Writing

Embracing the Challenge

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 15:03:19 +0000

Embracing the Challenge Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/16/2020 - 09:03

Christie Sounart

Edna Ma (EPOBio’99; MD’03) has worked in the Los Angeles area as a private practice anesthesiologist since 2007. The mother of two children also is author of two bilingual children’s books, Travel, Learn and See, featuring English, Mandarin and pinyin and inspired by her son Dean and his best friend Ethan, who met in a Mandarin immersion school.

Have you always been a writer?

No! At CU, I basically lived in the EPO biology building in Dr. Anne Bekoff’s lab. But I like being creative. Writing became that creative outlet.

Are Ethan and Dean fluent in mandarin?

Yes — the real Ethan started learning Mandarin and Spanish when he was two years old. Dean’s first language is Mandarin, which he speaks with his immediate family. Both the boys are enrolled in Mandarin immersion programs in Los Angeles.

What was the moment of inspiration for you to write a bilingual children’s book?

I really wanted to read to my children in Chinese but couldn’t find any books I could read with my limited literacy in Mandarin. Most Chinese children's books are published in Taiwan or China but are entirely in Mandarin. There are very few books written in English, Chinese characters and pinyin. I also observed how easily the children clicked. They naturally gravitated to each other.

I saw writing my own book as a multifaceted solution to my problems. I could write the books parents were looking to buy. I could also improve my own Mandarin literacy and spotlight the beautiful friendships forming at the multilingual school my children attended.

Since you aren’t fluent in Mandarin, how were you able to ensure the Mandarin language was correct?

This has been a challenge! Actually, I took my first Mandarin class as a college freshman at CU. Since then, I make deliberate efforts and I’m not too embarrassed to speak, even in my terrible accent. Some of these efforts include volunteering at my children’s school and watching Netflix in Mandarin.

How did you decide on art for the books?

Growing up, I was drawn toward the watercolor style of the original Winnie the Pooh and Curious George. The illustrator I work with brings back that nostalgic feeling I am hoping to capture and bring to today’s children.

How do you find time to write?

Currently, I write this during the coronavirus pandemic and my children have been home from school for months. On days I am in the operating room, I leave for work at 6 a.m. But on days I’m not administering anesthesia, I wake at 5 a.m. to squeeze in an hour of work before I am on mom duty. The process is slow, but like the quote, “Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence,” I’m slowly hollowing out that stone and making a figurative sculpture!

Do your ideas flow easily for you?

Sometimes. The challenging part is honing down the idea into a story. Children have short attention spans, so to tell a story in a compact fashion requires lots of editing and revisions.

Will you continue to write bilingual books?

As long as there is a market for them, I will write. So far the feedback has been great. Because of social media, I have discovered a community of Chinese American authors writing bilingual children’s books. This is reassuring that there is indeed an audience. I also hope my books are discovered by native Chinese speakers wishing to teach their children English.

What does your career as an anesthesiologist mean to you, especially during this pandemic?

Anesthesiologists are at one of the highest risks for contracting the coronavirus doing patient care. This is due to the degree of contact to the airway during patient care, operating the ventilators and ensuring the patients’ vital signs are stable. We are the critical care physicians of the operating room, and are the physicians that safely insert the breathing tube during the few precious minutes you’re not breathing.

Until recently, anesthesiologists were the proverbial wizards behind the curtain and the general public really had little understand of our roles in the operating rooms or ICUs.

You were on both Survivor and Shark Tank. What were your key takeaways from those experiences?

The experiences taught me that I had more courage and resilience to overcome things I feared. I wanted to quit Survivor; it was a physically and mentally tough game. Eventually, I was voted off the island. And on Shark Tank, I did not get a deal with the TV investors. I shared my “failures” with millions of people and I survived the process! New challenges no longer seem as intimidating.

What else do you like to do?

I would love to see my books become an animated series. Anyone who has learned a foreign language knows that language is learned by seeing, hearing and experiences. What better way than an animated series.

As for reality TV, I’m up for any challenge! Amazing Race? Do you know anyone I could pair with?

Condensed and edited.

Photos courtesy Edna Ma

Edna Ma has worked in the Los Angeles area as a private practice anesthesiologist since 2007. The mother of two children also is author of two bilingual children’s books featuring English, Mandarin and pinyin.

