Category Archives: writing

We’re All We Have

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In yesterday’s AWA workshop, Kathleen Olesky supplied a Langston Hughes poem entitled Tired as a prompt.

Will 50 million protest this weekend? 70 million? If we are all we have, it had better be a good showing — the signs held high, rage surging on the street. We are all we have, our signs, our rage, our collective refusal to go along.

Let us take a knife and slit the skin somewhere obvious, but not life-threatening. Let us then watch vermilion beads of blood form along the edge of our self-inflicted wound. And then let us turn toward a person near, not unlike those handshaking mandates issued from the pulpit, introduce yourself, offer a greeting of peace, except this time let 25 million people turn to the other 25 million people and take blood oaths — “We swear we will not lie down in defeat. We swear fealty to each other. We swear fierce loyalty to our discernment, to our bones filled with the marrow of justice. We let our lungs breathe in freedom, which resides somewhere in our atmosphere, and likely somewhere reachable.”

Our blood-sealed oaths will signal a willingness to protect one another, to go the distance, to scar the skin in service of a better America, an America ready to be restored and go not one, two, or five, but 10 times further in the departments of honest tolerance and government that serves all.

The vermillion beads of blood will not lie, they cannot. Neighbor, put your sign down for one minute and trust my blood as I shall trust yours. We swear. We swear not to give up.

“Is it time for the tar and feathers,” asks one purveyor of the early history of our revolution. Is Renee Nicole Good like the fallen Bostonians of 1770, five of them, whose arbitrary and unfair deaths at the hands of a tyrant’s occupying force triggered the revolution and made Thomas Paine write the pamphlets that ignited the populace to take up arms?

We are all we have both inspires and terrifies.

Five years after the Boston Massacre, which was hardly a massacre but certainly what we would today call a mass shooting, five years later, a resolution was put forth. Thomas Jefferson wrote it. “The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.” That was 1775. Now 251 years later we ask, we wonder, must we also take up arms? Is that what it will take to redress our grievances, to act in defense of freedom?

I still can’t quite see it, but I can easily imagine canceled midterms and maybe a rerun of Jan 6, this time with rainbow-striped flags.

I am so tired of waiting and wondering how this is all gonna turn out. The ancient political scientist online piping up,“we won’t recover from Donald Trump.” The Canadians on my feed screaming, “Don’t just complain do something!“ causes a private smile at the not very funny circumstance of an insane tyrant, shitting all over America and our allies being what it takes to crack that polite Canadian veneer.

But nothing is funny about this. The stakes are too high. He cannot be allowed to attack Greenland, can he? Little Pixie Speaker of the House says of the Venezuela bombings and abductions (practically under his breath and walking away, always walking away from the cameras), “It’s inappropriate.“

Inappropriate? Is that what we’re calling lawless violent tyranny now?

But honestly, that he said anything even mildly opposed to his Dear Leader shocked me, so complete has been his subjugation. Lindsay Graham crawled out of hiding. Where has he been? Speaking of unabashed Dear Leader recitals. I didn’t remember what an awful bite he has and here I refer to his teeth and jaw, not his powers to menace.

In other news, we can drink again and eat all the meat we want again as long as it’s organic. Things are upside down. So does that mean we can be fat and drunk when the measles rash erupts on chest and neck?

There’s nothing funny about this. We are all we have. I don’t have time to read about how this absolute firestorm of destruction has been decades in the making. No. No. Just swear to me, let our forearm blood, smeared one on the other, act as a pledge that says we are not finished.

The moral arc may have long ago snapped, but it doesn’t mean we are done. Let us become good and kind. Let us become good and kind, even in the face of illegitimate and rampant destruction. Let us breathe and bleed and resume carrying our signs even if we can’t quite believe that that is what it will take.

Later, I will sit down on a bench in Boston Common in view of The Embrace and eat an orange I quartered before leaving the house because no matter what, oranges are tasty in the winter.

There are no worms eating at the rind, no dessication, no mold – just sweet and juicy fruit that eats like sunshine.

Because I’m not actually recounting the events of the day here is a link to a Threads account that does so.

Writing Prompts — 1/26

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These are fragments of other writers’ responses to prompts in my workshops. All used with permission.

Feel free to pick one and write for thirty minutes with the words as a starting place.

