Short Story: Gwen's Dilemma, by M. L. Poncelet

Gwen stood outside the sidewalk looking at the address. The building had a closed sign, the windows looked grimy and the awning was missing. She smiled. This was going to be the future home of her new business, Gwen’s Flower Shop. She was going to be her own boss from now on. No more having to wake up and drive one hour to her government job.

As she peered through the glass she imagined all the new renovations she would do - new tile for the floors, a fresh coat of paint for the walls, and a good scrub on the outside wouldn't hurt either. It was hard to believe this used to be a flower shop, but there in the corner was the refrigeration unit with its glass doors.

Her inheritance from her late uncle Bob was a huge help when it came to getting the loan. She walked around a couple of times as she waited for the loan manager to show up and give her the key. She couldn't wait to get started.

"Hey lady, are you lost?"

Gwen turned around, somewhat taken aback by this toothless man.

"This is going to be the future home of Gwen's Flower Shop." She said, forcing a smile.

"Good luck to them," he said as he approached closer. "How much did they pay for it? They probably got ripped off whatever it was. I'm Dan by the way, I work out the back at the radiator shop."

Gwen took a step backward, and looked at him, unbelieving. Just then she spied the loan manager's car come bolting around the corner in a blur of shiny metal.

Dan wandered off just as Jeff came careening into the parking lot, slamming the car door behind him.

"Gwen! You beat me to it!" He ran up and shook her hand, congratulating her. Jeff's smile was infectious and soon her old enthusiasm was back. She shared her ideas of renovating and he nodded and smiled as he rattled the key back and forth in the lock. Finally it opened. "You might want to get a locksmith around, this lock is a bit rusty."

Inside the place was a complete mess; dirt and cobwebs were everywhere, clinging to the edge of the countertop and hanging down from the ceiling. Even the normally chatty Jeff was at a loss for words. He brushed his jacket. "I should get going, Gwen. Good luck!"

Gwen watched him go and waved through the grimy windows but he was too busy swinging his neck around looking for a break in the traffic. Afterward, Gwen put on her apron and started to clean, first one spot and then another. It was hard to stay focused on just one area when the whole place was in such dire need of help. Even the ceiling was yellow. Someone must've smoked quite heavily in here. She left the door open for some fresh air but soon realized after she started coughing that she needed a mask.

The locksmith came around noon.

"Whatcha doin'?" He said.

"Cleaning! This is going to be the future home of Gwen's Flower Shop," she said between gritted teeth. "Who are you?"

"I'm here to change your locks," he said as he rattled the door and the door frame. "This door is junk lady, it's not worth the lock. You see how it doesn't sit right in the frame?"

Gwen coughed as she came outside to see what he was talking about. He unscrewed the door handle.

"Ideally what you want to do is take out the bolt but this frame is so flimsy," he poked at the frame with his screwdriver. "If I take this one out you're going to have major problems. Looks like you need to call someone about these ants, they've found the rotten wood already." The locksmith pointed his shoe at the small mound of earth next to the corner of the door.

Gwen took off her rubber gloves and bent over to have a look. There were ants all right, dozens of them. One more person to call.

"I need the lock changed, whatever hardware you have, could you change it?" She was getting exasperated.

"Sure, sure. You just continue on what you're doing and I'll do my thing."

Gwen went back inside and resumed her scrubbing.

The locksmith opened the door, "I'm going to have to get another part, in the meantime, just keep this propped open, might be good for some fresh air."

Gwen kept cleaning for the next hour and then the wind picked up, seeming to blow more dust into the shop. Gwen pulled the door shut in annoyance.

By the end of the afternoon, the locksmith still hadn't returned. "Where is he?" Reaching into her pocket, she realized she had left her mobile phone in the car. Gwen strode to the door and hooked her fingers through the hole where the door knob used to be, but she couldn't open it. Perplexed, she bent down until she was eye level with the round hole and saw that the lousy bolt bit was holding the door in the frame. She rattled the door a few times but the door wouldn't budge.

"This is crazy," she muttered to herself. She needed something to turn the black piece of metal, a nail file? She always kept a couple of glass nail files in her purse which was - in the trunk of her car.

How was she going to get out? Gwen knew she shouldn't panic but she was tired and thirsty and hungry. She went around to all the windows but none of them would open. There was a small one out the back but it was stuck with grime and the lever was broken.

