MY JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: A Way Towards Me

by Christopher Allen

When I was 10, my piano instructor—a dour stickperson named Eva Jo Alpress, who told me I was going to be a concert pianist one day—quit. She “discharged” me in a long, painstakingly written letter that outlined my mother’s shortcomings and mine. I wish I still had the letter. What a gem. While almost all of it is lost, one phrase does resonate down through the decades: “Your son is an arrogant opinionated juvenile.” We had a good laugh at that. Eva Jo certainly had a knack for unwittingly hitting nails on heads. She thought she was telling me what a little dickhead I was, but she was actually telling me that I was a person with something to say. 

The reason Eva Jo discharged me: I wanted to trade études for ABBA. I wanted to play keyboards in a band. It was 1974. I wanted to shake my groove thang. I can still see my teacher’s eyes when I pulled out the sheet music to “Take a Chance on Me.” Horror? Disdain? That moment when you’re not sure if you need to sneeze or vomit? We got the letter the next day. There would be no Good Will Hunting end to the story.

I have to give Eva Jo credit, though, for spotting the truth in this situation. The keyboard part of “Take a Chance on Me” is really easy, especially for a ten-year-old apparently destined for Carnegie Hall. Without the band and a few Swedes “Take a Chance on Me” was boring.

I’m telling you this not only because it’s a fun story, but also because it’s one of a hundred formative experiences that have led me to where I am today: sitting in my office in Munich, writing about writing, wondering who I am. Who knows what moments are more important than others? I was going to be a musician when I was ten. That’s important. I was a little dickhead. That’s also important. In many ways I’m still that little dickhead.

But before all that, I was going to be an oceanographer. I was fascinated by the thought of living on the ocean floor in a never-ending labyrinthine sprawl of modular, pressurized compartments. I expanded my underwater city every day in my third-grade class. I’m sure the drawings were absolute crap. I can’t draw, not even a stickman. Point is, I was obsessed by the idea of slipping myself into a little world—or maybe I just needed to escape to where it was quiet, maybe it was a Jungian thing. I don’t know. I hate the water now, haven’t been swimming in decades. We also drew the flags of the world, which I was much better at.

At university I studied music until the end of my sophomore year when, in the hospital with mononucleosis, I missed my juries and all my finals. I also missed several weeks of my first professional singing gig in a gospel quartet—a ridiculous summer. When I got back on my feet I didn’t want to study music anymore, so I changed majors to music business. All the cool kids were there I guess or maybe just all the kids who understood the worthlessness of a music degree. Maybe both. And, yes, you’ve just noticed that I skipped my entire adolescence. I knew I wouldn’t get away with it. I was hoping you’d ignore the leap, maybe accept the gap, like the lost years of Christ. I find it hard to talk or write about that time. How about we leave it at this: from 1976 to 1982 I spent most of my time hating myself for being gay, praying to be delivered from being gay, and ending up being abused by the minister of music at my church—book forthcoming.

But did those years of depression, suicidal feelings, and fear that someone could figure out who I really was lead me to write? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’ve tried to write that novel several times, and it’s just not happening yet. Sometimes I think all this writing is just practice, that I’m groping around in the dark for the voice that will finally tell my story the right way, that all these stories aren’t me but maybe a way towards me.

At the beginning of the nineties, a very close friend of mine was killed in a plane crash. His death changed my life and my priorities. I moved to Los Angeles to get away from Nashville and the music industry. He’d been a keyboard player for an A-list country singer, and I was a studio singer. Everyone I knew was in the music industry, and it was just too sad. When I later returned to Nashville, I’d decided to become a writer; and because I wasn’t sure what that meant I enrolled in a master’s program to learn everything I didn’t know about literature—because by then I’d figured out that having an opinion about everything was a sure sign that I knew almost nothing. Realizing how little I knew was a giant leap towards understanding myself.

