JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: The Old Brag of My Heart

by Chelsea Voulgares

English Department - Marting Hall
 Baldwin-Wallace University.

Imagine a nineteen-year-old woman at a music conservatory twenty minutes from Cleveland. In high school, she wanted to grow up to be a high school choir director. This girl sings, dates a saxophone player, and pulls her kinky hair back into a ponytail most days to straighten it. Her dad works as a fireman and her mom as an office assistant in a rubber factory. She has a problem: she can’t play the piano and her sight-reading is lousy, so for the first time in her life she’s getting Cs. The education classes make her miserable too. She imagines (and dreads) a future where she’s a mediocre choir teacher who pretends to believe in God and acts as if she enjoys parent-teacher conferences. She panics.

Her parents divorce, the saxophonist dumps her, and as she tries to figure out what the hell to do with her quickly dissolving dreams, she picks up The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Plath is also young and dumb and full of glumness. The young woman chases Plath with Wuthering Heights, like a morbid gin and tonic, and these two books about young women in crisis, trying to make their way in the world, offer her a lifeline. She drops out of the music school and enrolls as an English major.

This young woman was me, of course. I’m not one of those writers who composed a novel when I was ten. I wanted to be a writer as a kid, sure. I also wanted to be an astronaut, a ballerina, a marine biologist. Kids want to be and do everything. The act of reading has always been important to me, though, and in that moment early in college, as my life seemed to be falling apart (in a very mundane way—let’s not be dramatic), I connected to literature in a way that clearly meant stories were an essential part of who I was and have become.

A year later I started writing poetry, in love with poets such as W.B. Yeats, Plath (again), and Sharon Olds. The poetry stunk. But in the way of early twenty-somethings, I thought it was amazing. I was an artist! I would be a star!

Luckily, because fame and fortune would not be an immediate outcome of my fledgling attempts at poetry, I also felt a deep connection with the teachers who guided me. I wanted to be like them; I decided to get a master’s degree in English literature. In my Master’s program, I read more books that would change me. These, too, would become an integral part of how I viewed the world: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, Audre Lorde’s Zami, as well as the poems of Adrienne Rich and Charles Bukowski.

Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” As a black man who lived through the civil rights movement Baldwin faced a specific pain I will never know as a white woman. But I do think Baldwin’s quote is universal; as writers we all experience death, disappointment, heartbreak, and joy. We read to see those experiences acted out, to identify and empathize with them, and then, if we are lucky we synthesize them, and we create our own art.

I ultimately decided not to pursue a Ph.D., and faced with what was already a substantial pile of student loans, I entered the work force. I moved to Chicago a month before 9/11, having followed a grad school boyfriend to the city. Unable to find a job, I spent most of the time drinking heavily and playing the Sims. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that relationship ended. I started temping to pay rent, and was hired by the company I still work for.

Finally, in the attic apartment I shared with a bike messenger/bassist friend, I began to write fiction. At first my stories were self-obsessed. Every character was a stand-in for me. Each plot involved some personal problem: a lost friend, an ex, a personal failure. But I took workshops, and I kept reading, and over the years I developed a sense of how to craft a story. I examined all the Plath and Hurston and Bukowski, and I formed it into my voice. Instead of merely being a reflection of myself, my stories started to become part of a conversation. I’m still learning, of course. I’m still reading.

To become a writer is to enter a community, to add your thoughts, ideas, and voice to an ever-growing discussion of what it means to be human. I’m in my forties now and wear my hair wild whenever I can. I live in my own bungalow just west of Chicago with my partner of ten years and four pet catfish. I’ve published a few stories and hope to publish more.

Right now, a book sits face down on my desk, and in front of me, a laptop with a mint green cover. Each day, I work here in my office to insure my words are part of this great conversation. I can only hope as I progress in my art, that I honor the young woman who all those years ago opened up The Bell Jar and found understanding and purpose.

Midnight Walk, 1993

We are in a football town in Ohio, where the boys hug toy pigskins in their hospital cribs, the girls are all cheerleaders, and the hard slap of hand against leather matches the chill touch in the fall air. Around the curve of this road is a driveway, marked by a keep out sign, covered with pentagrams, inverted crosses. We coast up to it in Donnie’s beater. Turn off the headlights. The street turns darker than any I’ve ever seen.

We should go home, I say. Donnie shakes his head. We’ve already dared each other, this time and before, and he’s eager; rumor has it that the dirt drive we face leads to an abandoned house, all crumbling rafters, black mold, and sacrifice. We can’t leave the car here in the road, I say, so he turns the engine back on, and parks right next to the sign…

Excerpt from the flash piece “Midnight Walk, 1993” – Full text appears in Midwestern Gothic, Issue 22 (Summer 2016)

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Chelsea Voulgares lives in the Chicago suburbs and is the editor of the literary journal Lost Balloon. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Passages North, Cheap Pop, Midwestern Gothic, Literary Orphans, The Millions, Punchnel’s, and Bust, and has been awarded grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. You can find her online at chelseavoulgares.com or on Twitter @chelsvoulgares.

