I've longed to be a writer.
When I was in high school I drew and wrote comic books, poetry, and short stories. As I moved to college, I found I expressed myself better with words than I did with pictures. I felt what I could write more closely hewed to what I pictured in my mind than a drawing did.
I attended writing seminars at Johns Hopkins -- specifically fiction workshops -- which had a fairly reputable writing program at the time, led by the likes of John Barth and Stephen Dixon (who I just learned passed away from complications of Parkinson's disease at a hospice center in Towson, Maryland on November 6, 2019; he was 83.
When I was still trying to find my voice, I was most influenced by Ernest Hemingway, Padgett Powell, Raymond Carver who could write stories about seemingly nothing, commonplace occurrences, everyday life, but still have the ability to comment, to say something, about life and the world we live in, and Stephen Dixon, the author of a collection of short stories, 14 Stories, that had the uncommon power to make me feel...uncomfortable. Though I didn't particularly like the way it made me feel, I was impressed by the power a story could have, that it could move a person in such a way.
In my last two years at Hopkins, I focused on screenwriting, finding I had a particular aptitude for writing dialogue, my instructors commenting on the authenticity in the way my characters spoke to one another. My screenwriting teacher, Marc Lapadula, casually mentioned to the class at the end of spring semester junior year if we continued to work on the screenplay we had been working on, he would take a look at it again in the fall. I say he 'casually mentioned' because he seemed somewhat surprised when I showed up at his door during office hours the following fall with my screenplay, the story of three brothers I had spent all summer working on. It was the summer I decided to stay in Baltimore, rather than come home to Florida. Probably the most seminal summer of my life when I lived in a six bedroom row house in the Charles Village neighborhood of Baltimore, a few blocks from campus and a few blocks from Greenmount Ave., a predominately black neighborhood I wondered into frequently to buy used vinyl, tapping away on my roommate's Apple in between working as a lifeguard and teaching swim lessons at the Coldspring Country Club.
I don't recall his specific feedback, but he liked it enough to encourage me to enter it in a screenwriting contest sponsored by Universal Studios. The first prize was a paid internship at the studio in Los Angeles. I was runner-up.
Despite this achievement, I didn't write another screenplay. I moved back to Florida, back in with my parents for a short while, waiting tables and working on short stories, pieces of a novel that would become In Full Bloom, a novel I sent to several literary agents. I was young, and the novel was likely youthful and unimpressive. Not surprisingly, this was a day and age before everything was on the cloud. I had to type my screenplay and the novel and I have since lost both unless they are in our storage unit in Maryland.
When I moved to Colorado, then back to Florida four years later, in 2001, I concentrated on writing short stories. I remember sharing four of them with my grandmother, Sitti, before she passed. I read them to her out loud when she lost her sight at the nursing home. I don't exactly remember her impressions either, but I do remember her telling me I hadn't experienced anything to write about.
That stung. She was right. She may have said it before I had gone to Colorado, an adventure at the time akin to packing up my Conestoga wagon of a Jeep Cherokee and setting off across the prairie. Yet even if she had said it after I had lived in Colorado, she still would have been right. I hadn't done anything. I hadn't experienced anything to write about.
Since then, I've done a lot and experienced much. That writing is here now, in this blog.
But those stories were still there. They still spoke to me on some level. They were stories written during an unsure time by an unsure person, figuring out where that person fit in the world, wondering what their future may hold. I thought they merited a place, somewhere to be told.
I recently revisited them and collected what I thought were the best ones in a short collection I titled Cerulean, the color of seawater, of the ocean, a reference to the Florida setting of several of the stories.
From the story "Luna": "I often wonder if I am the only man who looks up at a cloud bank and thinks of what it would be like to float above it. Or looks out across the ocean and thinks what it would be like to swim through its waters, not the foam and waves across the top or skim just above the sandy, ocean floor, but through the layer of completely still, midnight blue water that has no up or down nor no beginning or end."
From "The Sounds Mute Dogs Make": "Marty sat in the arch of the door. That’s when I noticed the TV was on, the volume turned very low. A woman on CNN was reporting a tidal wave had washed ashore in the Indian Ocean, striking beaches from Sumatra to Sri Lanka, dashing fisherman on the rocks and sweeping sleeping children out to sea. Marty looked at the TV and at me alternatively. I immediately thought of Zero, but didn’t know where he was. Addison sniffled, pulled her face out of her leg, and looked up at me."
From "Making Love to Men with Wings": “I feel like the ocean today,” she said. “Do you ever feel like that? Like that…ubiquitous?” We passed by two kids playing with plastic lightsabers on their stoop. One of them was wearing a Storm Trooper helmet. The toys made a hollow sound when they smacked together. “Do I ever feel like seventy-five percent of the Earth’s surface?” I asked.
But I still struggle with their relevance. Especially in the current climate. The world is such a busy place with so many voices. Literature is dominated by white male writers. I am especially sensitive I am writing from a place of white male privilege, that the trials of these characters are only trials because they, too, are experienced by white males. Is there even a place for another white male voice? Did it matter? Conversely, do white males stop writing? No one wants to see more women and minorities writing more than I and the world should be a big enough place for all voices.
I don't know the answers to these questions and I still struggle with what I want these stories to say or what I want them to be. I just wanted to write a story that read how a Counting Crows song made me feel.
I self-published Cerulean. It is available here for purchase.
