I don't really know how we're going to go about this, so I might as well introduce myself in this first post from me because you're going to be hearing from me throughout the summer.
My name is Adam Walters, I grew up in Las Vegas, served my mission in Sweden, and want to go into writing for older young adults (high school to college age). I'm a senior and if everything goes as planned and nothing too drastic happens I'll be graduating in December. After that I'll be going to a graduate program (hopefully). I've been married for a year and a half to my best friend while growing up, and currently the only kid in my life is her pet cat Sam.
To kick this off, here's my response to the writing prompt about cookies. I'm horrible with titles so here it is:
22 Cookies.
Twenty-two cookies. That’s all it was. One cookie on my desk every morning for twenty-two days. I thought that they were the leftovers from my roommates, that they were being nice, or even giving me the last cookie from their personal stash during the night. I am a night person. I am always the last one to fall asleep out of the five guys that I share rent with, but that means that I am the last one to wake up. Somewhere in between the 3:00 bedtime and the 10:30 alarm clock the cookie would appear on my desk.
After seven cookies I asked my roommates who was giving me the chocolate chip cookies. Mark, Seth, Brenton, Spencer, and Robert all said no. Mark lived in the library, Seth was flirting his way through the apartment complex, Brenton was addicted to a TV show and had managed to get to the fifth season in only two weeks, Spencer was Spencer and there was no chance for him, and Robert was too opposed to me to ever consider doing something nice for me. Even with the knock down of each roommate, I gave them the honorary question, and each said no.
Nine days in, and the cookies changed; I started to get Oreos. There was no more home made cookies until days numbers 13-20, and then I got swapped back to store bought for the last two days. After twenty-two days, and twenty-two cookies, it had become a morning ritual. My alarm clock would ring and make me want to punch a hole through the wall, but then I would move my hand eight inches to the right and find my morning pick me up. Some people stick with coffee, others have their morning Coke, but I had my morning cookie. That morning cookie was the beginning of a good day. That cookie would swap my mood from wanting to pro-wrestle body slam the first person I saw off of the balcony, to only wanting to trip anyone I saw with a rolling backpack or Heelies; but that’s normal even for the best of my days, there’s nothing that can fix a hatred that deep.
Twenty-two cookies, and then one note with one picture.
Twenty two cookies from her? I didn’t understand how she could do it. There was the obvious problem of distance. She was two time zones away. She couldn’t just drop by my place and place a cookie on my desk every morning. Then came the question of the logistics. 22 cookies, most of them fresh and home made, delivered nightly, through my apartment without any of the other guys noticing.
Then there was the hand written note. It was a loopy handwriting that I could identify without looking at the picture. It was simple note. In a sad moment of manhood after reading it I might have shed a small, microscopic, completely unnoticeable, hardly worth mentioning tear when I read it.
I love you.
Three simple words that could pack so much power. Three words and I was transported to going out with her, eating dinner with her, and seeing her smiling face and hearing what I thought was a perfect voice every night before I went to sleep. Three words. I had heard them before, but on that little yellow sticky note on the picture of her it was the first time that I had felt them in a long time. Girlfriends had told me those words before, there was even the man love between roommates, but that sticky note was the first time since I was away from home that I knew someone meant it.
I had to call her. It had been too long since I had heard from her. We went our different ways when I left her at home; but we left on a good note so at least I could call her. She knew the day that we started our relationship that I couldn’t be with her forever. College does that to people, it breaks you up from people that you grew up with. Even though there were a few tears shed when I left, we could do exactly what I was going to do.
I got my cell phone out and hit her speed dial; two.
I was listening to the phone ring when Spencer came into the apartment. “What are you getting all teary eyed about?”
I didn’t answer, I just waited for the ring tone to cut and for me to hear her voice. “Thanks for the cookies Mom.”
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Writing Prompt #2: Wristwatches, Handguns, and . . .