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Fanfiction Rising

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 07:00:00 +0000

Fanfiction Rising Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 02/01/2020 - 00:00

Lisa Marshall

How the once-obscure literary genre is giving voice to the voiceless and inspiring a new, more diverse generation of computer scientists.

Casey Fiesler was a precocious 14-year-old with, as she recalls, “not much of a social life,” when she switched on her parents’ boxy IBM PC, logged onto AOL for the first time and slipped into the comforting rabbit hole that is fanfiction.

The year was 1996, and she’d already been unknowingly writing “fanfic” for years — dreaming up new adventures for her favorite characters from The Baby-Sitters Club books and quietly scrawling them in her spiral notebook. But with her discovery of new online message boards in which fans share and review remixed versions of their favorite literature, her solitary pastime took an exhilarating turn.

“I realized that there were other people out there doing this too, and they were sharing their stories with each other,” recalls Fiesler, who went on to devour Star Trek fanfiction during undergrad, remained a prolific Harry Potter fanfic writer through law school and credits the experience for inspiring her to become a social computing researcher. “I felt like something clicked into place for me. Through sharing my stories, I found my community.”

Today, the once-obscure fanfiction subculture has evolved into a literary genre in its own right, with the fast-growing fanfic website Archive of Our Own (AO3) now boasting more than 5 million stories posted by 2 million registered users and drawing 200 million views per month.

In August, AO3 won a prestigious Hugo Award for science fiction, a milestone some view as validation that fanfiction — long looked down upon by literary critics — has finally arrived.

Casey Fiesler

Now a ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ assistant professor of information science, Fiesler has shifted her focus from writing it to studying it, exploring what she sees as a powerful role the unique genre can play in helping isolated teens, LGBTQ youth, people with disabilities and other marginalized communities find their voice.

“Fanfiction is fundamentally about writing outside the lines of traditional media, so it often becomes a place to increase representation of people we often don’t see in stories,” she said, pointing to fanfiction in which Kirk and Spock are lovers or in which all the characters at Harry Potter’s Hogwarts have physical disabilities. “It’s about speculating over how things could be different and pushing back against harmful stereotypes.”

And despite its reputation as a den of scandalous adult content (yes, there is some of that too) it’s one of the least-toxic corners of the internet, Fiesler contends.

“It’s a hugely positive community compared to many of our more negative online spaces,” she said. “There’s a lot we can learn from fanfiction.”

From Sherlock Holmes to Fifty Shades of Grey

As far back as the 1880s, frustrated Sherlock Holmes devotees, anxiously awaiting the next installment, would often write their own.

But many trace the true birth of fanfiction to the 1960s, when Star Trek fans — mostly women who felt left out or misrepresented in the series — would create self-published hand-stapled “fanzines” and distribute them at fan conventions.

The internet fueled further growth, providing would-be authors a way to easily test their writing chops outside the cutthroat publishing world. Because they were portraying characters that people already cared about, they often found a large, ready-made audience awaiting their work.

Fanfiction is one of the least-toxic corners of the internet.

“I would write something, and within an hour have 100 people telling me I am brilliant. It was very validating,” recalls Fiesler.

According to the new book Writers in the Secret Garden: Fanfiction, Youth, and New Forms of Mentoring (for which Fiesler wrote the foreword), fanfiction writers were contributing 80,000 new narratives per month to the site fanfiction.net by 2013. By comparison, 3,600 traditional books were published per month that year.

Today, the flourishing community is more diverse than ever. According to recent survey data from Fiesler’s research group, the vast majority are women, only 25 percent identify as heterosexual, and the way they practice their craft is equally eclectic.

Some pluck characters from popular works like The Hunger Games, Marvel comics or Breaking Bad and place them in an alternate universe (a modern-day coffee shop; a distant planet). Others fill in scenes that never happened or develop characters that had only minor roles in the original. In the case of E.L. James’ blockbuster Fifty Shades of Grey, which originated as fanfiction, the author took Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series and gave it an erotic twist.

“It’s about spending more time in the worlds you love and exploring characters beyond the page,” said Fiesler.

