Comeuppance—Nicely Delivered

dontravis.com blog post #357

 

Courtesy of Pxhere.com

Dennis Kastendiek and I co-teach a free writing course called Wordwrights at the North Domingo Baca Multigenerational Center in Albuquerque every Monday afternoon. It’s a nice group of people. We’re an open class, so anyone is free to attend at any time… or skip sessions if life interferes.

The last hour-and-a-half of the two-hour course is given over to comments on material submitted by class members for review… be they poems or fiction or memoir or essay. After a reading to the class by the author, our members are invited to give their comments. We get caught up in writing rules and how to break writing rules and does the material grip the reader… the usual things one would expect in a writing class.

But every once in a while someone comes along and puts us in our place by reminding us that everyone does not march to the beat of the same drum. Our class member, Joe Lovato—a quiet, unassuming, talented writer—delivered the class its comeuppance with the following poem he’s graciously permitted me to reproduce in my blog.

*****

THE WRITING CLASS

By Joe Lovato

As he sat and scribbled crazy thoughts

He wondered what the sane would think.

Will he love it, will she hate it, does it stink?

Two kind shepherds tried to

guide one lost lamb

out of the forest of doubt.

The lamb asks the trees for help.

And they said:

“I liked it, but that part

was a little vague, and redundant

I didn’t understand,

It stopped me,

I had to think.”

And the lamb bleated:

“Why must we

try to reach everyone,

have conflict at all costs,

always advance the story,

bleach thought with clarity?

You don’t have to be literal to be literate.

Why must the blood on the rose be edible?

Cookie-cutters don’t make the cookies taste better.

We’re not going to make it to the bigs.

If we did we’d be like that old ball player,

the luckiest man on the face of the earth guy

who died of Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Anyway, success might be more glorious… posthumously.”

And they said:

 “We criticize the work not the writer,

 but we can’t let one little pig build a straw house.”

And the lamb bleated:

“I’m a lamb!  This isn’t calculus it’s ego therapy. 

Don’t cry to be understood

understand what you’re feeling.”

The furrowed boughs on the frowning ferns

revealed their stoic thoughts.

The lamb thought, I’ve used the word thought too much.  

They won’t like it, but it’s a good word,

deserves recognition.

This probably took them out of it,

at least I’ve killed their apathy.

The lamb turned away shaking his shaggy head.

He pitied the pedantic poets

lost in the throes of perfection.

But then he thought,

crazy lambs never understand

why they’re not understood.

*****

Like I say… a comeuppance—nicely delivered. Good job, Joe

The advance buy link for The Voxlightner Scandal follows:  http://www.dsppublications.com/books/upcoming-releases-c

Now my mantra: Keep on reading and keep on writing. You have something to say, so say it!

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Buy links to Abaddon’s Locusts:

https://www.dsppublications.com/books/abaddons-locusts-by-don-travis-486-b

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Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Abaddons-Locusts-Vinson-Mystery-Book-ebook/dp/B07JLHKJLY

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See you next week.

Don

Wordwrights Writing Class

Wordwrights Writing Class Logo

For the past three years, a colleague and I have co-hosted a class for people interested in writing. Every Monday afternoon (except for holidays) some fifteen to twenty-five of us gather in classroom 1 at the North Domingo Baca Multigenerational Center (7521 Carmel NE) in Albuquerque for a meeting of the Wordwrights Writing Class. Promptly at 1:30 p.m., we open with a Weekly Tip covering some aspect of writing, ranging from how to construct a sentence, proper use and placement of modifiers, involving the senses in your work, tenses, viewpoint, and the like.

Next, Dennis Kastendiek reads from and talks about various authors who have caught his attention. Thereafter, for about an hour and a half, various class members read from their work and accept comments from the class. Our group is open-ended, meaning it is free to any and all. Those who join us attend when they wish or skip classes when life gets in the way.

Membership is eclectic. We have published authors, serious writers struggling to be published, beginning writers, and people who just want the stimulation of being around creative people. We are poets and memoirists, novelists and essayists, technical writers and film reviewers… and of course, those who haven’t yet settled on exactly what they want to be.

Our writers have a number of projects underway. I won’t try to cover all of them, but here are some of our current efforts:

·       A cozy murder mystery opening with a body covered with chocolate in a bakery

·       A novel based on some gristly Hungarian murders in the 19th century

·       A book of poems based on the writer’s dating partners over the years

·       An early 20^th century novel about a young woman breaking the shackles of convention and coming into her own

·       A woman both charmingly and courageously excising her traumatic past by facing it through her poetry

·       A novel based on an ancient Egyptian princess who some believe gave Scotland her name

·       An essayist who brings the class to laughter with his clever twists on life’s lessons

There are many more, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll stop here.

