When I was teaching at a junior high, I once had a kid ask, “What does e=mc² mean?” Clearly, whatever point of sentence construction I was elaborating on wasn’t sinking in with this kid.

“Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared,” I said as I underlined a predicate.

He squinted his eyes a bit, probably wondering whether or not he could trust an English teacher on this, but then nodded and jotted something down in his notebook. He looked up again. “Okay, what’s the speed of light?”

I stopped and looked at him. “186,000 miles per second.”

He nodded and scribbled the equation in his spiral, his number two pencil working madly. “Whoooaa,” he said, looking up.

“What?”

“That’s a lot of energy. Even if the mass is just 1.”

I nodded. “Yes, it is.”

He stared at his notebook, trying to make sense of the enormity of those numbers. “I mean, you could probably blow up a whole city with that kind of energy, right?”

I think the next few sentences we analyzed were about nuclear bombs.

A few months ago, my wife and I were on our way to a party her company was hosting at a downtown club. We had had dinner and had some time to kill so we stopped for a pint at Bull McCabe’s on Red River. We sat at a rickety table on the porch, enjoying the springtime weather and watched people walk up and down the street, drifting from club to club.

The homeless shelter is right around the corner so along with music lovers, there tends to be an abundance of homeless people mingling about the area, often indistinguishable from the music fans until they ask for a handout.

One guy, probably in his mid-thirties, came shuffling onto the porch. He wore a few extra sweaters under a grimy red coat out of which a white cable grew like a vine that terminated in his ears. I wondered if he actually had an ipod under there somewhere.

“Hey,” he said, walking up to our table. “You got any cash?”

My wife and I shook our heads. “Sorry, no.”

He stared at our beers and looked back at us. “What about them?”

I shrugged. “No cash.”

“Can you charge me a beer then?”

“No.”

“Aw, come on, man, you can just get me a beer. I won’t bother you. You can afford another one.”

I didn’t say, yes, I could afford more, and had he asked, I might have bought him a burger, but he just stared at us, clearly annoyed, small muscles ticking beneath his face. “What do you do for a living?” he asked, his voice challenging, likely trying to prove to us that we made enough to buy him a beer.

“I’m a teacher,” I said.

His body language changed with that last word. He relaxed, making me realize for the first time just how wound up and intense he was under all those used-up old clothes. He took a polite step back. “Aw, man, I’m sorry. I won’t bother you. You have a good night. You’re good people.”

He backed out of the bar and smiled at us again as he shuffled down the street, leaving us to wonder what teacher he had had that made such an impression on him that he refused to bother a teacher. I also wondered what would have happened had I been an investment banker.

I’ve heard it repeated quite a bit that we typically remember about 5% of what we hear, which if true really brings home the futility of lecturing to kids.

Then I think back to my first year of teaching. Seventh grade English.

It was after Thanksgiving, because it was after the point in the year when they tell first year teachers that it’s okay to smile. One of my kids was griping about the weight of his textbooks. The giant lit book, the mighty math tome, the science stack, the gargantuan grammar stone. With hunched shoulders and a lifetime of back pain ahead of him, he groaned, “They should outlaw big heavy books.”

I shook my head and told him that big heavy books can be pretty useful. I took his lit book and hefted it as if testing the balance of a sword, feeling its weight in my hand. The class stared at me skeptically and I smiled as I stared at the book. “Let me tell you a story,” I said…

When I was about your age we lived in Italy in a big old house with marble stairs. One night I heard commotion downstairs and crept to the top of the staircase to see what was up. I could hear my parents yelling and a bunch of banging around. Then my mom, hollered up the stairs, ‘We’re being robbed!’

I had no idea what to do, but it wasn’t long before my parents laughed and things settled down. Here’s what happened.

My dad had gone down to get a snack and he saw a man in the house. The man had my mom’s purse or maybe the computer or something and he stared at my dad and my dad stared back at him. Then, my dad reached for the nearest object he could find… a cookbook… and he chunked it at the robber.

At this point I threw the lit book at the wall as hard as I could. It hit with a crack that woke up all the kids who weren’t paying attention.

Then he grabbed another and another and he and my mom threw cookbooks and dictionaries at him until he ran out of the house.

The kids loved the story. Maybe it’s something about the appeal to middle school kids of objects that shouldn’t be thrown flying through the air, but it made them laugh, and the books, now that their potential as weapons had been realized, didn’t seem quite so heavy.

Years later, I taught at a high school in the same district. I had many of those same kids in my 11th grade English class. The first day of school, after reviewing the syllabus and talking about expectations, I asked if there were any questions.

A hand went up.

“Yes,” I asked.

The girl grinned. “Mr. B, will you tell us the story about how your parents chased the robber out of your house by throwing books at him.”