Giving Voice to the Geeks

Brianna Dym

Fiesler believes fanfiction is beginning to emerge from the shadows in part due to what she calls “the mainstreaming of geek culture.” Even she would have been reluctant to discuss her love of fandom a decade ago; today, comic book conventions are cool, superhero movies are dominating the big screen and fantasy TV shows like Game of Thrones are the subject of water-cooler conversations.

But she and her students are most interested in what the genre does to support groups that, even today, don’t see themselves in mainstream literature.

“You can make everyone have a disability, or everyone be queer or everyone be a person of color — just something different than the stencil we so often see,” said Brianna Dym (PhDInfoSci’22), a PhD student in Fiesler’s lab who’s leading research about how marginalized communities utilize fanfiction, funded by a $250,000 National Science Foundation grant. “That can be a very empowering act.”

Growing up queer in remote Alaska, Dym herself found her way to fanfiction as a way to connect with other LGBTQ teens. Through 56 interviews for her research so far, she has found that for many, fanfiction sites serve as a safe, anonymous space — away from critical eyes — where they can explore their LGBTQ identity.

“You can make everyone have a disability, or everyone be queer or everyone be a person of color.”

“They might find stories about Captain Kirk marrying Spock after he retires or Hermione Granger realizing she’s in love with Fleur Delacour, and they might recognize something about their own identity within those characters,” she said. “The stories become a community resource, and their authors mentors to help guide readers through the coming out process.”

Fanfiction has also become a rich resource for youth with autism, with numerous Harry Potter fanfics featuring autistic wizards describing what it feels like to be diagnosed, experience sensory overload or know that they’re different.

“People will often reach out to the writer and say ‘Hey, this is really amazing. It reminded me of what I’m going through,’” said Dym, who believes fanfiction can serve as a valuable tool for therapists.

A New Generation of Coders

Fiesler said there’s another often-overlooked reason to celebrate fanfiction.

At a time when only one in five computer scientists are female, and even fewer work in open-source development, it’s inspiring a new generation of women to get interested in the field.

In order to create Archive of Our Own, its all-female team of founders had to learn to code and plan, build and design the platform from scratch, creating a welcoming online space where users could find what they were looking for (or avoid what they don’t want to see) amid an ever-changing collection of stories derived from more than 30,000 original works.

“AO3 is successful as a platform in part because the people who use it are the ones who built it,” said Fiesler.

She uses that example often with her students, stressing that if they feel excluded or offended by existing online offerings, they can learn the tools to build their own.

In doing so, as in writing fanfiction, they’ll be able to write their own story.

“There have been times when, as a woman, I’ve felt out of place in science fiction communities, gaming communities or computer science communities,” said Fiesler. “Fanfiction is a place where everyone can come as they are.”

Illustration by Hanna Barczyk

How the once-obscure literary genre is giving voice to the voiceless and inspiring a new, more diverse generation of computer scientists.

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Closing the Generation Gap

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 07:00:00 +0000

Closing the Generation Gap Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 02/01/2020 - 00:00

Inquiry: Eric Klinger

Eric Klinger, senior writing instructor and associate faculty director of the ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ Writing Center, teaches “Intergenerational Writing,” a course that pairs juniors and seniors with community members over the age of 60 for research and writing projects. For many students, the class is the most memorable of their college careers.

Where’d you learn to write?

My father is a retired newspaper publisher and editor and my mother is a voracious reader, so they inspired a love of the written word in me from my earliest memories. I’ve been teaching collegiate writing courses since 2001. Writing has always been my intellectual home and I strive to foster that feeling for as many students, friends and colleagues as possible. When we write, we think better. When we think, we write better. Surely, that has to help make things a bit better for everyone.

How’d you come to teach this particular class?

A former student took me to brunch in 2018 and pitched the idea of me taking over this class that he was a volunteer in. I’ve always loved having conversations with people who have taken more trips around the sun and seen more of the world than I have. This class was the perfect opportunity to do that.

Why invite community members to a student class?

The concept of inviting community members from previous generations to share this class with students is the brainchild of Jack Williamson, who wondered, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat if we could find a way to connect local elders with undergraduates? Imagine how much they would have to talk and write about.’

