Tammy's Trio on Wednesday
Reflections and Readings from My Bradbury Trio Program
I am late this week with my TRIO share so I decided to share it with everyone!
The Bradbury Trio [reading a poem, an essay, and a story every day] fuels my writing.
This trio structure inspires me to write in response to these pieces either individually or as a collective. My wish for you is that your reading leads to writing that would not happen any other way.
The trio for today is a collection of my favorites with more commentary than normal.
Poem: I Watch Her Eat the Apple Natalie Diaz
I learned about this poem from a K-Ming Chang class. There is a sensual nature to this poem that I love. There is a voyeuristic sense from watching this person eat the apple in the poem. I also love how the apple represents so many metaphors within the text. It makes me think about how intimate eating can be.
I never get tired of reading this over and over.
Story: Amber Spark’s Thirteen Ways to Destroy a Painting
I have a list of stories I return to again and again as models for writing. Amber Spark’s Thirteen Ways to Destroy a Painting is from her collection The Unfinished World. You can listen to the story here.
Amber is one of the short story writers I follow closely. In interviews, she talks about how she takes old fairy tales and puts a modern spin on them which I admire. Her most recent collection is magical and I highly recommend it.
One of the many aspects I love about this story is that the title draws me in because of the use of the number. There is something seductive about numbers, especially thirteen. There is much debate about the luck of thirteen. The structure of the story also follows a numbered sequence. The story is told with a time traveler attempting to destroy a painting that stubbornly keeps reappearing in her own time.
Another takeaway element for writing is how she uses the repeated element of an object. In this case it is the painting. The painting is an anchor in the story and is referred to in each numbered section. Each iteration of the painting shows the title changes and the size depending on how the time traveler’s actions affected the painting. These are small details that contribute to the pacing of the story. You keep reading to find out what happens to the painting next.
As you read, you wonder if she will succeed and destroy the painting eventually. Your brain also knows there are thirteen iterations and then some conclusion will occur.
Time travel is always an element I am drawn to but I have seen it done well and done horribly in short stories and in novels.Satisfying time travel is hard to pull off. This story also reminds me of the connection between the writing practice we do and how that eventually emerges in a finished piece. Kathy Fish teaches an exercise in her flash fiction classes where you take a scene and write it three different ways. This story shows how an author can do this and make it a published story. This idea also reminds me of an earlier exercise in the course with the I don't remember prompt and how a similar list shows up in Tobias Wolff’s Bullet to the Brain. I have learned to pick out some of these freewriting elements and how they show up in published pieces.
The characters are identified by their labels in this story, not by name. The names do not matter in this story and gives the reader a bit of distance. The painting itself falls into this category for me as well. The descriptions of the people are tight and pack a lot in a few sentences. For instance:
He is so young, the artist, a white smooth face in the dark of his walk-up. She supposes this will be easy-from the empty, hungry tilt of his face, to the stooped posture from painting under this sloped attic roof.
The artist looks at her aghast but defiant. The artist knows his way around this kind of truth.
Another pacing technique I noticed is shown in section seven through ten. As the reader is moving through the destruction attempts, this section is written in two sentence bursts with repeated phrasing. This reiterates that the painting still exists and you can feel the frustration of the time traveler’s efforts.
Seven: The time traveler sets fire to the unfinished painting. The painting is still there.
Eight: The time traveler pours acid on the unfinished painting. The painting is still there.
Sparks is a short story writer who achieves a satisfying ending sometimes with unanswered questions which is a reason I read this type of story in the first place. Kelly Link is another author that does the same. Link is more blatant in her “unfinished” endings and has been unapologetic about it.
Thirteen Ways is a story I feel is satisfying but also stuck with me. When I first read this story I kept coming back to it. I appreciate the style Sparks writes in. Here is a sentence I love from section Thirteen:
She was more in love with life than with him-she’d never have believed how black and long the days could stretch over her, mean and empty, like shadows in the winter.
Story: The Museum
I am also obsessed with this story.
Essay: 12, 795 Possessions
I love visual essays and this one has been a center point of discussion many times in courses I have taught. A friend and I started to photograph just the items on our desks to send to each other, and after about ten minutes I needed to stop.
I have a strange relationship to material objects. I have moved many times over my years and there are some things I can easily let go of. This essay intrigues me.
It also is one of those pieces that I think about in relation to publishing. How many things are in our notebooks that we have just for our own amusement that could be shared? What are we self rejecting and not sharing?
Have you read anything interesting this week that you need to share!? Please do so in the comments! I love recommendations and have found some of my favorite stories that way.
A little more about me: Tammy L. Evans is a writer, teacher, and coach living in a tiny house on a peninsula with her husband and adventure cat. Her location device is her loud laugh. She is currently working on a short story collection. Her poetry has been published in The Storyteller, FoxGlove Journal, Story Hall, Blue Insights, The Partnered Pen, and others. Her fiction has been published in Gone Lawn, Cabinets of Heed, Spelk, Five on the Fifth, Clover and White, Fiction Berlin Kitchen, and others.