A/N: As you may have seen last week, our second writing prompt was posted, offering some possible threads to guide us through writer's block or into a story. In case you missed it, here's the prompt (taken from Reader's Digest):
One day you come into work and find a cookie mysteriously placed on your desk. Grateful to whoever left this anonymous cookie, you eat it. The next morning you come in and find another cookie. This continues for months until one day a different object is left—and this time there's a note.
The following is my response. My intention was not so much to write something unusual, but to develop a peculiar voice for the narrator that contrasted, yet complimented, the content. As always, any reactions, thoughts, criticisms are welcome (story after the jump).
--
One day you come into work and find a cookie mysteriously placed on your desk. Grateful to whoever left this anonymous cookie, you eat it. The next morning you come in and find another cookie. This continues for months until one day a different object is left—and this time there's a note.
The following is my response. My intention was not so much to write something unusual, but to develop a peculiar voice for the narrator that contrasted, yet complimented, the content. As always, any reactions, thoughts, criticisms are welcome (story after the jump).
--
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
How Many Times Can You Break Something Before It Can't Be Fixed Anymore?
A/N: Just a short piece I wrote the other night. Any feedback is appreciated.
--
It's a thick smell, almost dizzying, and it teaches me how to be silent. And I wish I knew the word, the name of the flower or tree or bush that carries the scent, but I haven't a clue. All I know is it's sweet and it's thick and it reminds me of the times we could have kissed, should have kissed, never kissed.
And it's only in that place, that bend down by the river. I smell it when the windows in my car are down and when I'm listening and looking and seeking the memories.
You remind me of myself. The things I am when people don't watch. Violently opinionated, passionate, yet afraid. Strong, and somehow weak. You taught me how to cry myself to sleep, how to nurse a broken heart, how to walk away.
That smell, it makes me believe. In romance. In first kisses and hand holding and the way one look tells me what you're thinking. We were primitive in those days, just charcoal splashed with pastels. Paint and paper mache. But everything was simple. Everything made sense.
I stayed awake one night to watch the moon rise and set. Everyone talks about the sun, but moons can be golden too.
--Kelsey Allan
--
It's a thick smell, almost dizzying, and it teaches me how to be silent. And I wish I knew the word, the name of the flower or tree or bush that carries the scent, but I haven't a clue. All I know is it's sweet and it's thick and it reminds me of the times we could have kissed, should have kissed, never kissed.
And it's only in that place, that bend down by the river. I smell it when the windows in my car are down and when I'm listening and looking and seeking the memories.
You remind me of myself. The things I am when people don't watch. Violently opinionated, passionate, yet afraid. Strong, and somehow weak. You taught me how to cry myself to sleep, how to nurse a broken heart, how to walk away.
That smell, it makes me believe. In romance. In first kisses and hand holding and the way one look tells me what you're thinking. We were primitive in those days, just charcoal splashed with pastels. Paint and paper mache. But everything was simple. Everything made sense.
I stayed awake one night to watch the moon rise and set. Everyone talks about the sun, but moons can be golden too.
--Kelsey Allan
Monday, June 6, 2011
Tillamook
A/N: I'd love any input at all!
--
We are proud of our indigenous populations. The Cayuse, Klamath, Chetco, Umpqua, Ahantchuyuk—all belonging to diverse linguistic stocks and defined by the sediment poetry of a salmon's cycle. We are proud of their names on our valleys, waterfalls, local banks. They are the last, boozed senators of the frontier, of horses without saddles, of ranch trucks and redwood protectorates. They once aimed obsidian through buttoned cavalries; hoisted scalps on spears, smeared compounds of mud and resin on their cheekbones. We likewise hoist their names on the flags of our county seats, public libraries, having assimilated the yearly corn rituals of Modocs, celebrating the rustwater Wasco reservations, naming our sweetest, most cooked-with onions after northeastern tribes. There is great, reverent nobility here. There is an Indian population of .2%. We uphold visions of traded blankets, hawk-feathers clinging to twice-washed dreads, the famine-angled faces and laconic jawbones.
Wampum, pow-wow, totem.
