Ryan Werner's Blog, page 4

Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 28: "Flood")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" by Bob Dylan, as suggested by musician Patrick Fleming of The Poison Control Center, was the inspiration behind the story "Flood"
Originally OBCBYL #32. Biblical tropes aside, floods are some serious shit. I live in a somewhat wavy part of the country—driftless is the geological name for it—and almost every year there’s at least one-to-three days of rain that ruins lots of things. Back in 1995, a large part of a nearby city, the part was called The Flats, was beyond fucked due to a flood. Two years ago, an elderly-yet-spry man I know was the only casualty in a minor flood that broke suddenly and swept his car off the road. Water is indifferent.

The flood in this story keeps coming back once a year every once in awhile as well, and the carnival described is actually a take on two local events of local importance: East Dubuque’s Fun Days and The Kieler Picnic. To the best of my knowledge, there’s never been a kissing booth, but I’m sure there has been young boys trying to figure out their newfound sexual feelings and directing them toward a woman old enough to be their mother. (Again, Oedipus and Freud had a lot of shit down.)

I was never a big Bob Dylan fan, though I’ll always respect him for the pathways he’s made in American songwriting. This song was one I was unfamiliar with, a deeper cut (to me) from Blonde On Blonde. I was stunned at its length and narrative, the number of versus and the loose, wavering arrangement. Fitting in the shamed woman who is still desired by a single entity was easy, but the language and imagery I was able to pinch from Dylan’s lyrics really made a lot of the lines and, at the end, the arc itself work wonderfully.

And of the end, it’s one of the few where there’s a bit of a surprise that changes the entire last section. I’m normally against surprises—they’re almost always cheap gimmicks that do-away with the possibility of rereading—but there’s always an exception. And just like Dylan himself, this song is an exception, and I’ve loved it ever since.

(Also, Patrick Fleming of The Poison Control Center was one of the most appreciative people to work with me on this project, and I cannot thank him enough. His band rules and you should definitely check them out.)


Tomorrow: A story named "Refund" that is based on the song "On To You" by The Constantines. Suggested by musician Kevin J. Frank of Haymarket Riot. 

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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 27: "B Sharp, C Flat")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Bicycle Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle" by Be Your Own Pet, as suggested by writer Kevin Wilson, was the inspiration behind the story "B Sharp, C Flat"

Tomorrow: A story named "Flood" that is based on the song "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" by Bob Dylan. Suggested by musician Patrick Fleming of The Poison Control Center.

SATCD on Goodreads
 
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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 26: "Mythology")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Bullet and a Target" by Citizen Cope, as suggested by writer Keith Scribner, was the inspiration behind the story "Mythology"
Originally OBCBYL #25.  In the middle of his wife telling him something, my 76-year-old buddy, Frank, turned to me and said, “If I’d strangled her on our wedding night, I’d be out of jail by now.”

This is one of many reasons that Frank is a wonderful man. Lately, his health has been shitty, and he’s had trouble getting through the jokes he normally told me—some clean, some with a punchline that goes something like “Lift your head up, idiot, you’re licking the carpet.” I would trade this story, most stories, to have him back in prime condition. As such a deal is impossible, I’ll settle for this as a tribute to him.

The one or two times I’ve met his daughter, a woman old enough to be my mother, I noticed her never finishing his jokes for him, but always knowing where they were going and still being surprised, still laughing at the end. The daughter of the Frank in the story is more affected due to her father, a sort of pixie dream girl who is more of a prankster than a mess.

I had trouble with the song and, admittedly, pinched very little from it. The title and a sense of danger are the only things, and neither of them really comes in until the end. I hadn’t written a sweet story in awhile for fear of sentimentality leaking in, and if this story works at all, it’s because of the real power of an absurdity that has nothing to do with me. The suspension necessary to disappear into a life that isn’t just not our own but is, in fact, no one’s, is a quality with a high possibility of resolving itself in joy. (Or drug addiction.)


Tomorrow: A story named "B Sharp, C Flat" that is based on the song "Bicycle Bicycle, You Are My Bicycle" by Be Your Own Pet. Suggested by writer Kevin Wilson.

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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 25: "Where Is Your H?")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Smile & Wave" by Headstones, as suggest by writer Tim Trenkle, was the inspiration behind the story "Where Is Your H?"
Originally OBCBYL #26. Small town baristas—waitresses of any kind, really—are the best girls, and there are days where I think I could live forever just through the love of a pretty girl with tired legs.

The baristas are only a minor point of entry for the real story, in which innocuous poetry readings during the summer in a college town reveal a layered, odd relationship between a couple thought to be undeniably right.

