Soda trickles between table leaves 
and spills on orange linoleum squares, 
expanding into a pool of brown. 
Gram grabs her mopine, and still it comes. 

The Coca-Cola has breached the rim 
of the jelly glass on the table.
The kitchen cataclysm stuns you
if you are only five or seven.

“Stop,” we say but still our grandpa pours. 
“Stop!” we shout but he will not, our Pop. 
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” but it is pointless now. 
Bott’l nearly drained, the mess is made. 

“Ha! You didn’t say 'when.' Ha!” he says. 
Poppy grins. Dad scowls. Gram mops. We howl. 
There’s none left to drink but no one cares. 
Clock hands turn in just one direction.  

“You didn’t say when!” he tells Heather. 
Pop grins. Dad scowls. Gram mops. Heather howls. 
There’s none left to drink but no one cares. 
Clock hands turn in just one direction. 

“You didn’t say 'when!'” he tells Joey. 
Pop grins. Dad scowls. Gram mops. Joey howls. 
There’s none left to drink but no one cares. 
Clock hands turn in just one direction. 

The house on Davis Street is empty now. 
No Coke in the fridge, no spills on the floor. 
Pop isn’t here and neither is Gram. 
I know that’s not right. He can’t be gone. 

He’d never leave before we said when.
​

I took a cool law class during my fellowship. One assignment was to rewrite the Declaration of Independence. I took a stab at it. 


​        We hold that all foods are created equal (notwithstanding the self-evident exception of chocolate) and that the food industry derives its profits from the consent of the hungry. Therefore, whenever a flavor combination offends it is the right of the consumer to abolish it and to institute a new chef who shall lay down his or her own ingredients, organizing them in a form more likely to delight the palate.
        Epicurean sensibilities, indeed, dictate that recipes long established should not be altered for the appeasement of the loose-livered. The history of certain elements of the food industry is a history of repeated offenses, olfactory and gustatory. First the industry ruined perfectly good coffees by adding the offensive flavors of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, clove and – worst of all – allspice. Unable to cease their relentless tainting of our food supply, food mongers next ruined our breakfast cereals, our beers, our yogurts and – in defiance of all that is right and good – our Oreos. A decent respect for the God-given sense of taste ought to impel the separation of this offending ingredient from the rest of the food supply upon which the people rely for sustenance. A separation comports with honorable values that provide for dissolution of established but ill-thought epicurean bonds when culinary offenses so demand.
        The food industry has a history of repeated assaults on taste buds of men, women and – worst of all – children, who already have been subjected to such offenses as pineapple pizza, strawberry-jalapeno froyo and maple bacon Pop-Tarts that have benumbed their developing palates. Have they not suffered enough? To now contaminate our precious progeny’s Justin Bieber lunchboxes with pumpkin-spice potato chips, pumpkin-spice granola bars, and pumpkin-spice Twinkies is unconscionable.
        Manufacturers have refused to submit to the laws of culinary decency and, furthermore, have violated the most basic divisions of time by prematurely peddling unpalatable pumpkin products. That they would purvey fall-themed products before leaves have begun to fall from trees is an offense to the calendar.
        Be it known that the traditional food supply is not the only victim herein. The discordant flavor combinations have rendered pumpkin-spice itself the object of ridicule and disdain.
        Consumers have sought redress on social media platforms from Facebook to Snapchat but the food manufacturing industry has been deaf to the voices of good taste.
        To achieve the greatest good, pumpkin spice must be restored to its traditional place as a pie additive alone.  It must be granted permanent independence from all other comestibles. Maintaining the status quo would render our nation vulnerable to both gastronomic disturbance and ridicule from our more cultured foreign neighbors who have a deeper appreciation of kindred flavors.
        In light of such threats to the perception of our nation, there is no option but to immediately grant pumpkin spice the freedom to which it has always been entitled.
        Therefore, we the consumers of prepared foods, declare pumpkin spice and all of its individual components – ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, clove, and allspice – free from all association from provender of the non-pie variety.

The other day I wrote a first-person account about an interaction I had with a Sandy Hook dad who touched me when I met him by happenstance six months after his daughter was murdered. I ended up writing a story that day but I held a little something back just for me: Jeremy's advice for how to get through even the most horrible days. I wish he had remembered his own advice this week when he took his own life.