How was she going to get help? The phone company wasn't supposed to come until the end of the week. Gwen put her ear to the hole in the door but all she could hear was the faint rumble of the machines from the radiator shop. She yelled for help, but it was useless.

She was trapped! Panicking, she alternated between yelling and kicking at the door. How did those people do it in those movies? Throwing doors open with their shoulder? Gwen hit her shoulder against the door but it just hurt. Near tears, she threw anything and everything at the door including a stool. Finally, it started to splinter in the middle. Encouraged, she kept ramming the stool at it until the hole was large enough for the stool. Out of breath, Gwen tossed it aside and started to squeeze herself through the hole; she felt the sharp splinters scratching her and causing a rip in her shirt.

She was half way through, her arms flailing in front of her as she tried to wiggle through when she saw the locksmith's truck come around the corner.

"Whatcha doin'?" he called out.

Bio: M.L. Poncelet resides on the west coast of Canada in a place full of interesting characters and inspiration for her stories. You can read more of her short stories at http://www.oceanbluepress.com.

Tuesday Poem: The Translator

Shutting out the torment and the fear
deep into the night's cold morning hours
I work on my translation.

Improbable, that in another tongue
such lines as these were born,
set down, are vivid on his page

and will not come across to mine.
Two ways to go: the forced rhyme
the flaccid filling phrase

or terse, unrhymed,
trying to capture the meaning
as if that could ever be known.

But something does translate —
a voice from bleak immensities
perfect for nights like these:

the wind's forgotten murmur,
the war that beggars language
speaking the creole of slaughter.

Credit note: First published in New Zealand Books (December 2004), included in Best New Zealand Poems 2004, and then collected in All Blacks Kitchen Gardens.

Tim says: I have had something of a translation theme going with the Tuesday Poems on my blog recently, one way or another, and furthermore Best New Zealand Poems 2010 has just been launched - congratulations to all those who've had work selected! - so I though I would post my poem "The Translator", which appeared in BNZP 2004. At that time, I also supplied an exuberant set of notes on the poem.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog - the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week's other poems are linked from the right-hand column.

Book Review: The Spectrum Collection, edited by John Prescott - and some thoughts on how horror fiction works

 

Dark Continents Publishing is a new publisher of Dark Speculative Fiction, which they define as "Dark Fantasy, Horror (supernatural, Urban, and whatever other twist you can think to put on the genre) Science Fiction with a dark side. Basically, if it makes people squirm, it may well be for us."

They are not open to unsolicited submissions until 1 May 2011, but they already have several books available, and one of them is a sampler of their current authors' work, The Spectrum Collection.

Here is what the introduction has to say about The Spectrum Collection:

Welcome to the Spectrum Collection. People have asked us what “Dark Speculative Fiction” is. With this collection of stories from the authors of Dark Continents Publishing, we offer our definitions of that little phrase. Basically, we all write horror. Over the years however, we’ve all developed our own take on horror. You’ll find all our contributions here. From Sylvia Shults’ post-apocalyptic vampire story, to Simon Kurt Unsworth’s story of a cursed home, to the zombie stories contributed by myself and Adrian Chamberlin, you’ll find all the nooks and crannies of the horror world that make up our brand of literature. Our Dark Speculative Fiction. You’ll even find some bloody good poetry by Tracie McBride, Maureen (Mo) Irvine, and John Irvine. Carson Buckingham, Serenity J. Banks, and John Prescott round out the chills with their stories guaranteed to pump up your adrenaline.

So how does The Spectrum Collection live up to these claims? I found that my adrenalin was pumped up quite often, and there were definitely chills, but also that quite a few of the stories didn't offer that adrenalin and outlet or those chills anywhere to go. In more prosaic language, while almost all the stories were well written, created a nicely scary/spooky atmosphere, and set up a premise that promised excitement and/or fear, a number of them didn't resolve in a satisfying way.

I'm not a big reader of horror, but I've read enough to know that there are two kinds of horror story that work for me: the Stephen King kind, in which the author creates one or a small group of characters the reader cares about, and then puts them in grave jeopardy; and the H. P. Lovecraft kind, in which the characters are much less important and the horror comes from the revelation that vast and inimical cosmic forces wish us all the deepest harm.