I worked not at a coffee shop in a small town, but, even worse, at a record shop in a small college town. Neither one did particularly well in the summer, but the coffee shop is still open and the record store isn’t, if that tells you which one did worse. The coffee shop would only be open for about four hours in the mornings, about long enough to afford to keep the lights on and pay the barista.

We ran a couple readings there when I was in college, but nothing nearly as exciting as an imploding marriage came from them.

The whole thing with the H was something I said to an ex-girlfriend’s sister once, a Sara, but not the one in the story. About the only thing I knew was that, biblically, Sarah (with an “h”) was holier than Sara (without an “h”). If this sounds like a rather flimsy thing to build a story on, that’s because it is. I had to research the letter “h” for about an hour just to round out the climax of the story.


Tomorrow: A story named "Mythology" that is based on the song "Bullet and a Target" by Citizen Cope. Suggested by writer Keith Scribner.

SATCD on Goodreads
 
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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 24: "This Illusion")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Feel" by Big Star was the inspiration behind the story "This Illusion"
(Read "This Illusion" over at Prime Number Magazine)

Exclusive to SATCD. Big Star really only fired the same few longing-related synapses over and over, so I knew immediately that the story was going to be about a guy and a girl and a disappointment sitting comfortably between them. What I ended up with was a guy dating one of “exactly four-dozen registered female magicians in the United States.”

I remember being obsessed with magic when I was younger. Not real magic—I’m obsessed with that now, though it’s even more fruitless than the other kind—but magic tricks, the kinds done with prop metal rings and slight-of-hand. I had books and learned some tricks and, until I decided I wanted to be a pro wrestler, was convinced I would be a magician someday.

Obviously, this never happened. I knew a magician in high school tangentially. His sister was in my grade. His license plate said MAGICEJ and he was kind of a fucking dork. The ghost was long given up, but that wasn’t very endearing.

I’m sure there’s a bit of GOB Bluth in here somewhere, but mostly it’s just a bunch of stuff I made up. I may have gotten the idea for a “female magician convention” from a porno. If that doesn’t actually exist, someone should make it.

As for the story, I think it was a bit of a turning point in my writing. After years of doing it accidentally, I finally figured out a way to be a little funny while still having that feeling of a big, functionless Midwestern heart somewhere at the center of it all.


Tomorrow: A story named "Where Is Your H?" that is based on the song "Smile & Wave" by Headstones. Suggested by writer Tim Trenkle.

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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 23: "Jests At Scars")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Hard-core Troubadour" by Steve Earle was the inspiration behind the story "Jests At Scars"

Tomorrow: A story named "This Illusion" that is based on the song "Feel" by Big Star. 

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Pre-order the book so Santana will stop releasing albums.   

Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 22: "Let's Go Shoot Her While She's Crying")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Black Coffee" by Sarah Vaughan, as suggested by writer Dena Rash Guzman, was the inspiration behind the story "Let's Go Shoot Her While She's Crying"
Originally OBCBYL #39. The question of “what makes a man?” is only slightly less interesting than “what makes a woman?” in that, after it’s been squared away that we’re all human, I think that there’s more depth to a woman. I don’t mean this in the manner of sitcom tropes—the Simple Husband, the Confusing Wife—but more in the manner that the world makes it more difficult to be a woman than it does a man, and the success or failure of any woman that is even tangentially related to their gender is, for better or worse, a point of curiosity.

I’m not saying I’m very good at writing in the first person voice of a woman. I’m not even saying that I’m a good feminist. I’m certainly better at both than I was when I was, say, twenty years old and thinking I was really doing some good by writing first person as a woman. As you can imagine there was a lot of internal dialogue about “supple-yet-firm breasts” coming out in a voice eerily similar to that of a sexually frustrated boy with good intentions.

The stories in the book that are told from the first person POV of a woman, this one and “Focus” and “Jests At Scars,” weren’t meant to be statements of any sort. I’m guaranteeing I would have fucked it up had it been my intention to do otherwise—I’m not entirely sure I didn’t fuck it up anyways.

If the stories succeed on any level, I think it’s one of delightful inoffensiveness. I want people to finish the story and think not about how I did writing in the voice of a woman or whether or not I painted a fair portrait of a female, but to instead wonder about the fate of the characters I’ve created, in all their human glory.

Also, the scene where the musician boyfriend is on set is based on the episode of the Valerie Bertinelli sitcom Café Americain where her real life husband Eddie Van Halen played a minor role as a coffee shop guitarist. And by “based on” I mean that I’ve never seen it but I know it happened. I will send $10 to anyone reading this who’s actually seen an episode of that show.


