. But I want to use as many of them in my work. I often ask my readers what a word means. I write my poems straight into my laptop. I have written more than 120 poems since I came to Galway one year ago, and I intend for most of these to be posted and published before I leave. If I ever leave. (Left: Place where Rye Aker wrote "A Penance of Sundays" Credit and Copyright by Rye Aker)

What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I knew that my first few poems needed to make a subliminal connection with the Irish people so I used images of times past that would resonate with the readers. 

I wanted to create a sense of time, slow time, not fast time like we have now. Slow time where it drags and stays in your memory. I have such memories from a small village in Holland. Perhaps they were not innocent times but when you are looking at life through the rear-view mirrors, it seems magic and slowed-down, almost static. This slowed-down static feel is what I wanted to achieve in my poem A Penance of Sundays.  As if the penance of months of lockdown was a sort of punishment or discipline that we would have to go through before life turns normal again. I had had many readers who say that this poem resonated with them because of that. (Right: Opening film scene of THE RIORDANS)

Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? I made questions to my Irish friends about what Sundays were like when they were in their childhood. It was interesting to see what rich memories they had. There was one television channel in Ireland in the 1970s and everybody watched the programmes. There was one soap opera The Riordans (above left) where the theme music at the end used to send chills down the spines of the children who would not have their homework done for school. The lines which moved me were the “Old Irish Sundays had a lot of nothing, so we sat around and devoured it.” The reaction to the poem was very moving too, more so for native Irish people who lived through those long hot summer childhoods and who saw the same nothing ness in those warm sunny days of early lockdown in the summer of 2020. (Left: Gabriel Byrne who appeared in THE RIORDANS)

Has this poem been published before?  And if so where? The poem has been published in my 2020 collection Fifty Akers —A Penance of Sundays, Galway Collection Vol 1, which contained 50 poems from my first year in Galway, Ireland. The book went on sale in August 2020 and sold well. The second collection 100 Akers — The Man With The Clock Galway Collection Vol 2 is due to be published in March 2021. I had intended to be leaving Ireland in this time because the Galway 2020 year was to be complete, but I have been so happy here that I am to stay until this changes, which I hope will be a long time away.

A Penance of Sundays

(Reflection on a Galway lockdown)

Think of it like a hundred Sundays,

Seamus says to me down the skype.

Not modern Sundays, but old Sundays.

Old Irish Sundays, me little 

non-rhyming Dutchman friend.

Old Sundays where nothing moved

‘cept the marrowfat peas on the Sunday roast

and the volume dial to bring that summer Sunday

sound of gladiators in some field;

Batin’ into each other 

feeding O Hehir’s excited prose

Modern Sundays have shopping centres 

and Sky Sports and brunch 

where luvvies clutch the pearls

while devouring newspaper supplements

covered in crumbs of toasted brioche.

Old Irish Sundays had a lot of nothing 

So we sat around and devoured it.

Car-less, we walked, slowly, like everyone

did in those days, not fast like now.

We contemplated 

inhaling the sweet incense 

of evening benediction, hugging pews

hours after our morning sweat had dried.

Days of chops and jelly and custard

and Spot The Ball and Pub Spy 

to the air of a Glenroe tune that sent chills

down the spine of all who hadn’t

Read their scothscealta or Frank O’Connor.

This is like those Sundays. 

Every day an old Irish Sunday.

An endurance test of our forbearance. 

A penance to be endured.

A medical act of contrition from this side 

of the mesh. 

’Tis like the priest said, ye’ll do

A hundred Irish Sundays 

and then you’ll be cleansed.

All of the Backstory of the Poem LIVE LINKS can be found at the VERY END of the below feature: 

http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/02/will-justice-drakes-intercession-is-251.html 

David Blair’s “For Dion in Belmont” is #271 in the never-ending series called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM

 *The images in this specific piece are granted copyright:  Public Domain, GNU Free Documentation Licenses, Fair Use Under The United States Copyright Law.

The other images are granted copyright permission by the copyright holder, which is identified beneath each photo. 

