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Learning the New House

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by Tim J. Myers

You move into a new house, and of course it’s a hell of a lot of work.  We’ve been pulling fourteen-hour days, hauling boxes till our arms and legs ache.  And you start setting things up, just so.  This goes here—should we put that over there?  A seemingly endless number of objects to be placed, to be positioned as the perfect slaves they are, never moving unless we bid them.  And you start learning the little peculiarities of the place—the way you have to pull just so to get the shower to work—how the front door sticks a bit.  Even the sounds of it, a kind of minor encyclopedia:  the kitchen tile you keep stepping on, that makes an odd squelching noise—the way china rattles in the hutch when someone walks past.

But all along you’re engaged in another kind of house-warming too, almost without thinking.  You hardly notice it.  And it’s more than one’s emotional attachment to a house, as real as that is.  It’s something that takes no notice of the elements of “home staging,” like the smell of fresh-baked bread to entice renters or buyers, or general “home-i-ness,” any of that.  You’re seeking, feeling for, slipping into, something far deeper.

I worried for days, unaware of it, that there were no mockingbirds here.  So many in our old neighborhood—and just three miles away!  The world alive with them in May and June, their songs filling me whether I listened or not.  Then I heard one, here, from the branches of the Modesto ash in our front yard.  Fool, I told myself—you just happened to move in early July, the season shifts, they stop singing then.  Mates are already won, sex on hidden branches has filled the world with a different, silent kind of song—eggs are growing in feathered bodies, nests being built.  They’re here too.  Of course.

We think about shower curtains, where to hang the mirrors, how to pack our plastic Christmas bins in the little shed.  I try to remember how to reconnect all the parts of my computer.  I go out to the car at night, off to grab some fast food, and notice a gleam of stars through leaf-thick branches above me.

We talk continually about what we need to buy.  A new rug for the dining room—what color?  Indoor-outdoor is best—they wear better, and easier to clean.  At night I fall into bed, my head as weary as my body.  But I find myself waking to sunlight crowding at the window, warming my limbs.  Ah, the window looks east—it can be for us like it was for those who lived here long ago, homes arranged so their doorways always faced the dawn.

And my neighbor, whose backyard is a botanical version of a middle-class pleasure palace, a Cheesecake Factory of greenery and garden knick-knacks—he tells me off-handedly that he gets hummingbirds all the time.  That eases me—eases this part of my self that’s learning the new house, the new street, the new bit of Earth beneath it.  Eases the part of me that fears a particular kind of emptiness amid the great but level fruitfulness of a modern American suburb.

The flurry of questions continues:  Where’s the closest grocery store?  How long will it take us to get to work from here?  Oh, you can’t go that way—that’s our old route, it’ll take too long.  But under those questions, a quieter one, less pressing in the practical world, far more pressing in the depths of myself:

What capacity does this new place have?

The question keeps rising in wordless form; I realize with only mild surprise that I myself am asking it, again and again.  And I know, without thinking, exactly what it means.

Capacity—for Vision.  For some strange sudden eruption of spiritual truth into my consciousness.  How will I encounter the sacred in the minutiae and particulars of this one small place?  What relationship may arise between my spirit and the sidewalks, the front lawn, the feel of the house at midnight?  It’s happened before—Vision has come to me, changing everything.  Can it happen here?

In the middle of our big moving day, sweating and dirt-smudged, she and I paused at twilight to glimpse the new crescent through vines and trees in the backyard.  Nothing made us feel more at home.

I took all the power strips and extension cords, cleaned them up, rolled and rubber-banded them, put them in a drawer so we can find them when we need them.  The cable guy came and connected us.  There’s an enormous deciduous, huge rounded leaf-heavy crown, off beyond the houses across the street.  It must be on the next block, maybe farther.  I step out the side door of the garage to finish a drink, find myself peering beyond the top of my new fence to those high branches as they shift in the wind—

Yes, I think.  Yes.  The way those leaves move, the sway of those branches in wind just after the sun sets.  Yes.

It can happen here.

My spirit begins to take its ease.  It has its own great animal faith in eventuality, even concerning that which seems, by its very radiance, impossible.  And now it feels this place, begins to let itself seep into everything here, the slope of the roof, the dirt of the empty flowerbeds, the worn wood of the back fence, the stuccoed walls, each blade of newly-sodded grass.  It greets passing breezes, neighborhood smells, little rainbows in the sprinkler arcs.

I begin to wait.

Regal House poet Tim J. Myers

Tim J. Myers is a writer, storyteller, songwriter, and senior lecturer at Santa Clara University.  He writes for all ages.  Find him at www.TimMyersStorySong.com or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/TimJMyers1.  Regal House is proud to publish Tim J. Myers’ poetry collection, Down in the White of the Tree:  Spiritual Poems in the fall of 2018.

 

Learning a New House,” was originally published in: America:  The National Catholic Review. 2017, with the title: “Looking for God while moving into a new house that doesn’t feel like home.”

Writing In New York – Part I

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by Nora Shychuk

Like so many others, I had moved to New York City with a dream to write, to be at the center of things and pay attention. But such a reality, even in the service of a great dream, is a hard and often lonely one. I knew it wouldn’t be an easy move to make, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t harder than I guessed it would be. I was out of my element and struggling to find my place. I knew very few people. To say that I was overwhelmed and scared on a daily basis would be an understatement.