Hart read a lot of Louis L'Amour. He has a bookshelf dedicated entirely to L'Amour's canon. Certain books are more worn than others, like routes of blood. They are all from the same publisher, and so there is uniformity in their spines, designs, size and cut. He likes the nickel cadence, the western faces. He sleeps on porches with a hat-brim over his eyes and keeps a tin of tobacco in his back pocket with an indian chief on its lid. He is very proud of the worn back-pocket denim around the tin. It means he is a man set in his ways, settled into good things, old habits, ballads accompanied by only one instrument. Reflected in virile tales told by men with French surnames, paisley patterns.
He told me at a young age that the worst thing a thinking man can do is read more than two books a season. A book is something to be considered, weighed, carried in the glove-compartment of the same pick-up truck a man uses to cross his own fields. Changes in the color of a landscape should be marked in memory by particular sentences, passages, fragments of dialogue. A man must be changed by the end of a book—if not by the book itself, at least by the daily hazards and lunchtime traumas of two or three months, and a variance in temperature. Hart believes in the pace of things. He has made me into an old man, with due consideration and gravity paid to a pending, side-mirror death. I started smoking Lucky Strikes when I was fourteen, and could bale thirty acres by evening, and often fell asleep rubbing the ridges of calloused skin on my palms, feeling the same pride a man nurtures in the denim imprint of a tobacco tin, in a name like Klamath.
Hart says that every man has some indian blood in him out here.
He tells me to carry it proudly, with respect to strange religions, memorized litanies, hand-carved wooden art.
The family unit falls into ruts of speech, expression, vacation. Fathers take their sons fishing, in hip-high boots, to cast lines thin and sunlit as the sill intelligence of ants. They have neat, slung baskets of bait, tackle, hooks, gutting implements. The whiskery flies are elaborate, wrought with trembling, masculine digits like marriage promises. Hart never took me fishing. He said it was a tired hunt, an institution of savage, arrhythmic nostalgia, without the same stealth and guile inherent to shooting a four-point buck with a heavy-duty plastic compound bow, while scented with bottled upwind urine, and fully camouflaged. He took his children instead to the Tillamook Cheese Factory, one-on-one, and afterward bought an ice cream cone. The cheese factory was the consolidation of an elder lifestyle, a place where cheeses and butters where not churned with the same hands which poured warm tub water down the long backs of children, felt fruit, hefted bibles. No dairy draped in breathing cloth, kept aloft from mice. No rounds of cheese aching with an appley firmness on a shelf. It was not a place where people wore calico and Thanksgiving was the showmanship of hard-work, tabled labors, and you could crouch at the spot where each item originated, and not walk far to get there either. At the cheese factory, the people behind thick glass wore hair-nets, masks, jeans. There were vats and overhead piping. Hart showed his children the tidy destruction of a lifestyle. He told me about electric milking machines that jolted milk from great rows of udders. This dovetailed into a lecture on meat-packing, butchery, Upton Sinclair. He wears blue shirts with white stitching. The tobacco smells like mint.
His best friend is an old Indian, who keeps his hair long, like a summer away from home. His voice is cool and quiet, a handful of grain in a dark pantry. At the hood of a truck, they talk about politics from their day, compare lifestyles, kids. They die at similar rates. I am terrified each time I see insurance companies and grocery stores going up bearing the names of forgotten fishing tribes.
We play billiards on Tuesday nights at the pool hall. There are few high school-aged kids there. They are Hispanic and they wear their t-shirts the length of gowns, hats still with tags, blue bandanas. They are no good, and they know it, and they laugh when the ball skids wrong, white pockets, the flat expanse is scratched. I know how we look. An old man and his middle-aged son. Heavy and with clean, acute strokes, leaning under light that emphasizes the depth and fallow of our furrows. I want a goddamn pizza. The place reeks of it.
Hart says to me, “I'll break.”