When I was in high school I drew and wrote comic books, poetry, and short stories. As I moved to college, I found I expressed myself better with words than I did with pictures. I felt what I could write more closely hewed to what I pictured in my mind than a drawing did.
I attended writing seminars at Johns Hopkins -- specifically fiction workshops -- which had a fairly reputable writing program at the time, led by the likes of John Barth and Stephen Dixon (who I just learned passed away from complications of Parkinson's disease at a hospice center in Towson, Maryland on November 6, 2019; he was 83.
When I was still trying to find my voice, I was most influenced by Ernest Hemingway, Padgett Powell, Raymond Carver who could write stories about seemingly nothing, commonplace occurrences, everyday life, but still have the ability to comment, to say something, about life and the world we live in, and Stephen Dixon, the author of a collection of short stories, 14 Stories, that had the uncommon power to make me feel...uncomfortable. Though I didn't particularly like the way it made me feel, I was impressed by the power a story could have, that it could move a person in such a way.
In my last two years at Hopkins, I focused on screenwriting, finding I had a particular aptitude for writing dialogue, my instructors commenting on the authenticity in the way my characters spoke to one another. My screenwriting teacher, Marc Lapadula, casually mentioned to the class at the end of spring semester junior year if we continued to work on the screenplay we had been working on, he would take a look at it again in the fall. I say he 'casually mentioned' because he seemed somewhat surprised when I showed up at his door during office hours the following fall with my screenplay, the story of three brothers I had spent all summer working on. It was the summer I decided to stay in Baltimore, rather than come home to Florida. Probably the most seminal summer of my life when I lived in a six bedroom row house in the Charles Village neighborhood of Baltimore, a few blocks from campus and a few blocks from Greenmount Ave., a predominately black neighborhood I wondered into frequently to buy used vinyl, tapping away on my roommate's Apple in between working as a lifeguard and teaching swim lessons at the Coldspring Country Club.
I don't recall his specific feedback, but he liked it enough to encourage me to enter it in a screenwriting contest sponsored by Universal Studios. The first prize was a paid internship at the studio in Los Angeles. I was runner-up.
Despite this achievement, I didn't write another screenplay. I moved back to Florida, back in with my parents for a short while, waiting tables and working on short stories, pieces of a novel that would become In Full Bloom, a novel I sent to several literary agents. I was young, and the novel was likely youthful and unimpressive. Not surprisingly, this was a day and age before everything was on the cloud. I had to type my screenplay and the novel and I have since lost both unless they are in our storage unit in Maryland.
When I moved to Colorado, then back to Florida four years later, in 2001, I concentrated on writing short stories. I remember sharing four of them with my grandmother, Sitti, before she passed. I read them to her out loud when she lost her sight at the nursing home. I don't exactly remember her impressions either, but I do remember her telling me I hadn't experienced anything to write about.
That stung. She was right. She may have said it before I had gone to Colorado, an adventure at the time akin to packing up my Conestoga wagon of a Jeep Cherokee and setting off across the prairie. Yet even if she had said it after I had lived in Colorado, she still would have been right. I hadn't done anything. I hadn't experienced anything to write about.
Since then, I've done a lot and experienced much. That writing is here now, in this blog.
But those stories were still there. They still spoke to me on some level. They were stories written during an unsure time by an unsure person, figuring out where that person fit in the world, wondering what their future may hold. I thought they merited a place, somewhere to be told.
I recently revisited them and collected what I thought were the best ones in a short collection I titled Cerulean, the color of seawater, of the ocean, a reference to the Florida setting of several of the stories.
From the story "Luna": "I often wonder if I am the only man who looks up at a cloud bank and thinks of what it would be like to float above it. Or looks out across the ocean and thinks what it would be like to swim through its waters, not the foam and waves across the top or skim just above the sandy, ocean floor, but through the layer of completely still, midnight blue water that has no up or down nor no beginning or end."
From "The Sounds Mute Dogs Make": "Marty sat in the arch of the door. That’s when I noticed the TV was on, the volume turned very low. A woman on CNN was reporting a tidal wave had washed ashore in the Indian Ocean, striking beaches from Sumatra to Sri Lanka, dashing fisherman on the rocks and sweeping sleeping children out to sea. Marty looked at the TV and at me alternatively. I immediately thought of Zero, but didn’t know where he was. Addison sniffled, pulled her face out of her leg, and looked up at me."
From "Making Love to Men with Wings": “I feel like the ocean today,” she said. “Do you ever feel like that? Like that…ubiquitous?” We passed by two kids playing with plastic lightsabers on their stoop. One of them was wearing a Storm Trooper helmet. The toys made a hollow sound when they smacked together. “Do I ever feel like seventy-five percent of the Earth’s surface?” I asked.
But I still struggle with their relevance. Especially in the current climate. The world is such a busy place with so many voices. Literature is dominated by white male writers. I am especially sensitive I am writing from a place of white male privilege, that the trials of these characters are only trials because they, too, are experienced by white males. Is there even a place for another white male voice? Did it matter? Conversely, do white males stop writing? No one wants to see more women and minorities writing more than I and the world should be a big enough place for all voices.
I don't know the answers to these questions and I still struggle with what I want these stories to say or what I want them to be. I just wanted to write a story that read how a Counting Crows song made me feel.
I self-published Cerulean. It is available here for purchase.
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