PROCESS EQUALS ...

Perception ... imagination ... presentation ... arrangement ... representation ... rearrangement ... re-representation ... and on until, maybe, dissemination ...

THE CURSE ...

Creativity is a curse. I feel like I'm wandering in a maze of mirrors. On the mirrors are thoughts I convince myself to collect and try to make sense of. When (and if) I come out, there's supposed to be a finished work ... 

SUSPENDED ANIMATION

Passing stages and phases, hard to fathom how it goes. I've suspended work in video art and filmmaking, in the Video Curio Theater, my dimly-lit backstreet internet venue for the experimental work. Writing seems to be the creative thing, more intimate and integral, though why I can't say.

I mourn this transition a little because of the seven years I've invested, a couple of good documentaries filmed, some social issues exposed, experimental work I feel was innovative. I'm not a good judge, though, and it was becoming tiresome, both in the doing and the pondering.

I'm not sure about this course either, the writing. But here I am.

"RUSTY NAIL" TO PUBLISH 2 POEMS - BOOK IS ON AMAZON

The online and print literary magazine "The Rusty Nail" has accepted two of my poems for publication -- "Alien Bones" and "Tick Tock." Exciting news to me ... I'll link to them when it happens.

Also, "Political Grace: The Gift of Resistance" is now available on Amazon.com at this link ... Check it out please.

BACKGROUND FOR "POLITICAL GRACE" IS FIRST-HAND ...

These are scenes from a few of the sites of resistance we've visited that helped shape some of the background and reflections that are part of "Political Grace: A Gift of Resistance" ... scenes from Chiapas, Mexico; El Salvador; Palestine, in this view ... photos aren't in the book ...

To explore our human-rights work more deeply visit the Rehberg Institute web site.

"POLITICAL GRACE: THE GIFT OF RESISTANCE" NOW ON SALE ...

My paperback "Political Grace: The Gift of Resistance" is now available for purchase at this Create Space link and soon at Amazon.com -- Check it out ! ... Synopsis viewable at Create Space as well -- And, links for purchase and a synopsis are also viewable on its own web page here on our site ....

"THE FOG" - Short story -- first page ...

THE FOG -- first page - short story -- final draft (I believe) --

The fog. Enoch felt secure in its midst.

It muted city sounds. It was a cloak that left the sensation that he was connected, like with a visible spirit, yet separate, suspended.

He always seemed to himself a little distant, out of place. Yes, he played with others, stickball in the schoolyard, punchball, stoopball, roller hockey on the streets, was even good at it. But there was a division between all this and himself that he knew but couldn't fathom.

“Maybe it’s my name,” he thought, walking down narrow 208th Street to a corner candy store -- “Enoch Jubal.” Some his age would call him “Jewboy.”

“Or maybe it’s just me,” he’d think.

Actually, his Hungarian-born grandfather was a Catholic, his grandmother a Lutheran, and Enoch a skeptical communicant in the Catholic church. His grandfather had an Austrian name, Rothpauer, but his drinking buddies called him “Rummy.” “Rummy Jewboy,” the young boys would say, teasing maliciously, when Enoch let on about his grandfather’s nickname.

“Or, maybe I’ll never know,” he thought.

Walking in the fog that day, a wisp of mist rose from the street’s manhole covers. Sewer smell. It carried. He let himself feel enveloped by that too...

MAKING THE SONG ...

"The poet brings the words, you bring your life and together you make the song" -- Christopher Burns

Shared from The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry

"SCOOTER" OPENING - SHORT STORY

Below, in the hollow, Madelaine Krutcher adjusted herself on the floor where she fell trying to retrieve a bottle of gin from the kitchen inside her 40-year-old house, nested among tall loblolly pines, tulip trees, sweet gums and maples. She launched into a harangue as she tried to sit up.

"Hate this thing, what, quad cane, fell again, but no one’s falling for me, don't they know I'm a Red Hat girl, damn legs swollen,” she said as if someone was there. “Cat tripped me, Snookie sweet pup lick my face, Nippy, you're ignoring me - Now they want me to have a motorized wheel chair, little ramps on my hardwood floor."

She had fallen in a hallway alongside three uncleaned litter boxes. Her elbow was in one, part of her robe in another. She was barefoot.

"Feel me, feel my skin, feel it all - nobody touches me - I'm the nice one with cute little dogs, lots of cats. Doctor says at my age, what, I need a health care worker. If he's a man OK, otherwise, skip it."

Krutcher removed her arm from the cat litter with what she thought was a gesture of grace, pretending she was on stage.

"Drink, drink, drink, drink, I need a drink, a man too, Horace is gone, other one also, husband, what was his name? Age makes you forget but how could I forget that. Rusty, Rusty was lusty, dead too. Oh can't get up. Oh no, not Rusty . . . Russell! -- Damn I gotta get up, nobody's going to help me."

Her monologues like this became frequent, nasty in tone. She liked to hear her voice, thought she should have been an actress, a femme fatal. Never too late, she believed.

