Mitchell Toews's Blog, page 16

Morning Serial: Prairie’s End, Manitoba 1

I wake up most mornings with a half a dozen characters, a plotline or two, and a bunch of run-on sentences running around in my head. After the requisite morning constitutions are ratified, I oftentimes just let these night-grown inspirations fade away.

Well, no more! I am resolved to give my readers something to read! How about a good old-fashioned serial? Compelling, bent-widget characters with a rollicking plot fraught with lotsa knots, cliff-hangers and roundabouts that meet in the middle.

In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, it will be voluminous, spontaneous, and free-flowing. You don’t know where the story and the characters are going, so why should I? I won’t promise 50,000 words, but you never know what my morning coffee will deliver!

Fun? I hope so! My ulterior motive is to build a readership who appreciate my brand of schiet-stained rambling and are on-board for something maybe not so much fine arts mastered but more glockenspiel on acid. You know what I mean.

We begin…

Episode One: An Apple a Day (915 words, about a six-minute read)

Donald and Maria Oswald were happy. They had a quiet, loving marriage and lived in a paid-for double-wide—(“This Unit will make your smiles DOUBLE WIDE!”)—just a fat pitching wedge away from the Beauchamp Highway. Their corner lot was neatly tended, grass grew dense and dark green on the sloping lawn. No weeds defiled this Gretna Green.

“Just ‘cuz we don’t have no basement, don’t mean we don’t need no drainage,” Donald would proclaim. Standing stiff and tall inside next to the ‘Proud Panoramic Picture Window’ like an animated John A. Macdonald statue, he would watch the rain come down. He took inordinate satisfaction from seeing the rivulets run off the convex dome of packed topsoil. “Glad I mixed ‘er wit pea gravel,” he would murmur, his Adam’s Apple riding up and down like a ball on a string.

“Fallin’ on my head like a mammary,” he would sing-song, grabbing Maria’s blue jean mama butt as she walked by and the torrents poured out of the sky.

In Spring and Fall, there was a lot of rain. During the brief heat of Summer, thunderstorms visited them almost nightly, hammering the tinny roof in a deluge. These were angry, driving rains, the drops making pock-marks in the sandy aggregate of their block road that dried hard like smallpox scars. Often hailstones collected, glimmering white in the blue lard bucket that held the downspout, looking like batting practice baseballs before a Reimer Reindeer game.

“Real cedar siding,” Donald would point out to visitors, tapping on the horizontal slats and sneering at neighbouring vinyl facsimiles, their brittle, embossed skins yellowing in the sun.

On the adjoining lot were two Granny Houses. They were placed one at each end of the seigneurial shaped, convex-topped grass strip like identical twins on either end of a teeter-totter.

“We got the Little Big House Deluxe models,” Maria would chime-in as they toured visiting relatives from Wawanesa. “It was a little more money but Juanita and Wade are worth it. Family, you know.”

The Little Big Houses were likewise clad in cedar, with black shingle roofs—(“low-slope”)—and eight-by-eight decks, each holding identical Canadian Tire MeatMaster barbeques. Each home was like a brown Lego piece, wedged snugly into its end of the fish-finger shaped lot, the two protruding decks facing one another like four-year-olds with their tongues sticking out.

Juanita lived in the rearmost cube. She was a pert, big-busted woman with grey hair tousled just so and her strip mall clothes tight-fitting and providing an easy-to-follow focal pathway to her freckled but still-smooth cleavage. “Gotta show the boys what they want,” she’d trill, pushing her butt out and pointing her breasts up. “Hi-beam!” she’d proclaim proudly as Wade cringed. Gino, owner of the local service station and a widower, came by on alternate Wednesdays to align her headlights.