I remember, just twenty-four hours before, feeling completely exposed walking through Times Square. Peddlers tried to sell me tickets to comedy shows and shoved CDs in my hands. The rumble of the subway underneath my feet was jolting, the perpetual traffic and honking became its own temperamental rhythm. I felt as if I was on another planet.

But the West Village is, comparatively, quiet. It was an early October afternoon. The sun shined, the blue sky above was soft and cloudless.  As I walked, people were few and far between.  I could hear my footsteps and birds in the trees. Colorful leaves blew across the cozy streets, drawing my eyes to the red brick buildings as I made my way to Bank Street.

I had an appointment. I was set to interview Carol Hebald, author of the novel A Warsaw Chronicle. We had exchanged e-mails for months, setting up a time and place to meet to discuss her new book. As a young, emerging writer just having arrived in the cultural, literary hub of the world, the chance to sit down with a seasoned writer and lifelong New Yorker struck me as a great professional opportunity.

And I suppose it was. But it was so much more than that.

When I arrived, Carol had food ready and waiting on the table. After a warm welcome, she asked if I’d like coffee, tea, or wine. Having to work later that afternoon, I passed on the wine and opted for coffee. While she got it ready, we talked about New York and my recent year and a half abroad in Ireland where I earned my graduate degree.

“Do you miss it?” she asked me.

She smiled easily and when I spoke her eye contact was unwavering. She was a woman – and writer – who knew how to listen. I felt at home immediately.

“Yes,” I said. “I really do.”

When my coffee was ready, I walked it to the living room where Carol and I both sat down on her couch at opposite ends.

A Warsaw Chronicle follows Karolina Heybald, an American exchange professor teaching at Warsaw University during the inception of martial law in 1981. Always present in the novel is the conflict between the Communist party and the Solidarity movement.  Karolina finds herself in the midst of political turmoil as she tries to find a missing cousin. Everywhere she looks, there is danger, real and unavoidable.

Carol and I started the interview by looking back. Amazingly, A Warsaw Chronicle was inspired by very true events. From 1981 to 1982, Carol was the visiting American exchange professor at Warsaw University in Poland. She had just received tenure as an associate professor at the University of Kansas but jumped at the opportunity to go abroad.

She explained that at the time, Poland was behind the Iron Curtain. Politically, it was divisive and violent. Many people asked her why she’d ever want to travel to Warsaw. She was doing well professionally. Didn’t she know the risks? But her reasons were never professional. They were personal and close to the heart.

Her father was born in Krakow and died when Carol was only four. To go to the country where he was born presented her with an opportunity for closure. Not to mention, she saw it as an opportunity to challenge herself.

“I was very naïve in many, many ways,” Carol told me. “Two classes and a handful of students in each. I’d have a world of time to write, I thought, [but] I was in something of a shock when I got there.”

When she arrived in Warsaw, it was sunny and clear. “People looked at me as though I was crazy because they were having such a difficult time,” she said. “It was only two or three months before martial law was declared and I didn’t realize what was happening politically. They kept saying, ‘why did you come here? Why did you come here? Nobody wants to come here.’”

She recalled waiting in long lines for food and how there was never enough to eat. She went hungry herself, a feature common in A Warsaw Chronicle.

Some of the characters in the novel are drawn from life. Karolina’s tutor, for example, is real. When Carol arrived in Warsaw she met him immediately. The two are still in touch today.

Another driving force in A Warsaw Chronicle is Marek, Karolina’s star pupil who dreams of becoming a poet. Their connection entangles Karolina in a high-stakes conflict concerning Marek’s fate. The relationship between the two is fully formed, fully realized. But, Carol told me, Marek is complete fiction.

“I shouldn’t say complete,” she clarified. “There was a meeting somewhere around November right before martial law was declared when a student raised his hand and asked a question I remember having at his age. [He asked] about great work. Does it come from a great idleness or does it come from an enormous amount of work. Which was true? And I just remembered that I had asked that question myself. I looked at him and his face remained in my mind. I never saw him again, but he became Marek.”

Carol went on to say that she felt the closest to Marek, that his character was the most her. He developed organically, as all her characters do. Instead of planning and plotting, Carol allows the moving pieces and voices of her novels to develop naturally, to come to her when the time is right. “[Marek] became a character who was very much alive. And my part was already there. And then I created the father. I don’t know from where. I didn’t consciously sit down and decide to write what I wrote.”

The father, first Lieutenant Maciesz, is a ruthless presence in A Warsaw Chronicle. But, Carol said, he’s a part of her, too. “They come out of me. The father. His cruelty, his bitterness, the fault in his thinking that because he has suffered so much, he knows more.”

The novel developed from old journal entries Carol wrote during her time abroad. Every day, she was chronicling observations about life in Poland. “I simply made diary entries every day and the story took off on its own.”

I told Carol I worked much the same way, going off of notes, feelings, and observations rather than outlining down to the very last detail. I told her I barely ever made a conscious decision in terms of pace or what’s best, practically, for plot. Instead, I go with my gut and allow a certain emotional tug to sway me.  I let the ideas grow as I work.

