EARLY MORNING WRITER

STORIES OF COMPASSION AMID DESPAIR

I struggle with ways to tell these stories ... 

A refugee camp in Chiapas, in southern México, the year 1998 - the mothers and children here were survivors of a massacre by paramilitaries. We met them and accompanied them on one of our human-rights journeys. The prevailing attitude of those who cared for them - radical Jesuits - was compassion. Compassion in the midst of despair. Sometimes that seems so rare.

Survivor Photo (5) - Young Tzotzil Mayan women and children in a Chiapas, Mexico refugee camp, survivors of the massacre of 45 kinspeople in Acteal in 1997, whom we accompanied back to the massacre site a year later for a commemoration of those slain by paramilitaries. © Wes Rehberg

JAILBIRDS STORY, HEAVY METAL, MR. BOJANGLES

Writing my "Jailbirds" story, I wondered whether the chunks of sound of barred-doors closing influenced "heavy metal."
I also thought about Jerry Jeff Walker's song Mr. Bojangles, who liked to dance, and in his cell "jumped so high, jumped so high, then he lightly touched down ..."

BRASS ...

Just laid out a paperback-size book of four short stories and five poems -- like a brazen neophyte ...
Might add a couple of other pieces -- still in process

CUBA VISIT AND A U.S. PENALTY ...

I'll be writing a story about this at some time, too - nonfiction -- 

One of two intriguing visits ...

"JAILBIRDS" -- fictionalized nonfiction short story

   I've begun writing a fictionalized nonfiction short story drawn from murderers and events I encountered while doing prison ministry in an upstate New York county jail and a maximun security prison.
   Its tentative beginning is this:
   
   "The guard brought me to a tiny room with a wooden table and two chairs, opened the door, showed me the button to push if I needed help, and told me to take a chair. He walked toward the county jail wing where an itinerant young man was behind bars, accused of murdering a boy, 13-years-old. The charges indicated that the accused killed the boy after he keyed a scratch on the imprisoned man’s car door. I was there because he requested a prison minister ..."

    

"TINA'S STORY" draft completed

   Wrote a draft of "Tina's Story," a short nonfiction piece about a woman my spouse Eileen I met in northern Nicaragua in 1992 who shared leadership in a base-community cooperative there. This was a region that constantly faced invasion by U.S. supported "Contras," who were also responsible for the deaths of her daughter and husband during an onslaught into Tina's cooperative and a nearby village. About 1,000 words. 
   Read the story aloud at "Wide Open Floor" at the Barking Legs Theater in Chattanooga, TN. It moved ...

"OPENING THE GATE"

     Thinking about putting together a book of fiction and nonfiction short stories and poems called "Opening the Gate" to try to launch my new effort in fiction writing and poetry and renew my nonfiction effort. The short stories are "Scooter," "The Fog," and "The Enduring." One of the nonfiction pieces is "Amanecera's Story." Two of the poems are scheduled for publication in "The Rusty Nail" electronic/print literary magazine. A curious amalgam, no doubt.
     The content may change as I work through this ... still very formative, especially the quality, but I'm learning, with help from the Chattanooga Writers Guild workshops.
     Also, I'm recirculating "Down Home With Dalton," 74-minute documentary film about Dalton Roberts, songwriter, performer, storyteller, and former Hamilton County county executive in Tennessee. This was filmed with songwriter-performers Martha Ann Brooks and Donnie Jenkins. This will be available shortly through Amazon.

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"