(Of course, there are crossovers: Stephen King wrote several Lovecraft pastiches, including "Rats in the Walls", and "Crouch End", which memorably melds Lovecraftian horror with the unease of an American adrift in London. For that matter, the great Jorge Luis Borges, whose work often has an element of cosmic horror, acknowledged the influence of Lovecraft on his work and wrote a story dedicated to Lovecraft, "There Are More Things", published in The Book Of Sand (1975).)

The Lovecraft style is well suited to short stories, because it's hard to keep up an air of cosmic menace for a whole novel without it tipping over into bathos or silliness. The Stephen King signature style, on the other hand, is better suited to long narratives - of at least novella length - to give time to build up the characters before putting them, and the reader, through the wringer.

Another significant difference between the two styles is that the Stephen King approach usually ends with the survival of one or a few of the characters we care about, while the characteristic Lovecraftian ending has the narrator frantically scribbling the final words of the story as the three-lobed burning eye/giant space octopus/shambling gelatinous horror oozes across the threshold to end story and narrator alike.

Most of the stories in The Spectrum Collection are closer to the Stephen King approach than the H.P. Lovecraft approach, and as none of them are very long, that means that each author has taken on a very challenging task. I felt that a number of the stories did a good job of setting up the characters and the situation, and then fizzled out, either not advancing the story to a satisfying conclusion or coming up with an ending that I'd seen too many times before.

The two stories that made the most satisfying whole for me were "The End" by Serenity J. Banks, and "The Bodymen" by Adrian Chamberlin. "The End" is what Cormac McCarthy's The Road might be like if retold from the cannibals' point of view - but it's not as obvious as that little synopsis makes it sound, and within a general atmosphere of doom and dread, the story still goes to places I didn't expect.

"The Bodymen" has a tremendous setting for a horror story, a crematorium for dead animals. I once worked for a few weeks at a freezing works coolstore, and I can tell you that they are not great place to be alone at night if you have a vivid imagination. (I still haven't written my own story based on that experience...). Adrian Chamberlin does a great job of taking his already spooky setting and piling up the horror on top of it. I found the plot a bit confusing in a couple of places, but I was still creeped out by the overall effect.

Other stories I enjoyed included "Wild Goat Curry" by John Irvine, which is short but nasty, and "The Elms, Morecambe," by Simon Kurt Unsworth; while I think the author could have done more with the premise of this ghost story, the atmosphere of pain and regret is well described.

In the poetry, Tracie McBride's "Tooth Fairy" isn't one you want anywhere near your child's pillow, and "My Sister Doesn't Live There Anymore," by John Irvine, is a strong narrative poem.

So, in summary: there are some very strong pieces here, plus some that are underdeveloped, but nevertheless plenty to suggest that the authors represented here, and Dark Continents Publishing, are worth watching out for.

Tuesday Poem: Notes From The Futurist Project

You float like a cloud in trousers
I stand with my cow in the rain

Your poems electrified Russia
Your dams were a hymn to the rain

Your empire crumbled around us
As here and as gone as the rain

The birch tree lies by the roadside
Its branches are wept by the rain

The smoke of my village drifts upwards
Its ashes retreat from the rain

Your red square has entered the market
Its cobbles are slick with the rain

The future lies inside the present
As close as a cloud and its rain.

Credit note:First published in Lynx XXI:1, Feb 2006.

Tim says: This is my one and only published attempt at a ghazal. I don't think it's as fleet-footed as the ghazal by Mary Cresswell I posted last week, and in fact, I'd almost forgotten I'd written it - but then poet and photographer Madeleine Slavick kindly sent me an article by John Berger about the Russian futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, which touched on Mayakovsky's 'frenemy' relationship with his contemporary, the Russian peasant poet Sergei Esenin (sometimes rendered as Yesenin).

To simplify greatly, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Mayakovsky tried to build the urban future in his poetry, while Esenin tried to preserve the rural past. Neither succeeded in life, though both did in art. Both died young and by their own hand.

In this poem, Esenin is the narrator, and Mayakovsky is the "cloud in trousers", as he once referred to himself.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog - the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week's other poems are linked from the right-hand column.