Things were popping off outside. OV

Grief is for amateurs.   CC

She thought of herself as alluring.   MT

I hate games and the wine was terrible.   MR

before all the trouble started…   MT

We were worried she might come undone.   LT

Perhaps your scars define who you are.   OV

I guess anything can be professionalized.   CC

The emptiness of the streets surprised me.   SH

I want my own climate zone.   CC

Some ugly quilt fabrics hurt the eye, even hurt the soul.   OV

… all the things you need to do to get out the door…   MT

_____________ makes me feel normal again. I am not normal.   SH

Everything fluctuates — markets, marriages.   CC

… and then I learned baker’s math.   LT

 

Rant/Lament 11/20/25

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When the fence goes up, jackhammering can’t be far away

This piece was written to a prompt in an AWA workshop about two weeks ago. Is it a rant or a lament? You decide.

The squirrels can have my edits. Torn, tossed, soggy with rain or blown by bitter autumn winds, I don’t care. You didn’t believe me, did you? Fine. Continue. Square the circle, whatever that means, and purge. Continue the scrabble. No nest-making now, but nest-undoing. You thought you knew me, but you didn’t. And anyway, I ran away. Chicken bones near the curbs — evidence of unruly neighbors. Pork cutlet remains, too. Who eats a cutlet in the car and then tosses the bone out the window? It’s as astonishing as it is common.

Another page, another paragraph. Can I run screaming from the room now? He’s defeated. Wilted and decomposing before our very eyes, but still entrenched. The paralysis of immorality must be overcome. My toes are numb. I can walk. I can climb stairs. But it is hard for me to put on my sneakers. Hard to shove the lower veggie drawer closed with my right foot. I have to stop and think: “Not right foot. Left.” Marching orders. Unanimous consent. A disappointed pixie. Short jokes from someone 4’11”? I’ll take them! Like the one about a good snowstorm in Chicago swallowing Bovino whole. Lake-effect weather vs. a little beast in tactical gear. Who knew whistles on neck ropes would become essential urban wear and PS not purchased from Target or Amazon? Costco delivers, I’ve discovered. Two shirts on their way. Somehow I don’t have many long-sleeved shirts anymore. Not sure how that happened. When is the BIG BOYCOTT by the way? “The Big Boycott” sounds like a federal bill or a boy band. Because we’re out of food. I’ll cook up cabbage remnants with red onion. Open a can of chic peas. Or something. In case today is a day not to shop. Nov 20.

Have you noticed the banners on Amazon? No, of course not. You’ve quit Jeff Bezos and good for you! The banners read BLACK FRIDAY WEEK. How to erode traditions and gut meaning, calendars, and sense with greed. Can’t wait to see the Met Gala this year. Maybe Lauren will show up wearing a fig leaf and nothing else. Betty Boop pumps and a black lace jumpsuit (unlined) will not do. Are long-sleeved shirts like socks now — vanishing into an inaccessible alternate universe? I’d like to go home, whatever that means. Years versus preference. For instance, I like the Berkshires and haven’t lived there for more than forty years. We were talking about boycotts and now all I can think about is Brodie Mountain Road, how it curved up and over and then down to home. THAT home. The one I lived in for all of a year, so make that  make sense.

Shit in the attic. Shit in the basement. But only a few long-sleeved shirts and by the way most of the ones that remain are pink. How did THAT happen? “Love is as essential as air.” Who said that? Seriously, do you know who said that?

There’s peanut butter in the house. We won’t go hungry. Oh, and ravioli in the basement fridge. How bad can things be with peanut butter in the cupboard and ravioli in the fridge? Costco ravioli, it should be said. I put the pasta on a waist-high shelf so I wouldn’t have to bend and open a drawer or think about which foot to slide it shut with.

It’s cold out there and I don’t want to walk the dog but will. Walking the dog is one of those things that keeps me whole, offers up a physical prayer to the neighborhood, as if showing up on the streets religiously says, “Here we are world, making the rounds, grateful to be alive even with the detritus of pork bones and yet another house being torn down.”

“Another House Being Torn Down” could be the caption for my town. One chapter would be about the buildings coming down and another about the buildings taking their place. Generally: no traditional roof lines, no color, ugly siding. It’s a thing. A style? I call it “Dentist Office Chic” because that’s what these oversized homes look like — office buildings. It must be cheaper to skimp on clapboard and angled eaves because, you know, greed. Even if this town had felt like home before, the furiously noisy pace of tear downs and the questionable taste of their looming replacements would make me a stranger here.