The point of this post? You’re welcome to join us if you wish, but more importantly, if there is no such group in your area, consider starting one. I am convinced that everyone in our class would tell you the results are worth the effort. As a matter of interest, this writing class has been going on for eleven continuous years. Rob Spiegel and Larry Greenley from SouthWest Writers (New Mexico’s largest professional writing organization), started the class and ran it for eight years before turning it over to Dennis and me. That says a lot for the worthiness of the idea.

*****

I know this post is a bit different, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, so I finally sat down and wrote it. Hope you’ll consider becoming involved in such an effort… or start a class if there’s not one available in your neighborhood.

Feel free to lodge your comments at dontravis21@gmail.com.

New Posts published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

I’m at Home Hiding Under My Bed

Not exactly under the bed. I…uh, well, let’s be frank. I wouldn’t fit under there even if it were up on blocks. But that’s my mental state of mind. Hiding out. Let me explain.

Some of my recent posts have focused on my “foibles.” More bluntly, my goofs, mistakes, lapses, outrageous omissions, and…you get the idea. Last Friday, I committed one of my best.

I recently changed automobile insurance companies and was expecting a rebate from my old policy in order to help pay for the new one. It arrived Friday. Anxious to get it into my account, I drove to the bank fairly late that afternoon. Before I slipped the check, together with my bank card and driver’s license, into the shushing vacuum tube that mysteriously whisks them to a teller, I noticed the license had expired two days earlier.

Although I was sockless, in house slippers, and wearing my lounging pants (which some call pajama bottoms), I raced to a Motor Vehicle Department office not far from the bank. Once there, I had to get a number from a machine. Okay, nothing unusual about that…but it insisted I select the type of service I wanted—and none of them read “Renew a Driver’s License.” So I punched a likely button and received a number with a 700 digit on it (they were calling number 167 at the time).

After taking a seat and fretting over the fact there weren’t 500 people sitting in the waiting room, I concluded I’d asked for the wrong service. Several other clients had come in and taken a number before I decided to take action. I made a second guess at the check-in machine and got a more appropriate number. Like 197. Made more sense. There were about 30 people plus children and hangers-on in the room. Long and short of it…hours later, I got my temporary renewal license, a paper thing that’s to serve notice the real, genuine, plastic doodad is on its way. Instructions accompanying the phony license gave stern warning to keep the paper one with the expired license for ID purposes. Happy to get out of there, I returned to my car, clutching the paperwork.

Can you guess what happened next? You got it. When I got out of the car at home, I discovered my expired license was missing. Another trip to MVD. Nothing where my car had been parked. Not a scrap of paper (or plastic) between there and the office. The guard on the door said no one had turned in a lost license to her. Feeling I was about to be the victim of ID theft and all sorts of fraud, I returned home to fret some more. By the way, I'm a worrier.

The MVD was closed over the weekend, so early Monday morning, I started calling. I don’t know about your MVD, but in ours, you can hear the phones ringing and ringing and ringing. So I wasn’t surprised when no one answered. I tried several times. Unsuccessfully. On my way to the writing class I co-teach, I stopped by and found a sign on the door saying they were closed for Columbus Day, a state and federal holiday. Duh! (To be honest, I also checked on my mail twice…once after finding the note on MVD’s door.)

All of that was set-up for what follows. Tuesday morning, I had three calls to make. The first was to MVD. The phone was answered after the second ring, and “Yes sir, we have your license in Lost and Found. You can pick it up anytime.”

Relieved and elated, I made the second call to the North Domingo Baca Multigenerational Center to ask for permission to move our class from 2:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. and keep that as our permanent home (we were there as guests while Bear Canyon Senior Center was under repair). “Yes sir. We can accommodate both of those requests.”

The third call was to take advantage of a benefit offered by my health insurance company to have a nurse conduct a Health and Well-Being Assessment (even though I’d told them this was a “no call” number and hung up on them when they'd phoned a week ago to make the appointment). “Yes sir, the nurse can be there on the morning of the 29th.” No mention of my previous rudeness.

Wow! The day was going great. I got in the car and painlessly retrieved my lost license. Then I went to Smiths for some grocery shopping and found they had paper bags. They haven’t had paper bags for weeks!

That’s when I tumbled to what was going on. I was being set up for a fall. This day couldn’t go anywhere but down. I drove home using extra care. I obeyed the speed limit and didn’t even tailgate. Once parked successfully, I entered my apartment, locked the door, and figuratively hid under the bed.

 

Next week: I’ll think of something.

New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.