A kind-of-list about experimental writing

Readers of creative writing and the writers of all genres want to read/tell a story, a story that takes in its audience as it did its creator. But experimental writing isn’t always as easily defined as its popular and traditional compeer. As a writer naturally drawn to telling the non-traditional non-linear tale, I needed to think about what impact my narratives might have on my readers. For fun and conciseness I attempted an Effectual and Demur list about experimental forms writing and the challenges of reading experimentally.

Effectual

• Narrative play (infinite control of information; less textual ‘padding’ to disguise it)
• Telling a story as it would happen (event, time passes, lesson later realized)
• Malleability with grammar (largely punctuation, the odd lowercased proper noun (i.e. god))
• Freedom to traverse time/space/tone (A bit like Junto Diaz short stories)
• Use of multiple forms/ authorial freedom (flash-fiction, poetry, drama, definition)
• An array of characters (Think: House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros)
• Elusive setting (yes, I do mean E-lusive)
• Succinct surprises
• Dual narrators offering the story from a somewhat unbiased perspective (The Lover’s Dictionary felt this way to me, at times)

Demur

•  Reader dislocation (setting, time, tone, unreliable narrator?)
• Covering too much fictional time in a small space
• Can Flash-fiction sustain a novelette?
• Grammatical choices off-putting/ misunderstood?
• Who’s your audience?
• What’s your genre?
• How would you market it?
• Should experimental writing be an earned art? (Think: The Lover’s Dictionary, David Levithan and Nox, Anne Carson)

A broad list and by no means the extent of my thoughts on writing experimentally. But for the sake of space I’ll leave you with that. I would love to hear from other writers; have a bit of a collaboration. So please do share your genius below. To see samples of my experimental work, or to get a fuller idea of what I’m referencing in the above lists: read me.

Monika:

We lay in her loft on the biggest bed I’d ever slept in. I awoke to her index finger circling my aureole. Do you shave around your nipples, she asked. I don’t like the hair there. But it’s a beautiful blonde yarn. I don’t like hair, I’m sorry. But it helps my mouth, my hands, find their way to your delicate places.

Monika had mandarin colored hair everywhere. Her legs appeared freckled in the summer light as it fell through large wall-sized windows. I’d find her orange threads in my underwear, and stuck in the crack of my ass after a shared shower. When I was folding her dryer warm sheets the static would capture her hair, I’d shake the sheet violently trying to free the hostage strands. Monika fought anxiety with Zanex, and I fought feeling like an outsider by trying to get inside her, to make her feel something through the numb. She was right about the trail of hairs that lead to the important places on the body. I let myself into her loft, switch my shoes for slippers at the door, take the metal stairs up to her open bedroom and follow the paths her body laid out. Her ceramic skin contrasted the fiery translucent hairs on her hands, a veil over each finger, a way for my lips to search out in the dark hours. But now it was 7am and her body was sprawled atop her bed, uncovered in the summer heat. From her fingers to her forearms, the wildfire spread sporadically up her, turning to the finest down at her shoulders where her ocean-curled hair blanketed them. Hairs like ivy peak from her armpit, crawling for daylight it seems. I purse my lips to blow warm breath on her clavicle, the forgotten microscopic hairs standing up across her chest leading to the red-ring around her nipple. My tongue makes contact. She shifts a bit, a hard sleeper under self-medicated anesthesia. I kiss her left nipple, hovering above it, blowing slow hot breath. I follow her trails, the one that dives at the center of her abdomen towards the well of her bellybutton. Monika doesn’t own a razor; her skin is shielded from the sun at all hours either by clothing, or in the safety of her apartment. She’s my protected prize, untarnished. The body is centered, balanced, composed of pairs and a few singulars. Her two hips are parenthesis for her singular beauty, one also made of pairs. Her cream panties, transparent enough to see the strawberry they encase. I continue my visual investigation, my exploration of a body I’ll never live in. Her fluorescent legs are spotted by the tint of red hairs that cover her. I’ve stared too long, touched timidly, can no longer resist the differences between us, the differences I am enamored with.  I take her right foot in my hands, her eyelids crinkle-squeeze; I press her small foot to my face. My cheek to the top of it; letting the little hairs carpeting each of her toes tickle my cheek as I move my face against them; the way the body mirrors itself so appropriately amazes me.

A Type of Greek Tragedy

I want to grow to skyscraper heights – wade through the Aegean to Santorini collecting gulls in palmfuls of salt water. The creases of my hands crystalized by the Mediterranean water. I will pick this ship up by its mast – wedge it somewhere between Rhodes and Symi. To spread my big fleshy body across Caldera, let the steam permeate my world-weary skin. Use the layered-cake cliffs of Fira as files for my curled calcium nails. To pluck the horizon free of its white pocked pimples. Send people crashing into the waves like the Greeks during the Akrotiri eruption. The military ships will speed between my toes, crushed by my tree trunk phalanges.

The water is swaying silk tie-dyed by the skies blue, made a darker hue by the blackened shell floor and somehow you can see the bottom, even from my view. The economy would no longer matter and the Turkish government would silence in fear of my wrath (so nearby), leaving its people in peace; one can only hope. I will leave the Greek islands for the goats, the cats, and remove the muzzles from the donkey snouts. Those who build houses atop the Earth’s mountains are far too arrogant for survival. Not everything is a Lego Land. And maybe the fish will return to these waters once the humans are gone. 

Lucy [in-progress]

appurtenance |əˈpərtn-əns|

noun

She stopped me as we were walking along the river. ‘It’s freezing, come on!’ Moving my body backwards with the ease of a dancer leading the Waltz, she propped me against the stonewall and kissed me. It’s in those instances that you forget—that it all becomes about the movements of the kiss, the colliding magnetics of two sets of lips, the fluid melody of dancing tongues, the moment when you forget there are two people involved, that we have jobs, names, titles, responsibilities. If I could hang in that first kiss, when my mind was untainted by the dangerous logic of her being, then I think things would have wound up a bit differently. If only being a sweet person was enough, if only the hope of love was really enough.

terminus |ˈtərmənəs|

noun

Losing you felt like a public event, the sort of breakup that takes place on a crowded train, when you’re trying to be subtle but screaming over the grating metal track makes that an impossible feat. The embarrassment of leaving the house with a coffee stain on the rear of your trousers, or getting news of your cat’s death or your mother’s kidney cancer making an unwelcome return. And you’re stuck on a train and everyone gets the news with you, everyone has seen the brown spot on your back-end. They can hear the pain in your tight throaty tone, the suffocating sensation of holding back years of reserved tears. When I abandoned you, because that’s what it felt like I did, I had to sit on the 131 to Tooting Broadway with clinched vocal chords and a hollow hole for a stomach. Losing you has been like trying to drink through a straw with a hole in it that I can’t seem to cover up.

She wasn’t, by definition, the intellectual type (whatever that means), but she said the most encouragingly extraordinary things about me: ‘I enjoy the way you write, the words plant themselves in my mind, sometimes making a bed in there.’ Why couldn’t I love her like that, how unashamed she was with her feelings and the risks she took with them—with me.