UFR Weekly Newsletter #13: Making Sense
David Cotrone
I’ve been writing the best stories of my life. It scares me because it all seems so honest. There are so many ways to fall apart and so many ways to write about what’s gone. I use fiction because then there’s distance and if you step too close to the glass it might fog up. I don’t make something happen so I can write about it; that’s not how anything works. It’s about taking what’s already happened and putting it into some kind of light.
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Two poems by Steve Mitchell
Dani Shapiro talks with furniture, saying, “I had moved from the city to the country with my family, I had a young son who was asking me what I believed, I had been raised in a religious family and had fled it, my parents were both dead — and for all these reasons and then some, I felt that I had to excavate, really dig into my history, my family, and my present … Always, I’m hoping to make sense of myself, my history, the moment I’m alive in this world.”
Sara Lippmann gets earnest
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Type in a name; it might break your heart. It might give you hope. What can we do about it? I don’t know. Think.
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I wrote my first story a few years ago. It was based on this song and I had it in my head that it would become a novel. It was about a brother and a sister set on leaving home, their mother dead and their father nothing. I knew how the story would end, too. The brother would be an old man sitting on his back porch, wondering why he had decided to leave all those years ago, why he wasn’t still running. I got about sixty pages in and stopped. It was terrible. It wasn’t working. It wasn’t me.
Right after that I had an idea to start writing a jukebox musical based on the stuff of R.E.M. It was going to shift between 1990 in the present: still at war, drugs for depression and anxiety still on the market, people just trying to make it. It was going to break all the rules. It was going to be about love. It went nowhere. It was too much of an idea and not enough. It was one of those things. I joined a band and was one of the guitarists and I wasn’t very good. We practiced in a small room and one of the songs we did was Everybody Hurts. Sometimes we just played it through without the singer. We played it again and again, the same chords over and over, knowing where the words were supposed to go, knowing it was a hard song to screw up.
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We’ve been getting a lot of submissions and a lot of them have been great. Keep sending them in. (We’ve finally updated our submissions system.) Thanks so much for your patience if we’ve accepted your work and it hasn’t run yet. Our queue is always in flux. We try to make everything we run cohere, but your work is in the queue nonetheless; we can’t wait for everyone else to see what you’ve done.
We’re trying to raise some funds so we can design a new website. There are some things that could be working better and it all takes money. You get what you pay for. You pay for what you get.
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There’s that quote you always hear about good artists stealing from other artists. But there’s a difference between stealing and being jealous. I knew going into that story that I was trying to see it through a song I wish I wrote, not the other way around. If you come up with something on your own then it’s yours; if you read or see something after you’ve started and it reminds you of yourself then that’s what it means to live. That’s what it means to steal. Of course, there’s that other quote that says nothing’s original, that everything’s already made, already said; we’re just finding new ways to keep it all going.
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We did Paper Planes by M.I.A., too, because it made us laugh.
Be well,
David