Stephani Maari Booker's Blog, page 7

Poetry: “Solitude”

I wrote “Solitude” when I was a teenager. My life was pretty miserable then, so this poem portrays that.

Flash fiction: “Tonight Is the Night”

Betty Wright in 1973

“Tonight Is the Night” is a very early flash fiction piece, written when I was an undergrad who newly discovered and fell in love with short-short story collections such as Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories and Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories. This story is a mix of fact and fiction about the trauma of attempted first PIV intercourse, and it’s named after a great song by a great songwriter, the late Betty Wright.

Nonfiction: “Kill”

“Kill” is another prose experiment from graduate school. This depicts painfully true events from junior high school (with the names changed to protect the guilty), the place that The Simpsons creator Matt Groening rightfully calls “the deepest pit in hell.”

Flash fiction: “A Perfect Gentleman”

“A Perfect Gentleman” is another one of the experimental flash prose pieces I wrote in graduate school. It’s based on my frequent personal experience with opening doors for men and how they react to it.

Flash nonfiction: “The Finicky Eater”

Yellow and cherry tomatoes harvested from plants in my backyard.

“The Finicky Eater” is one of a handful of experimental flash prose pieces I wrote in graduate school. I’ll be posting others over the coming weeks.

“A Night at the Babysitter’s House”

“A Night at the Babysitter’s House” is the first story I wrote for my first unpublished manuscript, a collection of interrelated stories called The Tabitha Times. The version of the story published here is close to an early draft that was published on a lesbian writing website called Sapphic Voices; it was my first online publishing credit. ”Playing House” is also part of The Tabitha Times.

A kiss-off letter becomes a poem

A now-former friend told me she has no sympathy for anybody who joins the military for any reason. Upon hearing this, I literally fell out in tears. Days later, she emailed me an apology that showed she still didn’t recognize the wrongness of her statement. The kiss-off email I wrote back turned into a poem .

Old writing on my new website

Paraphrasing my favorite soul music group the New Birth, my new website ain’t a big thing, but it’s growing. I’ve been tweaking and adding to it almost every day since it went live. One addition is an unpublished poem I wrote probably the day after Michael Jackson’s death, A Cry over Michael. The Twin Cities Pride Festival was that weekend, and Michael Jackson’s music was playing everywhere there. I read this poem during my appearance at the Power to the People Stage, a performance space at the festival created by and for BIPOC queer people.

I love dragonflies

Here’s one of many photos of dragonflies I’ve taken in my yard. It’s so beautiful and fierce. Butterflies get all the fame, but these killer queens should get more glory.

My first website blog post

This is a test post for the blog on my new website. Hopefully, there will be more to come!