Flash fiction — Priscilla

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Old collage : paper

This piece of flash fiction was written in class last week. The prompt was a few lines from a poem, describing the heart.

Priscilla — woman who dies; mother of Jeffrey

Jeffrey — estranged son of Priscilla, married to Nancy.

An unnamed dog

Unnamed EMTs

*** ***

It is a pump, a muscle, a churning engine, delivering blood and oxygen. The tasty foods of a lifetime line its pipes with plaque. Genetics has a hand. One day it will seize and though she expected it, its refusal to continue will shock her.

No tunnels of light. No slideshow of memory. Just a clamping pressure that will not let her breathe. No more breath.

Lying on the floor, clutching her shoulder, there will be no one near to offer compressions, no paramedic with electric paddles to try and shock that muscle back into a working rhythm.

Her last thought was typical of her — criticism, bordering on complaint. She thought, I wish this would go a little faster.

The silence that follows her last breath is not golden, secret, rich, or even personal. It’s a blank page that is not in a hurry. Whether another actor comes along with ink and turmoil isn’t of any concern to the blank page – it could hold its absences indefinitely.

But a dog climbs up the stairs. Noses the body in desperate repetition. He howls. He howls and a little spit lands on the face of his friend. She does not move, his friend.

By the time any human notices that Priscilla is gone, her body will be cold and past rigor mortis. Had she been alive to count the endless hours, she’d have felt a mighty sense of grievance, but since grievance is allotted only to the living, the discovery of her body is a mechanical matter. Not her business. Doctor to pronounce death, certified documents to be signed, the gurney to be hoisted up the narrow, definitely not-to-code staircase.

“At least she’s not a 300-pounder,” one of the EMTs remarks. A Worcester pick up the prior weekend had necessitated employing extra hands, revving up the extra wide van, and hauling out the reinforced gurney. Some people impose all manner of inconvenience, even after they’re gone.

No, Priscilla (they’ve been trained to avoid calling corpses “it” or “the body”), no, Priscilla is a scrawny old bird and all of the men secretly wonder how a heart attack felled one so rail thin.

Priscilla is incinerated according to her wishes. The son she hadn’t talked to in 13 years took care to contact the life insurance company and a realtor days before he arranged to turn her into ash.

Making her wait satisfied him. Being in charge of her body felt like retribution, one that offered scant justice, but justice nonetheless. She waited in one of those stainless steel, chilled drawers at the morgue.

While on hold with State Street Bank, Jeffrey, though not given to thinking abstractly, thought that a cramped and chilly dark drawer was a pretty good metaphor for his childhood.

Will he tell Nancy about the metaphor when he gets back to Houston? No. No. Because she would then insist on details and when your survival strategy has been to move on, never look back, supplying metaphorical details is not in your playbook.

But being in Priscilla’s house, talking to her insurance agent, her estate planner, and going through her papers and drawers makes his blank-slate-approach unworkable. Unworkable. He will have to confront his past whether he likes it or not and his stupid belief that all the hundreds of thousands of dollars coming his way would offer a kind of balancing pleasure was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Rabbit holes and synchronicity

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One of the best aspects of writing historic fiction is going down rabbit holes. Hey! It’s research! And, since you never know what information is gonna turn out to be important, no rabbit hole is too weird.

For instance, writing The Weight of Cloth, I found a record of Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s will, which of course listed the enslaved “property“ that she was bequeathing. To see names of people written out like this was one of many moments that drove home the inhumanity of chattel slavery. But also, the testamentary disposition provided me with a list of names, and I used many of them for secondary characters in the book.

In another rabbit hole, I found the terms of Sarah Rutledge’s father’s will, which informed how I crafted her character. These are just two examples.

On Saturday (Nov 8), I found a PhD thesis written by an archaeology student about the Fairbanks household in Dedham, Massachusetts. In it, he mentions that either Ebenezer Fairbanks Senior or Ebenezer Fairbanks Junior (Jason’s father and brother) (or both) enlisted to serve in the Revolutionary War. The very next day on Sunday, the magazine section of The Boston Globe covered Ken Burns’s upcoming documentary about the Revolutionary War. There was mention of an Ebenezer serving. Now his Ebenezer wasn’t from Dedham, but the echo of Ebenezer soldiers in less than 24 hours was a moment of synchronicity that made me sit up and pay attention. Moments like these are always affirming.

So that’s the thing in writing historic fiction — historic fact is both limiting and propulsive.