I wrote “The Stacker” when I was 23. It’s the first real story I ever wrote. (It’s also the first story I had accepted for publication, though not the first to be published, but I’ll talk about that later.) I’d written other stuff as an undergraduate at the University of Miami, where I majored in creative writing, but nothing I would call a story. As an undergrad fiction writer, mainly I flopped around, like a fish on a boat.

After I graduated I took a job with a small advertising agency in New York City. I answered phones when I started there, but pretty soon was writing copy for ads and brochures for toys and dog toys and wine — including Louis Jadot and Taittinger champagne.

I was going to New York University at night, after writing the dog toy copy all day. In my final term at NYU, I was working on my master’s thesis on Kafka’s short stories. For a couple of months I think I thought I was Kafka.

That same semester I decided to apply for MFA programs. I hadn’t written a word of fiction since getting my BA, nearly two years earlier. But MFA applications required creative writing samples. Besides, if I was going to be a fiction writer, at some point it figured that I’d have to write some fiction.

I wrote “The Stacker” over a couple of nights. With some distance now from its creation, I see three influences on this story. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, creative writing
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Here in Chicago, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company is currently mounting a well-reviewed “Young Adult’s Production” of The Glass Menagerie, which raises the question, “what production of The Glass Menagerie is not for young adults?” 

I don’t mean this at all facetiously, because there is no more poetic and poignant play in the American canon, and its status as an American literary classic is very much merited.  

But when I saw a production some years ago at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, it struck me that, as gloomy as the play’s portrait of the repressed and crippled Laura Wingfield might be, it represents a kind of wish-fulfillment on the part of Tennessee Williams, a determinedly brave and poetically false obscuring and softening of a much darker reality that might have been difficult for 13-year-olds to absorb or accept.  [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, creative writing
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It occurred to little Jimmy Peter one August morning, after the electricity went and video games with it, that he hadn’t even opened the chemistry set he’d received from his parents for Christmas. In the backyard Jimmy tested the Bunsen burner’s flame on the chemistry set’s instruction book. He smiled with satisfaction as the fifty-five pages of red warnings in 11 languages burned away. No sooner had Jimmy mixed a clear liquid with a thick blue, added just a dash of salt, and heated the concoction, than a monstrous orange cloud wafted from his test tube and was picked up by the wind and carried away. The cloud continued to expand as it departed. He stared at it for a second, but the whole thing rather bored Jimmy, and he went inside to play with the dog.

The cloud soon covered the west coast of the United States, reached the east coast within hours, and had crossed the Atlantic by dark. Air raid sirens and emergency broadcast systems around the world were dusted off as people taped their windows and fought over bread and bottled water at the supermarkets. Lines for gas backed traffic up for miles and the price for a gallon nearly doubled. Industry insiders blamed increased demand, but Democrats pointed to a corrupt capitalist economy and decreased support for school lunch programs. Senior Republicans noted that this could all have been avoided if only kids prayed in school and we supported our troops. [Read more →]

Tags: creative writing, rulers & ruled
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The pill didn’t make one taller. That wasn’t the issue. It wasn’t a case of medical science tampering with God’s design, or biological engineering in an effort to transform the human race into a different, better species — a taller one. No, all the oblong, indigo “Gargantuanx” did, miracle of miracles, was create the illusion in the mind of the consumer that he was taller. That’s all.

The pill didn’t take immediate effect. For about 10 minutes you felt nothing. Then you were taller. That is, you believed you were. [Read more →]

Tags: creative writing, low & high
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Among all of the other market meltdowns last week, the Japanese stock index Nikkei suffered its worst one-week loss in history, shedding nearly a quarter of its value — this, after a long and painful recession.  So, in the spirit of anachronistic contrarianism, here’s a souvenir in verse from late in 1991, when I was living in Japan and it appeared to be on the verge of conquering the world economically.

I remember being skeptical about the Japanese “threat” for a long time, but eventually, like everyone else, I succumbed to the “madness of crowds” and wrote this poem.  As it turns out, it was almost literally at the peak of Japan’s dominance — its economy started to sputter almost immediately thereafter. 