**Some of the links will have to be copied and then posted in your search engine in order to pull up properly

*** The CRC Blog welcomes submissions from published and unpublished poets for BACKSTORY OF THE POEM series.  Contact CRC Blog via email at caccoop@aol.com or personal Facebook messaging at https://www.facebook.com/car.cooper.7

***David Blair’s “For Dion in Belmont” is #271 in the never-ending series called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific poem and how the poet wrote that specific poem.  All BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links are at the end of this piece. (Below Left: David Blair in March of 2021.  Copyright by David Blair) 

Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? I wrote the first draft of this poem in my notebook in the spring of 2017. It was May, and the semester was finally over, so I could spend a lot of time just being outside and looking at stuff. A few mornings, I sat in this old-fashioned bakery and drank coffee after dropping my daughter after school, and I was able to really clock the decor, which reminded me of other old bakeries I remembered. (Above Right:  David Blair (middle) with friends Jim and Danielle. Copyright by David Blair)

      

I was cheering myself up with was the sound of how we rag on our friends and our friends rag on us, and somehow I remembered two things. One was a picture of Dion from Dion and the Belmonts come back to Arthur Avenue for a photo shoot to publicize a new album in say 1990 or so, and he had this big five piece newsboy hat on in front of Full Moon Pizza, and I realized I was returning to a draft of a poem about girls working in bakeries with crazy long nails that I had tried to write years before about old-fashioned bakeries in the Bronx. I also remembered how I once got big laughs on the street wearing some unfortunate shoes.

        

Then I threw the poem about for two years. I stopped looking at it until I was putting together the final manuscript of my book Barbarian Seasons in the summer of 2019. (Right:  David Blair in Summer of 2019.  Copyright by David Blair.)  

Most of the work I did on that manuscript in the end was on the book's closing sequence, and on tightening up the free-verse prosody techniques in different poems—things I could point out and explain working on both individual lines and individual groups of lines, but which I don't necessarily want the reader to think about as much as to feel as palpable, if unsettling. 

The last part of the last sequence uses "sprung rhythm" in a way that calls attention to itself, so I made the middle of the poem, which I saw as a bridge to the end of the book, work the same way just about.

Where were you when you started to actually write the poem?  And please describe the place in great detail. I was in Somerville when I began to write the poem. The thing I like about Somerville (Below Right: Davis Square in Somerville)  is that it is a good place to walk, and it has a lot of old pockets of strange buildings and a feeling that it is layered by time. It's like walking in my head sometimes. 

The bakery reminding me of old bakeries in the Bronx and Pittsburgh is a good example of this.  In a way, I think poems are written in parts all over as you see various things. So I saw those egrets on the edge of Pelham Bay toxic dump site from a Bx12 bus heading to City Island, I don't know, thirty years ago, remembered a thousand times, different windows. And I noticed the bronze egg with peppermint spring in May of 2017. Poems are written where they are. 

How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) Somewhere in a stack of 68 or so chemistry notebooks I have my original handwritten draft of the poem. The first version was 229 words, the second  149 words, and the published version 126 words. The final version is 15 lines long, and in some respects, it has sonnet-like qualities. It's not a sonnet, but it alludes to the sonnet. (Left: Rough Draft 001 of "For Dion in Belmont" by David Blair.  Credit and Copyright by David Blair)

For instance, there are three quatrains, only the poem ends with a quatrain. The first two stanzas function as an octet, and the last two stanzas are a single sentence, so they function as single unit, almost like a sestet, only seven lines. I thought about making it into a sonnet, but it felt right to resist the impulse, to let the poem go out of time within time, all its allusions, sitcoms and songs and forms, its overheard valences, like passing under the clock built into theatrical doorway to the ovens. 

One of the best ways of using form is resist it particularly if you are using form as a way of expressing and finding emotion. Expressive formal technique is somewhat different than replicating pattern—which is how some people sensibly regard any kind of form—but actually form can mean shifting patterns, mutability, breaking, reassembling, departing, arriving, or whatever, according to the emotional content or message of a piece as we make or discover this as we go along. I like to make small changes to a number of poems every day, and over the months and years, the poems change in an unforced way.  

What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? Primarily, I think of poems as modes of experience and processes rather than message machines, but I want readers to have a sense of life's amazing strangeness and that readers should have a sense of increased receptiveness to people, animals, plants, foods, feelings, places and things, and I want readers to have a sense that these experiences can be known personally and shared. (Above Right: The Rhyme Scheme of a Shakespearean Sonnet.)

Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? I really was happy when I realized that the there was a shift in the sonic qualities in the second stanza and I had a groove on, like a good break going, and the rest of the poem would have a musical aspect. Generally, what I feel when I am writing is happiness. Even if I am writing about something terrible, there is a baseline of happiness to be using language and making images and all that, sometimes resisting the glooms that might be requiring some cathartic happiness or physicality.  