“Yes,” she said. “You have to listen. You have to have the confidence. If someone tells me, for example, in the writer’s group, that they lost interest in a certain moment, I’d be interested in that because there is, in a novel, necessary places where you want to insert certain information and want the reader to be bored. You don’t want to get rid of too much of [the reader’s] energy. You’re writing and listening at the same time and you’re saying ‘I’ve had enough of this and want to get back to the action.’”

And only the writer knows their characters and how they must navigate through life as the story develops. For Carol, it can’t be all gunfights and obsessive love triangles. Writing is about life, and that includes the mundane, the slow, quiet moments of the every day. “Deep down,” she said, “you know when a moment should drag. It lets the reader rest so they have the energy to feel more when the next crisis comes along.”

It was easy to talk about the process of writing with Carol, about the importance of feeling a story and understanding our characters and where they come from. Personal experience always helps, too. For her, A Warsaw Chronicle was always waiting to be told. It formed from isolation and the reality of displacement. “It was the loneliness that I felt,” she said. “There was very little teaching that went on there. It was mostly waiting in line for food. It was mostly waiting for the day to end.”

But she remembered her time in Kansas and knew that her reason to leave was warranted. “It certainly didn’t do me any good professionally, but Kansas was more of a foreign country to me than Warsaw could ever be. I was a lot lonelier in Kansas than I was in Warsaw. I’m from New York City. Born and bred. And Warsaw was another city, at least. And my father was from there; I wanted to explore where he lived. I wanted to forget him – that was the central thing in my life because he was so much a part of me.”

At this point in our conversation, Carol stopped and looked far off. I followed her line of sight. She was looking out the window, at the streams of autumnal light. Whatever she said next would be carefully considered. She took a deep breath.

“This is hard to explain,” she said. “He was on my mind all the time. He died when I was four years old. And I wanted that to end. I thought if I went I could put it all behind me and just get on with my life as a woman, you know? I was nearly 50 at the time.”

I spoke openly about my own readiness to go abroad to Ireland two years prior. Of course, Ireland was much safer and free of any comparable political upheaval, but it was still a drastic move that few people I knew had ever taken. I wanted to get out of Florida and away from the people I never understood. I told Carol that, quite similarly, I felt the need to leave in order to understand something larger. I moved four-thousand miles away and felt immediately more rooted. I felt like a better version of myself.

I spoke of my own mother next. She died of lung cancer when I was ten. Carol’s father had also died of cancer. We both knew the pain of untimely death, of lives cut short. When such a loss disrupts your life, it’s not hard to understand the simple but heartbreaking fact that life doesn’t last forever. We’re not guaranteed long, happy existences. It was clear to both of us, in the quiet way in which we remembered them, that our parents passing away triggered something in us: the need to make our days count.

Nora Shychuk, Pact Press contributor
Nora Shychuk

“My mom is in everything I write,” I told Carol. “It’s interesting, the loss of a parent.  There’s so much you don’t know, but it still impacts so much of what you do.”

“Everything,” she said. “When I was three I was alone in the house with him. My mother took over the store, my sister was in school. There was a nurse taking care of me, but we were alone for an entire year. My dad and I. And even though I don’t know remember all the details of that year, it’s a central part of my life. I remember, shortly before he died, I asked my father what I should be when I grow up. He told me to be somebody.”

In 1984, after she returned from Poland, Carol resigned her tenure and moved back to New York City to write full-time. I told her that a lot of people would consider such a move reckless, to give up comfort for a life of instability and uncertainty. But Carol knew what it was like to struggle and scrape by. Poland proved that to her. She wasn’t afraid of being poor or of struggling all over again. As long as she was doing what she wanted to do, it was worth it.

“When I was in Brooklyn I was writing full-time in a little room which was about $275 a month, so you can imagine it was in the middle of nowhere. But that’s all I wanted, that room to write. If I wrote well I felt well.”

She paused and smiled again, remembering. “It was my whole life.”

“And what did you learn from devoting your life to writing?” I asked next.

I expected an answer that is heard quite often. A mixture of “never give up on your dreams” and the value of hard work, the earned freedom of going after what you love and want to do. That worthwhile joy of a life spent seeing, feeling, and experiencing. But Carol’s answer was surprisingly refreshing and true: she learned nothing.

“I’ve learned nothing, except that books make books, not experience, not human relationships. Books. And that’s the same advice I’d give anybody who was just starting out: Read! Read! Don’t stop reading! Read what you hate, read what you love. Decide why you love it, how you can borrow from the structure of a novel. You’re not doing anything but borrowing a way to tell a story. You’re trying to learn to tell a story.”

You’re not doing anything but learning to tell a story. Yes, that’s nothing—but everything all at once. By learning to write, you’re learning about yourself.

 

A Warsaw Chronicle is  available from Regal House Publishing.

PART II, to be posted forthwith.

Nora Shychuk has an M.A. in Creative Writing from University College Cork and a B.A. in Film Screenwriting and English from Jacksonville University. Her writing has appeared in The Lonely Crowd, The Quarryman Literary Journal, The Rose Magazine, and Pact Press’s Speak and Speak Again Anthology. In 2017 she was shortlisted for Cork, Ireland’s From The Well Short Story Competition and was also awarded one of two full Alumni Awards to attend the Iceland Writers Retreat (IWR) in April 2018. She lives in New York City.