We build fences, rabbit hutches, woodsheds, pantry shelves, armoires, bed-frames, dressers, piano benches, milking stools, writing desks, doghouses, cupboards, sawhorses. The shorn heat of wood, the musk wine of cedar smell. The constructions which occur between two men of differing age, irrigation, wars, comedians. Purposeful measurements with stubby wood pencils, extension cords, overridden knotholes. Hart continues to woodwork. I take him balsa at the clinic. He has a penknife which mewls through the soft, heartless white wood; carves horses, birds at rest—lightweight idols which make me wish for children who could treasure the technique of a grandfather, eventually become nostalgic for hand-made things which have no function. Hart would take them to the Tillamook Cheese Factory where they would appreciate cheese curds and the secondary destruction of intangibles which bedrock a man's pride. Their names would have been chosen from a bible, from an obscure region of begets. They would be ten and twelve. I would not take them to see Hart. I would tell them the story of the time he got in a fist-fight with John Gladney, who got in the newspaper a couple years later for blowing up a post office. Hart's memory would flex. Ripple in their minds with the silt muscle of trout.
I take him on a drive along the Columbia River. It is Sunday, they let him wear his old clothes, jeans without the tin. There is an oxygen tank between his knees like a torpedo wrestled into submission. The river is green and wide, the windows are down, the dark is the summer velvet of blackberry eating. He rides his hand out the window, letting it kite on the wind. We'll stop and stay at a motel along the way and then finish the drive and spend tomorrow at Chinook Falls where there will be park benches, coal grills, drop-boxes for day-fees. We will drive along ridges, spend an hour watching the bright downward gallop, the day fifteen degrees cooler there, white nearby pines easing hugely like sick horses. We'll talk about Louis L'Amour's autobiography, Dennis Day, Robert Kennedy. How orchards are irrigated in the summer. Techniques of spacing corn. How strange it is to see a modern Indian using a goddamn cell phone.
He turns up the radio when the talk runs out. Our headlights devour highway moths. We skim by fill-up stations, low bars, truck stops, outposts. The night is good.
--
We are proud of our indigenous populations. The Cayuse, Klamath, Chetco, Umpqua, Ahantchuyuk—all belonging to diverse linguistic stocks and defined by the sediment poetry of a salmon's cycle. We are proud of their names on our valleys, waterfalls, local banks. They are the last, boozed senators of the frontier, of horses without saddles, of ranch trucks and redwood protectorates. They once aimed obsidian through buttoned cavalries; hoisted scalps on spears, smeared compounds of mud and resin on their cheekbones. We likewise hoist their names on the flags of our county seats, public libraries, having assimilated the yearly corn rituals of Modocs, celebrating the rustwater Wasco reservations, naming our sweetest, most cooked-with onions after northeastern tribes. There is great, reverent nobility here. There is an Indian population of .2%. We uphold visions of traded blankets, hawk-feathers clinging to twice-washed dreads, the famine-angled faces and laconic jawbones.
Wampum, pow-wow, totem.
Hart read a lot of Louis L'Amour. He has a bookshelf dedicated entirely to L'Amour's canon. Certain books are more worn than others, like routes of blood. They are all from the same publisher, and so there is uniformity in their spines, designs, size and cut. He likes the nickel cadence, the western faces. He sleeps on porches with a hat-brim over his eyes and keeps a tin of tobacco in his back pocket with an indian chief on its lid. He is very proud of the worn back-pocket denim around the tin. It means he is a man set in his ways, settled into good things, old habits, ballads accompanied by only one instrument. Reflected in virile tales told by men with French surnames, paisley patterns.
He told me at a young age that the worst thing a thinking man can do is read more than two books a season. A book is something to be considered, weighed, carried in the glove-compartment of the same pick-up truck a man uses to cross his own fields. Changes in the color of a landscape should be marked in memory by particular sentences, passages, fragments of dialogue. A man must be changed by the end of a book—if not by the book itself, at least by the daily hazards and lunchtime traumas of two or three months, and a variance in temperature. Hart believes in the pace of things. He has made me into an old man, with due consideration and gravity paid to a pending, side-mirror death. I started smoking Lucky Strikes when I was fourteen, and could bale thirty acres by evening, and often fell asleep rubbing the ridges of calloused skin on my palms, feeling the same pride a man nurtures in the denim imprint of a tobacco tin, in a name like Klamath.
