Thinking Back & Forward

When I was in college, I discovered writing and enjoyed my English classes especially when we would talk about the authors. The Victorians. My professor said they were terse, stoic and very much into metaphor because they did not believe in telling it like it is. Emotions? Heaven forbid. English Lit: Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, (one of my favorites) and Shakespeare. And, of course, the poets. William Carlos Williams, Tess Gallagher, The Beats, and many others. Of all this wonderful writing, I first fell in love with poetry.

I set about writing poems about my teachers, one in particular who, bothered by the traffic noise on the hill in front of his classroom, walked slowly to the back of the room, slowly lifted a window and proceeded to shoot the trucks passing by, one shot after another. And then turning back to us, "Forgive me," he said. "But it was just so sweet and cold." 

Of course I got plenty of laughs borrowing from the good doctor and other greats I chose to mock in the school's Poetry and Fiction review with my attempts at proving that anybody can write poetry. But one day I was confronted by a professor of English 201, and a well-know poet herself, in the hallway. She said she had read my poetry and found it amusing. But looked long at me and said she though I wrote those amusing poems because I was afraid that I could not write a true poem. She told me that she thought I was afraid to fail, thus the funny stuff. And walked away. To this day I have never forgotten those words and how she was exactly right in her thinking. After that I attempted to write, as she said, real poetry and failed many times. But the few that I got right, the poems in which the words somehow made magic happen were worth all the failures. And from those failures and few successes came my love and fascination with the short story. And meeting people, some my heroes to this day. Raymond Carver had a way of getting deep into your soul and not easily letting go. And I have yet to figure out how he did it. Or Donald Hall who made me cry from cover to cover with "String to Short to Be Saved" and a very nice and down-to-earth person. The joy of reading new voices continues today. I recently discovered an author called Charlie Huston whose prose is so hot it burns your fingers, and he has even developed new ways to use grammar. 

So I say, face your fears, let's see some of those risks on this page. Poetry, Prose, Erasure, or Otherwise, Fiction, Flash or Short Story. There is nothing so exciting as reading a new voice except perhaps being that voice. 

Daniel. L. Austin.