Juanita’s son by Donald was a middle-aged man named Wade. He was her detached co-habitant on the narrow property, living across the grassy curtilage that separated their tidy abodes. Wade was a man for whom two things were true. First, he was not yet achieving the success he foresaw for himself as a child. Second, he won $25,555 in the first ever Lotto 5/55 draw held in Manitoba in 1982. His five numbers won second-prize – he needed the bonus number to claim the top prize of $55,555. It was widely believed that the existence of this latter cash fact greatly contributed to the ongoing truth of the former life fact. This apparent causal relationship was invisible to Wade’s parents, Donald and Maria, and his birth mother, Juanita, but was plainly evident to all of the neighbours in the Jolly Reindeer Trailer Court and Retirement Club.

He was known as “Wade-a-minute,” or, “Wade-down,” or sometimes, “LightWade,” by the sharp-tongued ex-farmers and ex-cops and ex-Reimer Reindeer truck drivers that populated the ticky-tack, block-on-block grid. They thought little of this 48-year-old bachelor living next to the rolling strip of black macadam that stretched from Prairie’s End, Manitoba to Toronto, Ontario.

“He’s just lucky he hit that jackpot,” they’d say, their cups of Timmies steaming in mute agreement. “I’d be set for life too if I’da won that kinda money when I was twenty!” Truth is they didn’t, they wouldn’ta and they had no clue.

Wade knew of their name-calling, but he didn’t care. It was him after all, not them, who had taken the $25,555 Lotto cheque and signed it over to his cousin Woody, a newly-minted investment advisor in Winnipeg. His money went all-in… Apple (AAPL) at $220 USD per share. He had invested on a drunken bet, Woody saying he would give Wade his new Camaro if Apple stock did not at least double in the first year.

Had he not panicked and sold most of his shares in the tumble of 2009, just last year, Wade would be worth a couple of million now. But, unknown to his family and neighbours, he still had done well. Really well, or, “Seea scheen!” as his boss, Old Man Reimer, would say. Wade kept his financial success to himself and worked patiently on his master-plan. He tapped the keys of a calculator and smirked to himself, his pencil poised above a neat column of ledger entries at the kitchen table in the Deluxe Little Big House.

“Just Wade ’til next Tuesday!” he whispered to himself. “Then we’ll see who the ‘under-achiever’ is around here!”

Next: The Stampede is Ont!

 

 

Morning Serial: Prairie’s End, Manitoba

I wake up most mornings with a half a dozen characters, a plotline or two, and a bunch of run-on sentences running around in my head. After the requisite morning constitutions are ratified, I oftentimes just let these night-grown inspirations fade away.

Well, no more! I am resolved to give my readers something to read! How about a good old-fashioned serial? Compelling, bent-widget characters with a rollicking plot fraught with lotsa knots, cliff-hangers and roundabouts that meet in the middle.

In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, it will be voluminous, spontaneous, and free-spirited. You don’t know where the story and the characters are going, so why should I? I won’t promise 50,000 words, but you never know what my morning coffee will deliver!

Fun? I hope so! My ulterior motive is to build a readership who appreciate my brand of schiet-stained rambling and are on-board for something maybe not so much fine arts mastered but more glockenspiel on acid. You know what I mean.

We begin…

Episode One: An Apple a Day (915 words, about a six-minute read)

Donald and Maria Oswald were happy. They had a quiet, loving marriage and lived in a paid-for double-wide—(“This Unit will make your smiles DOUBLE WIDE!”)—just a fat pitching wedge away from the Beauchamp Highway. Their corner lot was neatly tended, grass grew dense and dark green on the sloping lawn. No weeds defiled this Gretna Green.

“Just ‘cuz we don’t have no basement, don’t mean we don’t need no drainage,” Donald would proclaim. Standing stiff and tall inside next to the ‘Proud Panoramic Picture Window’ like an animated John A. Macdonald statue, he would watch the rain come down. He took inordinate satisfaction from seeing the rivulets run off the convex dome of packed topsoil. “Glad I mixed ‘er wit pea gravel,” he would murmur, his Adam’s Apple riding up and down like a ball on a string.

“Fallin’ on my head like a mammary,” he would sing-song, grabbing Maria’s blue jean mama butt as she walked by and the torrents poured out of the sky.

