Litquake Reading and Joseph Henry Jackson Award

This year, I’ll be participating in Litquake, SF’s big annual literary festival. I’ll be doing a short reading (Kristin Kearns is reading too!) at Opium’s event at the Elbo Room on Lit Crawl night, Saturday, October 11 (schedule and details here). I might even have a special something to give out to friends that night, as the University of Tampa Press is putting out a mini-book of my story, “Ms. Yamada’s Toaster." Once I have the final proofs of the mini-book I’ll give more details on that project, and the awesome artist who’s contributing the cover and interior art.

I also got the wonderful news this weekend that my manuscript containing three short stories ("Cram Island," "Rooey," and "Ms. Yamada's Toaster") won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, an award from the San Francisco Foundation and Intersection for the Arts.

KMF Fun Run & Walk: October 25 in Lake Villa, IL

Attention all runners, walkers, and funners in the Chicagoland area! Next month, on October 25, the Katie Memorial Foundation will be holding its first Fun Run & Walk (details here). The goal of the event is “to have fun and to tell you about what KMF is doing and what we plan to do in the coming year.” If you can’t make it to the run, consider making a donation to the foundation—KMF is just in its first year and already doing great stuff, including giving small grants to educators, so it’s an event that definitely merits your support.

The Story of my Dreams

I have writing dreams. In these dreams, I am scribbling or typing a fascinating story and though it's a story I don't know, the words still pour forth. It’s like I’m channeling a master storyteller. When I wake up from a writing dream I grab around in the dark for the nearest pen and writing surface, convinced I’ve dreamed a tale that out-plots The English Patient.

For instance, I have a fragment of a microwave popcorn bag with the following scrawled in Sharpie:

“House with doors in floors, trapped in cube but she must go DOWN to go up—puzzle!!!” Below this is the word “SOLIPSISTIC.”

A frantic tornado underlines DOWN. I had to look up “solipsistic” when I re-awoke later that morning. (Solipsism is the theory that only the self exists; it can also refer to extreme self-absorption. Hmm…)

I don’t hear the individual words as I’m dream writing. What I do hear is their rhythm, the rise and fall of their pitch across the page, maybe a sixteen-bar cadence, for example, that pauses for a minor third semicolon and then slams home the tonic chord with a big fat period.

Sometimes the story’s lost before my eyes can open all the way, and I’m left with one or two tantalizing lines:

“Once a week before Christmas he stopped outside Sheboygan to hear the one about a dead fish from a guy named Mike.”

or:

(Old man’s voice) “I guess out here, bein’ lost’s about the same as bein’ someplace.”

or:

“I lived in Tokyo then, and so did the girl.” (Don’t steal this; I’ve got plans for it.)

I wonder just what’s going on here. If I can recall the last line I “wrote” before waking, does that mean that I’m really composing an entire story, but losing most of it to my subconscious? Or are my neurons just randomly firing away as I coast through REMland, and instead of visualizing a regular, senseless dream scene, I’m writing it?

Does this happen to you, too?

Some final dream-food for thought, from the back of a USPS receipt for (how appropriate) story submissions:

“Sometimes you stop and think, maybe it won’t be okay. And I could tell by the way he was holding that underwear that maybe it really wouldn’t be, and I realized how much work had to be done.”

How much work indeed.