Intergenerational understanding is one of the most important human resources we have in society, yet we tend to squander it in the U.S. George Norlin challenges us to know one another with his words above the west entrance to Norlin Library: ‘Who knows only his own generation remains always a child.’ Community members talk about how getting to know younger generations in this class inspires new hope and faith in the future, and students talk about all that they discover in common with those who have come before them. It also prepares students for collaborating with older generations in the workplace.

What are the initial expectations of the students?

The first day of class is quite amusing. Although the class is described in the course catalog, most students arrive on the first day quite confused about the gray-haired folks sitting in every other seat around the room. Most stop, look around, take out their phones to verify that they’re in the right place and then cautiously take a seat. After I’ve finished describing the class syllabus, expectations and policies, I ask everyone to participate in a simple icebreaker. The pin-drop silence rushes out of the room as everyone circulates and learns something about one another, such as a hometown, a college major, a life passion, etc. By the end of the first class, there’s a self-charging electricity to the room.

How does the class work?

As an educator, I’ve long attempted to foster an environment of unconditional positive regard, something I learned about when I encountered the writings of Carl Rogers. I’ve discovered over the years that too much hierarchy is not productive to an enriching and intrinsically motivating classroom.

Both students and community members write papers for the class. The ‘magic sauce’ of the class is the profile essay, where community members and students pair up to write a biographical narrative about their partner. The experience is profoundly affecting for many, if not most, in the room. To authentically know and be known by another adult is a unique experience. I’m proud to be part of providing that rare opportunity for CU students.

This past semester, your students explored the concept of the American dream. Why that topic?

Every single person in the room has a connection to the American dream, whether we’re conscious of it or not. It evokes stories of immigration, work, families, geography, language, food, news, history, music, art and so much more. This topic bridges the past, present and future. It enables conversations that weave aspirations, frustrations and shared experiences into a tapestry no one can foresee.

What were some positive results of the class?

People share class conversations with neighbors, friends, family and even people at the grocery store. I’ve also heard how the class has rescued holiday dinner conversations from domination by cranky uncles.

How do you plan to expand the class in the future?

The community organizers and I share the goal of promoting this class far and wide. Currently, we do not know of any other intergenerational university writing classes being offered at other U.S. universities and colleges. We believe our core model of co-mentorship across generations has exciting promise in multiple learning environments including nursing, counseling, ethnic studies, management and other academic fields. We plan to continue offering the class each fall semester and look forward to seeing new iterations spring up around the country.

Condensed and edited by Christie Sounart (Jour'12)

More information on the course can be found here.

Photos courtesy Eric Klinger; Jack Williamson

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Ember Burning

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Oct 2017 22:08:11 +0000

Ember Burning Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/24/2017 - 16:08

By Jennifer Alsever (Jour'94)
(Sawatch Publishing, 312 pages; 2017)

Buy the Book

Author Jennifer Alsever delivers a page-turning story ideal for fans of The Uglies, We Were Liars and Before I Fall about a teen grieving over her parents' tragic death who becomes entangled with a mysterious forest teeming with urban legends of strange disappearances and witchcraft. Ember Trouve used to be alive, driven to become a musician and on a path to college. That was before her parents died. One day, after venturing into the fabled Trinity Forest, she goes missing. Now, Ember must confront the truth behind her parents' death -- or lose herself to the forest forever. In this fresh and compelling novel, Jennifer Alsever creates a paranormal world of loss, mystery, love and survival as Ember searches for escape-- and a path back to herself. Ember Burning is the first installment of the three-book Trinity Forest series.

A page-turning story about a teen grieving over her parents' tragic death who becomes entangled with a mysterious forest teeming with urban legends of strange disappearances and witchcraft.

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J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World: Movie Magic Volume Three: Amazing Artifacts

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Oct 2017 22:00:39 +0000

J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World: Movie Magic Volume Three: Amazing Artifacts Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/24/2017 - 16:00

By Bonnie Burton (Engl, Jour'95)
(Penguin Random House - Candlewick, 96 pages; 2017)

Buy the Book

From wands and racing brooms to a case full of beasts, the wizarding world is full of enchanted objects and magical devices. With this interactive book, go behind the scenes of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and all eight Harry Potter films to learn how the myriad artifacts of the films were lovingly designed and crafted.