In Spring and Fall, there was a lot of rain. During the brief heat of Summer, thunderstorms visited them almost nightly, hammering the tinny roof in a deluge. These were angry, driving rains, the drops making pock-marks in the sandy aggregate of their block road that dried hard like smallpox scars. Often hailstones collected, glimmering white in the blue lard bucket that held the downspout, looking like batting practice baseballs before a Reimer Reindeer game.

“Real cedar siding,” Donald would point out to visitors, tapping on the horizontal slats and sneering at neighbouring vinyl facsimiles, their brittle, embossed skins yellowing in the sun.

On the adjoining lot were two Granny Houses. They were placed one at each end of the seigneurial shaped, convex-topped grass strip like identical twins on either end of a teeter-totter.

“We got the Little Big House Deluxe models,” Maria would chime-in as they toured visiting relatives from Wawanesa. “It was a little more money but Juanita and Wade are worth it. Family, you know.”

The Little Big Houses were likewise clad in cedar, with black shingle roofs—(“low-slope”)—and eight-by-eight decks, each holding identical Canadian Tire MeatMaster barbeques. Each home was like a brown Lego piece, wedged snugly into its end of the fish-finger shaped lot, the two protruding decks facing one another like four-year-olds with their tongues sticking out.

Juanita lived in the rearmost cube. She was a pert, big-busted woman with grey hair tousled just so and her strip mall clothes tight-fitting and providing an easy-to-follow focal pathway to her freckled but still-smooth cleavage. “Gotta show the boys what they want,” she’d trill, pushing her butt out and pointing her breasts up. “Hi-beam!” she’d proclaim proudly as Wade cringed. Gino, owner of the local service station and a widower, came by on alternate Wednesdays to align her headlights.

Juanita’s son by Donald was a middle-aged man named Wade. He was her detached co-habitant on the narrow property, living across the grassy curtilage that separated their tidy abodes. Wade was a man for whom two things were true. First, he was not yet achieving the success he foresaw for himself as a child. Second, he won $25,555 in the first ever Lotto 5/55 draw held in Manitoba in 1982. His five numbers won second-prize – he needed the bonus number to claim the top prize of $55,555. It was widely believed that the existence of this latter cash fact greatly contributed to the ongoing truth of the former life fact. This apparent causal relationship was invisible to Wade’s parents, Donald and Maria, and his birth mother, Juanita, but was plainly evident to all of the neighbours in the Jolly Reindeer Trailer Court and Retirement Club.

He was known as “Wade-a-minute,” or, “Wade-down,” or sometimes, “LightWade,” by the sharp-tongued ex-farmers and ex-cops and ex-Reimer Reindeer truck drivers that populated the ticky-tack, block-on-block grid. They thought little of this 48-year-old bachelor living next to the rolling strip of black macadam that stretched from Prairie’s End, Manitoba to Toronto, Ontario.

“He’s just lucky he hit that jackpot,” they’d say, their cups of Timmies steaming in mute agreement. “I’d be set for life too if I’da won that kinda money when I was twenty!” Truth is they didn’t, they wouldn’ta and they had no clue.

Wade knew of their name-calling, but he didn’t care. It was him after all, not them, who had taken the $25,555 Lotto cheque and signed it over to his cousin Woody, a newly-minted investment advisor in Winnipeg. His money went all-in… Apple (AAPL) at $220 USD per share. He had invested on a drunken bet, Woody saying he would give Wade his new Camaro if Apple stock did not at least double in the first year.

Had he not panicked and sold most of his shares in the tumble of 2009, just last year, Wade would be worth a couple of million now. But, unknown to his family and neighbours, he still had done well. Really well, or, “Seea scheen!” as his boss, Old Man Reimer, would say. Wade kept his financial success to himself and worked patiently on his master-plan. He tapped the keys of a calculator and smirked to himself, his pencil poised above a neat column of ledger entries at the kitchen table in the Deluxe Little Big House.

“Just Wade ’til next Tuesday!” he whispered to himself. “Then we’ll see who the ‘under-achiever’ is around here!”

Next: The Stampede is Ont!