Writing in New York : Part II

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by Nora Shychuk

Catch up with the first half of Nora Shychuk’s conversation with Carol Hebald, author of A Warsaw Chronicle:  ‘Writing in New York: Part I‘

Carol’s young life sounds like a novel in itself. Born and raised in New York City, Carol nurtured a lifelong passion for the arts and performance. Professionally, she started as an actress on and off Broadway, but her need to write was always there from the beginning. She was always a writer; it was the one thing that never wavered. Eventually, she quit acting and went to college.

She was in English 1 when her teacher noticed her gift for writing. “It was poetry that I went after first. I don’t know why. I loved reading, I loved writing. The fact that I could do it was such a great relief because I left acting and I was lost for a while. See, acting was marvelous for me but I couldn’t do it unless I was hired whereas as a writer I could write anytime, anywhere whether it got published or not. And I knew it would eventually.”

Our conversation shifted to New York City as a place, as an inspirational, larger-than-life refuge for writers and musicians and artists. I asked Carol, as a devoted New Yorker, if she had any advice for visitors of the city. If they only had one day to spend here, what should they do?

Without thinking, two places came immediately to her mind. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The New York City Public Library on 42nd Street, specifically the reading room. “It’s where everybody who has no peace at home goes.  Everybody’s quiet in their own world sitting right next to each other, engrossed in writing or reading. It’s something to see.”

I shared my mutual love of The Met, citing it as a mecca for inspiration. The 19th-century European paintings, Rodin’s sculpture hall, and the period rooms knocked me out on my first visit. I told Carol you walk from room to room and it’s just one creative masterpiece after another. It’s inspiration in motion.

“When I go there, my mind churns,” I said. “People surrounded by art… They’re looking for something. To understand, to feel, to be taken away to another time, another place. My writing tends to be incredibly atmospheric and detailed, so being exposed to different eras and cultures really provide a fresh perspective.”

Carol nodded and asked if I’d like more coffee. When I declined, she looked around the room, at her writing desk and high, crowded bookshelves.

“But really I just need a quiet room anywhere to write,” she said. “I never write in public. I watch people who do and wonder how they concentrate.”

Preferring to write in private was yet another similarity we had. Like Carol, I write best at my desk, looking out at the George Washington Bridge and the Hudson River. Across the river sits New Jersey. The view, the cool breeze, even the sporadic beep-beeps from cars below culminate in an almost dreamlike setting to write. New York City: right outside my window.

“Why do you think artists continue to flock here?” I asked next. “What is it about New York?”

Carol’s answer was at first practical. “Well, people think all the publishing houses are here and most of them are,” she said with a laugh. “But people want to go to a place where they’re going to learn the most, where they’re going to find the best theater, the best museums. It’s a great place to observe.”

That’s the thing about New York. It’s wild. Every kind of person is represented, walking to some meeting, some friend, some restaurant. It is a place of variety and stimulating diversity, where there is always a million-and-one things to do at any given time. Sit in Washington Square Park and watch the people go by. You won’t see such range anywhere else. And that energy? That New York City energy? That’s there, too. We have energy in spades.

But one thing Carol doesn’t involve herself in is the New York City literary “scene.”  She joined groups and learned from them, but “had enough of them.” At some point, you have to take what you learn and run with it, she explained. She understands the practicality of networking and nurturing creative relationships, but it’s not something she feels she needs anymore. If she seeks out help for a section of writing or a new manuscript, it’s more about a simple assurance that the work is decent, not for any help in the overall project or completing it. The need to finish a project is up to you—the writer—and nobody else.

“I have a couple of writers and we do exchange manuscripts once in a while. It’s good to know that this excerpt works therefore I can submit it as a sample to a publisher, but that’s not helping me write the book. I didn’t show A Warsaw Chronicle to anybody but the editors and they did a fine job.”

And that’s a risk few writers would take, myself included. I have a network of writers and friends I’d feel the need to send work to before I made any type of move to get it published or “out” into the world. But Carol knew her story and what she needed to say.

“The character of Warsaw moved in on me so completely,” she said. “I couldn’t help but record what I saw and felt.” This usually came in the form of the blistering cold weather, the people, and the shops. She was putting in exposition unintentionally by simply describing what was around her while she was on her way somewhere. Anywhere. When martial law had been declared, she went outside and took it all in. She recreated that walk for her story.

A Warsaw Chronicle by Carol Hebald

And this walking, this paying attention—it became the story she had to tell. “[A Warsaw Chronicle] was about closeness and questions and my absolute ignorance about the importance of politics and who was who.  The fact is that most people on a personal level didn’t give a damn as long as they made a living and loved who they loved and could be with them. I was so apolitical. I knew nothing about anybody [in that regard].”

But she knew about the human condition, about loneliness and pain, because she herself had felt it. It had become a cornerstone of her life, this need to understand and overcome. The characters themselves developed from that ache.

“Because I needed them,” she said, “they became real.”