Detailed profiles of everything from the Golden Snitch to Lord Voldemort’s Horcruxes and Newt Scamander’s magical case include blueprints, concept illustrations, unit photography, and more. Jam-packed with bonus inserts throughout, including stickers, removable extras, lift-the-flaps, and many other fascinating items, this book takes young readers on a thrilling tour of the magical artifacts of the wizarding world.

From wands and racing brooms to a case full of beasts, the wizarding world is full of enchanted objects and magical devices.

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The Era of Lanterns and Bells

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Oct 2017 20:54:13 +0000

The Era of Lanterns and Bells Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/24/2017 - 14:54

By Ann Tinkham (Psych'83)
(Napili Press, 198 pages; 2017)

Buy the Book

In The Era of Lanterns and Bells, a lighthouse is haunted by the memory of lighthouse keepers, a train operator is forever changed by a subway suicide, a journalist befriends a homeless virtuoso, an orca trainer believes she's a whale, an aerialist runs away from the circus, and a Golden Gate Bridge jumper saves lives with fortune cookies. An obese woman is rescued from being a shut-in, a woman discovers that her favorite childhood pond is polluted and cancer-causing, a woman falls in love with a bipolar man in Jamaica, and an arborist writes love letters from trees. These quirky and darkly comic stories entertain while posing essential questions about truth, compassion, and humanity.

In The Era of Lanterns and Bells, a lighthouse is haunted by the memory of lighthouse keepers, a train operator is forever changed by a subway suicide and a Golden Gate Bridge jumper saves lives with fortune cookies.

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Writing as a Path to Awakening

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 20:00:47 +0000

Writing as a Path to Awakening Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/03/2017 - 14:00

By Albert Flynn DeSilver (Art'91)
(Sounds True Publishing, 212 pages; 2017)

The best writers say their work seems to come from a source beyond the thinking mind. But how do we access that source? “We must first look inside ourselves and be willing to touch that raw emotional core at the heart of a deeper creativity,” writes Albert Flynn DeSilver. In Writing as a Path to Awakening, this renowned poet, writer, and teacher shows you how to use meditation to cultivate true depth in your own writing—so your words reveal layers of profound emotional insight and revelation that inspire and move your readers.

Writing calls on us to fully engage our mind’s cognitive powers, while meditation often asks us to let go of thinking and storytelling. Though these two practices may seem incompatible, Albert teaches that they can be powerfully complementary. With a mixture of engaging storytelling and practical exercises, Writing as a Path to Awakening invites you on a journey of growth and discovery—to enhance your writing through the practice of meditation while using the creative process to accelerate your spiritual evolution.

The best writers say their work seems to come from a source beyond the thinking mind. But how do we access that source?

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Divestiture

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 07:00:00 +0000

Divestiture Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 12/01/2012 - 00:00

Bruce Holland Rogers

We do it like this. I go across the street to Oren’s house. Oren has loaded the plastic eggs the night before. He puts five or six of them in a brown paper bag. We don’t do more than five or six at a time. Then he gets his walker with the oxygen tank, and the brown paper bag goes into the basket in front, and we go out Oren’s door, down the ramp, all the way down the street, past the park and along the river path. That’s where we do it, on the river path.

But I’m making this sound too easy. Everything’s hard and takes a long time. That’s how it is for us, at our age. It takes a long time to get down the ramp. It takes a long time for us to walk to the end of the street. We have to stop for Oren to catch his breath. He doesn’t look too good. His face is kind of gray. But eventually we get all the way to the park, and in time we get through the park to the river path. And then we begin. We walk a little, and then we stop. Oren says, “Anybody?” He can’t turn around, so he has to ask me if anyone’s in sight behind us. We can’t do it when anybody’s watching.

When we have a stretch of path to ourselves, he reaches into the bag. His hands shake. The beds of his fingernails are purple. He takes out one of the eggs, and I crack it open so we can have one last look at part of his collection. Maybe it’s a Canadian silver dollar from 1967 with the goose in flight, or it’s a British crown with Saint George killing the dragon. A lot of times it’s just an ordinary silver dollar, a Morgan or a Peace. We admire it. Some of those coins are so pretty. Sometimes it’s a coin with a story, like that Luxembourg hundred francs with John the Blind charging into battle, and Oren fills me in on the details, and I say, “My, my. Isn’t that something?”