 

 

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Protected: Active Shooter Prayer

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Active Shooter Prayer

When I was a little boy in the tiny darp of Steinbach, Manitoba, I used to have to create interesting diversions on cold, sleety November Saturdays. Too cold for football, too wet for road hockey and banished from both the house (by my mom) and the Rexall Drugs comic book rack—”This ain’t a library!”—I had to get inventive.

I had heard somewhere that all churches were sanctuaries. I think I read that in a Spiderman comic book, but it did seem to be rooted in truth. The house of God would, of course, be open to all. Unlocked. God was more concerned about turning away His children than letting enemies in.

So, to test this, I took it upon my bored, Saturday morning self to investigate empirically. As soon as “Looney Tunes” ended, I donned my tweed cloak and deerstalker and set out to affirm or dispel.

Steinbach was well-equipped for this experiment. In an easy one-hour stroll, I could check the ingress of over a dozen places of worship. I brought a spiral notebook (blue), a pencil crayon (Midnight Black) and an empty Mountain Dew bottle (darkly). Entering Economy Store to cash in my pop bottle, I met Mr. Vogt.

“Töws!” he said, using the proper Molotschnan pronunciation, his big bass booming in the empty store. “Morgenstunde, Hat Gold im Munde*… What gets you opp so early on a Saturday?” I told him about my experiment and as he handed over my two-cent refund, he asked me to inform him of the results. “When you publish your paper—” he added, to which I had no immediate reply.

As I made my rounds, my dismay grew and I lost some faith in the revelations of Aunt May and Peter Parker, from whose expositional dialogue my theological curiosity had been aroused. I had jiggled unsuccessfully on the door handles of four churches, had gained entry to three others, but had found none that were open and empty. Although my scientific process had started out with a binary open-or-closed query, I had refined it a bit. Janitors, Ladies Aid, pastors writing sermons and others inhabited the sanctuaries, kitchens and furnace rooms of the churches that were open. To me, this sullied the purity of the never-locked standard I sought to test.

Not one, not one church, I am sad to report passed the open and empty test. And this was in 1963 Steinbach, a locale where the Royal Bank, Ungers Jewellery and a few other businesses might be Sack enn pack, but for the most part – bikes, cars and front doors were as open as a crypt on Easter Monday.

* * *

Flash! forward to today, in the aftermath of yet another U.S. machine gun massacre, this one in a synagogue. Presumably, the “shooter”—(that’s what we call them although they also respond to other profile generalizations like, “Card-holding-NRA-Member” or “White Nationalist” but are seldom called “Mom” or “Professor”)—was able to just walk right on in. Early on a November Saturday morning, in a big city in 2018, NOT in a Mennonite village in 1963!

What the bump stock? 

I read where a former FEMA guy, an expert on mass killing no less, suggested that churches would have to seriously consider security measures. Making churches “hard targets”. (Would Aunt May have used that phrase? Great Caesar’s Ghost! No!) Video surveillance; remote control, AI-equipped drone gunships; James Bond X-ray chambers; The Cone of Silence. Sanctuary doors made of impenetrable fictionite…

The FEMA expert did not suggest restricting guns. He suggested restricting churches.

I got out my spiral notebook (blue as a B.B. King song), my pencil crayon (black as the midnight heart of those offering up ‘thoughts and prayers’) and prepared my two-cents worth. I wrote:

“Dear Mr. Vogt, I pray that the doors of all churches remain open. I pray the doors of businesses that sell machine guns are closed, forever. I pray that the sickness that has overrun our neighbours in the United States never affects us here in Canada.”

allfornow,

Mitch

 

*Early morn—with gold adorned. Jack Thiessen, page 512, Mennonitisch-Plattdeutsches Wörterbuch

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Shade

FAMILY TREES sometimes cast shade. Due to the unbending quality of light and the laws of nature, this shade falls where designated by physics, not preference. We can’t change history to suit our current disposition.

