Won the R.V. Williams Prize in 2010

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 18:31:59 -0400

And, there I am. I mean was.

Winning the prize wasn’t the way I imagined it. There was a graduation event at the college that made it almost impossible for anyone to find parking. So, it was pretty much just me and all the people who won. You know, it seems like empty rooms like these are the beginning of a great success story.

It’s great to get some recognition--it confirmed to me that I was doing good stuff and other people saw it. Usually these times are few and far between but it was really cool--I wrote a nice speech and gave a shout out to my mentor Steve Gutierrez for encouraging me so much. Cal State East Bay was really great to me--it was one of those right places at the right time situations. If I hadn’t started writing fiction in 2008, I don’t know where I’d be right now. And I got some prize money in the hundreds--also nothing to sniff at.

The story I wrote, Beneath, won me this prize and also scored me a very great scholarship to Columbia University later. I’ve been very lucky, but I also worked very hard to get there then and now.

I'm On AMAZON.COM!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 15:47:37 -0400

My friends, it has been awhile. And yet, here we are. Time to catch up. Much has happened since my last entry, but only one new publication. With advice from other writers I’m holding off on publishing until I’m ready to show the world who I am. But, some news....

On May 1, 2010 I was published in Short Story Library’s literary anthology as the Best of 2009. You can buy a copy on Amazon.com here. I ordered a copy right away and it was really neat seeing my name in print in a physical way, an artifact, a piece of printed paper.

I can’t give the published piece to you here because I sold it to Short Story Library, but I can tell you what it’s about--Diners. My dad grew up poor and eating out was a special thing to him, something one only got to do on very special occasions like birthdays. When he grew up he got to be successful enough to be able to go out to dinner often. He met my mom one morning at the Diner of Diners--Emil Villa’s Hick’ry Pit (now it’s just Hick’ry Pit after being sold numerous times).

The way I got the expertise to write this Nonfiction piece was that when I was growing up in Walnut Creek, CA my mom and dad took my sister, brother and I out to breakfast every Saturday and Sunday that I lived under their roof. Later, after I moved out I could always find them there on the weekends at the same time: 6am. It’s strange I think to have eaten out so much, but also special that my mom and dad were eating breakfast at this one place when they met and revisited it twice a week. We didn’t always go there, sometimes we drove up to Lafayette’s now defunct Caffe Barbara, or Walnut Creek’s Copper Skillet (which served some of their food in these giant eighteen-inch skillets) but most of the time we were in that same place.

Of course I got sick of it. Hated it. Stayed home sometimes. Entertained myself by ordering every item on the menu. Sometimes I ordered lunch for breakfast when it wasn’t a hassle (it was also a barbecue restaurant and barbecue is always a-smokin’).

Then again, there’s something great about having breakfast all day, waking up over your coffee and newspaper in a restaurant, and the amazing chemistry of different combinations of egg, pancake, bacon, sausage, cheese, and toast. Different textures of egg that either keep to themselves with a hard scramble or the loose freedom of sunny-side up. And glasses of orange juice with a little frost on the lip of their inside, and Hot Cocoa sometimes, and the always bizarre urge for oatmeal sometimes.

Diners are more of a place that are counted as home by many people--something special that feels like it can belong to you from how intimate it is to spend a morning with someone. Diners are also about family--dressed up and on the way to church, retired old couples that got off the kneeling senior center bus wearing matching baseball caps, and kids visiting when they are away at college.

I guess you get that I’ve got a lot of emotion attached to Diners--I was channeling some of it in this piece. Hope you buy it. Hope you like it.

Poem Published--Guitar Hero

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:19:07 -0500

Full of Crow magazine published my poem “For I Have Played Guitar Hero,” you can read it here.

This poem has a few interesting details, first, it was an assignment in my graduate poetry workshop. Susan Gubernat had all of us write an “after” poem as an exercise on how to understand the mechanics of a piece more thoroughly. The poem I chose as the inspiration for this piece is the quite excellent “For I Have Taught The Japanese,” by Lucia Perillo. As far as I can tell, the poem is not available online as it is part of a collection by Perillo entitled The Oldest Map with the Name America you can find the book at Barnes and Noble.com here.

