Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan (03.08.12): "Shotgun Wedding" by Bonnie Jo Campbell

The protagonist of “Shotgun Wedding” started with a simple observation regarding her younger sister’s soon-to-be-husband: Clearly this groom is more accustomed to lugging hay bales and veal calves … and for whatever reason, as I listened to the author, Bonnie Jo Campbell, read her short story I couldn’t help but stare at my dishpan hands resting in my lap and wonder: If I had had more of a bad boy image, if I were a Neanderthal, a knuckle-dragger, would my marriage have survived? Fortunately, this momentary thought faded when the woman next to me said, “Isn’t she wonderful? I just started reading ‘Once Upon a River.’”

Campbell gets at the cold harsh reality of Holy Matrimony with the juxtaposition of both sisters: the young bride having the temperament of Cinderella and her older sister, the narrator, having the survival instinct of Annie Oakley. Here are a few keen observations from the protagonist: I look away, to the pastor who looms over this procedure with the gravity of a hangman ... or I’m letting my sister down by being sucked into her fairy tale … or (and this description of a passing glance with the bride may have unsettled the audience a bit) … she catches my eyes full of tears and my mouth set grimly in the memory of shooting my first raccoon dead outside the chicken house, of the shot picking its body up off the ground and slamming it against the barn wall.

Soon there’s a seamless transition from the wedding scene to an intruder scene at the farmhouse—a flashback—where the narrator protects her sister and herself from an intruder:

My father had told me to shoot a man anywhere on the abdomen, because I couldn’t miss at close range, and the twelve gauge at close range would tear a man apart. When I’d shot that first raccoon outside the chicken house its body turned inside out.

Interestingly enough, the intruder has some of the same characteristics and qualities as the groom in the story—a ruggedness that dissipates once he’s staring at the unidentifiable roundness of the end of the shotgun barrel … where the protagonist thinks … he might have seen his own self turned inside out.

Maybe because I’m a man, or maybe because I made that lengthy journey to and from the altar, or maybe because I lost so much after the divorce … hell, I don’t know … maybe I’ve been “turned inside out” because Campbell’s last scene of “Shotgun Wedding” is so hauntingly familiar, as if I’m running from the church in an attempt at shedding my old skin, my old civilized ways, as if the protagonist not only succeeds in that moment of protecting her younger sister, but has me dead in her sight: I held the gun up long after the man turned and walked down the steps and ran across our frozen lawn toward the road.

Whatever my feelings, I enjoyed listening to Bonnie Jo Campbell. Her short stories, as well as her novels, are definitely worth reading.

by JR's Thumbprints

"nothing more to tell" / stories by george dila

After a decade of email exchanges, not to mention a soon-to-be single’s lifestyle where I can do whatever I please (within the boundaries of good decency and affordability) I finally met fellow writer George Dila. He’s the Director of the Ludington Visiting Writers. Dila appeared at the Lido Art Gallery in Birmingham, Michigan, a few weeks ago and read from his latest short story collection “nothing more to tell.” Not only is Dila an excellent orator, he can sing too. He sang a few lines of “Betcha by Golly” by The Stylistics, taking on the persona of the title story’s protagonist, Vincent Root, as he drove through the dreamy tourist town of Mayesville while listening to an oldies station. Dila reads:

He and Mary had loved that album, playing it over and over again. He still liked the sound, even the sentiment, although it seemed so corny now. Corny, and not a little ironic. Ever will love keep growing strong, my ass.

As I sat in the audience listening, I couldn’t help but sympathize with Vincent Root. He suffered from a tragedy far worse than his failed marriage, a tragedy in the making as he navigated his Buick Roadmaster around the block to steal another glimpse at two young teenage girls that reminded him of ponies, or maybe otters, their bodies sleek and joyful, their movements fluid and confident, the rhythm of their gestures a bit arrogant and slightly provocative. Interestingly enough, and due to an agreed upon time restriction, if not a ploy to sell a few books, Dila left us hanging, craving for more.