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: You Should Be Writing Aka Get Your Ass in the Chair

by Ashley Perez

Last night, I finally put together a rough draft I’ve been writing for over four years. I’ve been writing bits and pieces of this essay and felt that the parts were there, but were all over the place. There were so many things stopping me from sitting down and pulling the pieces together.

On my journey as a writer, I come up against the same two problems repeatedly and every time I work on a new piece, they still surprise me when they show up.

Get your ass in the chair:

This one is about feeling awful. I am writing an intensely personal essay that is mining some painful memories. I didn’t want (still don’t) to feel what thinking of those memories brings up. The problem with not writing to avoid this pain is that the thing that makes you need to write this essay is going to sit heavy in your stomach and hurt as much until you sit in the muck and write it anyway.

You should be writing:

This is the conundrum of being a writer with a day job. I am far from the first person with this problem, but it’s there (and worthy of its own post really.) This is something I have been thinking of a lot, and an issue I wish more writers would talk about. How does one balance work and writing life in addition to all of the other hats one wears (like parent, partner, etc.)?

My day job involves sitting in front of a computer for most of the day and it is usually the last thing I want to do when I get home. I hear the rebuttal already, why don’t I write longhand, revise, etc.? Well most of the time, my energy and will are depleted.  

Is there a solution?

This is tricky. Sometimes you have to just write anyway and ignore these reasons. It could be similar to how I feel about going to the gym. I go kicking and screaming the whole way, but once I get it done I feel better. If you’re lucky, you’ll have one (or more) person to push you to do it regardless. It won’t feel great during the process, but if you’re like me, you live for the feeling of completion.

On the other hand, you have to respect your limitations and respect what your body and brain are trying to tell you.

I don’t think these issues ever really go away, but we find ways to deal with them. I am always interested in hearing about yours.

Read a recently published story by Ashley at Lost Balloon (March 1, 2017) : The Iridescence of Our Sins

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Photo of Ashley Perez

by Rachael Warecki/

Camera RAW Photography

Ashley Perez lives, writes, and causes trouble in Los Angeles. She has a strong affinity for tattoos, otters, cat mystery books, and actual cats, but has mixed feelings about pants. You can find her on Twitter at @ArtsCollide.

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: Chasing the Past

by Tyrese Coleman

In elementary school, I won a medal as my first and only writing prize. I had created a picture book called Shirley’s Blocks about a girl named Shirley who wished for a set of blocks for her birthday. Or, maybe it was Christmas—plot is not within reach of my memory right now. Although I don’t think it is as important as what I do remember, such as the bright lights of my classroom, the comforting isolation of concentration while coloring in a green turtle or tracing my careful and deliberate penciled lettering with a black pen, the shadow of my body hovered over the white paper as I positioned the turtle next to Shirley, a little black girl with long hair, holding a red block. This is my earliest writing memory.

I named her Shirley after my aunt, my father’s sister. My mom and dad were never married and had me at a young age, my mom 17 and my dad 20. I must’ve seen my Aunt Shirley the weekend before I wrote the story. My parents shipped me back and forth on the weekends, and I lived mostly with my great-aunt on my mother’s side the rest of the week. My Aunt Bee Bee woke me for school in the mornings, helped me get dressed, fed me breakfast or gave me money to eat it at school, made sure I was outside waiting for the bus, especially on cold mornings when the warmth from the kerosene heater reached the far edges of the house and into my bedroom, the comfort of the bed I shared with her more enticing than those bright classroom lights waiting for me beyond the hour bus ride.

I was to receive my award at a large, fancy ceremony at what used to be called The Mosque in Richmond, Virginia, but is now called Altria Theater. I wore an uncomfortable velvet dress and white tights. I’m not sure how the ceremony was explained to my mother, but she was not in a rush to get me there. We arrived late, very late, and as we ascended the stairs to where the usher told us to go, we met my teacher. My memory flickers here, like an old-time movie with scratches and ticks and skips. In the way of my understanding what happened is the lingering confusion of a seven-year-old who only knows that she was supposed to walk up to a stage, have a medal threaded with a satin sash placed around her neck, and be told that her book was the best in front a crowd.