We were alike in that way, too. I told her of my devotion to character. That some characters I had developed became more real to me than flesh-and-blood people in my life. Character-central stories moved us the most. We talked about books, about how a book with an almost complete absence of plot could still work if we cared about the characters. If they were true to us.

Carol opened up then about her favorite writers, about Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Gogol, especially.

“And Emily Dickinson,” she said. “I don’t stop reading her.”

When I asked if poetry was her first love, she became wistful, contemplative. She sat back against the couch and sighed.

“At City College there was an opportunity to take both classes, [poetry and prose]. I took poetry and the poetry teacher said, ‘you’re a poet, don’t ever take fiction. You’re going to dilute your gift. Stick with one thing.’ But I was too curious. The idea of making up stories, I was doing it all my life. I was a terrible liar as a child, but people believed me.”

At this we laughed. I told her that I started writing as an escape. The town I grew up in was small and pretty dull. I needed to lie and tell stories to make things interesting. I shared my theory: all writers are liars. We have to be, to some extent. We have to lie to get to the heart of the matter. We have to stretch boundaries and make impossible things possible to learn how to tell the truth.

“That’s right,” she said. “With myself, with Karolina Heybald, I didn’t want to make myself a heroine. I hate when writers do that. I wanted to bring out her faults.”

She wanted to capture the volatile time in Poland and throw the reader into obscenely imperfect situations with imperfect characters.

“If I opened a book about an American exchange professor who came to Poland and had nothing to say but that she was wide-eyed and she was quickly disillusioned, I’d put the book down and say ‘so what?’” she said. “I wanted to start with what I remembered most vividly.”

And what was most vivid, looking back after all those years? The declaration of martial law. The cold, dark mornings. A neighbor knocking on her door, assuming she had loads of money because she was American. Later, that neighbor breaking in. She screamed. He asked her for two cigarettes.

“It was awful. Horrifying. He apologized and asked for forgiveness,” she remembered.

Her students were also hostile. They thought by nature, as an American, Carol was spoiled. But she never had a mother or father the way most of them did. Her relationship with the students in A Warsaw Chronicle and with Marek was a comfort; he was created out of a need. She wasn’t feeling any warmth or affection in Warsaw, out on the streets.

When I asked her how she felt, resoundingly, about Warsaw, she became quiet and looked down at her feet.

“I’ll never go back,” she said. “I’m glad it’s over. But whether I loved or hated it – and I probably felt both ways – it felt like a part of my heritage.”

I ended our interview by asking an expected and stereotypical question: what’s next?

“I’m really searching now because I don’t know. I was exhausted writing A Warsaw Chronicle. I can’t say that I’m still resting because it was published last March. That’s almost six months, isn’t it?” she asked, laughing. “But I’ve been writing poems. Not a book, just individual poems to see where it’ll lead. I am getting older. I don’t know that I’m going to write another book. I may. It may come to me, but right now it’s not there.”

It felt strangely proper to end the interview in such a way. We had shared such an intimate conversation. In retrospect, it functioned not as an interview, but as an easy admission between two friends. We shared stories of our childhood, our mutual love of writing, our pain from losing a parent at a young age. Often when I spoke to Carol, it was hard to stay on track, to follow the outline and order of the questions I had prepared. But that is in no way a criticism of Ms. Heybald, or even myself. I decided to let our chat take its natural course and progress easily and honestly. And I’m glad I did. This interview wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t a valuable contact for a struggling writer. It was the afternoon when I realized that I wasn’t alone, that in this loud and bustling city there is beauty around every corner—and sometimes it comes in the form of a person sitting across from you on a couch in the West Village.

After the question and answer block, Carol brought out an old photo album. It was full of dated photographs, newspaper write-ups, and playbills from her acting days. As we flipped through the pages, I was aware that I was being shown a whole life—an exciting life—filled with passion and feeling and art, but also one of hardship and struggle, of heartbreak and loneliness, which made all of her accomplishments all the more magical. Her life, as successful as it was, was never easy. There was unrelenting pain. I was sitting next to a woman who really did it all, but I mean that broadly.  She was an actress, writer, teacher, and world traveler, but also a lifelong searcher. A woman who grappled with regret and missed opportunities and who, perhaps, was always a little bit lost.

But still, every day, Carol rises and she writes. At her desk, she sits and feels. She puts words on a page with the hope that an idea will rise, or a sentence will scrape away the gunk and mess of life and shine a spotlight on the truth. And that, more than anything else, makes her not only a writer, but a courageous artist.

After a time, she closed the book. We talked about the weather, about the fastest subway route to take to get back to the apartment I shared with my boyfriend.

“How long have the two of you been together?” she asked.

“Five years,” I said.

“Oh,” Carol replied, smiling. “Oh, to be young again.”

And then she asked me once more if I’d like a glass of wine. This time, I said yes.

 

Nora Shychuk has an M.A. in Creative Writing from University College Cork and a B.A. in Film Screenwriting and English from Jacksonville University. Her writing has appeared in The Lonely Crowd, The Quarryman Literary Journal, The Rose Magazine, and Pact Press’s Speak and Speak Again Anthology. In 2017 she was shortlisted for Cork, Ireland’s From The Well Short Story Competition and was also awarded one of two full Alumni Awards to attend the Iceland Writers Retreat (IWR) in April 2018. She lives in New York City.