Structurally, “nothing more to tell” begins with a couple of third person narratives, first Vincent himself, then Bob & Jill Regan grieving over the loss of their son who ran into the incoming path of Vincent’s Buick, and finally the first person narrative of Sherriff Parsons. The story is masterfully done, the POV shifts smooth and credible, and the ending is well worth the purchase of the book.

I’d like to tell you more, and there is more to tell, but since I’m living out of boxes and sneaking internet from fast food chains and coffee shops, I've decided to end my review now. But hey, there are eight more wonderful stories in this collection worth reading. I strongly recommend “nothing more to tell.” For more information, click here: www.mayapplepress.com .

Pictured from left to right: JR & George

Poetic Travelers Presents

Friday, November 19, 2010: 6:30pm-9:00pm
Location Lawrence Street Gallery
22620 Woodward Ave, Ste A
Ferndale, MI

www.jafansta.com/PoeticTravelers.aspx

MCBP Debut: "Adopted Behaviors"

Price: $4.00

Remaining copies can be found here.

COMING THIS SUMMER

MCBP’s first chapbook is rolling off the assembly line.

Title: Adopted Behaviors
Author: James R. Tomlinson
Content: 3 flash memoirs, 5 short stories, and 5 flashes related in some way to the human condition and/or prison experience.
Length: 52 pages
Size: 4 ¼" by 5 ½"

Initial Print Run: 75
Projected Release Date: July 2010
Price (including shipping in the U.S.): $4.00 *

*All funds will go toward MCBP’s inaugural issue. No set-up costs incurred by MCBP. No outsourcing; 100% Made in Michigan.

More details coming.

INDUSTRIUS RODENTICUS

Does “being a factory rat” count for having a “real ass” job? If so, how come a majority of American autoworkers are viewed as overpaid, unskilled laborers?

In Leon Chamberlain’s self-published memoir, “Factory Rat,” he states: “There used to be millions of us. Nowadays we joke that we are dinosaurs, a dying breed.” He made this observation more than a decade ago, and from what’s written, he, along with many of his coworkers, knew the manufacturing landscape would someday change, that they wouldn’t be able to continue working on the assembly line earning a decent wage, thinking themselves valuable assets to their prospective employers.

Although his first auto job started at Wayne “Assy” in the mid-60’s, he starts with a 1970's quote from Henry Ford II:

“The average worker wants a job in which he does not have to put in much physical effort. Above all, he wants a job in which he does not have to think.”

Chamberlain’s first line of work: Installing right-hand seat belts with a powerful air gun that often stripped the chrome plated bolts. He emphasizes how everything’s related to speed, including sprinting to the parking lot with his fellow coworkers so they could make it to the Wayne Party Store for whiskey and beer during lunch break. Also, he describes how those air hoses would sometimes get caught on a passing trolley or a car mirror, only to stretch and snap, sometimes cold-cocking a worker. He quotes Studs Terkel from “Working”:

“They’ll (management) give better care to that machine than they will to you. If it breaks down, there’s somebody out there to fix it right away. If I break down, I’m just pushed over to the side ‘till another man takes my place.”

His memoir spans a 33-year career in the auto industry. Unfortunately, it does not portray the autoworker in a favorable light; it doesn’t show them as valuable entities. You’ve got a pipe fitter that spends his working hours making and selling coffee for profit, an electrician laying on a wooden bench in his crib, night after night, snoring (he promotes to supervisor), and other colorful characters trying to “stick it to the man.” “Factory Rat” is an entertaining read which gives insight into the decline in the United States’ automobile manufacturing from an insider’s perspective. --jr

SPRING FEVER IN MICHIGAN

Sprung ahead, lost an hour, yet I’ve gained anonymity. Everyone needs a “time-out” now and then. I could list half a dozen reasons, six little things, but what would be the point?

There’s no sense in looking back.

Spring forward … slowly … using tiny baby steps.