Hart says that every man has some indian blood in him out here.
He tells me to carry it proudly, with respect to strange religions, memorized litanies, hand-carved wooden art.
The family unit falls into ruts of speech, expression, vacation. Fathers take their sons fishing, in hip-high boots, to cast lines thin and sunlit as the sill intelligence of ants. They have neat, slung baskets of bait, tackle, hooks, gutting implements. The whiskery flies are elaborate, wrought with trembling, masculine digits like marriage promises. Hart never took me fishing. He said it was a tired hunt, an institution of savage, arrhythmic nostalgia, without the same stealth and guile inherent to shooting a four-point buck with a heavy-duty plastic compound bow, while scented with bottled upwind urine, and fully camouflaged. He took his children instead to the Tillamook Cheese Factory, one-on-one, and afterward bought an ice cream cone. The cheese factory was the consolidation of an elder lifestyle, a place where cheeses and butters where not churned with the same hands which poured warm tub water down the long backs of children, felt fruit, hefted bibles. No dairy draped in breathing cloth, kept aloft from mice. No rounds of cheese aching with an appley firmness on a shelf. It was not a place where people wore calico and Thanksgiving was the showmanship of hard-work, tabled labors, and you could crouch at the spot where each item originated, and not walk far to get there either. At the cheese factory, the people behind thick glass wore hair-nets, masks, jeans. There were vats and overhead piping. Hart showed his children the tidy destruction of a lifestyle. He told me about electric milking machines that jolted milk from great rows of udders. This dovetailed into a lecture on meat-packing, butchery, Upton Sinclair. He wears blue shirts with white stitching. The tobacco smells like mint.
His best friend is an old Indian, who keeps his hair long, like a summer away from home. His voice is cool and quiet, a handful of grain in a dark pantry. At the hood of a truck, they talk about politics from their day, compare lifestyles, kids. They die at similar rates. I am terrified each time I see insurance companies and grocery stores going up bearing the names of forgotten fishing tribes.
We play billiards on Tuesday nights at the pool hall. There are few high school-aged kids there. They are Hispanic and they wear their t-shirts the length of gowns, hats still with tags, blue bandanas. They are no good, and they know it, and they laugh when the ball skids wrong, white pockets, the flat expanse is scratched. I know how we look. An old man and his middle-aged son. Heavy and with clean, acute strokes, leaning under light that emphasizes the depth and fallow of our furrows. I want a goddamn pizza. The place reeks of it.
Hart says to me, “I'll break.”
We build fences, rabbit hutches, woodsheds, pantry shelves, armoires, bed-frames, dressers, piano benches, milking stools, writing desks, doghouses, cupboards, sawhorses. The shorn heat of wood, the musk wine of cedar smell. The constructions which occur between two men of differing age, irrigation, wars, comedians. Purposeful measurements with stubby wood pencils, extension cords, overridden knotholes. Hart continues to woodwork. I take him balsa at the clinic. He has a penknife which mewls through the soft, heartless white wood; carves horses, birds at rest—lightweight idols which make me wish for children who could treasure the technique of a grandfather, eventually become nostalgic for hand-made things which have no function. Hart would take them to the Tillamook Cheese Factory where they would appreciate cheese curds and the secondary destruction of intangibles which bedrock a man's pride. Their names would have been chosen from a bible, from an obscure region of begets. They would be ten and twelve. I would not take them to see Hart. I would tell them the story of the time he got in a fist-fight with John Gladney, who got in the newspaper a couple years later for blowing up a post office. Hart's memory would flex. Ripple in their minds with the silt muscle of trout.
