Meg Sefton's Blog, page 17

happy writer, happy life

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

Sometimes I feel caught between my best interests as a writer and my needs as a person, especially during this shifting scene of our pandemic and the resultant isolation and lack of community. For example, I find it helps me to share what I have written on my blog. It helps me feel less isolated. Sometimes I may even be fortunate enough to get a comment or two. As a writer, I really need this to keep going. It helps me to produce and move forward. After getting some encouragement, I will often, but not always, take a piece down and try to publish it in a journal.

Not all journals will accept a work that has previously been “published” on a blog, however brief its appearance. I understand and respect that. As a former journal editor, I used to have that same policy. However, I have loosened my views about this. That being said, I recently missed out on the chance to have a story appear in a journal because it briefly appeared on my blog. When it came to signing on the bottom line, I checked with the editor regarding their policy, and sure enough, the piece was ineligible for publication with this particular journal.

Writers have to sometimes do what they need to do to keep the synapses firing. At times, this is the larger concern. Pay for publication is rarely beyond token for short fiction, for example, and in the tradeoff for the psychological gains of an audience, however tenuous that support, I often err on the side of doing what feels best in the moment. I pray for venues that might like what I’ve written and not mind its archived history on some obscure patch of the interweb, a history that will be close to obsolete in a few months’ time after I have deleted my blogpost.

It is a tradeoff, but I do understand editors’ perspectives on this.

Still, the larger value for me at present is happiness.

Home for Christmas

This is the extent of my Christmas decor this year. On the table beside my chair is a Henry James collection, including one of my favorite stories: “The Turn of the Screw” The Victorians used to share ghost stories around the fire on Christmas. That is the frame for the story within the story in James’s masterpiece. I think that people yearn for meaning over the holidays, especially in these years of our global pandemic, and that is why stories we find in movies and books and gatherings with friends and family bring such comfort. Be well and reach for a story. —Margaret

Minari

Photo by Kent Pilcher on Unsplash

Tonight I watched an excellent film called Minari. It is about a Korean American family who moves out to Arkansas to farm and start a new life. I spent part of my childhood in Arkansas. There were farmers in my father’s congregation who endured some of the hardships depicted in the film. This was a unique take. I loved it.

Christmas stockings

Gay Parisienne Barbie Roberts, Jim Cardosi, flickr

One year, a woman decided to splurge on some expensive silk thigh-highs for the office Christmas party. They looked great with a dress she had bought in New York, one she thought would be classic enough to outlast the whims of fashion. Sure enough, she was a hottie and caught some attention, but she snagged them on a corner of a filing cabinet and had to throw the stockings away when she got home.

The next year at Christmas, the same woman thought it would be nice to splurge on a pair of expensive thigh highs for the party that would be held at the office. The lace bands gripped well and she found a garter belt in her drawer that looked great. Her boss noticed how hot she looked and rubbed his hand along her leg when she was sitting on a desk, drinking. She slipped and snagged the stockings on a drawer. The next morning, she threw the stockings away as well as some things she found in her apartment – a couple of cigars, a kerchief.

The next year, the same woman wanted to do add something to her Christmas party dress that would make her feel sexy. Overworked and overscheduled, she’d been feeling more rat than woman. She took a bath before the party, drank champagne, and put on these great silk thigh highs. Why hadn’t she thought of these before? When she got to the party, she was so drummed up she hit on a young male intern. When she went into the office the next day, still in her thigh highs, there was a note on her desk from her boss, telling her what she’d done was most inappropriate. “This is a warning,” the note said. When she looked down, she saw a huge runner in her stockings, starting at the knee.

The next year, the same woman saw these thigh highs on sale. In a kind of mad frenzy, she gathered up as many as she could carry and took them to the register. The saleswoman gave her a little smile, just a slight upturning of the lips. “This is a great price,” said the woman, ringing up the stockings. She agreed and tried to ignore what the saleswoman might be insinuating. She could wear whatever stockings she wanted for whatever reason. That night, for the party, the woman decided to stuff extra stockings into her purse. Sometimes these silk stockings tend to snag, or at least she’d heard, and she was intent on being more polished about her look these days though she wasn’t about to stoop to nylon, at least not for the office Christmas party. She also remained sober. She had filed the warning the previous year among her pay stubs and came across it from time to time. She went home with all of her stockings intact and put them away neatly in her drawer the next day.