When Mr. Talibi, a man of middle eastern origin who worked in his family’s Detroit party store, tip-toes into my classroom some twenty-minutes late and makes accidental eye-contact with yours truly, he speaks in a soft, broken-English sort of way. He says, “I thought we didn’t have school today,” and sensing my displeasure, “when is spring break?” and after a moment of awkward silence, rephrases his question, “we get spring break, don’t we?”

The class waits for my response.

“Oh sure, we get spring break,” I say. “As soon as the maintenance workers dump two truck-loads of sand in the yard …”

“What?”

“… and the food service workers fire-up the grills and tap the kegs …”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

I raise my voice, “… and the corrections officers escort in bikini clad women for the volleyball tournament.”

He starts smiling. “We could get sponsors.”

“Hell no!” I answer. “We don’t get spring break. This is prison!”

***

You can read my prose in the spring issue of Six Bricks Press. --JR

RECOVERY

Last summer I featured one of my rare poems on my “shelved-for-now” blog, JR’s Thumbprints. Since writing that poem I have yet to witness a full-scale economic recovery, except maybe on a personal level; I am happy to announce that my brother, who had devoted twenty-three years as a mechanical engineer for one of the “Big Three” before being “let go,” found steady employment in the defense industry. He told me that others returned to their old jobs as “contractual employees.” One of his engineering friends found temporary employment at Gibbs Technologies in Auburn Hills, the manufacturer of amphibious vehicles. I’m wondering how long it’ll take before we see Tata automotive (DetroitNews.com and Jobs in Michigan) competing in North America? Can they really sell a car for 3 - 8 grand? With that said, I'd like to share my poem again:

WHEN A SUBURANITE SUFFERS

There’s decay in the Motor City, it’s in the roots of my teeth,
stuck like taffy, I gnaw and pull at the yellow tape. There’s
fencing too, down the south side of a dead-end street—a factory
caught in my braces; Everywhere: foreclosed homes and empty
lots, worse than unfilled cavities. I gum Better Mades and dream
of a stimulus package in a brown paper bag placed on the console
of my Chevy. Whiskey and Vernors, for medicinal purposes,
me traveling, no tires, just cement block and fragmite. Pain too,
in my jaw, raw raw pain, a telling sign that I’m alive. I step into a
blacktop oven and smile my jagged smile and scale the chain
link fence and yell to my fellow Detroiters: “We must organize!”

***

In other news, Matt, the editor of Staccato Fiction, accepted my flash story “Still Life in Detroit.” Having once lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he made the following statement during our email correspondence: “it’s tough about what’s happening there, especially places like Detroit or Flint.” The story will appear on Monday, March 8th. I hope you enjoy it and please feel free to leave comments at their site:

Staccato .

--JR

"Bloodsport" & "Catch and Release"

After reading about Michigan author and funeral director Thomas Lynch’s current book “Apparition & Late Fictions” in last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press, I couldn’t help but recall the strong imagery from two stories in this collection. The first story “Bloodsport,” I had read in the 2002 Pushcart Prize (Best of the Small Presses). The premise was not lost on me: The main character, Martin, informed of the murder of a young woman at the hands of her husband, had to retrieve the body and start the embalming process just as he had done for her father five years earlier. Lynch writes:

Martin could not get his mind off how mannish the violence was, how hunter-gatherly, how very do-it-yourself, for the son-of-a-bitch to stand on the front deck of their double-wide out in the woods while she loaded the last of her belongings in the car—her boom box and a last armful of hanging things—how he must have carefully leveled the rifle, his eyes narrowing to sight her in. He put the first bullet through her thigh. An easy shot from fifteen yards.

