Short Stories
 
Catcher, Caught - novel in progress

Excerpt:
When I first met Holden Caulfield, I didn’t know I was dying. And even though his story’s lots more exciting, I’m going to tell you mine anyway. It may be the last thing I do. Daniel Solstice Landon, that’s me, soon to be gone so you have to excuse my skipping around. I haven’t had a lot of practice at this kind of thing and I’m short on time. According to the doctors.

My name’s from the Bible, though my parents would never credit that. They insist they chose Daniel because it’s simple and because he was the little guy, the underdog. What’s worse than being pegged right before you’re even born is to find out about your name from a girl you wanted to date once but were too chicken to ask. Daniel means ‘Judged by God.’ Tough standard.

‘Solstice’ is a throw back to my parents’ hippie days. Another thing they won’t admit; they’re still stuck in that stage.

If you want to know the truth, until I got sick my life was boring. Truly and completely boring. School and summer, school and summer, mostly hot and more hot in our part of Virginia. Holden’s cab rides around New York City sound exciting compared with my life in Essex County. Even my little brother’s soccer schedule is more exciting than my life. Nick’s the star of the team, a brilliant sweeper. He stops the other team dead a zillion times a game, but he’s too nice to admit it. Although I’m not into team sports myself, anyone can see how much they rely on him and how he lives to be that indispensable guy. He’s thirteen.

My older brother’s a third year, philosophy major. The dude has more girlfriends than anyone I know. He’s Joe College to the umpteenth degree, too cool to hang with me much anymore.

He’s a real Joe, short for Joseph Ides Landon. My parents stuck him too, only Ides isn’t half as bad as Solstice. It easier for people to believe Ides could be a real name, so he’s never embarrassed like I am. He’s not forced to make up some song and dance about Solstice being a family holdover from the old country, another freebie from the girl I didn’t ask out who probably doesn’t even remember me.

Just to round it out, in case you’re into names like Mom obviously was, Nick is short for Nicholas, which means ‘victory of the people,’ Mom’s basic life philosophy. I’m not sure why she chickened out the third time around on middle names and opted for the family name of Sumner for Nick, but he’s definitely the one who’ll change the world. He’s got the name for it. And the energy.

Being sick puts you right out there. Just like being the lead in the Middle School play when every little sixth grade teenybopper stares at you in the caf and fights over the stool you used at lunch or insists on chewing the same kind of gum you do. I didn’t mind that so much. As Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music, I was lucky. I didn’t have too many lines, I was the good guy, and I got to kiss Marissa Bennett. Counting practice and performances, twenty-two times. Joe said to enjoy it, most ninth graders don’t kiss anyone no matter what they tell you. Aside from the kisses, being in the limelight is harder than you think. The whole time I was kissing Marissa I didn’t realize how much I would wish someday I could just blend in.

I don’t really get how Holden stood it that everyone knew about his being kicked out of that fancy schmantzy private school. Pencey. How lame is that for a prep school? And they all had an opinion on why he shouldn’t have let it happen. But he didn’t seem to care. Mostly, I guess, because he knew it didn’t matter in the long run. No matter how much I try to convince myself to be the same way about everyone knowing about The Disease, it’s different. Dying IS the long run. So it matters. There’s just nothing I can do about it.


'Deep Breathing' - First Place, Fiction, NMW Awards VIII.

Excerpt:
Every once in a while the snow hesitated, letting unadorned air fall on the white cushion, slowly, silently, brushing aside the lingering flakes and letting the forest breath deeply of nothing. Then, as Penn watched from the cabin's steamy warmth, a few straggling flakes slid from the heavens, tumbling head over heels on the velvet carpet of night sky, gathering speed and numbers until white swirls danced in nautilus formations with the trees and fence posts and porch railings. Anne should have come with him.

For days now their argument had lingered, making the smallest pleasantry suspect. They hadn't had a complete conversation in months. She wanted him to resolve it, and he thought he had. He worked, he came home on time, paid his share of the bills, ate her mother's holiday dinners, wanted her in bed, yet was content to just sit and hold her hand...

