Second poem for the poetry shmoetry blogfest

Yare'ackh *

I chased the moon
in my car that night;
it was large in the sky,
almost surreal
and I tried to catch it
as a child would a lost           
floating balloon.
I thought of us. 

*Yare'ackh means moon in Hebrew

Poetry Shmoetry blogfest

Time for another blogfest!

The blogfest is hosted by Shelly and you can see her page here.
So the rules are:

1. Follow this blog

2. Sign up by filling out the Linky below

3. Write a Poem

(ANY kind of poem or you could even blog about 'why I hate poetry.' I'm cool with that.)

4. Post your poem the week of July 11th-14th (midnight PST)

BAM!

You did it!

You can stop there if you want.

And here is my first poem, a haiku. 

to grow wings that are

large, lavished, feathered cream and

light, to fly away. 

I will post another poem tomorrow. But for now, I'm off to read some other poems in the blogfest. 

My published story ... and other news

It finally arrived!! My short story 'Objects of my Affection' was being published by a literary journal called [untitled] and I have been waiting anxiously for it to come out. Unfortunately, I was unable to make it to the launch last week but was jumping with joy when it arrived in the mail this morning (and to my surprise, a check fell out! Being paid for my writing? Hell yeah!)
You can see my excitement in the photo ... 

I also have two more stories (actually both flash fiction pieces that I have posted on my blog here and here) being published by local literary journals this month and next, so there is a lot of excitement the next few months.
It's really inspiring me to write more.  


In other excitement, I would like to congratulate my friend James Shackell, for selling out his zine at the Sydney fair! You can read all about it on his blog. I knew that kid was going places. 


I have been researching my new writing project the past few weeks, and I interviewed someone about it this morning. I'm getting very close to actually starting writing it. It is my goal for the National Young Writers Month, to finish the story in June. Some other goals I put down was to learn a new word every day (which is part of blog goals up the top, but I haven't been doing so well on that :S) and to read more and blog more. 
I came up with another good story idea, too, that I can't wait to start writing :) 


Speaking of reading. I have gone nuts. Obsessed. Bought 4 books off the book depository this week, and have 4 books from the library, and 4 books that my friend Sari lent me. Good thing I start uni holidays next week!


And to keep on with the excited tone of this post, 
I saw Li Cunxin, author of Mao's Last Dancer,  talk on Friday night (was such an incredible, inspiring talk) and 
I am seeing Michael Connelly talk at the Wheeler Centre on Thursday night! 
AND the Emerging Writers Festival starts this week so I'm super excited. 
Looks like June is going to be a big literary month for me.

Joined my first Blog Fest!! Flash Fiction

So I have joined my first Blog Fest! Which is very exciting. And it's a flash fiction blog fest by Cherie Reich, and you all know how much I love flash fiction. 

Anyway, I wrote this story a while back, but it's still one of my favourites :)

Looking forward to reading everyone else's flash fiction stories! 

Maybe

We were watching Pearl Harbour in bed.

You always liked watching war movies, although I never understood why. Perhaps it made you think of your own luck and mortality, or maybe showed you techniques and weapons that made you feel stronger about your country’s army. I just assumed that watching these kinds of films would be hard, and would bring back memories of your own past in a country coloured by war.

I wrap myself around you and mould my body to your contour. You lie still like a rifle and watch the screen intently, making sounds when bombs explode and crude comments on the soldiers’ wives.

‘Have you done something like that?’ I ask, when soldiers lurk in trenches.

‘Have you been in a situation like that?’ I ask, when they run through bushes with bullets flying around their bodies like flies on a summer’s day.

 ‘Have you ever had a gun held up to you?’

You always answered yes.

Then Ben Affleck appears again after we all thought he died in a bombed plane, and he tells Evelyn, his love, that it was her that gave him strength and kept him alive.

I turn to you then, my large eyes wilting tears like a bullet hole oozing blood, and ask if I would keep you alive in a war. You don’t answer at first and I shake you lightly, saying ‘babe, babe, would you stay alive because of me?’ and you shuffle up the bed till you’re almost sitting upright and you mutter,

“Shhh, I’m trying to watch. It’s a stupid question,’

                                                                                    your words slipping out like a rolled grenade. 

Writing death

Just a note to say that I won't be posting for a little bit. 
My grandfather passed away unexpectedly yesterday morning, on his 92nd birthday. (Something symbolic in the way he left the world the same date he entered it) I'm still pretty shocked. 


Were at the hospital for hours yesterday and my mind wandered to writing. I thought about cliches associated with writing on death. Because they were all true yesterday. The hospital room smelt sterile. His body became cold (a different kind of cold to anything else). He looked pale and peaceful. And his family stood around, holding his hand and crying. Reminiscing about his life and his fulfillments. 
Although every death is unique, there are still cliches that cannot be avoided.  It takes a good writer to write about it originally. 


Here is the beginning of a story I wrote about my grandfather in 2008. It is about how he got to Australia after World War 2. 

