Edification – Newsletter #95 – November 7, 2021
Dear Reader,
Happy Sunday!
Let me push a couple of newly published pieces on you. First, a short story called “Culling Chickens,” published in Still: The Journal.
Daddy’s breath comes out in battleship puffs ahead of me on our way down the path this morning. “Time to cull the chickens,” he says without turning around. “Cull” is how Daddy pronounces “kill.”
We’ll cull the three oldest hens who don’t lay many eggs anymore. They lived cheap all summer eating bugs out of the yard. But chickens have to eat all year-round, and there aren’t many bugs to scratch up in the winter.
Daddy told me not to name the laying hens, because it’s harder to cull a pet. The problem is when you learn to tell animals apart, names come all on their own. One is all speckles, another is dark brown and small as a teapot. The oldest is brown, too, and big as a kettle – she is the mother of the others. They take turns sitting on my lap, letting me pet their different feathers down flat. I know them apart, and so they have names whether I say them or not. They cluck at me like I am a chick with a name they have accidentally given me, too.
This is another piece of my novel (the same girl you may have met in my flash piece “As Solid As an Ashtray and Emits More Smoke”, published last week in Fractured Literary). I’d be ever so tickled if you gave it a read.
Second, I had a creative nonfiction essay published in Identity Theory: “A Flash as Intense as It Is Solitary”. I write about the time I was stuck in the middle of a massive pileup accident during a polar vortex blizzard. It was the same day my husband proposed to me. (I nearly wrecked multiple times that day, but I steered steady, said yes, and lived to tell the tale!)
A big-antlered buck, frozen upright in a snowbank, sends me swerving into the right lane of the interstate. It’s there, then gone, as I struggle to read the signs through a whiteout snowstorm west of Toledo. That’s the way everything begins and ends in Ohio—in a flash as intense as it is solitary. I don’t know if the deer died straining to escape the median or if a semi knocked it there already frozen into its noble pose, but it feels like a message for me on Valentine’s Day of 2015.
I can never believe my eyes driving over this monotonous part of the country, with its tangles of frenetic cities in the middle of dismal stubble-fields, so busy and yet so forlorn. Maybe the deer wasn’t even dead, I think, trying to catch a glimpse of it in the rearview. Truck trailers fishtail and hurl ice chunks, warning me to keep my eyes on the road. Then the glacial blob of wiper fluid I had futilely dispensed half an hour ago rattles up my brown-streaked windshield and startles me all over again.
I’m driving in this hellish weather to see the man with whom I will soon elope.
At 3,800 words, this piece is a little on the longer side from what I’ve managed to get published lately. But because it is nonfiction, I wanted to spend time turning over my thoughts about the events depicted in this piece. The polar vortex of February 2015 was intense in the northeastern US – do you remember? The wreck on Valentine’s Day was one of many tragedies of that storm.
My place there was incidental, as witness. But the way it overlapped my own story – of love, escape, changing my life, all these wonderful non-tragedies, all these happy endings – felt so consequential that I wanted to give the journey and that “liminal space” of rural Ohio center stage. It was the physical embodiment of my own journey, my emotional liminal. It’s more than a symbol. It’s reality.
I feel like those in-between places and times are sometimes overlooked when we look for story ideas. We’re looking at the moments of action. Sometimes we’re so busy asking, “But when does the story really start?” that we miss the potential for a richer exploration of life.
And there’s good solid writing advice that tells you not to tell a story by having your character driving around by herself. What are the rules? Don’t have your story start by having your guy waking up or driving alone. Don’t do it!
I guess I’m stuck on liminal spaces. For Christ’s sake, I just wrote a whole novel about roadcuts and logging and quarries and trespassing. (Hey, the “Cut-Through” of Pikeville, Kentucky is one of the world’s wonders and nobody even knows about it! If I don’t write about it, who will?)
In some ways I feel those are my natural haunts because it’s where I’ve lived my entire life. Flyover country. Jerkwaters. The Rustbelt, the mountain hollers. All of Appalachia is a liminal space. Drive down a highway and see the Dollar Store strip malls, the mine access roads, the ditch-dumps full of tires and old refrigerators.
The truth is most of America is “liminal.” It’s what Iggy Pop describes in his song “The Passenger,” as he sits contemplating “the city’s ripped backsides.”
There are good stories happening back there.
Talk soon,
Edie