But it works in the other direction, too; often, at the very moment when the majority of the investing public is convinced that a given market or economy is in permanent decline, it begins to recover.  The sun also rises — in the U.S. and Japan alike.

Incidentally, one explanatory note:  The last stanza refers to the massive green nets that were draped around buildings under construction in Japanese cities, as well as to the controversy over the Japanese hunting of whales and the other forms of environmental despoilation they committed. I suspect Japan, like the United States, has since become more conscious of environmental stewardship, and hope that this attitude, as well as our industries’ investment in solar energy technologies, bio-fuels and other alternative energy sources, will survive both the hard times we’re experiencing now, and the next wave of prosperity as well.

Expatriate, Waking
(Japan, 1991)

The rising sun assembles itself in the East
With matches, scraps of silk and kerosene,
And, hot off the line, lacquers our door before
The pale plodders stateside even dream it.

Like all we consume, sunlight is made here,
And in its export West, warms only those who work.
Witness these pigeons, diligent at dawn:
Setting the tone from below, they’re selecting

From a soggy salad of string and twig
Sufficient bits from which to build a home
Across the yard from, and a comment upon,
In its sense, and compact cleverness, ours.

Outmanned in every sphere is how we feel:
We’ve the better materials, not they!
But across from my office has materialized
A nineteen-story tower in the time it took me

To skim three magazines and eat a bun.
I swear, an hour ago, it wasn’t there:
Just a lot of rubble, flattened sacks of rice,
And a crumbling cistern choked with twiggy moss.

Now, nearly done, its bloody beams are dressed
With massive, block-wide, kelp-green drifting nets
That sift the swimming breeze and hide the doomed
Whales, spirits, haunting its empty halls.

Tags: creative writing
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Part Two:  The Dead Return 

A week ago, when I posted the first half of this reminiscence of my very brief career in my twenties as a performer, I had intended the follow-up to be a light-hearted account centering on one of my two objectives back then in pursuing acting: meeting girls. 

But every time I tried to write that story, the face of one actress in particular, and her unimaginably horrific story, kept materializing like an admonishing wraith, and I realized that this instead was the story I needed to tell.

[Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, creative writing
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Part One: Bury The Dead

My recent post on this site entitled “Robert De Niro’s Ugly Mug: A Roundabout Review of Righteous Kill by Way of a Long-Forgotten Horror Flick CalledThe Flesh Eaters,” prompted a number of complaints (the number, to be precise, was one) that I had no right to mock a once-great actor like De Niro — an Oscar-winner, no less — when I myself had never personally experienced the challenges of creating a character, the terrors of facing a live audience, or the trauma of encountering witheringly negative reviews.

All of this is utterly untrue.  I have known terror.  I have felt trauma.  And not only have I experienced the challenges of embodying an onstage character, I have failed in every conceivable respect to meet those challenges. 

In short, I do indeed have a background in acting, and one that is not without an interesting parallel to De Niro himself.  Just as De Niro, in the years between Mean Streets and Meet the Parents, once was widely considered to be the Greatest Actor of His Generation, I once was regarded in certain very narrow circles as the Worst Actor of His Time. [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, creative writing
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 ”Don’t give us that cock-and-bull story,” the prosecutor said. “We can wait till the cows come home. Let’s talk turkey.”

“You’re trying to throw me to the lions,” the accused said.

“You’re in the doghouse all right, but I’m giving you a chance to keep the wolf from your door.”

“It’s a fine kettle of fish I’m in.”

The prosecutor was impatient. “Just grab the bull by the horns.” [Read more →]

Tags: creative writing, wild things
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August 23, 2006

I dream I park in the lot of an auto supply store in Bucks County. They have arcane parking rules, but I make sure to follow them. Days later, however, I get a ticket in the mail and I am furious. I go back to the dealership and demand to talk to the parking manager. They are laughing and having a good time because they know they have arcane parking rules and they intend to screw people. Nobody wants to talk to me so I take off all my clothes, even my underpants, [Read more →]

Tags: Fred's dreams, creative writing
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