Semi-Urban Cartography

Uninspired, yet digging is a familiar refrain

As recently as Friday morning on this blog, I described on-going frustration with a game of “wait and see” that has taken over my creative life. Progress with a prospective agent has inadvertently led to stasis at the writing desk. Four treatments. A dozen poems. A few really promising short stories. None of them spark any real sustaining interest for me though. Fleeting interest. Stasis creeping in, the state of moving slowly creatively, isn’t something I’m accustomed to.

Lisa left for Seattle with the dog yesterday morning. A friend is a few days from moving to Santiago, Chile, bridging the final leg of a long distance relationship. Instead taking her absence as an opportunity to put myself back at the desk to try and futilely scratch out the missing words, I decided to embark on a long bike ride. I’d listen to the new Flaming Lips record. In part, the bike ride was an effort to clear my head from the white wine/lite beer hangover from Friday night at the Shanghai Tunnel, but more the exertion was in the interest of clearing out the creative cobwebs, frustration and to start refocus. I went from Woodstock, down past Reed college into Sellwood where at the crumbling bridge, I connected with the Springwater Corridor. Three miles down the quiet, idyllic strip. When I parted with the river, I passed through the industrial southeast into Ladds Addition. I grabbed the pint of half-and-half I offered to pick up and then came home.

Saturday passed into Saturday night. I sat with Wally Schmidt, drinking Sessions Dark Lager and Bushmills talking about life and love, distinguishing the difference between virus and bacteria into the late night. Wally has just made a long needed life change, giving up a dead end warehouse job for a second chance at a career in radiology. Talking to Wally about proteins, lipids, natural selection and cell structure was oddly riveting. It sparked and felt almost blissful. I left his house at 2 am, wrecked with more drink and exhaustion, but I felt my creative perspective was changing. It was good to feel interested in a new subject again. H1N1 virus wasn’t on our agenda (although the Bushmills and video games were). It felt good to learn. For the first time in two or three months, I was awash in newness, however ordinary and unrelated to my struggle.

Waking up this morning, groggy and alone, I cracked the Oregonian while waiting for my coffee to boil. In the back pages of the front section, I found a small story that captivated me. My eyes were suddenly attuned, alive. Rebecca Cathcart of the New York Times News Service described in a few hundred words the story of an Marina Del Mar man, dead on his porch for days from a self-inflicted gun shot wound. How did he manage to end up left there, dead in plain sight? His body was mistaken by his neighbors for Halloween decor. The story was too good — too strange, too eerie. It was too right on.

My favorite stories often come from the forgotten back pages of the newspaper (one of the primary reasons the vanishing newspaper saddens me — there is no back internet page). The Oregonian is where the framing story in The Fawn came from. It still haunts me. There is an intoxicated feeling I get when these small, seemingly throw away stories rise off the page. While a war in Afghanistan, or genocide in Rwanda are real enough, they are not stories that I can distill down to human experience. It’s my particular story telling bent that guides me away from these. Through whose eyes do you tell of a catastrophe?

I’m not going to write a story about a dead man on his porch, but the tale was just enough of a boost to one of my favorite treatments to know it was time to go forward.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to start on something I’ve been sketching on since June. I’ve culled enough color for the outline. The story is called Promise Before The Sword, the story of a social worker in an immigration center, Kevin Fanning, who is pressed into investigating an incident much larger than he could have first imagined. Kevin finds that one of his clients is the victim of a hate crime, but who is the perpetrator? Is it a local white power group? Or is it her husband, desperate for increased attention from a system that can sometimes ignore the little guy in a sea of needs. The story of a dead man on his porch fits well in the background of Kevin Fanning’s story. It is set in autumn. Leaves are falling, winds blowing colder as he plunges into the depths of two seedy, unpredictable underworlds. It’s time to write it.

Sometimes it’s that background piece that brings forward the missing whole. Sometimes it’s the pressure, unbearable.

Tomorrow morning, I refocus.