Photographs by Nora Shychuk.

A Warsaw Chronicle is available now from Regal House Publishing.

On Writing ‘Path to the Night Sea’ by Alicia Gilmore

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Alicia Gilmore, Regal House authorI have always loved reading and creating, with words, with paint and pencils, from joining a Creative Writing class as a child – as an asthmatic and more than a little uncoordinated, team sports were never my forte – to studying art and then writing at university. Since childhood, when I realised that someone had created the book I held in my hand, I have wanted to write. To create. Perhaps it was reading Little Women and wanting so fiercely for Jo to succeed, to be Jo, or alternatively her sisters and enter the Marsh household. Perhaps it was Alice in Wonderland and wanting to throw myself down that rabbit hole. Books were a perfect escape when I was indoors with another bout of bronchitis. They gave me the world. From those tame beginnings to discovering books could not only captivate and inspire me, but thrill me and scare me, keeping me up at night reading under the blankets with a torch. Books introduced me and immersed me in new worlds.

Looking at art, being captivated by passages of paint, the use of light and shadow, thinking how did the artist do that? Reading novels and admiring the skill, the clever hints and clues, the beautiful play of words, wondering how did the author conceive of that? How did they do that? There have been more than a few false starts, a multitude of drafts, dreadful poems and sketches that will never see anyone else’s eyes but I love the process, being swept away into another space, another moment, when reality (and the day job and all the ordinary, everyday concerns) subside.

Path to the Night Sea by Alicia Gilmore, a Regal House authorPath to the Night Sea started as a short story in a fiction class with Sue Woolfe. Sue had given the class a selection of photographs and objects to spark our creativity and give us a physical stimulus to write a short fragment. I remember a small glass perfume bottle and a photograph caught my attention. The photo featured a woman in profile, seated at a piano, her hands poised to strike the keys. There was a cat sitting on top of the piano, and I wondered if these were the two most important things in her life – music and her pet. I started to write about this woman who would sit and play, not looking out of the curtained window, but indoors with her cat. Her face in profile, her ‘good side’… The perfume bottle that perhaps had belonged to a woman who would never get hold. A bottle that held scented memories… Ideas and elements came together and what is now a lot of Day One in the novel formed the original short story. Sue read the story, said I had written the start of a wonderful novel and she had to know what happened to Ellie. I realised so I wanted to know too.

Coal Cliff, Australia, setting for Path to the Night Sea, a Regal House title
Coal Cliff

The story became darker the more I delved into Ellie’s world. Seven days seemed the fitting structure for Ellie to be introduced to the reader and for her to seek her path, tying in with the religious dogma she’d heard from her Grandmother and Father. Listening to music by Nick Cave and Johnny Cash helped me establish the mood at times and gave me the impetus to embrace the flaws and the darkness. When I was writing the first drafts, I was living near the beach and the waves, particularly during storms, formed a natural soundtrack. If I peered out from my desk, I could catch glimpses of the ocean. By the time editing was underway, I had moved to a house that backed onto the bush and had inherited a cat. Listening to the raucous native birds, possums scurrying up trees and across the roof at night, dealing with the odd snake and lizards, plus watching the cat, heightened those natural elements of the story.

coal_cliff_viewI was concerned about and for my characters. I needed to ensure that Arthur in particular had moments, however fleeting, when he was ‘human’, and that Ellie, despite her circumstances, not be passive. I found myself going off in tangents in early drafts with minor characters and subplots but judicious readers and editing brought the focus back to Ellie and Arthur, and the confines of restricted world they inhabit.

I had thought of letting Ellie go one morning years ago when I woke up and heard the news about Elizabeth Fritzl kidnapped and abused by her father. In my drowsy state listening to the radio, the reality of her situation came crashing in and I wanted to put my humble writings aside. What was fictional pain in the face of such devastating reality? Even in 2018, the newsfeed this week is full of children being trapped at home by their parents, the neighbours unaware. Path to the Night Sea is my way of using language to explore familial dysfunction, small town horror, and ultimately, hope.

Regal House author Alicia Gilmore

 

Alicia Gilmore lives in New South Wales, Australia. Her debut, Path to the Night Sea, is a contemporary gothic novel exploring the dark secrets hidden within an otherwise idyllic coastal setting. Alicia has had short stories published in Phoenix and Cellar Door. In 2012, she was a contributing writer and lead editor of Burbangana. In 2009, Alicia received an Allen & Unwin / Varuna Publishers Fellowship that included a residency at Varuna, the NSW Writers’ Centre.

Written on the Wind

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mountain view in GeorgiaHalfway to Tallulah Falls, my son spills his entire bottle of Gatorade into his lap. “Um, Mommmmmay?” He says in a tentative, keening voice, emphasis on the last syllable, the way he always does, adding a frantic edge to what is not really an emergency. “I spilled my drink.” I sigh, tilting back my own water bottle and taking an eager gulp. Thankfully I have leather seats, though we didn’t bring any spare pants and I have no idea how he’s going to hike down a mountain with his butt soaked through.

