Tag Archives: Creative Writing

A parable, of sorts.
Part one.
Part two.

Two strangers stand at the edge of the woods. One is tall, the other short.

“We’ve been watching you for a few days,” Tall says a round of introductions later. “Where are your people?”

“Back home,” you reply, your arm sweeping back to the gentle waves behind you.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says with a flinch. “We thought you were a traveller.”

“I am.”

“But you came home to bury your kin?”

“My pod isn’t dead. Or at least I don’t think they’re dead. We live in the sea.”

“Oh.” Tall and Short exchange glances. “And where did you live before then?”

“I don’t understand the question,” you say. “We have always lived there.” Short steps forward, gingerly touches your warm hand.

“You’re still alive!”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“We release our dead to the sea. We thought you were one of the ones that try to come back,” Short says with a grimace.

Time passes. Night falls. You had all but forgotten what it felt like to share a meal, to listen to others breathe as you fall asleep.

In the morning Tall and Short convince you to swim to their pod.

You are too lonely to do anything but agree.

The waves grow larger the longer you swim. Their people huddle behind the peak of one of the biggest waves you’ve bobbed through so far.

The pod parts. One paddles up to you and touches your hand.

“You’re still alive!” One says.

“So are you!” you reply. One really looks too old to swim. You wonder why he continues to kiss the sky with so many new swimmers competing for air.

“The sea hasn’t called me yet,” One replies. “How did you manage to escape it?”

You share your story.

“There’s someone you need to meet,” One says. “I’ve never heard of people living in the water but she may have. But first you must rest here, build your strength.”

“Is it a long swim?” you ask.

“Swim?” One laughs. “Where you’re going there isn’t any water at all!”

A parable, of sorts. Click here for part one. 

Time trickles by.

One day you wander so far that you end up spending the night in this strange new place.
It feels good to slip into old habits the next day and give your sore muscles a rest. There are so many new things to explore, though, that you slowly begin spending more and more time wandering away. Eventually you don’t even need to come back for.

Seasons pass.

One day you come back to the in-between place. The others have returned, their solemn heads bobbing up and down as they watch you swim to them.

“You won’t believe what I’ve seen! The water there is solid but not frozen. Instead of swimming you stand or climb. I’ve even seen some who have figured out how to swim above it.”

Some of the others look puzzled, angry, skeptical.

“There are still places where water is wet…especially after a storm. But you can usually find a puddle of it somewhere when you’re thirsty.”

“What’s wet?” one of the leaders asks.  You hesitate, wondering how to describe something they’ve always had.

“Have you been eating that weird algae again?” someone else asks.

“No,” you say.  “Listen, it’s hard to explain. Why don’t you come see for yourselves?”

“There’s no such thing as solid water,” the leader replied. “Maybe you stepped on a sea turtle by mistake. Come back home with us. There’s no need to mention this again.”

Part of you wants to swim back and forget everything. It’s incredibly lonely to eat, sleep and explore without any companionship but you cannot imagine pretending to un-know all that you have seen.

“No, I’m staying.” The others begin to slowly swim away.

For a moment the companion you originally discovered this new sea with hesitates and then she, too, joins them.

There is silence once again.

You settle back into a routine of eating, sleeping and exploring. At night you stare at the stars and tell yourself stories about their origins.

And then one day just as you’ve slump into the realization that there is no one else in this strange new place….

“Hellllooo!”

 A chair sits in the woods.

Drew and I stumbled across it a few months ago.

I still wonder why anyone would go through the trouble of bringing exactly one dining room chair into the woods and then leaving it there.

Did a painter need a place to sit?

Are there other chairs from this set in other forests?

Was it a prank?

What do you think?

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Most of the time we glide past ordinary objects without thinking about what it is we’re experiencing. There’s nothing wrong with doing this.  Few people can focus intensely on everything around them all of the time.

Last week I stumbled across some magnified photographs of sand. This is what grits between your toes and stubbornly clings to your towel at the beach. Amazing.

Your challenge today is to pay attention.

Kneel down.

Look up.

Back away.

Peer closer.

Sometimes beauty pops out at us right away, at other times it comes in unexpected packages: edges worn smooth, weeping rust, flaky paint, a shaggy dog panting in the shade.

This is what I’ve seen over the last year. What do you see in your environment?

Spam happens.

I’ve finally found a use for it: poetry. Everything in Letter to You (including the title!) was harvested from recent, unsolicited emails to me and Drew.

When you’ve finished reading it I challenge you to make the best of something. Copy my idea for spam poetry, transform something that you’d normally throw out or recycle into a work of art, laugh instead of scowl at adversity and then come tell us about it in the comment section.

From dubious links and pleading letters from Nigeria comes a maudlin poem about the intersection between love, loss and profit.

Without further ado I present:

Letter To You

This mail might come to you as a surprise

and the temptation to ignore it as unserious

could come into your mind but please consider

it a divine wish and accept it with a deep sense

of humility.

I never really cared about other people

before this happened.

(Died on the 24th of November.)

My business and concern

for making money was all I was living for.

(Plot 84, if actually this is true. Three

days from now and there is no response.

We will confirm that you are dead indeed.)

I made $450 in a few hours.

I snagged $888 in less then a day.

I have 18,000,000.00 U. S. Dollars.

But since the loss I have found a new desire to

assist the helpless orphans in orphanages/

motherless homes/humanitarians.

Don’t say I never help anyone!

You did not die.

Please I want you.

You have to get back to us.