In graduate school, while I was reading everything Henry James wrote, I wrote a screenplay partly about my friend’s death, a poignant road-trip movie in the vein of This-Will-Never-Be-Publishable. Also while in graduate school, I published my first short story, “Air-Conditioned Souls,” which one of my professors said “made no sense.” I also published my first two (and last two) poems: “The End All” and “last night I dreamed we dreamed a poem.”

Then I moved to Germany and spent the following ten years trying to write and rewrite that screenplay. Then I wrote and rewrote a novel manuscript: "The Sure-Shot Rabbit Association." And then I wrote another one: "What You Don’t Know." And another: "Three-Handed Bridge." And another: "Conversations with S. Teri O’Type." And another: "The Lambent Light," finally trying to tackle my own story. And a screenplay manuscript: “Almost Ophelia.” Except for Conversations with S. Teri O’Type, an experimental and episodic work of linked flash fiction that I self-published in 2012, I’ve pretty much walked away from all of these manuscripts. They terrify me because they are not perfect. They are all massive derelict buildings.

At some point in the middle of all these construction sites I joined an online writing workshop called Urbis. What an intense time of learning that was. I remember getting up at 4 a.m. every morning to read and write reviews. That workshop forced me to think about my writing objectively. It taught me to write economically, to write competitively (in a good way), and not to settle for a boring phrase. Lots of stories that I workshopped in Urbis ended up published. Urbis gave me the push I needed towards becoming a writer.

In 2009 I started editing at the daily litzine Metazen and became the managing editor there. Sadly, Metazen came to an end in 2014. In the same year I joined the team at SmokeLong Quarterly. The journal is a big part of my life. When I love a thing, I love it big.

I feel all grown up now, but I still need to disappear into my little worlds. I still feed on sarcasm. I still need music. And I still feel incomplete. So I suppose my Planet Write is some amorphous gas planet or maybe some inchoate hunk of volcanic chaos—very much a work in progress. And that’s fine. I just love being at the party.

Here’s a link to one of Christopher Allen’s award-winning stories:

"Everything We Had"

Semi-finalist for The Best Small Fictions 2017

First published by The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts

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Christopher Allen is a freelance editor, translator and writer living somewhere in Europe. His work has appeared in more than a hundred journals and anthologies both online and in print including Indiana Review, Juked, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and others. He's been a finalist at Glimmer Train, a finalist and semi-finalist for The Best Small Fictions 2017, and he's won some awards too. Allen is the managing editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, the author of the episodic satire Conversations with S. Teri O'Type, and the curator of the travel blog I Must Be Off! which sponsors an annual travel writing competition.

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: From Peanuts to Programming to Plotting

by Sybil Johnson

The first thing I remember wanting to be was a cartoonist. I spent hours drawing the Peanuts gang, copying what I saw every day in the comics of the newspaper, dreaming about creating my own strip one day.

As a kid, I never once thought about writing as a career. Sure, I enjoyed the creative writing assignments in grade school and junior high. I even worked on the school newspaper. But that was only a fun thing to do, not a potential career choice.

Still, the few stories I wrote must have been important to me since I saved them, stashing them away in a box of memorabilia. When I found them recently among the report cards, autograph books and miscellany I’d collected, I discovered I gravitated toward crime stories even then. I remember reading a lot of mysteries, but hadn’t realized I liked to write them as well.

The older of the two stories I found, “Sleepy Toes and Fido,” featured a donkey (Sleepy Toes), a hippie dog (Fido) and a jewelry theft. By the end of the (very) short story, the jewelry had been returned and all was well. The second story, “Murder in Catville,” involved cats, a murder, a ghost, a seance and a secret panel in the wall. At the end, the murderer is caught and peace restored to Catville. Both of these stories end well, so I can see at a young age I was more inclined toward cozies than noir. That’s still true today. Most of the mystery reading and writing I do is on the cozy end of the spectrum, although I occasionally channel my dark side in short stories.