“We’ll figure it out,” I say to my husband, who is in the driver’s seat, and turn up the radio, melting into the sunlight-warmed car, listening to the equally sunny, warm voice of Chris Cornell. I’m happy, because I’ve just signed a contract with Regal House Publishing for my much-beloved-and-agonized-over manuscript, Monarchs Under the Sassafras Tree. I haven’t told anyone yet, save for the two people in this car with me, and my friend Alice. We are taking an impromptu drive to the mountains – one of my biggest sources of inspiration, and part of the novel’s locale – to celebrate. We’ve had coffee and breakfast already, and soaked pants or not, we’re going out into the air to watch the last remnants of autumn drift from the trees. The burgundy, green-yellow, and day-glow orange of the leaves cannot wait for us any longer.

The mountains are my happy place. Long before I ever knew I had ancestors who hailed from there, I relished my visits to Helen, to Hiawassee, to Tallulah Gorge, to Mt. Airy. There is a quality to the air, and it’s not just the clean, thin breath of the mountain, the fog that settles over the crisp leaves – it’s the spirit there, the life-force. You can taste it, you can feel it running over your skin, making it cool. The way the light falls on the red earth, the mottled gray-brown trees, the blue of the sky – like the most underrated colors in the Crayola box, they alight my senses and make me breathe in deep. If you listen, you can hear the whispers of the trees.

Lillah Lawson Regal House authorUp the mountain, we stop in the gift shop and buy the kid a pair of leggings and a piece of rock candy in his newest favorite color; cyan. On the way outside, he stops to study a taxidermied fox. We visit the museum exhibit, and I point out the boxcars, the butter churn, the crisp, thin white dresses with their square collars; all relics from a time gone by, with lessons to be gleaned. He nods, but isn’t really paying attention. What use does an eight year old have for sack dresses? He wants to get outside, into the air, to touch the stone and bark, to walk the paths, to hear the delicious crunch of the leaves beneath his feet, and I don’t blame him.

It is a bond we share, this love of the outdoors. Together we have traipsed through forests in Rutledge, swam in the lake beneath Mt. Airy, stood under Ana Ruby Falls, marveled at the ceremonial mounds in Sautee-Nacoochee, collected shells on the beach at Jekyll Island, touched statues in the square in Savannah, bent down to smell mountain herbs in Hiawassee, dipped our feet into the creek, counting turtles basking in the sunlight in Athens, and stood on the banks of the Oconee River in Nicholson, Georgia, fishing with my Papa.

Callum and Georgia MountainsWhen he was two he wandered off while I was putting his carseat in – I turned and he had vanished. Those ten minutes felt like hours, and when we found him, he was wandering out of the woods – the forests in Oconee County are heady and thick with skinny, gray-brown pine trees, tall and imposing, but full of a gentle kind of calm, as though benevolent ghosts might pass their days there in a cocoon of sweet silence – with our little beagle in tow, humming a little tune as his fat, toddler hands grazed each tree, oblivious and full of joy. He is a natural wanderer, my kid – and while it isn’t always ideal, and are sometimes stressful, these wanderings – I always understand them. I always understand him. In so many ways just like me, but in others so wholly different, so pure and clear-eyed and awake. I feel I know him better than I’ve ever known myself. He is a natural wanderer, fluent in the woods, a real-life tree hugger. He has always felt at home there in the silence of the woods, a place where he is heard and understood, nurtured and adored.

It is a gift I passed along to him, the one I’m most grateful for. Just like every other kid his age, he’s more interested in video games, Captain Underpants and YouTube videos than he is anything else, but he’ll stop everything if I say, “Want to go for a hike?”
I make it a point to walk behind him, present and ready should he have need of me, but content to watch his footfalls on the path, clumsy and childlike but full of innocent purpose. He blazes down trails, forgetting us, forgetting all. He has been begging for a compass for years but he doesn’t really want one – he has his own sense of purpose, his own rhythm that he dances to. I think when he’s an adult, he’ll really love Thoreau.

Georgia mountain streamWhen he graduates high school, I plan to take him on a hike through the Appalachian Trail. I haven’t told him yet, but it’s a secret dream. It seems poignant, appropriate. I can picture him, sweaty blonde hair, cheeks flushed with red in the cool air, panting with exertion, a heavy backpack weighing down wide shoulders. Undoubtedly he’ll have spilled his Gatorade on his pants, or tripped and skinned a knee, but there will be joy.

For now, my husband and I follow his lead, his skinny legging-clad legs pumping double time down the small trail, as though we’re late for something important. As it turns out, we are – just as we arrive at the first viewing platform, the people gathered there drift away and we see that the noon day sun has just settled on the trickling water, glinting off the rocks, making them look like diamonds. It is what photographers call perfect light. The water pools, and the cool air hints at what it might feel like to dip your fingers in. We stand there, forgetting to take our photos, content instead to just stand and bear witness. People fall away, and it’s just us there, the rock solid and welcoming beneath our feet, the water below quietly trickling a Hello.

My son takes a mischievous look around, and seeing no people in his vicinity, gives us a sly grin and lies down right on the rock, spreading out his arms and legs, closing his eyes and tilting back his head to the sun. He is making a stone-angel.