Has this poem been published before?  And if so where? A poem from Barbarian Seasons by David Blair, MadHat Books, 2020

For Dion in Belmont

 

The Napoleons got theatrical. 

The bakery surrounded me with cakes

years after when I got along

with an invisible transistor

and getting called Hey-Boom-Boom-Washington, nice hat, ah, walk on.

Dull bronze eggs of peppermint-striped string dispensers hung on chains

level with a modish clock built into the paneling above an egress. 

I saw snowy egrets by the dump on the edge of Pelham Bay Park. The hunt.  

And in a dark night the bread-only bakery was open and windowless,

its doorframe full of bare bulbs, no fluorescence, and the crust 

would rivulet into floury cracks,

the gush that swells and dissolves

with traces of peppery dust, fresh. 

In the morning, the girls had nail extensions

with glue-on rhinestones on them like spaceships.

David Blair lives and works around Boston. Thomas Lux chose his first book of poetry, Ascension Days, for the Del Sol Poetry Prize in 2007. His second book, Friends with Dogs, was a Must-Read Selection for the Massachusetts Book Awards, and his third book, Arsonville, was published as part of the Green Rose Prize Series by New Issues Poetry & Prose. A graduate of Fordham University and the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Blair has taught in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire, and in the online master's degree program in creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University. MadHat Press published his new collection of poetry, Barbarian Seasons, in 2020. www.davidblairpoetry.com (Above Left: David Blair in March of 2021. Copyright by David Blair)

All of the Backstory of the Poem LIVE LINKS can be found at the VERY END of the below feature: 

http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/02/will-justice-drakes-intercession-is-251.html 

Fiona Glass’s DECEMBER ROSES is #223 in the never-ending series called INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION

 *The images in this specific piece are granted copyright:  Public Domain, GNU Free Documentation Licenses, Fair Use Under The United States Copyright Law.

The other images are granted copyright permission by the copyright holder, which is identified beneath each photo. 

**Some of the links will have to be copied and then posted in your search engine in order to pull up properly

***The CRC Blog welcomes submissions from published and unpublished fiction genre (including screenwriters and playwrights) for INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION.  Contact CRC Blog via email at caccoop@aol.com or personal Facebook messaging at https://www.facebook.com/car.cooper.7 

****Fiona Glass’s DECEMBER ROSES  is #223 in the never-ending series called INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific excerpt from a fiction genre and how that fiction writer wrote that specific excerpt.  

Name of fiction work? And were there other names you considered that you would like to share with us? My latest book is called December Roses. It’s a gay ghostly romance set in a mysterious English garden and I wanted a title that reflected both the gardening aspect, and also a sense of something fading and/or not quite in its right time. The title is taken from a famous quote by J M Barrie (Right): "Someone once said that God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December." It seemed to fit the book absolutely perfectly. This is a rewrite of an earlier version which was called ‛Roses in December’, but I changed the book fairly substantially so I wanted a slightly different title to set it apart from that.

What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? I started writing the book back in the late 1990s as a short story called ‛Garden of Remembrance’. It was eventually included in a collection of short gay romance I had published by Torquere Press in 2005. Soon after that I realised that the material would make a fantastic full-length novel so I set to work, wrote it up into a 73,000 word book and had that published (also by Torquere Press) in 2006. 

https://www.pinterest.com/torquerepress/_saved/ 

A chance remark by a Twitter friend made me take another look at it last year and I felt that it had too many sub-plots which shifted focus away from the main storyline, so I set about rewriting it to remove some of those, and also to give the love interest, Richie, more of a back-story. That took me about four months and I self-published the result in (appropriately!) December 2020. So from start to finish the process took over 20 years, but I was only working on the book for a fraction of that time.

Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work?  And please describe in detail.  And can you please include a photo? I do all my writing on a computer thanks to a permanent wrist injury which makes handwriting for long periods uncomfortable. The computer has changed and upgraded over the years, and we’ve moved house at least twice, so the physical set-up has changed too. However, I like to have a permanent desk (in a separate room if possible) with a proper office chair and a wrist support. Currently my "office" is a tiny room (about 7 ft by 4 ft) which was the nursery when the previous owners had the house. There’s just enough space for the desk, chair, a couple of bookshelves, and me, but it gives me an enclosed space I can retreat to when I want to write. It also has a window looking out across a neighbour’s cottage garden, which gives me inspiration. I still use WordPerfect for all of my writing, which I do directly to screen. Once I have a completed, edited and formatted book, I convert to Word, and then transport the Word document straight into Kindle KDP.

