Category: Guest Posts

Story Time: Haole

Author J.L. Murray

by J.L. Murray

The bus is packed. I stand with my shopping bag dangling from my elbow. The old Chinese people look up at me curiously. One old woman points at me and says something to her husband in Chinese, laughing. I’m a novelty. The only Haole. The younger Asians don’t look at me, giving me my privacy. I appreciate it. I mind my own business. When some people get off in Chinatown I sit down next to a small woman with straight black hair. She pulls her purse closer to her body and groans, irritated. I wait for my stop and mind my own business.

I take my kids to the zoo on Saturday. I hate going to Waikiki, but they like the animals. I like them, too, but I don’t like looking at the pink, sweaty people that wave at me like I’m a long, lost friend. I try not to look at them. It doesn’t make sense that I don’t like white people anymore, like it’s myself I’m hating. But they embarrass me, like a relative in a nice restaurant that gets drunk and asks why they gave him two forks. Continue reading “Story Time: Haole”

Memoir Writing from Diary to Publishable Piece

Author Jeff Rasley
Author Jeff Rasley

Most writers have kept a journal or diary during some period in their lives. I started a diary when I was sixteen. After two weeks burned the document out of fear my parents might find it — too much incriminating evidence. I didn’t take up journal writing again until I hitchhiked from Indiana to Florida and then to New Orleans for Mardi Gras at age 18.

For a small town Hoosier kid, some of the characters I met on the road amazed and moved me. There was the back woods Tennessean couple who lived off shooting squirrels and rabbits. Their car was a rim racking old Chevy with the seats torn out so we sat on bare metal. They picked me up because they needed gas money. We had a good ride and conversation on the $3 I could spare. And there was the night I spent at the house of the daughter of the Town Constable of Pleasureville, KY.

Anyway, my first great adventure on my own moved me to keep a journal. As my appetite for adventure travel increased and took me to even more exotic places than Pleasureville, KY, I thought others might find some benefit in reading what I learned from the adventures. But, real meaning would not come through a mere recording of events. The serious memoir writer must interpret meaning from one’s own experiences, but meaning beyond the immediacy of the moment. I would record in my journal the facts of a travel experience and my reaction to it. To turn the journal writing into a worthy article or book there had to be an insight, lesson or wisdom which I could offer to others. Continue reading “Memoir Writing from Diary to Publishable Piece”

Story Time: The Woman Who Gave Juice To The Roofers

Author Elisavietta Ritchie

By Elisavietta Ritchie

She is large, fair and buxom and nobody asks her age. Some from a distance guess forty, biographers hint at more. But why she bothers to carry a thermos heavy with ice and juice from her attic apartment down four flights of stairs to the foot of ladders surrounded by splintered wood, cracked tiles, tarpaper torn into trapezoids, bent rusted nails, twisted-off gutters too full of holes to hold more than last year’s maple leaves —

Not even her building. The brick one across the alley. The roofs are on par, and since her windows are raised, they share their orchestrations of crowbars, hammers, buzz saws, planks clanging, while she spins back Aida, Traviata, Forza del Destino.

Now she waits while they lower a rope five flights down. Might they lift her like a wired angel up to their heights? Continue reading “Story Time: The Woman Who Gave Juice To The Roofers”

Sorry, We Can’t Use Funny by Barry Parham

Author Barry Parham

Not long ago, I wrote a book. I didn’t mean to – I had to. Somehow, I had managed to snub a minor deity, and I had to set things right.

I knew I didn’t have what it takes to write a novel. I’m missing a few essentials: a plot, a plan, intimacy with a bunch of interesting characters, vocabulary, discipline, talent.

No, I wanted to write something less dramatic, something more useless, something that lets me get away with gross grammatical gaffes like, for example, the previous paragraph. I wanted to write a weekly commentary and then find some newspaper to carry it, so I could get out of the numbing habit of actually working.

And so, for a while, I tried writing stuff and contacting newspapers all across America. But the newspapers kept telling me to get out of the way so they could finish dying.

So it didn’t go well, and now I focus on writing other things: online columns, long parole violation rationalizations, extended grocery shopping lists. Continue reading “Sorry, We Can’t Use Funny by Barry Parham”