The kids who had been in that class perked up and nodded assent. One boy asked, “And will you throw a book?”

Fortunately, I was to find out that that wasn’t all they learned back in 7th grade, but I realized then that when we tell stories, the people we’re talking to will remember a whole lot more than 5% of what we say.

I realize it’s been nearly a year since I posted one of my old short stories. Strangely, “This Thing of Darkness” is one of the first I ever posted, back during an older incarnation of this site. It was originally published on a now-defunct online literary journal called TheSoundOfWhat?

I wrote it in 1997 when I was living in south Austin, and it’s a south Austin kind of tale about bad neighbors, roommates and a giant mushroom.

Like many stories, “This Thing of Darkness” contains elements that are based on my own experiences. In this case, the more fantastic elements are the ones I didn’t make up. Everything about the fungus is true.

You can find “This Thing of Darkness”on the Sories & Poems page or link directly from here.

He could not so much see the fish as he knew they were there, surrounding him by the millions. He could not touch them, yet he knew they were as real as the sun behind them. As he fell deeper, the fish began to disappear and he saw stranger and more unsettling things that he could recall no more once they faded from his sight.

He knew he was an intruder in a place he did not belong. So long as no one found out and he was careful, he knew he would make it back to the other side, but for now he was gone. Missing in action and high in love with the nuances of every strange new sensation that gripped him.

Sticking to the dive plan was impossible. He couldn’t remember it anyway. Who knows where a moment will take one in a time of free-fall, when the body and mind wonder at a separate pace, abstractions real and reality a distraction. The only thing that mattered was resurfacing correctly when the time came. Come up slow, he remembered the dive master saying.

His mind raced sluggishly along the bottom. He watched as the blurry tornado of tropical fish was replaced by one of raw motion swimming to and fro in distinct packets for which he could find no name.

When he looked up through the clear water he saw every star ever recorded shimmering above the watery ceiling, and he alone beneath them. He released more air, negating his bouancy, and dropped again ever farther into the unfathomable deep, searching for the bottom.

It amazed him how much there was to see, how much he had not known.

We have a guest speaker program at school, and last week I was asked to be the guest speaker and give a talk about writing.

I wasn’t sure what to talk about at first, but then I decided that I’d talk about the process of writing and publishing my book, which is what people always want to know about when they find out I’ve written a book (by the way - shameless self-promotion here - feel free to click over to your favorite online bookseller and purchase a copy). That led me to thinking about answering some of the questions that my students frequently ask about writing. Such things as: “Where do characters come from?” and  ”How do you make up your stories?”

I decided to talk mostly about making up stories and thought it would be useful (and hopefully entertaining) to read a short story I’d written and then use that as a frame of reference for discussing how a story develops.

The story I chose to read is called “Yawgoog.” I wrote it during the summer of 2000, and it was published in The Sound Of What?, a now vanished online literary journal/community. “Yawgoog” is about two boys who find a bunch of money out in the woods near a Boy Scout camp.

My short stories sometimes originate in real life, little moments that emerge from memory, scenes vividly recalled years later. I sometimes tell my students to try starting their stories with the everyday moments that they all know from firsthand experience and then build the story around those things. The story doesn’t have to be true; it just has to feel that way.

That’s how “Yawgoog” started. While watching an electrical strom come in one day a few summers back, I remembered another summer day, long ago, when I was in Boy Scouts. I was at summer camp, out on the pond in a canoe, or maybe a row boat, just drifting and fishing with a friend named John. An electrical storm suddenly appeared and we had to head in fast. We couldn’t make it to the docks so we put in at the nearest land, which was away from the camp and waited out the storm. It didn’t last long and when it moved out, we went back to the camp. End of story.

The scene was vivid in my mind: two guys on a canoe outrunning a storm. Generally, when I think of scenes like this I write the scene as it appeared or felt at the time, but then I usually people them with invented characters. So I wrote the scene and got to know the characters in the canoe. The storm cames up, they paddle to shore and while waiting out the storm, one of them notices an old trash bag. I was as surprised as they were when a whole bunch of money fell out of that bag, but I ran with it, asking myself what these guys would do. That wondering about what they would do with it ultimately became the point of the story. Enjoy.

“Yawgoog”

The paddle cut easily through the water, and the canoe thrust forward a few feet, as silent as a shark. The sun was high, but the air already held the vague promise of coming fall. A gentle wind blew through the trees that surrounded the scout camp on the shore of the small pond. I set the paddle across the aluminum hull and stared out over the glassy surface of the water. Closer to the shore a small fleet of dinghies set sail as boys learned the art of running and tacking. Other than the sailboats, our canoe was the only other boat out. My friend Alexander, who was sitting in the front of the canoe, and I had lost interest in scouts years ago, but we went to camp and we fished and walked around the edges of the small pond while the younger and more eager boys attended to the business of earning merit badges.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, while driving down North Lamar, I came to the light at Airport and rolled to a stop. In front of me, a well used Toyota (I think, but we’ll call it that nonetheless) vibrated in time to the thumping bass within.