The above is the mental garden in which the following Facebook post took root:

https://www.facebook.com/mitch.toews

Macdonald, Mennonites, and Métis: these things have been ricocheting around inside my bulbous, roomy-and-well-lit cranium lately. My daughter, a woman of letters considerable and the possessor of a mind much more well-tended and well-educated than her dad’s, did some research on the goings-on of 1870-1873, part of Sir John’s tenure.

It’s worth noting too that the grandchildren she has provided own a much less homogeneous ancestry than their maternal predecessors. Her rugrats are Menno-Ukrainian-Franco-Métis. This moves the issue out of the theoretical and right into Nanna & Gramps kitchen!

Her scholarly digging turned up some unsavory evidence about how Manitoba Métis were given “scrips” for land titles along many southern waterways in the then-new province. That was in 1870, before our Toews antecedent and his Molotschnan peacenik delegation rolled in and said, “Sure, we’ll take this stoney ground off your hands for frie, ommsonst.” As the research suggests (to some), the post-1870 gov of the day appeared slow-handed in making good on the scrips and many would-be Métis land-owners left for greener pastures, tired of waiting.

Historians also wonder whether the 1873 governments (Fed + Prov) had some prejudicial racial motivation; they were all out of Scots settlers from Ontario and if they didn’t act fast and populate the prairies, they stood to lose the territory to the avaricious Yanks. These industrious, white, tabular-headed Mennos, well-schooled in the way of farming floodplains and (as it turned out) compound interest, were juuuust the ticket! Exit Métis, enter Kleine Gemeinde.

The whole issue is complex and unsettling. What did the delegates weehte and when did they weehte daut?

* * *

This whole Mennonanigan got reinitiated, for me, when I read,

Canada’s First Scapegoat 

in The Walrus. An article that was preceded by “Old Macdonald”.

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In Pursuit of One’s Own Identity

Know thyself. It’s not that easy.

Writer, know thyself.

LOL. Yeah, right.

This topic makes Dave from Leamington, Eek the Freek, Charcoal Charlie, and other trusted advisors roll their eyes. Boring. Still, it’s fertile soil and I plan to muck around in it a bit. Why not?

Here’s what one author wrote about this personal pursuit:

While we constantly hear of postcolonial writers—Salman Rushdie, for example, to name one of the most famous—I am part of a rarer, dying species: a pre-postcolonial writer. That’s because I was born and spent my teen years in part of one colonial Empire, in what was then (redacted to protect anonymity) and started my writing career in another part of a greater colonial empire: (redacted). Having outlived both of them qualifies me to make the claim to be “pre-postcolonial.” And since I have lived in the (redacted) since (redacted), that gives me a broad perspective that is reflected in my fiction.

Okay, not bad. A bit blah-blah-blah, but you know – writerly.

If I follow that format—and you give me a little latitude—I get this:

While we constantly hear of part-postcolonial writers—Miriam Toews, for example, to name one of the most famous—I am part of a rarer, dying species: a part-pre-postcolonial writer. That’s because I was born and spent my teen years in part of one colonial Empire, Steinbach, in what was previously The East Reserve in Manitoba, and started my writing career, years later, in another part of a greater colonial empire: Chilliwack, B.C. Having outlived one of them qualifies me to make the claim to be “part-pre-postcolonial.” And since I have lived in Canada from my birth in 1955, that gives me a sea-to-sea-to-sea perspective that is reflected in my fiction.

You diggin’ it? Me either. Too colonialcated. But it has some potential.

How about this introspective, Bukowskiesque gaze-and-mutter:

“Some writers grab the polish and remove the tarnish. For me, the tarnish is the thing. The unequivocal; the rough, crushed rock that packs tight and stays put.”

Sure that’s better, but ain’t it a little, “Oh, damn, I’m good! And so fresh.” Yeah. Thought so. I do try to drop the pretention, but like all Mennonites—even Mennonite Imposters, of which club I am the Boss—I’m pretty proud of my humility.

And then there’s the big question I am asked*: “What’s with all the assinine yappin’ on social media? And then you turn around and write these dark, hurtin’ stories about degenerate scum with theology degrees and such, interspersed with your, ‘Aren’t Mennonites quaint and whimsical, especially in 1964?’, stuff? Like, PICK A GENRE, DUDE!” 