Kindly expedite action and contact me.

You’re going to be so happy!

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.  ~Evelyn Waugh

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth – that the error and truth are simply opposite.  They are nothing of the sort.  What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.  ~H.L. Mencken

The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.- J. Robert Oppenheimer

David Hayward had an absolutely fantastic post last week about how difficult it can be to communicate with people whose worldview conflicts with your own. (You do not have to read it to understand the rest of this post but his ideas did influence my thought processes while writing this.)

I’ve mentioned my love of dystopian fiction here before but I’ve known precious few books about life in an utopia. Even the most well-written science fiction or fantasy novels on this topic tend to either comically over-react to whatever social ills the authors believes are plaguing us in the present or create characters so ploddingly virtuous and prone to splitting that I assume they were meant to be read as unreliable narrators …but I digress.

What would be the best possible world? What sort of lives would people lead? How would the problems that plague our current society be solved?  Imagine that all of these questions are answered and that we’re walking around in whatever it is we’ve decided is utopia. Everyone is healthy and happy now.

Well, almost everyone. A small group of people who don’t want to cooperate are throwing a wrench in our new system. Maybe they miss the way things were before, resent us for changing everything so drastically,  or maybe they follow a contradictory set of rules (or none at all).

How would you react if they began protesting violently? What about if they started to harm other people? Would controlling or punishing them mean that a specific utopia no longer exists or never actually did exist? Would sending them elsewhere mean that utopia is only appropriate for certain types of people? Would it still be a utopia if people were unable to make destructive choices?

So, these are the cheerful thoughts that rolled around in my head this past weekend. 😉 I’m still having trouble coming up with answers that don’t change two minutes after a contradictory thought comes to mind. What do you think?

So, you’ve finally chosen a political party. Congratulations! Here are a few things to remember as your country prepares for the upcoming election:

1) God is on your side.

2) There’s no such thing as common ground. Either they have the unvarnished truth or you do.

3) Except when it comes to atheists and agnostics. Everybody knows that it’s impossible to be a moral, upstanding citizen without god.

4) The best way to convince others to agree with you is to start a heated political debate every time you see them. Don’t worry if they start changing the topic or asking you to talk about other things instead. This simply means they’ve realized that you’re right.

5) The best way to win political and religious converts is by insisting that the country cannot be governed properly without consulting your holy book. The more you intertwine the two the more both appeal to those with other beliefs.

6) When in doubt assume the worst-case scenario if one of their people is elected and the best case if one of your own wins.

7) You can tell how qualified and trustworthy a candidate is by how closely his or her religious beliefs match your own

8 ) Don’t waste time learning about the political systems of other countries or how the decisions made by your leaders may affect them.  If possible, refuse to learn even the names of their leaders or the outcomes of their elections. Information like this only clouds your judgment and makes voting that much more difficult.

9) It’s ok to lie about what the other side says, believes or does if it furthers your cause.

10) Finally, never forget that god has a special plan for your country that can only be brought to fruition if enough people vote for your party. Anyone who votes for someone else is sending a clear message about to whom they’ve given their allegiance.

Note: if you don’t watch the television show Supernatural you may want to skip the first two paragraphs of this post. They contain spoilers for a season six episode.

A recent episode of Supernatural snatched the stars of the show, Sam and Dean, out of their demon-hunting world and into our own. Everything that Sam and Dean have experienced in their universe is part of a television show in our own.

They had such humorous reactions to landing in a world in which the supernatural doesn’t exist, the two of them are costars instead of brothers and they are pursued by fans and production assistants instead of by angry demons or monsters.

It made me wonder how other fictional characters would react if they were transplanted into our world?

The What If List

The first character to come to mind was Anne Shirley (Anne of Green Gables, et al.). She has such a whimsical, creative relationship with the idea of gentle otherworldly creatures like faeries or nymphs. How would she react to our television shows about vampires, werewolves and zombies?

Jo March (Little Women) always seemed more interested in writing than in finding a husband. Her marriage to Mr. Bhaer has always looked to me like something pushed onto Jo by the social conventions of the time instead of being a natural development of her character.  I could see her jumping feet-first into journalism, blogging or even writing and publishing her own e-books if she walked into our world.

It would probably be too much to ask Frodo Baggins (The Lord of the Rings, et al.) to visit our noisy, congested cities but I wonder what he would think of our national forests and wildlife preserves?

If Pecola Breedlove (The Bluest Eye) lived in our time would she still so strongly associate being beautiful with being white? Would her sexual abuse have been discovered sooner? What would her adulthood have been like had she been given access to counselling appropriate for someone who has been severely abused?

Would contemporary small town life cause as much discord between Will Kennicott and Carol Milford? (Main Street). I could see them coming to a compromise by moving to the suburbs of or a small town very near to a big city so that Will could have a strong sense of community and Carol would feel less isolated from the outside world.

It would be a thrill to introduce Ayla (The Clan of the Cave Bear et al.) to modern medicine. There are so many diseases and injuries we easily treat now that are beyond the scope of her medicine bag. I don’t think she’d approve of the often massive disparities in life expectancy and overall health that exist among various cultures and countries, though.

The cause of Lennie Small‘s (Of Mice and Men) cognitive disability was never explained to the best of my recollection. If George Milton and the rest of the characters in his universe had our medical equipment and knowledge about developmental delays could Lennie have been taught how to avoid accidentally hurting other people?

Your Turn

How would the lives of your favourite fictional characters change if they were brought into our universe?