An Interview With Mary Cresswell

 

Mary Cresswell is a Wellington poet who lives on the Kapiti Coast. She came to New Zealand from Los Angeles in 1970, after having lived in various parts of the US, in Germany, and in Japan. She graduated from Stanford University in California with a degree in history and English literature. She is retired from freelance work (science editor and proofreader) and has spent at least one lifetime in the Wellington workplace.

Her first book appearance was with Mary-Jane Duffy, Mary Macpherson, and Kerry Hines, co-authors of Millionaire’s Shortbread (University of Otago Press, 2003). This book is illustrated with collages by Brendan O’Brien, has an afterword by Greg O’Brien, and introduced these four poets to the Wellington scene.

Nearest & Dearest, Mary’s collection of her parody and satiric verse, was published in 2009 by Steele Roberts and is illustrated with cartoons by Nikki Slade Robinson. At that time I interviewed her for the first time.

This is a first for me, Mary - a re-interview, and it indicates that you've had success in getting two books published in relatively close succession. Before we get onto your new poetry collection, Trace Fossils, how did things go with your 2009 collection, Nearest & Dearest? Collections of light poetry are still quite rare in New Zealand - do you think that this affected the critical and popular reception of Nearest & Dearest, for either good or ill?

There was no critical notice in NZ, which didn’t surprise me. In the US, I got a very good notice in the well-established print journal Light Quarterly, but the US has a lot of humour written by women – not just Dorothy Parker years ago but many women today. I fondly remember Hen’s Teeth, Crow Station, and lots of good women stand-up comics, but NZ seems to me to have handed written satire and parody over to the boys. (If anyone can tell me otherwise, please get in touch!!)

The publisher and I sold just under 150 copies between us. Most of my sales, many of them multiple copies, were to groups of women who would never browse poetry shelves but who were pleasantly astonished that reading poems could be fun. ... On the other hand, I was surprised by a number of people who were nonplussed (embarrassed?) by the contents, didn’t know what to say. Perhaps they had no experience of responding to satire or to sarky women fronting up in print.

Trace Fossils was first runner-up for the Kathleen Grattan Awards in 2009, judged by Fleur Adcock - a notable achievement! Is the published version of the manuscript the same as that submitted for the Kathleen Grattan Awards, or has it changed since then?

It’s exactly the same. The manuscript wandered around some years before that. One reason I am so very glad to see it in print now is that I am starting to have trouble recognising the author – and I’m extremely happy to be on the receiving end of Steele Roberts’ very attractive design and presentation.

Trace Fossils is divided into four sections of roughly equal length. What is the significance of these four sections within the collection? Were most of the poems written with an eye to this particular collection, or did the shape of the collection derive from the type of poems that you had been writing?

The section names are intended to be vaguely geological and to suggest eras, different from each other and long in time. Trace fossils themselves may or may not represent anything, and they are a geological construct, a fascinating one (they also have a very funny classification system – take a look). In the introduction, I nominate trace fossils as a metaphor for our memories of loss and our ways of observing loss.

The poems themselves were written at various times and in various forms: counted syllables, sonnets, prose poems, ghazals, concrete poems, ovillejo, accentual poems, free verse in a variety of lengths and shapes. I assembled them more with an eye to connection than to form; they were none of them written with a particular book in mind.

I spent some time recently talking with a fellow poet about the marketing and distribution of poetry collections - that is, letting people know about new poetry collections, and getting poetry collections to places, whether physical or virtual, that people can buy the books if they wish. I imagine the poets reading this interview, at least, would love to know whether you have any innovative ideas on either of those topics!

I wish. Virtual: I have no clue. Finding more about this side of things is my next project. Physical: The books I have sold were sold by word of mouth – people rang me. Local museums, educational groups and art galleries are sometimes prepared to handle books by local authors, especially if the books can be tied in with current shows, if you do the record-keeping and paperwork, and if you are prepared to donate some of your profit to the organisation. (And if you accept it as a one-off, not a continuing relationship.) I suspect special-interest groups, like writing classes, might be worth trying if you’re prepared to give a reading. I expect any reading is a place to sell books.

Do you have any poetry readings planned around the publication of Trace Fossils - and if so, where can people hear you read?

No, no readings. As you know, there are poets who perform with panache and poets who potter on paper. There is a lot of overlap, I’m glad to say, but I generally prefer not to do solo readings. The main reason for this is that a lot of my poetry is based on word play (both visual and syntactic) and shifts of register. I think that much of this goes west when people hear the poems read out loud and only once. I write page poetry that is to be looked at and re-read. I wish I could bounce and rap, but I can’t.