What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I write whenever I get inspiration, since I’m lucky enough not to have a full-time day job (other than looking after the house and my hard-working husband!). Quite often I find it easiest to write in the mornings, up to about 11.30 when my brain decides it needs feeding again and switches off. If the writing is going well, I can often go back to it in the later afternoon and sometimes I even have a short burst of creativity in the evenings, although if I write after about 9 pm it rarely makes sense and I have to delete most of it and start again. I’ll have a cuppa while I’m writing but I can’t cope with listening to music because it drowns out the character voices in my head. If I can’t hear my characters, they don’t feel real and I can’t write the dialogue that I hang the rest of my writing around.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/27/majority-of-authors-hear-their-characters-speak-finds-study 

Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference.  This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. I kind of wanted to include the book’s ending because for me that’s the most emotional part, and leaves me with a few sniffles every time I re-read it, even now! However, that would be giving far too much away, so here’s a piece from earlier in the book. I can’t quote meaningful page numbers because I have to take them out in order for the Kindle formatting to work, but it’s from the end of Part Three: Spring 1995, which is just over half way through the book:

        A wet branch slapped him across the face and brought him back to his surroundings. As so often when he was out here he hadn’t been paying attention to where he was going, and now  he was looking at something he recognised—the high stone cliffs of the ‘Great Wall of China’. Which meant he couldn’t be far from the lake, and the little bridge, and the pagoda with its line of bells. And where Richie’s garden was, Richie might not be far away.

He quickened his pace, eager to find the pagoda and ring the love bell and see if Richie replied. The path zig-zagged down between the rocks, a little muddy but otherwise just as he remembered it, but when he got to the bottom he paused for a moment, confused. Last time there’d been a view across the lake. Now the view was obscured by a hostile jungle of bamboo and giant rhubarb, and the ground at his feet was a mess of brambles and mud. Admittedly it had been dark before, but the moon had cast a rippled silvery path across the lake to the arch of the little bridge. Perhaps he just hadn’t gone far enough along the path? But going further only produced more mud and undergrowth, until he turned a final corner and the bamboo parted at last. Nat took one look at the scene it revealed and stopped. Was this even the same place? So much had changed. The lie of the land was the same, but the lake had shrunk to a muddy, reed-choked pond; the Chinese bridge was a line of rotting piles jutting from the ooze; and the pagoda was a burned-out shell, roofless and charred, with weeds rioting through the gaping holes where its windows had been.

Fire. Flames crackling, devouring everything in their path. Dust and smoke, acrid in the nostrils, choking back the supply of air. Darkness, shot through with orange and red, flickering lights from hell. The screams, the whimpers, the choking sobs, as people around him died. Richie, trapped and burning, his face twisting with agony... No, none of that was real. Nat pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, willing the visions away. God knew where that last thought had come from; he hadn’t even met Richie back then and Sean, thank God, had been nowhere near the fire. But this—this was here and now, this was on his doorstep, or in the hospital’s back yard. 

His first coherent thought, once he was capable of thinking again, was why didn’t anyone tell me about the fire? This wasn’t just some out-of-hand barbecue; this was a serious blaze. There would have been fire engines, or the ‛green goddesses’ the army used themselves. There would have been patients evacuated and staff running about and all the gossip afterwards. But there’d been none of that. Nobody had said a word. Nobody, except perhaps... was this the danger Elsie kept banging on about? If so, he might owe her an apology. But how had she known this would happen, all those weeks ago?

He took a cautious step towards the ruins, half expecting them to flicker and fade, revealing the structures he remembered in their place. They stayed stubbornly real, and the nearer he got, the less anything made sense. There were brambles rioting through the open gaps where the pagoda’s gothic windows had been, and a young sycamore straggled out through the roof. It took years for plants that big to take hold, for timbers to crumble and a roof to collapse in on itself. So, had it all been a dream, the pretty Chinese garden and the reflections on the water and the tinkling sound of the bells? Wishful thinking, a sanctuary when he’d needed one? His snort of laughter echoed in the still air, but inside he wasn’t laughing at all. This was proof his illness was worse than he—or any doctors—had thought. The wonders of China had never existed outside his head.

