Category: poetry

100-Word Story: The Good Thief

~ Chris Cocca ~ 1 Comment

This 100-word story/prose poem was written probably 10 years ago and published around that time at Tuesday Shorts.  Tuesday Shorts was such an early journal of micro-fiction that it was actually hosted on MySpace.  Before closing up shop, it moved to blogspot.  The editors had been planning a print anthology, and this piece was to be included.  The anthology ended up not happening, and the blogspot version of the journal carries this 100-word epitaph:

Tuesday Shorts placed writers we know alongside those we don’t to communicate that quality writers are everywhere, and make one community. Writing—no matter how frustrating an endeavor it can sometimes become—should always be a challenging game we can all play.

Jacquelyn Mitchard, whose Deep End of the Ocean was the first Oprah’s Book Club selection, not only recommended making Tuesday Shorts a MySpace blog, but also contributed the first piece. More excellent work followed by writers known and unknown, and pieces continue to draw readers who want a good story but only have a minute to read it.

Here’s The Good Thief:

My grandfather cannot walk now but his arms and back are strong. He wears a v-neck work shirt and a gold and diamond Christ-head and he’s kneeling on the den floor looking for his pills. His forearms are Italian-dark with latent bulldog power, still big from turning Navy mounts and tagging Mitsubishi Zeros by blood-red dots behind their wings. Now he’s moving the recliner and sweating from his nose and steel wool shadow. His chair crashes heavy and Jesus weeps the nose sweat while my daughter crawls behind him and he doesn’t know I see. Find the red dots, Pop.

***

A note here about 100-word stories and the impact they seem to still have on my writing. 



Poem: The Birds

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

There’s nothing to say now to Eugene Victor Debs or William Jennings Bryan.  No spring under iron wheels and no thaw in the concrete borders of compassion.  No dispersing from the lock-step forms of ill-formed fear, fear of self, of other, fear of washing rain, revealing living oneness, fear of drowning in it.  There’s no green in our window-boxes, no stray cats in alleys and nothing left to feed them. Only fat birds always eating and the statues of our past, the ideal likeness of forgotten shapes and forms, fat birds always eating, bleaching white our skin-toned stories.

Revising after Rejection: Re-Seeing, Re-Listening, Re-Hearing

~ Chris Cocca ~ 3 Comments

Like most necessary things, writing is hard.  Communicating mental images or flashes of memory or triggering smells with tools that are, themselves, none of those things, takes work.  Doing so in ways that makes sense not just to you but also to readers takes even more work. 

I submitted some things to a great journal a few months ago.  Even though the work I shared wasn’t ultimately accepted, I’m quite pleased with the feedback.  Having given myself some time and space, I’ve come back to the piece they particularly liked with new eyes and ears.  (Revision is always, literally, re-seeing.  But it’s also re-listening and re-hearing.)

I greatly appreciate what the editor here is saying, and the time he took to say it, and the time he and the rest of the team take thinking deeply on these things:

We are writing with mixed news. While we are not accepting these poems, your submission made it through multiple editorial rounds. We particularly enjoyed “[title redacted]” with its exploration of anxiety and attempts at self-soothing. Our main concern, ultimately, was that there were moments when the piece felt too expository. We’d love to see the entire piece rooted in the wild imagery of the last third of the poem.

We recognize how much talent and skill went in to your submission, but we can only publish a small percentage of the work we receive. In the final round of selections, we start looking for the smallest of reasons–reasons in line with our own personal tastes–to reject a manuscript. This part of the process, we understand, is so very subjective. So we want you to know that while we are not accepting this manuscript, we were pleased with your submission, it was a joy to read, and we hope we’ll see more of your work in the future.