If you don't mind me asking, what projects are you working on now?

No, I don’t mind, but there’s nothing all that coherent. It’s been years since I finished the poems included in Trace Fossils, and I have shifted more and more to formal patterns, particularly ghazals (at the moment) but also other repeating structures. I enjoy working in accentual (as opposed to accentual-syllabic) forms. Somewhere down the line I would like to end up with a book built on a skeleton of ghazals but fleshed out with a variety of other poems. I’m still writing light verse and publishing it in the US and the UK, but as always this is a separate department. My main immediate project will be trying to get my head around what might be useful in the world of e-publishing.

Book Availability

Trace Fossils can be ordered from the publisher, Steele Roberts, and is available at independent bookshops.

Nearest & Dearest can also be ordered from Steele Roberts.

Sample Poem

I published Mary's poem "The Sound Of Now" as my Tuesday Poem this week - check it out!

Tuesday Poem: The Sound Of Now, by Mary Cresswell

 
The Sound Of Now
First line from Marie Ponsot, ‘Reminder’

I am rich. I am poor. Time is all I own.
Time is fair. Time is foul. I am all I own.

Pale hands pick me up and let me down again.
I smell shit and Shalimar. I smell cologne.

No matter on which page you hide, in which book,
I’ll know your name when I can’t recall my own.

A sob?... no, it’s a stab of recognition.
The knife cuts deeper. My thought is all I own.

They called me Marīa when I read Latin.
In this place I have no name to call my own.

Until the end, the sound of one hand clapping —
In the trees, the toucan plays a slide trombone.

Credit note:Published in Ambit 199: 71 (London; Martin Bax and Carol Ann Duffy, eds.) and reprinted in her new collection Trace Fossils.

Tim says: There are two good reasons that this is my Tuesday Poem for this week: first, it's a fine and most elegantly constructed poem, and second, I am running an interview with Mary - my second interview with her - later this week on my blog. Keep an eye out for it!

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog - the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week's other poems are linked from the right-hand column.

A Mainland Double: Tales For Canterbury and the Readers And Writers Alive! Festival

 
Tales For Canterbury

In just over a month since the Christchurch earthquake of 22 February, editors Cassie Hart and Anna Caro have done an amazing job of pulling together Tales for Canterbury, a fundraising anthology to benefit the victims of the earthquake, with all proceeds going to the New Zealand Red Cross Earthquake Appeal.

Tales for Canterbury is now available for pre-order as an ebook (in pdf, mobi, and epub format) and as a paperback - I've just ordered my paperback copy. It should be published in April, so you won't have long to wait for it.

There's a blog detailing the progress of the anthology, and if you're not sure whether you'd like one, you might want to check out the list of contributors. There are a few names there you might know - Neil Gaiman, for example; not to mention Janis Freegard, Gwyneth Jones, Jay Lake, Helen Lowe, Tina Makereti, Juliet Marillier, Jeff Vandermeer, Sean Williams, and many, many more fine writers. I am honoured to have a story in such company.

Readers And Writers Alive! Festival (Invercargill)

I lived in Southland between the ages of four and sixteen, and though that's, well, several years ago now, I have written a lot of poetry about and set in Southland, and have even set a science fiction story in Gore.

So it has always been a private ambition of mine to take part in a Southland literary event, and I'm delighted to say that this ambition is about to be realised. I'm going to be a participant in the Readers and Writers Alive! programme of the Southland Arts Festival 2011, organised by the Dan Davin Literary Foundation, for whom Helen Lowe is currently running writing workshops.

I'm taking part in two events: a poetry reading featuring Joanna Preston, Kay McKenzie Cooke and Lynley Dear on Friday 29 April; and a writing workshop the following day. For that, I'll remove my poet's beret and put on my SF writer's battered propellor beanie to run a workshop on "Writing Different Worlds". I have to return to Wellington that night, so I'm unfortunately going to miss Joanna's poetry workshop the following day, which should be excellent.

Reading with friends, and with poets I admire; getting an extended time to run a spec fic writing workshop; and returning to the scene of my youthful (mis)deeds. It's all good.