The other story, “Catch and Release,” first appeared in Witness, a literary journal published by Oakland Community College and edited by Peter Stine. (In fact, both stories were first published there.) In this story, the main character, a fly-fishing guide, takes his father’s ashes down a familiar river in a symbolic gesture of “letting go.” Again, Lynch writes:

Danny remembered his father taking him fishing, that first time in the river, when he was a boy, how the water tightened around his body, the thick rubber of the Red Ball waders constricting in the current. It was late March. It was cold and clear and he wondered how his father ever found this place, hours from home, driving in the dark to get to the river at first light.

It’s easy visualizing Danny tossing his father’s ashes to the wind; it’s what he does afterward with the last bit of his father that may shock you. As much as I’d like to tell you the ending, I encourage you to discover that on your own. Whether poetry, essays, or short stories, Lynch’s writing is masterfully done. This latest collection consists of four short stories and a novella. For more information go to: http://www.thomaslynch.com/ .

--JR

Summer in the Winter City

Monthly Detroit has been gone for a while. How about Orbit? What are the best magazines and papers of today's Detroit? Or is everything online now?

Happy New Year, peeps, watch out for flying debris!

A Whole Lifetime of Living

"When I lived in the Detroit area . . . I taught at the University of Detroit and I had a whole lifetime of living in Michigan -- you can get a whole lifetime very quickly living in Detroit, just a few years there adds up to a long time." -- Joyce Carol Oates, 1996.

MAKING A STATEMENT

Photographer Gregory Holm, a native of Hamtramck, Michigan, and Architect Matthew Radune want to make a statement regarding Detroit’s high foreclosure rate with an art installation called The Ice House Detroit -- that is, if they can raise $11,000. It certainly isn’t going to have as lasting of an impression as Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project. Perhaps sometime in the near future the economy will improve and people will find work. If not, we can always count on spring to melt away our hopes of a recovery. By then the Ice House will be a figment of our imagination as we enjoy a reprieve from the cold.

DRIFTWOOD

It's no longer called The Driftwood Review, however it has returned! Driftwood is accepting flash fiction stories of exactly 100 words from Michigan writers. Click here for more information.

THE MOTH COMES TO DETROIT

Prepare yourself! Mark your calendar! The Moth is coming to Cliff Bell’s, 2030 Park Avenue, Detroit, on October 1st. They will be hosting five-minute story slams, some of which will air on WDET 101.9 FM. Click HERE to learn how to participate.

Upcoming themes at Cliff Bell’s are:

October 1st: Firsts
November 5th: Blunders
December 3rd: Cars

There's a $5 cover charge. Story slams start at 7:30 p.m.

Watch the above YouTube video of Adam Wade, a previous Moth Grandslam Champion, to get an idea of what it’s all about.

BRACE YOURSELF FOR THE DETROIT LIONS!

With Fall fast approaching—the changing of the weather and color of leaves—comes the arrival of NFL football and, sadly enough, the Detroit Lions. After last season’s .000 winning percentage (excluding the preseason), I’m not sure Detroiters are willing to call the Lions’ mediocre play a form of entertainment and/or escapism, even with Michigan’s nation-leading unemployment rate.

At the beginning of last year’s professional football season, a neighbor proudly displayed the Detroit Lions’ NFL flag at the top of his flagpole. Around midseason it flew at half-mast. Then after a few more losses, it flew at half-mast and upside down - the emblem of a Lion waving in the wind, flat on its back, paws in the air.

I’m not sure what’s in store for this season. I don’t really care about the win-loss record. I’m more interested in what my neighbor will do with his flag. Will he proudly fly it like past opening football seasons, or will he start what may become a new tradition?

If you’re a Detroit Lions' football fan I recommend you read Todd Hasak-Lowy’s short story "Silver and Blue" from Five Chapters. Click HERE for the link. I first discovered his story in "Best of the Web 2009" published by Dzanc Books in Westland, Michigan. Hasak-Lowy knows all too well what it means to be a loyal fan of the Detroit Lions. Get ready for heartbreak; get ready to cancel your DirecTV.