Perillo’s poem and mine are about being a foreigner, an outsider to a different culture. I’m really interested in the new generation of kids and the values they experience and adopt as a member of an online culture. I wonder about what kind of manners the adults of the future will have as we spend more of our time computing.

Whenever I play XBOX 360 online, I was often surprised by how mean the kids can be. However, I realized after time that to those playing XBOX, swearing and insulting others isn’t rude, it is just the language spoken by the online tribe.

The poem also considers how our global community is shrunk by the internet and how often Americans are perceived as lazy by other cultures. Like Perillo’s piece, my speaker is lost in another country, trying to gain a foothold in a crazy world, while also realizing that he will never fully understand the other culture.

Thank you Full of Crow editor M.K. Chavez and thank you XBOX Live!

Detective Fiction Published

Sat, 9 Jan 2010 18:37:47 -0500

First of all, thank you to Cindy Rosmus for publishing me in her literary magazine. You can read “Working Lunch” here.

“Working Lunch” is part of a mystery piece I wrote about kidnappings in Portland, Oregon. Cindy wrote me my first acceptance letter ever, and helped me through two rewrites.

This piece is also another first, this is the first time a professional artist read my piece and responded to it by making an illustration. I’m flattered that someone took my imagination and turned it into art.

Re-reading the piece, I can see my writing has evolved in the last year. I’m proud of this piece of flash because of how different the characters are, and the dialogue matches their personalities.

The main character is a diabetic that goes into insulin shock in moments of sudden stress. The use of diabetes was inspired by my grandfather’s life as a Type I diabetic. His experiences give me a unique perspective on how one must define their life around their medical condition.

Enjoy.

A Blue Clear Day

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 20:20:28 -0400

I won an honorable mention for Tattoo Highway’s Picture is Worth 500 words contest. You can read it here.

I owe this one to the editor of Tattoo Highway Sara McAulay. I wrote the piece in a stream of consciousness form, and my grammar wasn’t the best. The other editors dismissed it, but Sara saved it because she liked its unique structure and imagery.

The prompt for the piece you can see using the link above. Tattoo Highway puts out a thought provoking picture and challenges its readers to write the best prose and poetry about it.

What I like about this piece is how different our lives are in youth and how many new dimensions we add to our lives when we get older. But, no matter how old we get, we always return to who we once were.

Enjoy, I hope it makes you smile.

Thank you Sara McAulay.

New Scifi Published: We Love Bunnies!

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:05:08 -0400

On August 28th of 2009, my flash Scifi story “We Love Bunnies!” was published by 365tomorrows. You can view it here.

Interesting story on this story.

It started as a daily writing exercise, I wanted to have the excitement of escaping an alien invasion while having an encounter with the unknown. A prerequisite for interesting aliens in scifi for me has always been a lack of comprehension/understanding.

In my teens one of my favorite scifi films was “Enemy Mine,” based on a short story by Barry B. Longyear. The movie starred Dennis Quaid and Louis Gosset Jr.

Stuck on a weird planet, a human needs to cooperate with an alien in order to survive. What was really neat to me was the concept of language acquisition. The difficult part was that Dennis Quaid’s human character and Louis Gosset Jr.’s alien character had completely different ways of seeing the world.

Eventually they came to understand each other, but only after many years.

My story is about a spaceman fleeing from one alien that’s trying to kill him into the formless body of another alien that doesn’t comprehend violence.

And, since there is a language barrier, everything takes some explaining.

I cut a lot of the piece to fit it into the word limit, I suspect the Bunnies will return in a later piece....in the future....

Thank you 365tomorrows, and thank you editor Kathy Kachelries!

Steve Gutierrez

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:10:05 -0400

What can I say? He’s my thesis director. He’s one of the most positive and encouraging people I’ve ever met. He brings out the best in people. You can visit his website here.