At the time I wrote “Murder in Catville,” my interests had turned to more academic subjects like math and history. When I entered college, I was considering math as a major, but hadn’t fully committed to it. Then, on the campus of the University of Southern California, I discovered Computer Science and fell in love with programming. The major was fairly new at the time (the IBM PC came out the year I graduated) and, as you might guess, male-dominated. Of the 100 or so students majoring in CS, few of us were female. I don’t remember the exact number, but I think it was around five.

My first job out of college was at Xerox where I worked on software for the 6085 computer system and its predecessor, the Xerox Star, the first commercial system to incorporate technologies such as a bitmapped display, graphical user interface, Ethernet networking, icons, folders and a mouse.

It was an exciting and fun time. I consider myself fortunate to have worked with and been around so many talented people and to have been involved with such cutting edge technology. Over the years, I worked on a number of other projects in various roles—programmer, software development manager, technical program manager. The only writing I did during this time was technical documentation.

Fast forward twenty years. I woke up one morning with the image of a young woman finding the body of her painting teacher in her garden. That image stuck in my brain and wouldn’t go away. I was coming to the end of a contract and looking for a new challenge. Even though I’d always thought writing a mystery would be too hard, I decided to give it a shot. I pulled up my big girl pants, sucked in my breath and plunged in.

It hasn’t been an easy path. I lost track of the number of times I considered quitting. But, every time I thought about it, something inside me urged me to keep writing. I kept on reminding myself I was learning a new skill. It would take time.

I wrote, took a couple online courses on writing mysteries and wrote some more. I was ecstatic when I got an Honorable Mention in a Writer’s Digest short story contest and over the moon when my first short story was published.

While I was writing short stories, I was also working on the idea that had got me started down this path in the first place. I wrote a version of the book, decided it wasn’t good enough, and started over again. Ten or fifteen years later, I felt I had something a publisher might find interesting. In 2013, I attended the California Crime Writers conference, a mystery writer’s convention that I had co-chaired in 2011. There I met the managing editor of Henery Press. After some modifications, they expressed an interest in buying the story and the Aurora Anderson mystery series was born. The first book, Fatal Brushstroke, was published in 2014 followed by Paint the Town Dead and the recently published A Palette for Murder.

I still find writing hard, the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But it’s also the most rewarding. The satisfaction I get from crafting a story out of thin air more than makes up for the difficulty.

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After a rewarding career in the computer industry, Sybil Johnson turned to a life of crime writing. Her short fiction has appeared in Mysterical-E and Spinetingler Magazine among others. She wields pen and paint brush from her home in Southern California where she writes the Aurora Anderson mystery series set in the world of tole/decorative painting (Fatal Brushstroke, Paint the Town Dead and the recently published, A Palette for Murder). Visit her at www.authorsybiljohnson.com or check out Type M for Murder (typem4murder.blogspot.com) where she posts every other Wednesday.

_______________________________

Sybil Johnson is a member of the Los Angeles chapter of Sisters in Crime.

California Crime Writers Conference 2017

June 10 & 11, 2017 (Saturday & Sunday)

At DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Los Angeles - Westside,
6161 West Centinela Avenue, Culver City, California 

Sisters in Crime/Los Angeles and SoCal Mystery Writers of America invite emerging and established mystery writers for a weekend of invaluable guidance, insight, and community at the 2017 California Crime Writers Conference. Whether your novel is brewing in your imagination, ready to publish, or you already have several published books under your belt, our workshops, presented by agents, editors, award-winning authors, and crime investigation professionals, are geared to elevate your mystery writing skills and foster relationships on your path to publication and beyond. 

http://www.ccwconference.org

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: Of Produce & Poetry

by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

I was a 14-year-old male. Which is to say: I was an asshole.

I was also working my first job as clean up boy of the Produce Place, a small grocer in my hometown of Nashville, TN. And I was doing a lousy job.

My mopped floors were dirtier than those unmopped. I could clean a clean window dirty in seconds. Flies were multiplying like flies.