I take him on a drive along the Columbia River. It is Sunday, they let him wear his old clothes, jeans without the tin. There is an oxygen tank between his knees like a torpedo wrestled into submission. The river is green and wide, the windows are down, the dark is the summer velvet of blackberry eating. He rides his hand out the window, letting it kite on the wind. We'll stop and stay at a motel along the way and then finish the drive and spend tomorrow at Chinook Falls where there will be park benches, coal grills, drop-boxes for day-fees. We will drive along ridges, spend an hour watching the bright downward gallop, the day fifteen degrees cooler there, white nearby pines easing hugely like sick horses. We'll talk about Louis L'Amour's autobiography, Dennis Day, Robert Kennedy. How orchards are irrigated in the summer. Techniques of spacing corn. How strange it is to see a modern Indian using a goddamn cell phone.
He turns up the radio when the talk runs out. Our headlights devour highway moths. We skim by fill-up stations, low bars, truck stops, outposts. The night is good.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Writing Prompt #2
Here's another prompt if you need some inspiration:
One day you come into work and find a cookie mysteriously placed on your desk. Grateful to whoever left this anonymous cookie, you eat it. The next morning you come in and find another cookie. This continues for months until one day a different object is left—and this time there's a note.
I think it will be interesting to see what people can do with that. This prompt is from Writers Digest, which has great ideas if you're having writer's block.
Friday, June 3, 2011
Welcome New Followers!
Hello, everyone!
We have a lot of new followers and comments today; I'm going to assume that this is a result from the email sent out from the English Department. So for all of you newcomers, here is what we are trying to do with this summer creative writing group.
BYU English Society hosts a creative writing interest group (Team Gryffindor) in the fall and winter semesters. We wanted to continue writing and commenting on each other's work during the summer but some of us have returned home, some of us have remained in school, and some have gone on study abroad programs. We created this blog to continue our writing, but due to our small numbers and our summer activities (which I'm sure are awesome), we haven't been too successful thus far.
Here is where you come in! With more people, we can get this group really going. What we've been doing so far is giving the email to anyone who wants to post a story so they can do so from the BYU Creative Writing account. If we have enough people interested that already have Google Accounts, you can just post from your Google account.
We would like to have a writing prompt posted every two weeks (I will post the next one tomorrow). Then the next week, people can post their responses to that prompt. It can be nonfiction, fiction, poetry, what have you. And then others can give feedback on your writing! It's win-win for all!
So for those of you who would like in, please email byucreativewriting@gmail.com. I will send the details on to you! Thank you!
We have a lot of new followers and comments today; I'm going to assume that this is a result from the email sent out from the English Department. So for all of you newcomers, here is what we are trying to do with this summer creative writing group.
BYU English Society hosts a creative writing interest group (Team Gryffindor) in the fall and winter semesters. We wanted to continue writing and commenting on each other's work during the summer but some of us have returned home, some of us have remained in school, and some have gone on study abroad programs. We created this blog to continue our writing, but due to our small numbers and our summer activities (which I'm sure are awesome), we haven't been too successful thus far.
Here is where you come in! With more people, we can get this group really going. What we've been doing so far is giving the email to anyone who wants to post a story so they can do so from the BYU Creative Writing account. If we have enough people interested that already have Google Accounts, you can just post from your Google account.
We would like to have a writing prompt posted every two weeks (I will post the next one tomorrow). Then the next week, people can post their responses to that prompt. It can be nonfiction, fiction, poetry, what have you. And then others can give feedback on your writing! It's win-win for all!
So for those of you who would like in, please email byucreativewriting@gmail.com. I will send the details on to you! Thank you!
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
WRiting Post for Monday, May 9, 2011
Sorry this is so late, guys! Monday I completely spaced, but here's the prompt!
So, since the original date for this was the day after Mothers' Day, I wanted to have our prompt be in honor of mothers! Your challenge is to write something from the perspective of a mother. It can be first person, third person, prose, poetry, whatever you prefer. The only qualification is that it has to be from the perspective of a mother. Good luck, you guys! :)
So, since the original date for this was the day after Mothers' Day, I wanted to have our prompt be in honor of mothers! Your challenge is to write something from the perspective of a mother. It can be first person, third person, prose, poetry, whatever you prefer. The only qualification is that it has to be from the perspective of a mother. Good luck, you guys! :)
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