He sank down on the cracked stone base of the pagoda and put his head in his hands. An eternity of deep breathing later the dizziness faded and he was back in the garden in spring, with the sun shining through the fretwork of broken timbers at his back and a couple of coots pacing solemnly towards the pond. In their black-and-white livery they looked like ushers at a funeral, and he shivered and rubbed the goose bumps on his arms. For God’s sake get a grip on yourself. Things were scary enough without him adding to the effect.

The chill of damp stone percolated through his pants and he was already shivering; stay out here much longer and he’d freeze to death. He hauled himself to his feet, the toe of his boot catching against something hard in the mud. Bending, he realised it was one of the pagoda bells, half buried in the ground. He must have seen this before, perhaps when he’d come with Richie that first time, and his subconscious mind had stored it and reproduced it in full glorious technicolour without him ever realising. With one finger he levered it out of its muddy grave. It was grubby and etched with verdigris, and there was no way of telling whether it was the love-bell or not, but it still tinkled sweetly when he shook it. He clutched it tight in his hand for a moment before tucking it away in a pocket; he’d give it a wash and cadge some polish from Elsie, and hand it back to Richie the next time they met.

He took the long way back to the house, to see whether anything else looked familiar now he was seeing it with new eyes. A path at the back of the pavilion led round in an arc to the stand of pine trees. He’d been here before with Fred, looking for his stick, but not really recognised it. Now he could see it was the Scottish glen, stream blocked somewhere and the grassy banks choked in shrubs. If he followed this path further it should bring him to the flight of steps where he’d had his fall, and up them to the mysterious, elusive terrace where all his adventures had first begun.

He couldn’t find the steps at first, and passed them twice before he realised where they were. The sunken path had been raised and levelled and now only the top few treads showed above the ground, so mossy they blended with the soil. At the top, sure enough, was the terrace, or what was left of it. Bushes had run wild, box hedges bolted, and the central pool had cracked and dried, its fountain knocked askew. But a few straggling roses still thrust their blooms towards the light, and with the sun casting dappled shadows like this it was a pleasant place to sit. He could still come out here sometimes, and smoke a forbidden cigarette.

Thinking of smoking reminded him of Richie. Did his lover know about the fire? If so, was he upset? He’d been so fond of the pagoda, and the rest of the garden, and Nat had the impression he spent a lot of time out there. How would he break the news, if Richie didn’t already know? The answer hit him like a fist to the chest. There might be nothing to tell; or if not nothing, then nobody to tell it to. Because if he’d imagined the glorious garden of yesteryear, then maybe he’d dreamed up Richie Douglas too.

Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write?  And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? If I’m honest the whole book was a bit of a roller-coaster for me; I really feel for the main character Nat who’s been on quite a journey. He’s in an army rehab unit recovering from injuries he receives in a Belfast bombing and has discovered the garden, and its elusive inhabitant Richie, and fallen in love with them both. I like to put my characters up trees and then throw rocks at them, so it’s at this point that everything he thinks he knows about Richie and the garden starts to come crashing down. That was hard to write about because I care about him, and having to describe him being hurt like that was almost as bad as having to hurt someone in real life. However, it’s not all gloom, because the book does have a ‛happy for now’ ending and it was lovely to be able to bring Nat through his problems to a happier place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Friday_(1972) 

  

Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt? I’ve just read the excerpt back and realised that unlike much of the rest of the book, this has survived more or less intact from the earlier version. It seemed to work really well, describing both Nat’s discovery and the impact it has on him, so I didn’t feel I needed to add anything or take anything away. So I’m afraid I don’t have any deletions to share with you! 

Biography of Fiona Glass: 

        “I've always been passionate about history. I studied Ancient and Medieval History and Archaeology at Liverpool University, and some of my favourite authors include Dorothy Dunnett, Mary Renault, Mary Stewart, and Daphne du Maurier, all of whom write about history in one form or another. I particularly love anything that weaves different time periods together (such as du Maurier's The House on the Strand or Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden) or introduces an element of the supernatural (Stewart's Thornyhold). My own writing reflects this, often focussing on how the past sends echoes into the present.

        Several of my books explore the world of ghosts and/or the slippage of time. In December Roses a soldier wounded in Northern Ireland recuperates in an army rehab unit with a beautiful garden where past and present inhabitants collide to startling effect. In Got Ghosts?, a clumsy medium awakens a malovelent spirit in a haunted English manor house with hilarious results. And in vampire romance Echoes of Blood, a lonely man finds himself drawn to a group of men who have a unique take on history.”