Read online (New Millenium Writings)


'Repeater' - The HooK Fiction Contest 2002: Second Place.

Excerpt:
“Of course he could be shot. He could drown in a duck blind too, but he won’t.”
“He’s only six,” Susan says to Charles, wishing her brain would clear, sludge in a timeless fog from not enough sleep. Since New Year’s it seems like, she’s only slept standing up, what with the baby’s croup and the early morning tightness in her belly that can only mean one thing. For a second she wishes Chuckie was the one with croup so he wouldn’t have to go on this first hunting trip, an initiation she’s delayed for the last two years with tricks and pleas and tears. This year nothing works...

Read the full story (37 KB .pdf)
Read online (The HooK)


'Diary of a Traveling Novelist' - OC Magazine, May 2007.

When you own a convertible, there’s usually no contest about which car you’re taking on a road trip. My dream—my first published novel in hardcover, selling well, and getting good reviews—already had me smiling. Add to the dream the company of a newly retired husband for a whole month and Florida as a destination in mid-winter, it should’ve been a slam dunk.

But… there was the issue of luggage. Golf clubs for him, for me boxes of books to sell at the non-bookstore events, and clothes for both travelers from a chilly February weekend in South Carolina through television interviews, author signings, to a few days on a friend’s sailboat south of St. Petersburg. After hopping from foot to foot in twenty degrees (without accounting for the wind chill) while we tried every configuration, including packing the backseat to the headrests, we gave up and took the Mercury sedan. A geezer’s car, but ‘be prepared’ was too ingrained from childhood scout training. The real advantage, the cooler was within reach on the backseat for quick snacks in the event of traffic jams. Starvation, we both agreed as we started down the driveway, ranks right up there as a ‘real’ danger with today’s plethora of interstate eating options.

Day One: Drive like banshees to Columbia, South Carolina to make the opening festivities of the South Carolina Book Festival. Eight hours in the car hardly phased me. The invitation to speak on a panel with two other first novelists thrilled me, even without my travel expenses being covered by the Humanities Council of South Carolina. Flattered and humbled, I checked us in, gathered our name tags, and took particular note of the hospitality rooms in each building for ‘Authors Only.’ Steeped in his own visions of deep conversations with some of his favorite authors, my husband thought it was too cool.

The opening speaker created quite a stir by referring to a dozen famous authors as ‘they shall remain nameless’ before she told one revealing story after the next, complete with their names. Dorothea Benton Frank announced that she writes romance novels to insure herself enough income independent from her husband to buy what she wants when she wants it. They print 750,000 copies of her novels, though the average print run for fiction is under 5,000. Most of us in the audience laughed while we turned green.

Book festivals, by definition, occur in large buildings with multiple ‘venues’ for more intimate conversations between panelists of authors and audiences of readers, sprinkled with aspiring authors. The questions range from personal ‘when do you write’ to broad, ‘how do you know when a book is finished.’ Lucky again, I was invited to fill in for an author who cancelled at the last minute because of ‘plumbing’ problems. Personal or otherwise we weren’t told, but it was an extra opportunity to spread the word about White Lies, my novel about a mother whose baby was injured by a childhood vaccination. The panel, ‘Carving Fiction Out of History,’ started with an author turned actress who mesmerized the entire room by reading in dialect a slave mother’s monologue as her children were torn from her side and sent to auction. It was a hard act to follow.

After that panel, we authors signed books for eager readers. Sitting next to Rosemary Wells, the very famous children’s author of Ruby and Max, I admired her line of fans that wove through the other exhibition hall booths and into the hallway. Someday, I told myself, I’ll have as abundant an audience as Wells. In the meantime I signed for my much shorter line and wondered if it would be too amateur to ask if I could keep the sign with my name printed so officially. It was a first for me.