Tomorrow: A story named "Jests At Scars" that is based on the song "Hard-core Troubadour" by Steve Earle. 

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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 21: "What Burns Never Returns")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Alcoholiday" by Teenage Fanclub was the inspiration behind the story "What Burns Never Returns"
Exclusive to SATCD. I follow enough porn stars and pro wrestling divas to know that stupid girls don’t interest me much. Crazy girls, on the other hand, are endlessly interesting. Unfortunately, it’s hard to realize right away that an attractive girl who gets drunk and lights garbage cans on fire is both completely charming and entirely relationship-proof.

The story isn’t about much, just two people who shouldn’t be trying anymore finally realizing it. I don’t (purposely) write many things without an arc, so I like rereading this one every once in awhile just to remind myself that I don’t need to be such a slave to narrative all the time. Sometimes people can just light shit on fire and then punch one another and then possibly have sex later on and that’s all that needs to happen.

This story was actually written a couple years before the OBCBYL project started up, but it was, in fact, written about a song. I used “Alcoholiday” as the name of the original story, too, because it was too good to pass up. The current version is titled with apologies to the band Don Caballero.

Tomorrow: A story named "Let's Go Shoot Her While She's Crying" that is based on the song "Black Coffee" by Sarah Vaughan. Suggested by writer Dena Rash Guzman. 

SATCD on Goodreads
 
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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 20: "Sweet Tooth")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"I Wanna Be Your Dog" by The Stooges, as suggested by musician Ted Nesseth of The Heavenly States, was the inspiration behind the story "Sweet Tooth"
Originally OBCBYL #2. Because there is no such thing as unrequited like, we will constantly heed the tension between any two people bound by unrequited love.

One brother in “Sweet Tooth” has everything, including the problems. It’s a rather uncomplicated set-up.

My own brother and I get along just fine, so I had to pull the majority of inspiration for this one from the excellent Tom Franklin story “The Ballad of Duane Juarez.” They’re similar stories—the “brother dynamic” manages to run deep with few variations—except his is, of course, better. If only I had thought of shooting a bunch of cats at the conclusion of mine.

This story is also one of the few where I was able to work in musical elements of the song—the sleigh bells, the piano. As this was the second story in the series and I was coming off a long stretch of not writing, I found a lot of ideas and details from my life rushing out. Shipping Wisconsin beef 2000 miles to California was something someone actually did when I worked at the meat processing plant, and San Diego is one of the few places outside of the tri-state (WI/IL/IA) are I’ve actually visited.

I’ve got real fights with my brother I could have pulled from if they weren’t all ancient and meaningless, but nobody wants to read about the time I punched a door because he wouldn’t let me use his Nintendo 64.

Tomorrow: A story named "What Burns Never Returns" that is based on the song "Alcoholiday" by Teenage Fanclub. 

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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 19: "Facts")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

 "Crosseyed & Painless" by The Talking Heads, as suggested by writer Kirk Nesset, was the inspiration behind the story "Facts" 

Originally OBCBYL #3. There’s a lot of sophomoric ranting to be done on the subject of truth, whether or not it’s a matter of majority rules (“Terministic Screens” and the such) or if it’s a matter of actuality (Science and whatever). But I’m not the one to do it. I’m sure that, if cornered a decade ago, I would have been more than willing to tell it like it is, as only a seventeen-year-old can.

I’ll settle for this story, in which a photographer takes nude photos of a barely-legal Czechoslovakian girl, who later catches him taking the pictures into photoshop and turning her into something fairly grotesque.

Not that it should matter with the exercise being what it is, but I had a hard time with this because I fucking hate The Talking Heads. I’m barely comfortable with coming out on this, especially on the internet, which is full of exactly the sort of nerds who would love The Talking Heads. Don’t execute me, please.

I had a hard time deciding on a Czech name for the girl. They all sort of sounded like something from a Longmont Potion Castle skit. I settled on Zuza—graceful lily—because it sounded nice. Thankfully, after getting stuck at some point, I went back and looked at the meaning of the name again. Of course that’s what a beautiful eighteen-year-old woman would be named when completely naked and questioning her beauty, proving that I’ve got dumb luck, but at least I’ve got luck.



Tomorrow: A story named "Sweet Tooth" that is based on the song "I Wanna Be Your Dog" by The Stooges. Suggested by musician Ted Nesseth of The Heavenly States.

SATCD on Goodreads
 
Pre-order the book so you're not bored at a bus stop.