Then we do it like this. We put the coin back inside the egg, check again to see we’re alone, and I hide the egg where Oren tells me. In the crook of a tree. In among the blackberry brambles. Under some leaves with just a tiny bit of pink or purple showing.

Oren has lived here his whole life, and the river path is where he used to hunt for pop bottles. I grew up somewhere else, but I remember the hunt, the triumph of a good haul. One bottle was good for two pieces of penny candy. Five bottles were worth a dime, and that was a comic book.

Oren says, “Wouldn’t that be a good feeling?” He has to catch his breath between sentences. “You find an egg, and inside it a silver crown?” Silver is up so high that just one of these coins is real money. Of course, I kind of think it would be sad if whoever found one of these eggs went right to the coin shop and sold it.

My favorites, of the ones we have hidden so far, are the Polish coin with the girl haloed in wheat, the Nicaraguan cordoba with the smiling sun and the Ceylonese five rupees with the sixteen ducks walking around the coin in a circle.

We aren’t too regular. Oren doesn’t want anyone to come looking on a schedule.

Anyway, that’s how we do it. I don’t know about the others. Their eggs started showing up on the river path in places where we knew we hadn’t hidden anything. Sometimes they were reusing our eggs, we think. Sometimes their eggs were different sizes, or a different color, or they made an egg that was half blue and half green, which we don’t do.

Inside the first one, we found this little poem on a scrap of paper:

The oak tree stands
noble on the hill even in
cherry blossom time
— Basho

One big yellow egg held a smaller egg that held a smaller egg that held a still smaller egg that held a slip of paper with the word “Sunshine.” Another of these nesting eggs, a green one, held the word “Grass.”

We have found eggs bearing a wristwatch without a strap, a pair of cufflinks, a roll of postcard stamps, a boondoggle keychain, a phone number, a tiny pen knife and a dollar bill. Oren usually spots them first, and I bring them to him. Then we put them back.

We make our way along the river, and every so often Oren has to lean over the walker in a way that lets him get his breath. The oxygen can only help so much. While we’re resting like that, Oren spots a hollow tree that is such a perfect hiding place, it’s a wonder we never saw it before. We’re alone. We crack open the last egg of the day and look at the coin. Oren says it’s from Iran. One side shows a lion holding a sword. It’s a beauty.

When I get to the tree, I find the big blue egg that is already there. I swap eggs. I bring the blue one to Oren. I can tell by the size and feel of it that it’s going to be another one of the nesting eggs. And, sure enough, when I start to open it for him, we find a blue egg inside a blue egg inside a blue egg. Inside the smallest egg is a slip of paper. It says, “Air.”

Oren smiles. I think he’d laugh if he could. “This one,” he says. He pauses to get his breath. “This one, I think I’ll keep.”

Bruce Holland Rogers (MEngl’86) won the 2012 Micro Award for “Divestiture” for being the best story published in English in 2011. It is a fiction piece. He has taught creative writing in Budapest on a Fulbright fellowship and teaches fiction writing in the MFA program of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts in Whidbey Island, Wash. His website is www.shortshortshort.com

Illustration by Justine Beckett

A short story by alum Bruce Rogers.

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On the Road

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 06:00:00 +0000

On the Road Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 09/01/2012 - 00:00

Malinda Miller-Huey

You say there is a horse in your bathroom, and all you can do is stand there naming Beatles songs?” asks my 15-year-old son, Zach.

The sun is beating down, and we’re sitting on the cement back steps of my dad’s rock house, a sprawling structure one mile off Highway 50 and 60 miles west of Austin in central Nevada. Zach reads to me from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. Adams, best known forThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, dedicated this book to his mother who liked the science-fiction mystery for “the bit about the horse.”

A few minutes earlier when Zach held up the tattered book he found in a box of my dad’s dusty paperbacks and asked if I wanted to hear it, I didn’t hesitate. “Yes, absolutely,” I said, the answer I always want to give when he makes such requests, though too often it’s something I can’t, or don’t, pull off. Like the spring he wanted me to read the entire 118-book Japanese manga series of One Piece or the evening he asked me to watch vampire movies when I had a paper due the next day.

