What the Ocean Left Behind
What's It All About
You’re probably going to love some parts of this book and hate others. That’s OK. The stories and not-poems in his book were written over a period of 45 years. Almost half a century. Gives a writer a lot of time to change, especially the writer’s voice. You don’t have to like all the voices in this book. You bought it. It’s yours. Read whatever you want and stop reading a few lines into something that just isn’t for you. These days, if you like just one thing in the course of your day, you’ve gotten your money’s worth.
Some of the stories were published in literary magazines and ezines, some are making their public debut after hiding in digital obscurity for years and some were written just in time to appear in his volume. A few others didn’t quite make it. Nine to be exact. I generally have a bunch of short stories, one or two novellas and a few novels (in various stages of development) on the go at any time. This allows me to forgo frivolous things like sleep, eating and life.
My favorite story, The Nickel, is in this volume. It was first rejected by a local literary magazine because the editor felt that nothing in the story could be trusted because the lead character appeared to be slow of mind. Some editors very much need schooling on what it takes to be a valid human being. But that was a long time ago and since then the story has won a couple of awards and has been published in a much more prestigious (and open-minded) literary journal.
It took almost ten years to write the story. I got the initial idea while travelling across Canada on a bus. Somewhere in Saskatchewan, I saw a metal box on a short pole by a crossroad and lettering that appeared to be DO NA ONS and I wondered about this for a few years before I started writing a story about a man who finds a nickel in a donation box. Coming toward the end of the story, I lost focus completely and put it aside for a few year before picking it up again and writing a few more pages and then leaving it until one night when I was working on a bar in a club on a slow night. I had pencil and paper and wrote four pages that I passed to three customers sitting at the bar who read them as I wrote. Almost came to the end before the midnight rush time started and had to put it down for another few years and finally finished it in a hotel in Toronto while I was on a business trip.
All in all, ten years.
I have a few more stories (that didn’t make this volume and are hiding in folders somewhere on my computer) that have been on the go for several years. Some day I might just finish some of them.
It could happen.
Stuff somewhat related to What the Ocean Left Behind
What Is A Not-Poem?
Like a border line between prose, poetry and madness, the not-poem addresses a very real gap in contemporary literature...the need to rant, laugh and create the impression that you're shitting your pants all at the same time.
This is what my enemies have told me...you know...in an effort to kick me in the balls and diminish me because that don't give a damn about my feelings.
Whereas my friends lie to me all the time.
Click below to read about it. No credit card required.
Searching for Peace: The Story Behind the Story
Years after writing the Searching for Peace blog posts, I’m still not sure why I wrote the first one and, then, why I became obsessed with them and wrote one after the other for months.
Magical realism surfaces often in my photography and ink art as well as in my writing, but in the Searching for Peace episodes, it often slips into magical madness.
The episode of me slipping through the eye of a needle and looking from clues to the whereabouts of peace from the zillions of dust mites in my livingroom carpet tend to be maybe a little over the top or under the bottom…or wherever.
But that definitely wasn’t the end of the search.