* Not that anyone has actually ASKED me this, but IF THEY WOULD…

Anyway, “What’s with that schiet?” you ask? Good question. It’s mainly because I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings on social media. I mean, it’s such a cowardly thing to do, right? Ignoble. The pinnacle of pipsqueakery. So, I like to kid around instead. Dad jokes, wordplay, quips, I’mjusfuckinwitcha stuff. You know?  At the same time, I DO mean to ruffle feathers in a lot of my writing. That is the point, sometimes.

I suppose I want to be class-clown AND also get a few “A” grades on essays, even though I like to mess around.

Here’s my last try at self-realization, for today:

If writing success is the tip of Everest, I am plodding my way there, wearing gummschooh three sizes too big and making my way over the wet, sucking clay of the Red River Valley towards the Himalayas.

.

You know the stuff, right? The sticky, grey, toxic compote around the basement walls of a house under construction. It reeks of radon, and of rotting alphalfa roots, and decaying ancestors. It makes each boot as heavy as a sack of nickels. Hope I don’t burst a stent!

.

Nonetheless, I like these boots I’m wearing even if they do come off every step or so. I enjoy the miserable terrain. I appreciate the path although I’d gladly take a less difficult shortcut—just for a change of pace—and I  the other travellers steeweling their way to higher ground along with me.

[image error]Keep on steeweling.

 

allfornow,

Gummschooh Toews

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Brit Screenwriter and Canuck Author Seek Not-for-Profit Film Group

Object: MATRIMONY!

Well, even if marriage is out, perhaps a mutually beneficial, platonic, creative partnership working towards a COLLABORATIVE production effort within an ARTS COUNCIL FUNDED program is a possibility?

Here are the bullets:

I’ve written a short story trilogy that has drawn some interest as the raw material for a screenplay. http://bit.ly/FotWBtmSKY
I shared it with a friend in London, a screenwriter with some decent film creds, who expressed interest in the story and the possibility of turning it into a screenplay.
While we both liked the idea, it IS a longshot and we both have more than enough on our respective, existing, literary plates. We chose to pass, with regrets.
THEN, miraculously, or fortuitously, or, at least, with GREAT TIMING, we learned of a co-sponsored, government-funded program designed to:

encourage and support the development of creative and collaborative partnerships between artists and arts organizations in the performing arts sector in the UK and Canada.
initiate challenging and inquisitive conversations, exchange ideas and practices and develop ambitious, creative research and development projects that can offer the first steps for collaborations and productions between Canada and the UK.


 HMMM… our brows knitted across the cold North Atlantic, and we wondered about PROVIDENCE and other ports and harbours on or above the 49th parallel. A bit more specifically:

The program aims are:

To fund collaborative and sustainable creative projects that can deliver long-term benefits for the performing arts sectors in both countries
To increase cultural exchange opportunities between UK and Canada, allowing for more artist mobility and international opportunities
To share best practices and networks through exchange, to increase skills, develop ideas and new artistic vocabulary between professional artists and organizations
To support visibility and representation of voices and a diversity of dialogues in the performing arts sector
To support research, development and creation, and seed support for future collaborations and productions

And that’s where I, my story, “The Bottom of the Sky”, and my friend the produced screenwriter and general all-around nice bloke reinitiated our plan to collaborate!

NOW, we are looking for a registered not-for-profit organization-group-guild in Canada or the UK and Ireland, to knit up this ravelled sleeve and turn my fictive literature into a script for the screen. 

Please contact me if this knits your brow, your sleeve or any other unknitted item appropriate for polite company. We await your potential collaboration to MAKE APPLICATION FOR FUNDING as we LEAP FROM TREE TO MIGHTY TREE… together.

November 18, 2018 DEADLINE
Seriously, this is a dead-set brilliant opportunity, so please respond if you are part of a non-profit or know someone who is!  mtoews55@gmail.com


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The Bottom of the Sky (Dos)

Here’s a fast literary, “Guess what!” in case you were just waiting for some random information from the noireal. My short story trilogy, “The Bottom of the Sky”, is Fiction on the Web‘s Pick of the Month.