My husband made friends with the Happy Booksellers, the independent bookstore in Columbia. They enthusiastically displayed my book . . . with the other two hundred titles for sale. Afterwards, we shared the wonderful rush of an exhibitor offering best sellers for $5 each, several stolen innings at the University baseball game up the street, and an authors’ only barbecue with live music. I could have returned to Orange and been completely satisfied.

But Sunday was my advertised panel and a television interview I had lobbied for since January, so it was early to bed. It’s hard work to sell books.

Day Four: In Georgia the southern hospitality continued. The Statesboro Friends of the Library hosted a reading and signing in the original one room lending library, now a renovated meeting room attached to their state-of-the-art facility. The refreshments were four star. Outside on the lawn the sign announcing my presentation was bigger than a car. Statesboro, home of Georgia Southern University, charms visitors with its renovated and expanding downtown, an East and West of every street, and a campus almost totally under construction. The constant expansion may be attributable to that fairy tale truth that Georgia residents attend college for free if they maintain a certain grade point average. Because our hostess taught IT (Information Technology) at the University, we had an insiders’ tour, which did not save us from a parking ticket, but it did make it go away.

Arranged in advance, I spoke to a Literature and Ethics class of first year students. A little wide-eyed, even at eleven o’clock, and eager to add their take on why doctors might not tell a mother the whole truth about her baby’s seizures, they were intrigued with the book and the fact that it was fiction, inspired by a true story.

On to Savannah we drove to see an Aunt and Uncle and to try to talk the famous and elite Savannah bookstore into carrying White Lies. Once I saw the narrow front door, the single window, and the stacks of books, floor to ceiling, I realized the answer would be no to an unknown first novelist, even before I recited my writing credits or the importance of the vaccination issues to parents. Second line of offense worked better. After careful coaching from my marketing-whiz of a husband, they took the publisher’s postcards to give to any purchaser. Someone might read the endorsements on the back or check out the website listed there and think it sounded like a worthwhile read.

To compensate for that failure, we ate. Byrd Cookie Company headquarters in Savannah offers samples of everything. Crab dip, southwestern salsa, and mint chocolate cookies in a gift box decorated as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. At least Georgians appreciate good literature and good food. We recommend the Oglethorpe Blue Trolley Tour. Rain or shine, $10 flat for two days’ riding, they tell funny, insiders’ stories and drive slowly enough for you to take pictures of Flannery O’Conner’s childhood home for writerly inspiration.

Day Eight: We drove to Florida in the rain, made a last minute change because of the funeral of our Vero Beach host’s sister, and stayed in New Smyrna Beach with an elderly friend who had trouble remembering I was Chris’ wife and not his sister. No book selling until we made Vero Beach.

As one of the top five highest book-buying zip codes in the country, this East Coast beach town held promise and it didn’t disappoint. Our host and hostess were enthusiastic and ready for good news after the funeral. They recommended my book to the local radio host, Rhett Palmer, whom we constantly referred to as Rhett Butler, but who’s affectionately known locally as ‘Radio Rhett, Host to the Stars.’ A fifteen minute interview turned into an hour and a half conversation with Rhett, his second guest, an escaped Cuban who ran a low-impact physical therapy clinic, and the last guest, the director of the Vero Beach Opera Company. The director, a sophisticated philanthropist, just happened to have a son who’s the screenplay reviewer for Director Mel Gibson. And, thanks to Radio Rhett and the Opera Director, the son just happens to be reading White Lies now for possible movie consideration.

After the show, I checked in with the local bookstore. They had already sold two copies. I bought a “Life is Good” T-shirt and displayed it in the rear window of the car for the rest of the trip.

After a one-night stay and a candlelit steak dinner with Orlando friends we hadn’t seen in a decade, we met The Smith College Club of Tampa for lunch. Smithies are to the most sophisticated readers in the world. I talked books and sold books while Chris caught up with his emails at a wireless café. Travelers’ Tip: Public libraries everywhere offer internet, often wireless, usually timed to expire at the exact moment you are trying to send the document you’ve rushed to compose during your ten minute slot, but they are friendly, helpful, and almost always FREE.