This woman became so particular about silk stockings, especially the kind that come up to the thigh, that she put it in her will that she be buried wearing this particular kind of hosiery. When she had passed, her daughter brought to the mortician the stockings her mother had requested for her coffin attire. The mortician was a friend of this woman’s daughter and was surprised the woman had worn thigh highs while alive and wanted to don them while dead. She was a crusty old broad. Plus, the stockings themselves were incredibly expensive as was obvious from the feel of them, their quality, the packaging. The mortician slipped off the stockings she was wearing and slipped on the woman’s stockings and garter. The lace gripped her thighs and her legs felt great. She put her own stockings on the corpse and wheeled it into cold storage. She called her boyfriend and they snagged the dead woman’s stockings all over the place.

Saturday: Samantha Fish’s Spell

If you are desirous of a spell this Saturday, Samantha Fish has the right kind of magic for you. I discovered an early youtube several years ago, a live performance in a bar, but can’t find it now. Still, this recording is early enough. It still has that rawness of something new and not over-performed and smoothed out. She is now renowned the world over.

Friday’s Freddie Freeloader

I’m considering crossing town tomorrow night for a little jazz education at an Asian fusion restaurant/lounge. A musician will be teaching some insights to some wannabe jazz cat groupies lol. I’ll play it by ear. In the meantime, there is Freddie. And Miles.

To keep the Freddie mood going, try out the Freddie Freeloader list on youtube. Primo.

Radio Free Europe Radio

This is one of my favorite radio “channels” on Spotify. It’s upbeat and peppy and a great one to listen to while decluttering, which is what I am attempting to do post-Thanksgiving and pre-Christmas. lols. I hope you are having a good day. —Margaret

Oopsies

I have a correction to my earlier post about Willie Nelson composing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” It looks like it was written by Fred Rose and first performed by Roy Acuff in 1945. I got an urge to dig a little deeper and found my blunder. Here is its earlier iteration…..Happy Tuesday.

Day 30: Write a story where the impossible is now possible “Man Dog”

Chris vT, flickr

When I took command of my dog in the presence of men is when I knew I had turned a corner, when I rejected the men who didn’t understand dogs, worship dogs like I did, men who tried to be the alpha to my dog which was easy to do with my small submissive fluffy she-dog. Some men were weird, would treat her like she was their very own bitch. My little darling died of heart failure and after a period of grief, I began to take my vitamins and sharpen my nails. I got me a man dog. Muscled haunches, shoulders, and jaws, bite up to 743 pound-force per square inch, power on a choke collar, loyal to the death, command ready. I loved this dog as much as any other but in a different way. He required I command respect. He required I show who’s boss. Further, he would brook no suitor’s disrespect toward me, not even a hint. That low, rumbling thunder growl was my built-in red flag. The moment Joe shambled into my life, held his hand upside down for Brutus to sniff and approach unthreatened was the moment my life clicked into place.

Day 28: Photo prompt “Detritus”

In memory of by Jereme Rauckman, flicker

(I adapted this from an earlier post – September 2017. I composed it a year or two earlier at a flash fiction workshop at The Milk Bar in Orlando.)

We are what is left when everything from the accident is carried away – the driver, the smashed car, the branches from the bush that crumpled thin metal. We are the detritus, the pieces, the bits – the piece of reflector, the broken glass of the windshield, the broken cross dangling from the rearview.

The bush the car crashed into was as crushed as the car’s frame. The conclusion of the police was that the young man was drunk.

But we know it was a deer. He swerved to avoid a deer. But he died. The deer lived.

The mother who came to collect pieces of us the day after had it right, and this is what she told the police, that her son had swerved to avoid an animal. The police said his intoxication level had been a more solid forensic indicator. But the boy loved animals, she said to them, and later, she told it to the ground, she told it to the bits of debris.

We are a reflection of stars and lost dreams and yet should we be able to tell the story of that lonely boy riding through the night in the city of lakes at Christmas, we would tell the truth only a mother’s heart knows: The purity of her son’s heart, that, drunk though he was, he was responsive to the natural world even in a city like ours where people careen around lakes without their licenses because of last year’s DUI, believing they can save the world despite themselves. The law does not allow for the best of what someone could possibly be but more often what is the worst.