As I sat there waiting for the light to change, mentally reviewing the long list of errands I had to run, I noticed that the back end of the Toyota was slowly rising. I’ve seen plenty of rides (though I had thought this was just a car rather than a ride) pimped out with hydraulics so this wasn’t anything special. Not yet.

Once the back end of the car had reached its summit, the trunk popped open. Now fascinated, I found myself gawking and wondering what could be trying to escape from that trunk. Garish red light bathed the interior and before I could ask myself why the trunk needed to be filled with red light – or any light for that matter – I noticed that a pair of neon tubes affixed to the inside of the lid were the source of that light.

The lid continued to rise until it was fully open at which point I could see that the tubes were not meant to illuminate, but rather to enlighten. It was a sign. Actually a number. 52.

I stared at it for some time trying to think of all the 52’s I could. Cards in a deck. Weeks in a year. After going two and out and still pondering it when I got home, I checked Wikipedia and found that 52 also represents the number of white keys on a piano, the atomic number of tellurium, and the international direct dial code for calling Mexico.

Whatever it was, the stoplight turned green, the trunk closed, the Toyota jacked back down, and we drove our separate ways with my life having been made just a bit more surreal. Perhaps the owner of the car was helping to keep Austin weird or maybe I was just the random victim of a drive-by numbering.

I don’t write autobiography or memoir, but I often use real events as a start point for my fiction. I’m sure most writers do. Sometimes memories come floating along without context, without rational explanation, they’re just there, triggered by a smell, a sight, a feeling, the minutiae of life. These pictures appear vivid, bright as day, begging to be recorded and then they’re gone like waves receding from shore.

“Treading Water” came about as a sort of experiment in capturing these memories. I wanted to take a collection of scenes and connect them not so much through narrative, but rather through context, jumping from one to another the way the mind wanders in those wonderful moments of quiet reflection.

I decided to use scenes that take place near the ocean. I started writing the memories as they came without knowing how or if I would connect them. Eventually a story of two people standing on a beach watching the waves roll in emerged, and it became the frame for the scenes I ultimately decided to include.

I think it plays out sort of like a short film or a prose poem.

Here’s the link: “Treading Water”

Enjoy.

Update: It’s now been added below the fold on this post. Enjoy

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve now added “Meat and Potatoes” to the stories and poems page. It’s pretty funny. Feel free to comment here if you like.

Here’s a bit of background:

I originally wrote this as part of my application to NYU’s film school. They wanted a story about gluttony. I sent them a story about giant hamburgers in a Texas BBQ joint. I don’t know what they thought of it, but after choking in my interview, they wait-listed me and then accepted me a few months later. By that time, I was working in the Austin film scene and leaving to rack up huge student loan debts wasn’t so appealing anymore. When I finally did go to grad school at UT, I rewrote the story into its present state for a writing seminar. The teacher, a serious and talented writer named Zulfikar Ghose, asked me to read this to the class at the end of one meeting. I read it, wondering why he had selected this one. By the end, everyone was laughing and Ghose was in tears from laughing so hard. Over the next few semesters, it wasn’t uncommon to be approached by people who were in that class and would laugh when they saw me and reminisce about the day I made Ghose cry.

Enjoy.

Update: It’s now also below the fold on this post

Read the rest of this entry »

As part of my site redesign, I’m reposting all the short stories I had up on the old site, but because of some reformatting, I’m doing them one at a time and adding some commentary about them as well. I’m starting with “Kimberly Road” because it seems to get the most traffic. It comes up when people ask Google or Jeeves how to compose blues songs, which surprises me. But it is about the blues, so I guess it fits.

The idea for “Kimberly Road” came to me as I was driving from Dallas to Austin back in 1994. I was listening to a Lightnin’ Hopkins CD and the story just started forming. It was one of those instances where I stepped on the gas to hurry home and get to my computer while the story was still coming together in my head. I worked on it for a few days, and the day I finished turned out to be a good day. It was the day I met a woman who would introduce me to one of her co-workers whom I would eventually marry.

I picked the story up a few years later and re-wrote the character of Jake, basing him heavily on a man with whom I worked for a short time. His name was Willie and almost everyday he’d say, “Now see here young man, der’s two kindsa people out there. Them that’s happy at home, and them that ain’t. Them that ain’t is about ten percent and they like to make ever’body else unhappy. So you got to watch out for that other ten percent, see?” Everyday. Some days it would go up to 20%, but usually it hovered around ten.

Update: The story is also on this post below the fold

Read the rest of this entry »