Zaida

It was 1945 and he was in Austria. The war had just ended and my grandfather, Bernard, who was twenty-eight at the time, had lost almost everything. He was alone, weighing thirty-eight kilos and suffering from Tuberculosis (TB), a contagious disease of the lungs he inevitably caught during the war. The Nazi’s had separated his entire family, putting them all into different concentration camps around Europe; Bernard was the first to be taken on the 1^st of March 1942.

The first camp he was in was a forced labour camp where he was made to work vigorously for most of the day, building the road ‘Outbound’ from Berlin to Krakow. He recalls now, his voice cracked and aged, one of the men he worked with, whose body was so weak from starvation (they were only rationed a ladle of food in the evening and 33 grams of bread); he dropped a brick and was consequently strangled to his death in front of them all. For years he witnessed these callous murders, feeling himself getting closer to his own demise.

The other three camps he went to were concentration camps “just to kill people”, where he remembers his friends and family-friends from the Jewish community being taken into gas chambers and only coming out from the chimneys. “The minute you came to the camps, the world stopped,” he explains, in both the physical and mental meaning.

His comfortable life and happy family were now just a memory he clung to with clenched fists; the attainment of this past a dream that kept his heart strong and his body moving.

After the liberation of the camps in May 1945, Bernard, who had been in them for three years, found the names of two of his brothers and two of his sisters on a short list detailing the where-abouts of survivors. His parents were not on the list, nor the rest of his family. They had been murdered in the gas chambers – their body’s mass cremated - in Auschwitz, a place where the most unconceivable and unfathomable inhumanity occurred.

His younger siblings in Germany came to meet him in Austria, where they all began the gruelling process of mourning and recovery. Bernard was in hospital for eighteen months suffering from TB and a deathly low body weight; crammed into wards with other holocaust survivors, their bodies like gaunt ghosts and their minds scarred by brutality. His family, the only thing left to him and fortunately without disease, came to visit him daily.

Flash Fiction

I was looking at A.S. Patric's blog this morning (He is a Melbourne based writer) and I read his latest piece of flash fiction. 


I realised just how much I love reading and writing flash fiction. I love the way that in such a small space, with so few words, you can tell a story. A.S. Patric proves just how powerful pieces of flash fiction can be. And it's challenging. You don't have time and plot leaads to reel your reader in. If they aren't in from the start, they aren't in at all. 


I have another writer friend, Rafael S.W who is on the editorial committee for Express Media, who writers wonderful flash fiction, some of which I have been fortunate enough to read. 


So what is Flash Fiction?

• Fiction between 300-1000 words. 
• As with most modern writing, there are no rules in flash fiction. 
• It's usually a small idea that shows complexity, or something larger. 
• There are usually no plot or character set ups. The reader is just thrown in. 
• Flash fiction could be a conversation, an image or a thought. 

Here is a piece of flash fiction I wrote last year while on a weekend writers retreat (Rafael was also there writing flash fiction). I knew the sentence I wanted to start with, and a metaphor I wanted to describe and I went from there. I didn't know how long the piece was going to be. I just wrote and let it take on a life of its own. It turned out to be 402 words. 

She was here

This is how she is dying.  It’s cold and then the bullet penetrates her chest. It settles in the part of her that pulsates, warming in her body like sex, and she starts to leak. They carry her through turbulence on a jagged stretcher, her red confetti dripping on trampled sand, and they take her away.  

It started as love. No, it started as two soldiers who only ‘saw’ each other once they’d lost their uniforms. She cried the first time their skins had touched. He’d shrugged his shoulders as if to say ‘this is me’, and she’d fallen into him. His body was soft and curled around her like a baby gripping a finger. He was everything, now, that as a soldier, he wasn’t.

The war receded in their fusion. Champagne bottles replaced pops of grenades and colour coated their memories of military green. Soon they were caught in a different kind of insanity; an obsession that was beyond the choice of love. She was distracted. When he wasn’t there she wrote him letters, and even when together, she’d think about being with him. They’d go for walks down the same streets over and over.  They’d name things that didn’t have names and then laugh at themselves. They created their own world around them.

They made love moving quickly in each other, their hands grabbing firm at faces, hair and torsos, not knowing where to touch and wanting to touch everywhere. They found each other’s scars, traced them and moved harder. After, she wished it were slower, the way romantic sex is meant to be. But he holds her tighter after each time, leans his head against hers and breathes hard, his lips lingering near hers. Then he gives her the necklace he always wore, a bullet on a dirty chain and it sits between her breasts.

She forgets about the war and it finds her when she’s lost without him on a paved street near the desert. She was remembering the way they first kissed, and the feel of him pressing himself against her. Then the war comes, bullets fire and shells fall through the smoke. Soldiers take her away, her body leaking the dregs of her love on a military green stretcher. Winter starts to arrive and the warmth of her fades.

She was here, he thinks after. She was here, and then she was gone.

The story is based off truth, in a metaphoric sense. 

So has anyone written flash fiction?

What are your thoughts on flash fiction?

I challenge everyone to write a story between 300 and 1000 words.