“There was something odd about the horse,” Zach continues reading, “but he couldn’t say what. Well, there was one thing that was clearly odd about it indeed, which was that it was standing in a college bathroom.”

I laugh, and not just because it’s a funny book. Dad’s house has 18-inch thick rock walls, 10-foot high ceilings and seven doors to the outside. Built in 1899 before indoor plumbing, two rooms originally used as bedrooms have been converted into oddly large bathrooms with doors opening to the outside. Dust and wind creep in through the doors. If ever there was a place where you might find a horse in the bathroom, it would be here.

It’s my two teenage boys’ first full week out of school for the summer after a busy few months. When I admit to being overcommitted recently, Zach replies, “It’s always like this, mom.”

He’s right. His dad and I both work full-time. I’m in a part-time MFA program, and his twin brother, Nate, runs track and plays the guitar. Zach is in band and theater. In the spring it seemed most of our conversations were about schedules, rides and food.

A stranger sitting on these back steps would likely see the wire clothesline sagging with clothes, the three broken-down grills and a flatbed truck that is more ornamental than functional. I see an afternoon as expansive as this valley of caramel sand and stubborn sage.

A few days ago we drove the 891 miles from Boulder along Highway 50, dubbed the “Loneliest Road in America” by Life magazine, in weather that produced high winds, rain and a cloud-and-lights show rivaling any movie. Driving instead of flying and seeing through the eyes of a 15-year-old have cleared my head.

On our second morning of the road trip Nate drove the first 200 miles, and Zach took the wheel in Ely, Nev., where my family lived until I was six. Zach has had his learner’s permit for several months, but it was his first time driving above 55 mph and in temperamental weather.

“What’s the longest you’ve driven before today?,” I asked a few hours into his leg of the drive.

“I’ve mainly driven up and down Lowell Boulevard near our house [in a Denver suburb],” he says. Then he smiled, “Today I’ve driven through hail and wind and rain.”

The rain was clearing, and I had been staring out the side window.

“Take a picture, mom,” Zach said.

I started to take a picture of the view
I saw, copper hills and sage under a canopy of clouds building upon themselves in the valley.

“No, of the road.”

I didn’t say, “There’s nothing there.” But, there was nothing there.

“Wait, you missed it,” he said.

“Missed what?”

“Take it when it’s absolutely straight.”

In that instant I’m a child again loaded into the back of our brown-panel station wagon with my siblings, dressed in pajamas and listening to the 8-track tape of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Dad would drive the 717 miles from Ely to Colorado Springs where both sets of our grandparents lived. We stopped only for meals. For hours I would stare at the stretched-out road and unbroken sky.

“Take another picture,” Zach said a few minutes later.

The road ahead was perfectly straight, disappearing into sand and low hills miles away. There were no cars, no buildings, no signs. I breathed easier than I had all spring.

“That straight road, surrounded by a hundred miles of space, I meditate on that. That’s the place I go when I’m stressed,” I told him.

He nodded and smiled, not knowing, or maybe he did, that he was driving toward an afternoon with nothing better to do than read to his mother the bit about the horse from a dusty paperback.

This personal essay features a journey of a mother and her teenage sons on the "Loneliest Road in America."

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Coloradan Takes International Gold Medal

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 06:00:00 +0000

Coloradan Takes International Gold Medal Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/01/2011 - 00:00

Staff

Coloradan associate editor Marc Killinger, at left, and editor Tori Peglar (MJour’00) are shown outside the Koenig Alumni Center.

In June your Coloradan magazine won first place from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, one of the world’s largest nonprofit educational associations. The category was “College and University General Interest Magazines with circulations of 75,000 and greater.”

Berkeley’s California Magazine won second with New York University Alumni Magazine and Tufts Magazine tying for third. In previous years, University of Cambridge in Great Britain, Kings College London and Stanford have won first place in the same category.

Coloradan editorial staffers are thrilled to receive this honor. We thank our contributors, designers and readers for always engaging with us and encouraging us to create a magazine that truly connects our Forever Buffs family to each other and the university.

In June your Coloradan magazine won first place from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, one of the world’s largest nonprofit educational associations.

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