Chris’ favorite part of the trip was our three days at the River Point Marina south of St. Pete’s with friends from Tappahannock, Virginia. R & R of the highest order: hot tub, heated pool, showers cleaned by someone else, constant fresh air, piped-in music of a variety to satisfy the same variety of tastes, and bunks that rocked you to sleep not long after the sun went down. Tampa Bay sports a fantastical bridge that we sailed in and around one day, cruising by scattered islands and beaching it where the conquistadors landed.

Because sailboats are synonymous with naps, I even managed a little writing while Chris slept. Any period of time without writing spins me into a temporary depression like the slow wilting of a tulip in a dry vase. Florida, though, the Land of the Fountain of Youth, attracts more characters that ought to be in books than any other place I’ve been. Fodder for more stories, hoorah. My Lost in the Land of Sunshine is out looking for a home in some lucky literary journal as I write this.

Outside of Gainesville where we stayed with relatives again, we toured Micanopy, a tiny village draped in Spanish moss, chock full of antique stores, the world’s largest collection of cameo jewelry, and a stained glass studio in overdrive. Doc Hollywood could have appeared from any corner; the movie was filmed there and it looks exactly like it did in the movie. One garrulous antique collector bought a copy of the book.

From there—after golf, more swimming, and another book club talk—we sped around Atlanta, stopping long enough to locate the Fulton County library where I was asked to return for a presentation. We ate lunch with a young William and Mary friend of our son’s. After a drive-by motel evening in South Carolina, we arrived in Raleigh for another Smith Club presentation. You can always count on Smith women to buy books.

Traveling north to Charlottesville for the Book Festival there, we noted the buds on the Bradford Pear trees and the crocus heads cutting teeth on the still cold ground. No Birds of Paradise, no palms swaying in the breeze, no colorful characters ready to be fictionalized, but lots fewer boxes in the trunk. Although the oh-so-convenient cooler was full of gas receipts and discarded maps of places we’d loved and left, slipping that house key in the back door and being home was the high point of the trip.


'Thomas Marsh: Sculpting Ideas and Hope' - OC Magazine, September 2007.

More of a poet than he credits himself, Thomas Marsh, internationally renowned sculptor and Orange County citizen, views art as transformative, rather than mere self-expression, the sixties’ trend that he rejected as a youth. Marsh’s childhood in rural Iowa and his parents’ conservative values may have impacted his values, but he’s on the cutting edge of political debate with his recently completed public memorial in the District of Columbia to victims of communism worldwide.

In his gracious, but pensive figure carved from bronze, he reveals the private, more contemplative side of his creativity, reiterating that the statue is first and foremost an artistic expression. “The Democracy Statue is . . . a kind of whisper in the face of the massive human calamity which it memorializes.” Marsh speaks eloquently of the statue’s “mournful overtones” and “its overarching character … of peaceful hope and quiet strength.”

The history of Marsh’s commitment to the idea behind the statue is a similar confluence of his own classical inclinations and the international outrage, sparked by the Chinese government’s response to the student protest in 1989. Marsh had followed the aftermath of the tank’s destruction of the gigantic sculptural symbol created out of plaster over three days and nights by the Chinese students and referred to by the international press as the Statue of Democracy. Marsh explains the name. “The Bejing students made many artistic references to the Statue of Liberty in the Democracy Statue.”

His vow to rebuild the statue was mirrored across the globe. “In 1994 I was the artistic director for a permanent bronze sculpture in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a one-quarter scale version of the Bejing creation, which came to be known as the Goddess of Democracy.” His newest Washington, DC project on the same theme references the link between the protesters’ memorial and the Statue of Liberty. “The radiants divide the rounded triangular plaza into ten sections, each standing for ten million of the more than 100 million victims of communism in the twentieth century. The radiants also provide a forced perspective, beckoning the viewer inward. The pedestal is circular, a kind of drum, whose proportions call to mind the heavy, massive style of communist or imperial architecture.”

