UFR Weekly Newsletter #22: When A Story Counts
David Cotrone
Sometimes I read books about fast times because they show me a world I don’t know: the willingness to get high off anything, the ability to live off nothing, the baddest love, or else the best. I listen to music that talks about the same kinds of things, songs about being alive and desperate, right where you’re supposed to be. Maybe because a small part of me wants those experiences to be mine, or maybe because I like a good story. Maybe there’s some other reason, one I can’t quite put a finger on, can’t quite reach.
***
To A Flame by Aaron Wolfe
Wild Words by Gabriel Thibodeau
Five poems by Karol Nielsen
***
“I felt compelled to scribble some short stories based on real things that had happened to me: vignettes about my nutso ex-girlfriend, about when I was so in love I ran away to Tucson on a Greyhound bus, about how I did speed at the Dyke March and picked up that girl from Canada. But was that literature? ...That’s the strangest part of turning your life into a story — not the social fallout, the way you over-expose yourself, the way others will inevitably think you’re a narcissistic egomaniac who can’t get enough of herself. The hardest part is how writing it down petrifies your experience, freezes it in time. You have to believe the story is true to put it on paper, at least I do.”
- Michelle Tea, Valencia
***
There’s no life not worth writing about but there’s writing that isn’t worth reading. Your job is to take what you have to say and make it sing. It doesn’t matter what you say, just that you say it well. The story always counts. Take what you are and give it away, again and again. Someone will pick it up and keep it, keep you, as if you are theirs. You’re a writer after all, a person. Isn’t that what you want?
***
Sorry it’s been a while. It’s getting harder to get these out on a weekly basis. It might turn into something monthly instead. I hope you don’t mind. I hope you to hear from you soon. I hope to hear your story.
Be well,
David