“Y’all see me out there,” she said to the living room uttering a laugh. “I’m a gonna get up. I expect applause.”

She managed to rise, stabilize herself uneasily on her cane, and reach for the bottle of gin on the black formica counter in the kitchen to return to the screened-in back porch where earlier she had carried a melting tray of ice, a tall floral glass and a bottle of tonic, now on an opaque glass patio table. She sat unsteadily in a lawn chair, filled the glass, took a long drink and shouted;

"You out there, you damn coyote? You the one who was jumping at the porch door for my little pup Nippy?"

A canine chorus of dogs had begun their nightsong of barking from other homes in the older subdivision carved into the steeply bounded hollow.

"Oh yes oh yes sing it sing it. You hear that Nippy, they’re singing to you and me?" Nippy made a little motion with his tail but otherwise didn't move. Snookie was off somewhere.

“Snookie,” she called. “Snookie, get out here and keep me company.

Coyote, you out there?"

Above, on the ridge overlooking Krutcher’s home, stood Billy Daisy, short, disheveled, in his 30s, eyes focusing and unfocusing in the fading late summer twilight, sweating in the heat in front of a double-wide mobile home where a couple inside was cooking enough meth for tonight and tomorrow, they said. ...

THE MAZE PHASE . . .

Intensive reading and writing are in process, and even reconstituting, just a little, a doctoral dissertation for self-publication that puts a book on Amazon, joining my documentaries there, which doesn't mean it will be bought or read but could get a little more exposure than it's gotten forgotten buried on my website along with other pages I haven't looked at in years.
One short story completed, a novel started as well as another short story and a large amount of Scandinavian and other noir reading plus Joyce Carol Oates and Annie Dillard, research into markets plus hooking up with the Chattanooga Writers Group and one of its fiction writers gatherings.
Style and character - and fearlessness, going forth with that in the foreground at the moment conscious of storytelling too but not formulaic. My voice, too. On paper... I know what it feels like, even imagine it complex, and am in awe at the way some authors can distill that complexity and unwind it in long lucid passages. Or defer it intermittently throughout a work thematically along with other themes similarly intermittent, woven.
So now it seems the first phase of this new way to me to be creative has passed. A slight pause to look at the maze from above, then back to it.

IN THE PROCESS OF PUBLICATION ...

BACK COVER TEXT:

Philosophy and theology have increasingly turned to the problem of the rising numbers of people who live in severe conditions of oppression, people who are surplus to global economic and political orders which the oppressed define as "neoliberal" and "neocolonial."

This work, Political Grace: The Gift of Resistance, is part of that turning, through conversations with those who were and still are living under oppressive conditions, especially in Central America and Mexico, and through conversations with phenomenology, feminist theology, feminist jurisprudence, ethics, and liberation theology.

There is an assertion that grace, and the organization of the "lifeworld" which phenomenologists discuss, act in concert to seek to empower the flourishing of humans to understand and resist the abasing conditions they confront.

What frequently occurs when people living under oppressive conditions try to change their circumstances is a backlash by those who control their political, social and economic conditions. In response, the spirit of grace, as part of the human effort to flourish, aids in the resistance against the denial of this flourishing.

-- Wes Rehberg

WAS SHE A "SUBJECT" OR AN "OBJECT"?.

"Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don't know her name?"

-- Toni Morrison, "Beloved"

THE ENDURING

Completed what I now think is the final draft for my short story "The Enduring" - an excerpt is below - since revised a little in the latest version.

I'm not sure what to do with it at this point. Probably let it sit a bit. Exploring publication options. Though I've published nonfiction, this would be the first for fiction - a leap, for sure.

SCATTERED...

I read, write, create, envision in scattered ways, wrong side up, pacing through tunnels and over bridges that lead to unknown destinies, negotiating slippery rocks in a stream that seems to be rushing by too fast, so fast that I know I should have worn a life-jacket, following a character or an assemblage, asking: "What is it you're conjuring now? If we fall, will it be fatal?"

RANDOM REFLECTION ....

It's going to take awhile in this new fiction writing effort until I feel I've gotten a sense of rhythm, pace and phrasing. If I get there at all. Some of it now seems so clumsy ....

DRAFT PASSAGE FROM "THE ENDURING" - A Short Story

Draft excerpt from my short-story "The Enduring" ...

With winter nearing, Elijah occupied himself with the woodpile, often supplied by Malcolm, easily handling the maul, sing-songing a string of thoughts while splitting logs.

“Chop, chop, the chopping block. Mock me, sucker, I’ll knock your clock. No way, no way, you’ll get away. Chop, chop, the chopping block.”

He’d also unchain the dogs and daily walk with them in the woods, feeling like he set them free, himself free, feeling connected to something along the trails and long-abandoned logging roads that would settle him.

“Free, free, run for the sun. Dogs are gunning it on the hunt. This way, that way, anyway now. Free, free run for the sun.”