 

But in between those scratches and ticks and skips of memory, I recognize, now thirty years mature, the glance of irritation from my teacher sliced toward my mother’s direction. This look in my now adult mind reads as some expectation of disappointment, and I think my teacher probably wished I’d come from a different home, a different family, one with a better sense of haste, with parents who weren’t children themselves. I’d missed my award. Missed the whole damn thing.

My teacher had my book. I had not seen the final product. It was perfectly bound and laminated with my drawings of Shirley and her blocks. I don’t know if I cried or not. I think I must have because I still carry with me the disappointment and anger from this moment, conflated by the raw eagerness of childhood emotions still worming through my psyche.

My journey across planet write is circuitous, where I am always chasing this memory and the feelings from it, hoping that when it comes back around again, I can smother it, erase it, make it flick and fade away with the joy I get from writing and sharing my work with others now. And then other times, when that rotation comes back around and I am forced into that sadness I associate with some of childhood and with using that childhood to express myself, I deliberately wallow inside the dark lines of the flickered memories, wanting to root and curl up in those feelings that make the stories I tell real. I return to the comforting isolation of concentration, the hovering shadows my body makes as I crouch over my laptop or journal, choosing each word deliberately, hoping to tell the story of little black girls who look like me, who remind me of my Aunt Shirley, who are as special to me as those women who woke me in the mornings for school and who made me miss my medal, because, without them, my first writing memory would not have so much power. And I want my writing to have power.

Here is a story by Tyrese Coleman:

Prom Night

Outside fogging car windows, empty parking lot lights glowed like part of a fairy world Keisha wasn’t allowed in. X, still wearing his tux, passed the blunt toward the front seat to his boy dressed in a white tee; he hadn’t gone to prom. The radio played 90s hip-hop—money, cash, hos, moneycashhos—they rapped along. The fairies outside her window were blond and pristine with stars for eyes and gold-coin titties. Could heavy-breasted black girls be fairies? Nah—her magic was lost at ten when her mother’s boyfriend fingered her, taken when men at her grandmother’s house parties grabbed her, made her sit on their hard laps and bounced, bounced, bounced her soft baby-girl body against dirty construction clothes rotten from sour Wild Irish Rose. Gave the magic away at fourteen to an older boy who said he loved her. What else was she supposed to do with it? So, did it matter if she let these boys have some of it too? Did it matter if they laid her flat, pressed her face against the blue leatherette seat, did a Chinese fire drill around the car to switch places when the first was done, high-fiving on the way around like teammates through an obstacle course, while Keisha suffocated silently until every drop of any magic she’d ever had was gone?

She sucked the fat brown tube when the blunt came her way. Her fingertips tingled unpleasantly. She shivered in the boiling car. X said her hands were cold. He kissed her. It was messy despite his soup coolers, wet, his breath tasting of stale cigars and McDonald’s chicken nuggets. Keisha and X were alphas: smart, popular, college bound. His friend, she couldn’t remember his name, was the Nobody, the Dope Boy, the Sidekick. Nobody was the poor kid the hot guy friended in elementary school, or his cousin he shared sloppy seconds with.

Nobody faced the steering wheel while Keisha and X kissed. She sensed Nobody’s hard-on, lingering in the air with the weed smoke. What did he think? That this is how it happens in pornos, his anticipation a tight spring before release? She knew nothing about him, and his power scared her. X pulled away. Nobody faced Keisha. She stared at her shoes.

Nobody got out of the car—was it too late to say no? X massaged up her thigh. She looked over the front seat through the windshield to a haze of black, golden darkness, like Christmas, wishing she could fade into the land of the little white fairies, fly into the iris of a glowing dot of light between dark trees with notched, shadowy holes. Be magical, like what she’d dreamed this night would be.

The headlights of a security service car turned a corner, tiger eyes burning brightly. Nobody jumped into the front seat, turned the engine over, and drove off. The boys wanted to park somewhere else, roll a new blunt, drink more beer, listen to more music, and run a train on her.

But—the engine’s vibration. The car’s motion. The taste of open air, fresh air—warm, spring air struggling to breathe while summer sits on its face—the taste, the caress over her bare shoulders and open toes. A spell broke. She made them stop the car. Eyelids half-shut, she walked home in her slinky dress, her pumps glittering an unearthed enchantment across the blacktop.

Originally published by Stoneslide Corrective, May-June 2016

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Tyrese L. Coleman is a writer, wife, mother, and 

attorney. She is also the fiction editor for District Lit, and an associate editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. A 2016 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and a nonfiction scholar at Virginia Quarterly Review's 2016 Writer’s Conference, her prose has appeared in several publications, including PANK, Day One, Buzzfeed, Brevity, The Rumpus, Hobart, listed in Wigleaf's Top 50 (very) short fictions, and forthcoming at The Kenyon Review. She can be reached at tyresecoleman.com.