[image error]
*
*

The bottom of the sky is where allegiances collide: a charter boat owner, the ship’s captain, and a young deckhand. When an act of needless violence plays out on the waters of Acapulco Bay in 1955, simple lives are pushed off course, perhaps to be lost forever.    

*

https://www.fictionontheweb.co.uk/2018/10/the-bottom-of-sky-by-mitchell-toews.html
*

Note that “Part 2” appeared as a solo piece in Rhubarb Magazine back in 2016 as “The Fisherman’s Story”. I had to find out more, so I wrote the prequel and the sequel.
*
FotW is a London based literary site, the first of the species, to be exact – publishing online since 1996!
*
P.S. – It’s been suggested that this trilogy might lend itself well to a screenplay conversion. What do you think? “CUT!” or “That’s a wrap!”? 
*

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The Bottom of the Sky (Uno)

London is calling! Great news from England. My trilogy, “The Bottom of the Sky”, will be published in Fiction on the Web. Editor Charlie Fish read the three-part short story at my request to critique and assess. Normally, FotW does not run stories longer than two or three thousand words, but Charlie has begun to consider lengthier pieces.

“I’ve increasingly been publishing longer pieces (to the considerable detriment of my time, but mostly totally worth it), and this would just about fit into one release.”

– Writer, Editor, Screenwriter – Charlie Fish.

“The Bottom of the Sky” began as a single short story that was published by Rhubarb Magazine in Winnipeg. (Now sadly out of publication.) “A Fisherman’s Story” ran in issue 39, back in September 2016. My thanks to Editor Bernice Friesen who was kind enough to give me my first fiction opportunity in print. Ink!

It was exciting but the full story including the things that had happened to me, or those I had witnessed, the experiences that triggered the story in the first place, remained untold. So too, the many circumstances — both causal and consequential — that I imagined continued to nag at me.

I wrote “A Fisherman’s Story” in 2014. During January of 2017, I was inspired to complete the story. I wanted to write a prequel and a sequel. The first segment, the prequel, was completed that year: “Part 1 – The Mismaloya — Acapulco, 1955”

Part 1 introduces the chief characters, Avelino and Jose, cousins who are partners in a charter fishing boat in Acapulco. The cousins are from the tiny fishing village of Mismaloya, near Puerto Vallarta. A young boy, a pinche named Carlos, signs on as a crew member aboard the Mismaloya for a sailfin day trip.

A number of changes were made to the original story and it became, “Part 2 – The Fisherman’s Story — Mismaloya, 1975”. This account tells of Jose and his wife Violeta and their daughter Josefina. The viewpoint is that of Violeta and the reader also is introduced to Matthew, a Canadian Mennonite church volunteer living in the village. There to help build a school, Matthew meets Jose and the two become oddly-matched friends, fishing with handlines in the bay most evenings.

In “Part 3 – Avelino and Carlos — Acapulco, 1976”, Avelino engineers an unexpected reunion and the story concludes near where it began, on the Pacific shore overlooking the bottom of the sky.

All told, the trilogy involved over three years of writing, on and off, the support of freelance editor James McKnight (another Londoner), and the difficult but necessary learning curve provided by numerous litmag rejections.

And All I Got was this Lousy Poem

That’s right, I had a surprise heart attack, suddenly lying out on the wet gravel of a deserted road and all I got out of it (besides a couple of stents) was…

Well, we’ll see about that. Here’s the poem:

Woman with the Dog’s Eyes

By Mitchell Toews

Uppermost boughs sough with impatience as I stare

Grey fingers stretch up to the arc, branches of a birch gone bare

And these I frame in the quiet now, the tide wheel all but silent

Apocryphal offspring close by me, how? And dear, so dear

Brushwork details unfinished yet, I fear, I fear

Eyes wide I rise with canvas ready, my pigment not yet spent