#

It wasn't entirely unexpected, a day in that looming winter that etched itself in Malcolm's mind as another defining moment in his life. It had a particular eerie vibration that chilled him, that he could feel sweeping across an ancient upcropping of tree-covered bluestone shale like a wild spirit in the wind. Still it seemed sudden, the sisters sensing it too, electric. They looked up at the sky, low dark gray clouds moving much more swiftly than the gray masses above them. Heralds of foreboding.

Both the sisters and Malcolm heard the vehicle coming up Claw Valley Pike, the tires in the loose gravel and dirt, coming from the direction of the Pennsylvania border. ...

PERSONA, PLOT, PROTAGONISTS

Intrigued by the development of a relationship between two persons into a persona-as-protagonist plus the use of two protagonists on parallel plot tracks - such as in Jussi Adler-Olsen's "The Keeper of Lost Causes."

Or, somewhat similarly, the use of two protagonists and their parallel plot lines in Stieg Larsson's "Girl With a Dragon Tattoo."

CHARACTER SKETCHINGS FOR "SCOOTER" - short story

Title - Scooter

Key Characters:

MADELAINE KRUTCHER - Hate this thang, what, quad cane, fallen again, don't they know I'm a Red Hat girl, damn legs swollen again - cat tripped me, Snookie lick my face, Nippy, you're ignoring me - want me to have a motorized wheel chair, little ramps on my hardwood floor - feel me, feel my skin, feel it all - nobody touches me - I'm the nice one with cute little dogs, lots of cats, and here I am fallen by the litter boxes, full, elbow in one, doctor says at my age, what, 68, need a health care worker, if he's a man OK, otherwise, skip it. Rhonda comes to clean, but not this week, only when she wants. Drink, drink, drink, drink, I need a drink, a man, Horace is gone, other one too, husband, what was his name. .. age makes you forget but how could I forget that. .. Rusty, Rusty was lusty, dead too. Oh. .. can't get up. Oh no, not Rusty, Russell.

BILLY DAISY - Floating, didn't need a license for the scooter in this state, feels like riding on rubber, frame liquid, flowing, rocking, rolling, what speed, who could tell, so high, shimmer shimmer, up to Cliff's and Samantha's, cooking it, smoking it, out again, book me, fuckers, I'm out again, nobody I am, nobody but the scooter under my legs, swirling. Could see that little lady down in the hollow from the yard where Cliff shot golf balls into the hollow, using an iron, where the hell did he get them from, he called them goof balls, funny man. Little lady on the back porch with a bottle, must be vodka, got to pay her a visit. Place might be warm, this one's cold, electricity water turned off, candles, love the flickering, what they doing now those two. Little lady want a visitor? I'm the one the swat team snared when I tried to kill myself after I scared off my lady friend in that house by the state park, shit, one year is all they took from me, then rehab, what fools, what a joke. Little lady, I got a rap sheet, I'm bad, you want bad?

RHONDA STILLMAN - Calls me her friend, tightwad bitch doesn't pay me enough to clean up all that cat crap, but she's a worry the way she's started carrying on, in a way I got to keep an eye on her, but I got enough troubles, don't need hers, she'll get what she wants, can pay for it, but what neglect, how could she not see that, downsliding like she is.

CLIFF BREADSWORTH -

SAMANTHA JENSON -

NEIGHBORS (to be named) -

SHELLY ROSE - neighbor - Madelaine worries me, no doubt needs groceries, bright lady bright eyes bright humor (is it an act? There's a dark side) - what a mess her place fine furniture, could be elegant, probably was once, wants to know about the revolver in her drawer.

CAROLYN CORTRIGHT - next door

ROBERT SKILLEN - property owner where meth couple lives

Firefighters etc -

EMTs -

Police -

THE CHARACTER IS PRIMARY FOR ME

Caught up in this - Some book characters that remain with me:

Carl Mørk / Merete Lynggard - Jussi Adler-Olsen
Annie Dillard - herself
Lisbeth Salander - Stieg Larssen
Harry Hole - Jo Nesbo
Janie Crawford - Zora Neale Hurston
Frank McCourt in "Angela's Ashes"
Deanna Wolfe - Barbara Kingsolver
Lew Archer - Ross Macdonald
Hazel Motes - Flannery O'Connor
Ignatius J. Reilly - John Kennedy O'Toole
Beloved - Toni Morrison
Lancelot Lamar - Walker Percy
Francis Phelan - William Kennedy
William Least Heat-Moon - himself
Annislee - Joyce Carol Oates
Anonymous
Elias Chacour - himself

Kurt Wallander - Henning Mankell

Meursault - Albert Camus

Others too - got to stop here ...

UPDATING BLOG - VIDEO CURIO THEATER & WRITING

Been awhile since I've communicated via this blog site. Two things I'd like to note:

1. I've now turned to writing, intrigued in some ways by the noir style, but not that exclusively - short stories and a novel.

Though earlier videos are posted here, the blog now will be mostly devoted to what's going on with writing.

2. My video work recently has been strictly experimental, fashioned in what I'm presently calling a video anarchist style for a blog site called the Video Curio Theater - at http://blog.rehberg.net - short video art works.

Reminder that our home page is http://www.wildclearing.com

Be back in a bit ...