OCEAN OF PEARLS

With all the hoopla regarding healthcare, with all the hoopla giving tax credits to movies shot in Michigan, you would think "Ocean of Pearls" would be a box-office success; let me make myself clear: it’s definitely worth seeing and it deserves every penny it gets. Unfortunately, I counted nine folks in the audience (eleven if you counted my brother and me). Granted it was Sunday morning, a holiday for people of Indian descent, but I’m willing to bet most people reading this post have never heard of it. Until now.

How did I discover “Ocean of Pearls”? Trailer on television? YouTube? Newspaper article? Nope, nope, nope.

A coworker, someone I carpool with, someone with the same urologist as I, mentioned the movie on the ride to work. Without getting into his health issues, let me just say my passenger-friend sought out a doctor for a second opinion, and if he hadn’t, I’d probably be driving to work alone. Thanks to Dr. Neelam, my friend is still with us.

Dr. Neelam is also the movie director of “Ocean of Pearls,” most of which was shot in the Metro-Detroit area thanks to his access to hospitals and medical centers. There are also some familiar City of Detroit scenes as well. (Incidentally, he did not receive a tax break due to filming in 2006).

I’m in total shock that a main distributor has not picked up this film. Although the storyline is about a young doctor who questions his Sikh faith while moving from Toronto to Detroit, it’s also about the discovery of a seriously flawed United States’ healthcare system.

If you have the opportunity to see this film, please do. You will not be disappointed. In fact, if Dr. Neelam directs another full-length feature film, I’ll be first in line to buy a ticket.

Posted by JR

TAKE A MINUTE...IF YOU WILL

If you pass through this page, and we know you do because there is an embed counter to monitor traffic, nothing serious. it is a numbers only collector and not a tracking widget, I would like you to take an extra few minutes for me and answer a question or nine.

It doesn’t matter if you comment anonymously or with your call back logo because I am only interested in the answers provided.

1. Are you native born to the Detroit area, a transplant, or currently living somewhere else?

2. Did you leave Detroit and Michigan and would you move back?

3. What conditions made you leave and what conditions would have to happen before you would move back?

4. What is your impression of Detroit, when the word comes up what does your gut tell you?

5. Compared to where you grew up/live does Detroit compare favorably or unfavorably and briefly why?

6. Have you ever visited Detroit as a tourist destination? What did you come to see? Did it meet your expectations?

7. Did you encounter any violence while here either as a resident or a visitor?

8. What is your impression of the people you met or know in Detroit?

9. What would it take for Detroit to lose its reputation as a hardcore city?

OK that’s about it. I’d like to thank you for taking the time to answer and thank you for stopping by. I am working on a few pieces of writing and I am trying a new tact in formulating them. I want the images your answers presented to me to filter through my brain and see what comes out the end of my finger tips.

Be Well and Be Kind

Mark C Durfee

aka

The Walking Man

Detroit from the Other Side

Detroit's downtown looks so beautiful from Windsor, from the Detroit River, skyscrapers and all. This is a still from the opening sequence of HBO's Hung. Can't see the desolation from afar. But up close, that's another matter . . .

In Detroit, 1942

Race relations. Often strained in Detroit and everywhere else. This photograph is courtesy of the Library of Congress, and has to do with housing wartime black workers. Nice.

Have we made progress since 1942? Yes, but it's been tough going. Is race more culture or skin color? The human race is one, so what's up? What about someone with "mixed blood," like Salma Valgarma Hayek Jiménez (Salma Hayek)? She may pave the way for the future, when we can all get along.

-- PM.

Detroit During Wartime

Detroit has had its share of troubles, especially during wartime. 1812. 1943. 1967. 2009.

1942 was a time of severe housing shortages for emigrant workers in Detroit, especially for African Americans. Here's a photo (courtesy of the Library of Congress) of soldiers with fixed bayonets patrolling the perimeter of the Sojourner Truth Housing Project. Not hard to believe -- not at all.

For more:

http://www.detroit1701.org/Sojourner%20Truth%20Housing%20Project.html