        My short stories can pick up on the same themes, but also include a wider range of genres. Many of them have been published in anthologies, magazines and online, most recently with the Library of Rejected Beauty, Fox Spirit Books, and Paragraph Planet.

http://www.fiona-glass.com/ 

All of the Inside the Emotion of Fiction LIVE LINKS can be found at the VERY END of the below feature: 

http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/03/stephenson-holts-arranged-marriage-is.html 

Paola Ferrante’s “Asch’s Line Study in the Current Anthropocene” is #270 in the never-ending series called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM

 *The images in this specific piece are granted copyright:  Public Domain, GNU Free Documentation Licenses, Fair Use Under The United States Copyright Law.

The other images are granted copyright permission by the copyright holder, which is identified beneath each photo. 

**Some of the links will have to be copied and then posted in your search engine in order to pull up properly

*** The CRC Blog welcomes submissions from published and unpublished poets for BACKSTORY OF THE POEM series.  Contact CRC Blog via email at caccoop@aol.com or personal Facebook messaging at https://www.facebook.com/car.cooper.7

***Paola Ferrante’s “Asch’s Line Study in the Current Anthropocene” is #270 in the never-ending series called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific poem and how the poet wrote that specific poem.  All BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links are at the end of this piece. (Right: Paola Ferrante.  Copyright by Paola Ferrante)

Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem
from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? The idea for ASCH’S LINE STUDY IN THE CURRENT ANTHROPOCENE was conceived in conversation with my partner. We were talking about an emotionally difficult situation and I remember him saying “Where is your line?”

One of my undergrad degrees was in psychology and Asch’s line study is a classic study in conformity, where a subject is shown a line of a certain length and asked which line matches it the best. And even though it’s an unambiguous answer, and the answer should be line C, people chose the wrong line, line B, because the confederates of the experimenter had all chosen that line.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments 

And I had been feeling a lot of grief around the climate crisis and guilt around the ways my own life has contributed to it. So I remember thinking about the pressures in conforming to a capitalist system and living the way we do, along with the poetic possiblities of choosing to “be” as we are, rather than to “see” the issues that we create which contribute to a climate emergency. This was what sparked the wordplay in first line of the poem, giving the piece its start. (Left: Matthew Zapruder)

After that, it was a matter of brainstorming lines, some cannibalized from other, unsuccessful poems I had already written, reading a bunch of Matthew Zapruder’s Father’s Day, and reordering until I felt the poem had an emotional arc.

http://matthewzapruder.com/ 

https://www.amazon.com/Fathers-Day-Matthew-Zapruder/dp/1556595786 

Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I’m a fairly boring creature of routine when it comes to where I write, which is always at my writing desk. This means my computer is precariously positioned around stacks of paper about American horror films, my tax paperwork (which is really the same thing), and, of course, numerous books. (Left:  Paola Ferrante's writing space.  Credit and Copyright by Paola Ferrante)

Because I generally alternate between writing poetry and fiction, my desk is covered in volumes of both genres; Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties 

https://carmenmariamachado.com/ 

https://www.amazon.com/Her-Body-Other-Parties-Stories/dp/155597788X/ 

and several collections of Karen Russell’s short fiction which have provided countless hours of inspiration for my own short fiction collection in progress. 

https://karenrussellauthor.com/ 

There are, of course, many books of poetry (currently Roxanna Bennett’s Unmeaningable

https://roxanna-bennett.squarespace.com/  

and Matthew Zapruder’s Father’s Day). 

https://www.facebook.com/matthew.zapruder 

The best part about where I write is that my desk looks out over a park that backs onto a spillway which you can just see through the trees. We have been flooded twice, and I think the rivers and water imagery that appear in ASCH’S LINE STUDY IN THE CURRENT ANTHROPOCENE seeped into the poem because of that spillway.

What month and year did you start writing this poem? I started writing this poem at the end of February 2020, just before the world went into lock down. And when I looked back a month later, doing the edits for the final draft, it was strange to me to see some of the predictive elements of the poem (the standing in lines for example), and just sort of how the poem’s elegaic qualities synchronized with the world’s grief and loss during a pandemic. 