There’s a fine line in teaching writing where every instructor walks between giving helpful feedback that coaxes more effort or having the same advice inadvertently make a writer feel condemned. The great grace that Steve has is his openness to listen and willingness to work with his students both in and out of the classroom. When there’s somebody off the mark or a little too vague, he always brings in an example from another short story or novel. His style is non-confrontational while illuminating for those who listen. He sneaks up on you and I owe a lot to him.

I’m glad I started with Steve because everything with him is possible. A lot of teachers have a pretty strict definition of what they want with creative work. He’s open to hear love stories, serial killer stories, literary realism, and even fantasy.

“I don’t care about ideas, I just want to feel something on the page.”

With such an open teacher, I think creativity can thrive instead of being bottlenecked by limitations. Even though you can step in any direction, you still have the limit of having to write a compelling story.
“The story is carried by the language, not the plot.”
So, tell the story, tell it well, make the reader feel something. Seek only to connect.

Jim Heynen

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:54:48 -0400

Jim Heynen (pronounced High-nen) was my instructor at the summer Iowa Writer’s workshop. You can visit Jim’s website here.

Jim’s class was the subject of an earlier post, but I wanted to talk about him a little and encourage others to take his classes and read his work.

When you meet him you feel like you are sharing a room with a man who is the last of his kind. He’s an Iowa farmer’s son with a unique sensibility to nature.

We discussed the number one cause of death for beavers, how pigs outnumber people 4 to 1 in Iowa, how snails reproduce asexually, and how to turn the material of our lives into something bigger and more interesting.

Jim has a great body of work that you can check out on his website. What I really like about his poems and his writing is that he speaks to the inner life of a person and the thoughts that often go unshared. He’s worth checking out.

Here’s some quotes from him that I thought were especially important to me as a writer and hopefully they’ll be useful to you as well.

On writing every day:

“Breakthroughs are more likely to occur when you are on a plateau rather than coasting.”

“Cast a line out into the darkness and wait.”

On writing good first drafts:

“The best moments in Thoreau’s writing are where he loses control and goes unheeded regardless of grammar. Sometimes you need to shut down your inner critic because if you put it down too slow it sometimes stops the flow of the piece.”

“Develop your own voice, don’t let our era turn you into a style du jour.”

“Writers do their best when they don’t believe they understand the end of their piece.”

On editing:

“Most pieces will get better when you condense them. But sometimes when you Strunk and White a passage, its tender flesh falls out.”

“Condense. You must write as if you represent the whole world in a grain of sand.”

“You must go after the inner piece, the polished style that reflects the heart.”

I’m gushing a bit here, sorry. I just learned a lot.
Thank you Jim Heynen, it was a great workshop.

Susan Gubernat

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:33:53 -0400

Susan Gubernat has a book of poems called “Flesh” and if you are interested in buying it, you can find it here.

If you ever get the chance, you need to take a class taught by Susan Gubernat. She introduced me to the obsessive nature of revision and taught me about the diligent effort needed to make good work.

She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s conference, so she successfully got into the most competitive program in the world.

Susan told me and the rest of my class that the real factor in success is putting the work first and finding time for it every day. When I drove all the way out to Iowa, all of the instructors and lecturers said the same thing again and again.

Work. Every day.

You can read her poem “Etruscans,” and listen to it at Cortland review here.

Thank you Miss Gubernat for a challenging class that made me grow as a writer.

Professor Susan Gubernat (Center) with Graduate Student Matt Klein (Left) and Professor Emeritus Donald Markos (right)

Tony Press

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:38:22 -0400

I met Tony Acarasiddhi (aka Press) at the summer session of the Iowa Writer’s conference. He’s a fellow Bay Area fiction writer, a helluva poet and a great conversationalist. Check out some of his work here:

http://34thparallel.blogspot.com/2009/01/reckoning.html
www.chsbs.cmich.edu/creative_writing/tony_press.htm
www.mendacitypress.com/5.2009Press.html