Sean Taylor's Blog, page 15

Your Smallest Update

It's a good book. Put me in a small room with it. Read it because it doesn’t require small talk. You can do it alone, so confidently.

Possibly Back and Front cover

I heard you scheming new pyramids.

Dear Mr. Taylor,
 
Thank you for your kind words, and for submitting your manuscript to Leapfrog Press. We have reviewed your query and sample pages from Your Smallest Bones, and though we admired the writing style, we have ultimately decided to pass on the collection. We do wish you all the best with your work.
 -------------------------------------------------------
I really wanted that one

Isn’t all the wine up here Ore-ganic? Comes from Oregon right?

The first thing I’m going to do when I get back to the hotel is shower. Standing in the cleanest lake in the world. I don’t feel bad about it, I don’t feel bad about peeing in the world’s cleanest lake. It’s a volcano too. Peeing in a volcano, find me a man that wouldn’t. After swimming in a volcano we all could use showers. Lather up and wash the sin of wading in hell off.

Crater lake is a contradiction. It is the most beautiful contradiction. It’s built from destruction and harsh winters... That water, that water is god before man, it’s holy untouched.

After we passed a mysterious tree that floats vertically forever (see purgatory) Seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_of_the_Lake, a woman asked if there were people around when the volcano last erupted. The guide responded, oh yes, though we found in the eruption they all perished. Perished is when your fruit spoils because you decided to take the 5 freeway. These people, in the name of heaven and hell became no more than fruit. They over ripened. What power. They say the volcano first erupted when it was surrounded by glaciers. I can understand that, I guess, when you have to go, you have to go. What loneliness, a volcano erupting amidst glaciers. What shame, what surprise. A coming out party?

“I’m happy to tell you all, we just fell into the top ten of America’s most dangerous volcanos! They aren’t saying ‘if’ anymore, now they’re just saying ‘when’!”

Sounds more like an engagement. Where’s the champagne? The poppers? Save the date cards? Can we save the date? We will be there! We are already perishable.

Now back in the motel the wifi is down. I want to know where are we in the top ten of most dangerous volcanos. Did Letterman do that top ten? Google is down in Crater lake, the internet is always down in the face of the real important questions.

After we pull into the docks the guide tells us Wizard Island is ours to explore. It is a volcano island, in a lake, that is in a volcano. After a quick swim in the cleanest lake in the world I headed for the peak, the cone, the crater. It is about five hundred feet wide and one hundred feet deep. Empty. No lake with another volcano in the middle. I would have killed to see a volcano inside a lake inside a volcano inside a lake inside a volcano.

History repeats. Heaven knows hell from harsh winters and destruction.

Seventeen billion gallons of water evaporates from the lake every year. Up, up, and away.

Seventeen billion gallons of water seeps down below the lake every year. Nobody knows for sure where it goes, when it goes down. If Crater lake were a card game, it seems heaven and hell push every hand. 17 up, 17 down.

While we’re waiting for the last hikers to board the boat, the captains radio starts a mile a minute. Then thunder cracks above us. 

“That’s just god moving furniture.” A woman beside me tells her child.

The captain says if we have hiking sticks, don’t point them to the sky. He smiles, like he laughs, like he hopes, all just about half. Then lightning comes down.

“That’s just god taking pictures of his new furniture.” The woman adds.

The clouds are moving fast towards us, over the caldera.

“We’re in a bowl, and there’s soup coming for us.” I want to say, but I don’t.

How could that be the first thing you say to a stranger?

   

   By the time I got back to the car, after 2.2 miles and 700 feet up and out of the Volcanic lake, I found the air in the can of lightly salted whole cashews had expanded. Surely it expanded out of fear and excitement, almost to a breaking point.
   Do not worry, my cashews, I said as I snacked on them, it is only god moving furniture. Then the hot rain soup began to come down.

A hot well in earth

Today's itinerary

Wake up at 6:00

Leave motel at 6:45

Breakfast at 7:15

Finish breakfast at 7:50

Drive to trailhead

8:30 hike to boat dock

9:30 on boat

To Wizard island!

Where I, like native Americans before me, Vision quest!

The animals before the zoo arrived

It’s as quiet as Oregon outside. I left early this morning. The bright pain of my eyes adjusted to the sun as I passed through a town called Winters. It was ironic enough to write down, just barely twice. I was trying to get my tax dollars out of the roads by traveling them, they came and went like breath, to become something bigger. The 5 freeway is as bad north as I knew it south, marching us up or down. The sidelines swept with sweet corn and peach offerings, in wooden shacks with white paint that will outlast generations. Then the endless farms and fields. The one-hundred degree heat and the apologies whispered more or less like prayers to the fruit traveling in my back seat. If the motel has a mini fridge and I get these bananas in right when I get there, a presumed five hours from now, will they be okay? Do bananas need refrigeration in warmer climates? Will my apples ever be the same after this drive. I enjoy and fear the words over and ripen. What has the 5 freeway done to us? Done to me? A farmer on the side of the road kneels to gather dirt, to get it under his fingernails, and then again, tomorrow.
Driving past Oasis road, I had to wonder. If it holds true, is it holding true?
Lake Shasta is Depressingly low, showing its red earthen flesh, it’s water lines, nobody was asking Shasta, nobody wanted to see.
Mount Shasta retains forever clouds year round. It is haunted in a drought, wearing snow patches in this summer heat, as I drive up and seemingly around it.
After two more hours of semi-mountainous climbs I start to wonder if and when I have and will be crossing into Oregon.
By the time I know I have it’s far too late to celebrate. I have traded heat for tall trees and am at the base.
Then I reach the motel and the fruit is first thing in the fridge that won’t cool. I take to walking barefoot for the tiles cold relief. Across the street there are horses shaking off flies, kicking up soil. I’m about twenty five minutes outside of Crater Lake, I’m not sure how to feel, but I think that’s what I was after in the first place.

The conversation pieces of an easier life.

The Burden of Legitimacy to be published twice (accidentally)

-About a month ago, after a number of Colorado Whiskeys I submitted one of the longer stories in the collection to five or six or seven publications. The first response I received, was an acceptance. After withdrawing the submission from the known other publications I received yet another acceptance. Then a rejection. Then I wondered how places I submitted this thing, and drinks I had that night.

In the end, when the dust cleared, The Burden of Legitimacy will be published in the fall 2014 edition of The East Coast Literary Review and The Fifth Issue of Petrichor Machine due out May 2015!

This is made possible by the incredibly kind and hard working editors and staff of both publications to which I am beyond spoiled and grateful to work with.

I can not wait to see this story represented two different ways, in two different periodicals.

Links to the publications below!

Petrichor Machine

East Coast Literary Review

The Big Bang before the ever expanding quiet.

That's story number 7 of 12, my friends. And a long one at that, some 5,400 words. I was advised to stop attempting to publish the stories separately and get the whole collection a home. Now I think I might push forth with whatever I have left, go down guns a blazing, take it or leave it, read it, and don't forget it.