How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) I write all drafts, including the first one of any poem, on computer, and I generally do my cutting and pasting electronically.  Most of the time, it takes me anywhere between two and four days to get to an actual working first draft of the poem, and then, I find that this draft goes one of two ways. It either becomes a poem with a matter of minor editing; switching some lines here or there or taking them out, or I trash the draft completely because I don’t feel it is “poem-worthy.” For this poem, there are four drafts; a day’s worth of me playing with lines, followed by a real first draft, and then a working draft I brought to a workshop. That feedback led me to the final form of the piece. (Right:  Paola Ferrante's first rough daft of her poem "Asch's Line Study in the Current Anthropocene" Credit and Copyright by Paola Ferrante)

Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? Not counting the brainstorming of lines I did on my absolute first draft of this poem, there are two lines that didn’t make it into the final draft of ASCH’S LINE STUDY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE. The first is “The line that moved became a fence, keeping in our children, keeping out the children not allowed in our backyards. We watched the line, but did not see in ticker tape that looped in circles while we stood in semi-ordered lines for what new screen to buy, what new thing to love, and more than once, thought all this would help us see all that there really is to see.”

The first part of this line was inspired by Matthew Zapruder’s lines “the children sleeping/ alone in some/ detention center/ don’t need/ our brilliant sincerity.” I realized, as I got farther into my drafts, that while I wanted to the poem to be a reflection on society’s collective inaction and an exploration of why this was so, I was really starting to narrow my focus to discussing the climate crisis, and that this would have been beyond the scope of the poem. As for the second part of this line, although this poem is, in part, a critique of capitalist structures, I realized the imagery in this line wasn’t linked closely enough to the environmental imagery in the rest of the poem, and so should be taken out.

The second line that didn’t make it into this poem’s final form was “When the river became a pineapple in the sky; we stood in lines for elevator talk about the weather as though we’d never tried to buy the rain...” This was actually deleted in the process of workshopping the poem. I had gone down a research rabbit hole about weather patterns, learning about the “pineapple express,” which is the term for a particularly disruptive atmospheric river that transports moisture from the tropics to northern latitudes, and is often responsible for extreme rainfall and flooding. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple_Express 

However, in the workshop, I got feedback that, despite being a fun little research tidbit, “pineapple in the sky” was too esoteric an image, as it generally made people think of yellow fruit and not a deluge of rain, so I scrapped it.

What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? ASCH’S LINE STUDY IN THE CURRENT ANTHROPOCENE is a part of a collection I’ve been working on called The Dark Unwind, which explores the complexity of living with anxiety and depression in very anxious times. In it, there are themes pertaining to climate grief, and fears around motherhood, especially at the end of the world. To me, ASCH’S LINE STUDY IN THE CURRENT ANTHROPOCENE is a poem of mourning, but also a call to action. It is a recognition of how all of us are implicated in the current climate crisis, and how we need to wake up to this in order to build a better future, especially for the next generation.

Which part of the poem was the most emotional for you to write and why? Definitely the line “With be, the line was chalk, children’s drawings of a home on driveways, those little branches on a family tree, or the smile on the mouth of a boy with the tilt of your own childhood, going down even the reddest of slides just one more time.” To me, that line encapsulates the longing and hope that I have, and I think many people have, for the future to be bright for our children, to the point where we actually simply ignore the damage our behaviours do in the present to maintain this idea because the alternative can be too painful. 

Sometimes, I think we want to just “be,” live in the moment, maintain our happiness and our illusions that our children will be happy like we think we are, and that we can continue to live as we’ve been doing because a lot of what is happening with the climate crisis can be overwhelming.

Has this poem been published before? And if so where? Yes, this poem actually won the Short Grain 2020 Poetry contest, and was published in Grain Issue 48.1, Fall 2020.

http://www.grainmagazine.ca/48-1 

Paola Ferrante's debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack, was shortlisted for the 2020 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. 

https://www.amazon.com/What-Wear-When-Surviving-Attack/dp/1771262249 

She was longlisted for the 2020 Journey Prize and won The New Quarterly's Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award, Room's prize for Fiction and Grain's 2020 Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming in, The Journey Prize Stories 32, The Master's Review Anthology Volume IX, North American Review, PRISM International, and elsewhere. (Above Left:  Paola Ferrante.  Copyright by Paola Ferrante)

She is the Poetry Editor at Minola Review and currently finishing her debut collection of short fiction. 

http://www.minolareview.com/ 

Find her https://twitter.com/PaolaOFerrante 

All of the Backstory of the Poem LIVE LINKS can be found at the VERY END of the below feature: 

http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/02/will-justice-drakes-intercession-is-251.html