cafenowhere

I posted this on my Patreon last month, and now that it's available to read for everyone, I thought I'd post it here too. 

CW for brief mention, near the end, of long-past suicidality

 

Last week my ageing werewolf poem “Dodging the Bullet” appeared at Small Wonders. This poem is a companion piece to “Through the Keyhole”, which appeared in the Nov/Dec 2023 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

“Through the Keyhole” is the more traditional werewolf poem, focusing on the body horror of transformation, with the modern twist that, with mighty effort, one can control the transformation back to human so that one’s body better suits one’s identity. “Dodging the Bullet” challenges the mythos of the angsty werewolf doomed to a tragic death. I wrote it thinking about people who were convinced they’d die young, but then did not. These people live with such gratitude and sweet surprise, savoring milestones they never expected to see. I wanted to capture their sense of wonder.

Both poems have their genesis in a trip to Denver for the Sirens Conference (may it soon return!). I wrote “Through the Keyhole” while waiting in the Denver airport for my ride to the hotel. I drafted “Dodging the Bullet” at the hotel bar that night. I ended up scrapping most of my notes for it, substantially revising it when I got home, but the core idea was there. I don’t know why I had werewolves on the brain at the time. These poems are completely unrelated to the werewolf novel I wrote many years ago. I was listening to the audiobook Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith at the time. So maybe I was thinking about the lockstep of evolution and how to pry from it a modicum of self-actualization, how we can deviate from programming and write our own endings.

The phrase “to see two human looks away” is something I’ve been carrying around for over 20 years, since I first researched my werewolf novel. Unfortunately, I can’t find the index cards I used for that research, so I don’t know the provenance. I think the saying may have been attributed to Native Americans, but folks have been known to put their words into other people’s mouths to sound wise, so that’s not helpful. I don’t know if wolves can actually see twice as far as humans. They have a wider field of vision and can see more on the horizon without moving their heads. They can also detect more shades of gray than humans can. Consensus seems to be that wolves can see faster than us, if not farther. But I’d been holding onto “two human looks away” for decades, so I was damn well going to use it.

“Dodging the Bullet” may be my version of “Sometimes” by Sheenagh Pugh, a poem that acknowledges, “Hey, maybe things aren’t always terrible, maybe sometimes it all works out.” For me, realizing how often things go right is a privilege of ageing. In youth I could be callow and pessimistic, maybe because I didn’t really believe I was destructible, no matter how harsh the universe or suicidal my ideation. But the longer I live this fragile life, the more I see, far more often than seems statistically likely, the happy endings. As Pugh writes, “may it happen for you.”

This weekend José and I attended a progressive poetry reading. It’s kind of like a bar crawl, but instead of bars, you move from one poetry reading to the next. The readings were held outside a neighborhood bakery, on someone’s front lawn, in a backyard, and the like. I was delighted when one poet read a poem published by Strange Horizons. I must have yipped or gasped audibly because the poet smiled and said, “Yes, we love Strange Horizons.” It’s always a surprise when my literary circle and SFF circle overlap.

It was a little chilly to be sitting outside, so J and I only went to three of the spots. We made sure to attend the reading where a colleague of J’s was a participant. That colleague tends to write speculative poetry but I think he exclusively submits to literary markets. In any case, he read a newer piece he’d told us about at a Latinx Council dinner. It was about a scorpion that wanted to marry a shoe. Another poet shared a piece about wanting to hold a goose, which had a response delivered by her boyfriend, that demanded the goose back off, he wouldn’t let a bird steal his girlfriend. It’s unfortunate the third poet didn’t continue the animal theme.

Last week, I watched Infinity Pool, directed by Brandon Cronenberg. I was disappointed. The premise is an interesting one: what if you could create a doppelganger of yourself that would take the punishments, endure the consequences, of your bad actions? Unfortunately, the only sane character quickly exits the experiment, leaving you no one to root for. Also, the protagonist’s devolution includes drug use, which led to too many “trippy” scenes of sensory distortion and sexual antics/fantasies. They were so tedious. I think Brandon Cronenberg’s made three films. Antiviral left me cold, but I really liked Possessor. Now this. I guess his work is hit-or-miss for me.

Right now I’m reading Shiny Things: Reflective Surfaces and Their Mixed Meanings. It is fascinating. The authors discuss how shininess can indicate wealth, power, and transcendence or it can signal that something is cheap, ubiquitous, and tacky. Shininess is disruptive, because it dematerializes the surface of a thing so we stop looking at it and begin looking into it. There’s a whole section devoted to Dutch Golden Age art and the worshipful (fetishistic) representation of various forms of shine. The section I just finished reading talks about how smudges, though common on shiny objects, are rarely if ever portrayed in art (big, if true) and just how hard it is to depict a smudge as intentional. “The central issue of depiction is that a smudge on a shiny surface is a disruption on an already disrupted form.” I love thinking about this stuff.  

What did you do this weekend? Seen any good movies recently?

It snowed about four inches over last night and this morning. At about 4pm I went outside to shovel the porch and sidewalks. In a "never tell me the odds" moment, I flung myself outside without checking the temperature. In the first ten minutes, I thought I might have a heart attack--thanks, Covid!--but I persevered at a measured pace and got the job done. Not well, mind you, just done. JJ came out to clear the driveway and urged me to go back inside, but I hung around the garage, out of the wind, and watched him work in case *he* had a heart attack. He had to take a break inside because he couldn't feel his fingers or nose. After we were done, I checked the temperature and it was -11F. Add in the wind chill and it was -35F. I'm glad I didn't know while I was outside, or I never would've made it.

Yesterday and today I worked on a poem recommendation for my Patreon. Yesterday I was really dissatisfied with it and frowny-faced because it was over 1000 words, whereas I usually aim for 500-750 words. Today I pared down my purview and sharpened my analysis. It's still over 1000 words, but now I feel like my recommendation does the poem justice. It's not going to appear until January 6, because I'm taking a two-week break over the holidays.

I also worked on the novel today. I keep picking at a particular flashback scene that isn't cohering as I'd like. It really irks me to be having so much trouble with it, because it's all old material (from a trunked novel), just refashioned. At least I added about 500 words of new dialogue before I returned to the flashback scene. My new planner has plenty of room for notes each day, so instead of simply recording the word count, I've been including a note about what I did. Like, I unraveled a plot knot or I revised the flashback, etc. This helps me realize how much I've accomplished even if the word count doesn't change much. Before, I was a little paranoid that I was entering a new writer's block if I didn't make a certain number of words per day. Now I have some evidence to the contrary.

Tomorrow we're supposed to be under blizzard conditions. Not much new accumulation, just a lot of wind blowing the snow around and frigid temperatures. We might get up to 0F!