I laugh, shake my head, and say, “You’re ridiculous.” It’s true, but its said with the utmost love and respect, because it is a kind of ridiculous I understand, and covet, and miss.
He grins, but doesn’t answer. There’s no needs for words here. They are all unspoken, written on the wind.

Regal House author Lillah LawsonLillah Lawson is the author of the upcoming work of historical fiction Monarchs Under the Sassafras Tree. When she isn’t writing, you can find her out traipsing through the forest, cycling, playing bass, or parked in a corner with her nose in a book. She currently resides in North Georgia, where she lives out in the country with her husband, son, her two sardonic cats and a goofy dog.

The Seeds of Curva Peligrosa

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When six-foot Curva Peligrosa rides her horse into Weed, Alberta, after a twenty-year trek up the Old North Trail from southern Mexico, she stops its residents in their tracks. A parrot perched on each shoulder, wearing a serape and flat-brimmed black hat, and smiling and flashing her glittering gold tooth, she is unlike anything they have ever seen before. Curva is ready to settle down, but are the inhabitants of Weed ready for her? With an insatiable appetite for life and love, Curva’s infectious energy galvanizes the townspeople. With the greenest of thumbs, she creates a tropical habitat in an arctic clime, and she possesses a wicked trigger finger, her rifle and six-guns never far away.

Then a tornado tears though Weed, leaving all the inhabitants’ lives in disarray and revealing dark remains that cause the Weedites to question their very foundations. And that’s how the novel starts, with the twister hurtling Curva’s purple outhouse into the center of town, Curva inside, “peering through a slit in the door at the village dismantling around her.”

From then on, we follow Curva and the Weedites as they recover from the chaos that follows. As the above synopsis shows, a good portion of Curva Peligrosa’s narrative takes place in the fictional small town of Weed, Alberta, about twenty-five miles from what is now a major city, Calgary. When I, Lily MacKenzie, left the city in 1963, the population was two hundred fifty thousand. Today, Calgary, and its environs, has well over a million people.

While Curva Peligrosa doesn’t have autobiographical roots (I’m not Mexican American or six feet tall. Nor do I have a gold tooth!), it does have some parallels to historical moments in the province. When I was growing up in that area, agriculture was the main source of income. But in 1947, significant oil reserves were discovered at Leduc, Alberta, ushering in the oil boom that continues today. The excitement over extracting black gold from the earth brought job seekers and others to the area, eager to exploit the province’s riches.

I must have registered these developments subliminally, even though it wasn’t something I was particularly conscious of at the time. And as a young woman, I did secretarial work for Sinclair Canada Oil and other American petroleum companies. Impressionable, I thought the Texas accents signified power and prosperity and wanted to emulate them, faking a drawl whenever I could. It took me a while to realize that, in fact, many Americans were taking over our land and much of its oil.

My association with these (mainly) southerners fueled my interest in moving to America in my early twenties. Eventually I became an American citizen so that, as a single parent, I could take advantage of California’s university system and earn degrees (a B.A. and two Masters degrees) from San Francisco State. So while my early contact with these oilmen may not have been personally promising at the time, the experience propelled me into seeking higher education that wasn’t then available to me in Canada. However, the earlier image of American oilmen making off with our prairie identity had been planted. It stayed with me, surfacing in Curva Peligrosa and in Curva’s concerns over what she was witnessing in Weed, a town she had recently made her home. But none of this was intentional when I began the narrative. I had no idea then where it would take me.

In the novel, Shirley, an americano who is buying up nearby land so he can own all of the oil rights, represents the kind of southerner from my earlier experience. In Curva Peligrosa, he ends up being a villain in the old sense of the word where many readers will end up booing him. In turn, Shirley seems to embrace that identity and to enjoy the turmoil he is creating, not only in Curva, but also in the Weedites themselves. I had created a kind of Trumpian character long before Trump had brought chaos to America.

Like Curva, I’m not averse to some kinds of development, but I do recognize that the word can be misleading. In certain cases, it might represent growth and advancement for the people involved. For example, the Blackfoot tribe in Curva Peligrosa benefit from the oil wealth. It allows them to build a museum that highlights Native life and also to open their own university. Under the leadership of their chief Billie One Eye, the wealth gives them an identity they otherwise had lacked, even though they sold out to the americano in order to enrich their tribe.

But in many other instances, such development can deplete the land of valuable resources and drastically disturb the environment, improving a few lives but enslaving many, not unlike what we are witnessing today in America. The continued practice of mining and burning coal doesn’t make sense given its harmful effects on the environment. This imbalance becomes one of Curva’s concerns. She also hates how life’s pace has speeded up, not leaving time for the basics, such as enjoying leisurely meals with friends and loved ones, fiestas, and sex.I hadn’t set out to write a novel that harbored a political slant, but once I became involved in Curva’s quest, I didn’t have any choice but to follow along and express her concerns. In the process, I learned how seeds planted in our unconscious early on do sprout and bloom in our writing.

 

Lily Iona MacKenzie is the author of two novels, Fling and Curva Peligrosa, and a poetry collection All This. Her upcoming novel, Freefall: A Divine Comedy will be released in 2018. Lily’s poetry was also featured in the Pact Press anthology, Speak and Speak Again. When she’s not writing, she paints and travels widely with her husband. Lily also blogs.