Marsh describes the statue at the new DC memorial as a variation on the San Francisco version of the Democracy Statue. “The major forms are largely the same, but the face and base were entirely revised, along with lengthening the statue and modifying many of its textures. The landscape architectural plaza is my design concept, and the beautiful details were designed by architects Mary Kay Lanzilotta and Gail Douglass of Hartman-Cox Architects in Washington. Different shades of granite highlight the architectural elements of the base and pedestal.” He is quick to add that the integration of the existing cityscape marks another important link between the disgrace of the past and the hope for the future, captured in the new Memorial. “The U.S. Capitol is clearly visible from one important view, which means the Goddess of Freedom on top of the Capitol is juxtaposed with the Statue of Democracy.”

At the June 12, 2007 dedication, President Bush spoke of ten million victims and the need to prevent such horrors in the future. Marsh worked with the historian Dr. Lee Edwards, who spent seventeen years guiding the memorial project for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Marsh sidesteps his part in the process. “It’s appropriate that the focus is not on the designer and sculptor, and is instead on the meaning of the memorial.”

But Marsh’s perspective is more personal. “Ten years ago in 1997 I had the pleasure of meeting one of the student sculptors who created the original statue in Beijing. At that time he feared revealing his identity because of possible reprisal on his family in China.” It is that kind of ideological relevance that drives Marsh to sculptural interpretations that are more than textures and shapes. “As a young artist, it was no great task to recognize the characteristics of “selling out” in one’s art and to view those as acts of selling one’s soul, of rejecting integrity. Capitalism may be a manifestation of human freedom, but it certainly doesn’t guarantee the existence of good taste and artistic depth! Artistic virtue is a function of far deeper cultural norms.”

With honesty fostered in his Iowa roots and his parents’ traditional values, Marsh hits head-on the traditional dilemma of artists trying to make a living from their art. Funding for large scale projects often comes from capitalists or businesses that can generate the funds and connections to back artistic projects that require coordination of design, landscape architects, and sculptors. In that regard Marsh’s conservative idealism sparks enthusiasm from American sources. Projects in the works include a portrait bust as a public sculpture for Amgen, Inc. in Boston, Massachusetts, and a private bust commission. He is waiting to hear about a national competition for a public sculpture at the Boise, Idaho airport and a new statue commission for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Arlington.

His life’s work springs from an early recognition of his interest in all things classical. After his 1974 graduation from the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee, Marsh moved from Wisconsin to California. “Iowa has so many facets, and I think Meredith Wilson and Garrison Keilor have aptly touched the real nerves of the state. I left as a young man because I felt I could never make a living there as an artist. Rightly or wrongly, I perceived the ‘big cities’ of either coast as the place to be.”

Three years later, studying with Professors Kenneth Glenn and Stephen Werlick, he graduated with an MFA in sculpture from Cal. State Long Beach. After graduation he studied as an apprentice to the Italian sculptor Milton Hebald. When he returned from Italy, he settled in San Francisco where he worked as a sculptor and taught part-time at the Academy of Art College (now University). Marrying in 1995, he and his wife Siobhan moved to the town of Sonoma where he lived for nine years before coming to Orange in 2006. Their enthusiasm for Orange stems in part from the welcome and encouragement they received from their neighbors, Randolph and Susie Miller, who has since died.

Although Marsh works in a small studio he refers to as a ‘cube house’ in his backyard in Orange, he’s happy there. “I’ve had large warehouse spaces in the past, and they just fill up with ‘valuable’ useless materials, and become places for mold storage!” And he’s close to his children who are being home-schooled by Siobhan.

Of his talent, he credits his parents for their encouragement and early financial help with tuition. “I thank my older sister, Judy, also an artist, whose example led me to believe that working as an artist was a very natural thing to do, though quite uncommon in my hometown of Sioux City. Above all, I thank God for the gift of artistry.”