What can I say? I was making $3.15 an hour, I was more interested in Amanda Hardaway’s hair than cleaning floors, and I was a 14-year-old male, which is to say…

So the boss, this dude named Steve who lived at the top of the hill south of my house and who’d tried to date my older sister a few times and whose kid brother, Chris, hadn’t yet died in a tragic accident—Steve approaches me and is like:

Hey. Andy. Can we talk a minute.

Hey. Steve. Uh. Sure.

Uh. OK… So, Andy, you’re doing a shitty job, and you suck overall. Jusy sayin’.

That was the gist of it anyway.

The Produce Place was set in an early 20^th Century bungalow on Murphy Road just off I-40 a ten-minute bike ride from my house. At the time, the entire sales floor consisted of produce bins: four rows of jonagold apples and kiwis and exotic lettuces. All types of beans in the summer. Tomatoes. Tomatoes. Tomatoes. Did I mention tomatoes? And kale. And six different varietals of onion. And cherries. And Rainier cherries. And rainbow chard. And and and.

The Produce Place helped turn around the neighborhood.

Built on a landfill after the Second World War, Nashville’s Sylvan Park of the 80s and early 90s was a ghetto. A neighborhood where men beat their wives and their kids, and their kids went out into the neighborhood to beat each other and to become men. White kids called black kids niggers and black kids called white kids all sorts of shit. Kids smoking dope and kids having kids. That was the law and word of the place.

But the Produce Place was different. The Produce Place was a place where kids could get jobs, where boys becoming men could be rewarded for their bodies rather than punished.

And as the Produce Place went, went the neighborhood.

The Produce Place thrived and so did Sylvan Park. Today, I couldn’t afford my parent’s house, let alone the land it sits on. Today, there are all sorts of jobs available to the kids in the neighborhood. Bars. Restaurants. Lawn care. Baby sitting. Etc. Etc.

Here’s the thing. There are no kids in Sylvan Park. Families with children can’t afford to live there. And if they can, their kids don’t work.

So the Produce Place was the only gig in town. Luckily, I had an in. My sister was one of their first employees. It was only natural I work there when I came of age. But it was also only natural that they demand I do my job. There were plenty of kids who didn't have sister-ins ready to take my spot. If I couldn’t cut it, why keep me around?

One particularly important item on the list of ways I could do a “less shitty job and keep my job” was to “actually sweep up under the goddamn bins” under which rogue fruits and vegetables fell and quickly set up and quickly started attracting “all the fucking flies” that were buzzing around our heads.

So there I was, sweeping under the bins. When I got to the corn bins, out wobbled this old, rotted ear of corn. And as I was looking down at it, mid-sweep, out of nowhere, the line came: “What if I were this piece of corn?” And when that line came to me, I felt compelled to stop my labors and write it down. Thus I pulled out my Sharpie and grabbed the nearest corn crate and upon its surface scribed my line. And the brilliance? The brilliance continued from there.

At the end of it, I had a poem. I had no idea what it was or why I had written it down but there it was in all its awful glory. After that, I was writing poetry. Day in and day out. And I’ve never stopped. 

What I wrote was wonderfully awful then, and what I write is wonderfully awful now. But, for some reason, I keep at it, and it becomes less awful. I’ve tried to quit a few times to no avail. Poetry makes life present. When I’m writing poems, I’m at my best. The rest of the time? I’m alright.

We don’t know why or what we are doing here.

That is why we are here.

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Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is an award-winning freelance editor, writer, and lecturer at the University of Colorado. He is also acquisitions editor for Upper Rubber Boot Books, founder and editor of PoemoftheWeek.org, founder of the Colorado Writers’ Workshop, founder and editor of The Floodgate Poetry Series, and editor of two anthologies. His first book of poems, Ghost Gear, was a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize, the Colorado Book Award, and the INDIEFAB. His second book, Marysarias, is a Finalist for the National Poetry Series, 2016. Read and learn more at AndrewMK.com.