What he told me was to look for something beautiful every day. There's always something, he told me. I wish he had looked harder before he made that awful decision to leave this world.

Rebecca Droke, the Post-Gazette's visuals editor and a good friend of mine, knew about my encounter with Jeremy Richman and encouraged me to write something about it. My first instinct was no. (I need to get past that and start saying YES to things generally!) But she got me thinking so I did. The story must have been bubbling up inside me because flowed through my fingers quickly. I read it when I was done but didn't think it would be of wide interest. 

I tested it out as a Facebook post and the reaction was so encouraging that I handed it over to my editors. It wound up on A1 and quickly became wildly popular online, where it was Tweeted and reposted over and over. 

Was it the first-person point of view that made this post so popular? I have to think it was. I've written many stories before that quoted sources relaying poignant moments like my own encounter with Jeremy but none of them got the same kind of reaction.  When I write "I" I am talking about me, but when a reader is absorbed in a story than "I" becomes them, too. I think the difference is the pronoun. I. Such a little word. 

Maybe I really am on to something with my idea to experiment with a new first-person model of literary journalism. I could be onto something. I feel encouraged.

And that is a beautiful thing.

Here's a case for a copy editor. Try your hand at editing this monstrosity. See if you can get it down to seven words. Post your sentence as a comment and then click here when you think you've got it. 

Here's the challenge:
In the past, this writer has been the witness of combustion that has produced positive thermodynamic change along with luminescence, and also has viewed condensed aqueous vapor descending from above.

Just a brief update:

​I picked up a new client who hired me to ghostwrite a memoir about her work rescuing abused dogs. I didn't sign a non-disclosure agreement for this one, and I negotiated cover credit into the contract, so I'm a little freer to talk about this project than the last. Her story is fascinating and I can't wait until our next interview session. It sure beats interviewing politicians!

The project also lets me combine my passions for writing and animals. I'm more of a cat person to tell the truth, but dogs are the next best thing. I've been volunteering at the Animal Welfare League of Alexandria and loving my time there. 

I thought I'd share the one word processing feature I can't live without: screen splitting. 

It's the reason I refuse to write in the Post-Gazette's content management system or basically any word processor that isn't Microsoft Word. When I'm done I copy the text over to Libercus so it can be published. Word's split-screen function is well worth the extra step.

Here's the how-to: Open a document, click "view" on your menu bar, then choose "split screen." You can use your mouse to place the split wherever you want it in the document, and you can scroll through it to view different parts of the same document simultaneously. I write my stories on the top of the document and put all my notes underneath. Using the split screen I can see my notes and my story at the same time and everything is all together. 

There are other ways to achieve the same effect, for example, by opening two different windows side-by-side. Sometimes I do this as well, for example, if I'm getting information from a website or an email message. More typically, though, I copy and paste whatever content I need into the bottom of my Word doc and view it there. 

Writers, give split screen a try, but in the end do what works best for you. 

"It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech."
Mark Twain

"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;" Your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." 
Mark Twain

"The importance of the writer is that he is here to describe things which other people are too busy to describe."
James Baldwin

"I made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short."
Blaise Pascal

"Not that the story need be long, but it will take a while to make it short."
Henry David Thoreau


Do you have a favorite quote about writing? Share it in the comments.

I've kind of ghosted on my blog readers lately. It's because I've been busy ghosting.

I've been working on a fascinating non-fiction book based on the lives of two artists. I really wish I could say more but I signed a non-disclosure agreement. That's the downside of ghosting. I'm really proud of the work I've been doing but I'm not allowed to tell you about it. 

I've also got two big transcription clients now so I'm busy, busy, busy. That explains the lack of blog posts. 

I'm working hard to squirrel some money away in case of a work-stoppage at my full-time job, where labor negotiations are in the toilet. I'm loving my side work so far but I hope I'm not being spoiled. Maybe I've just gotten lucky and landed unusually terrific clients out of the gate. 

I've got two more potential projects on the horizon: a smaller ghostwriting gig this summer and maybe a children's book project with a friend. 

If you have a project you'd like to talk with me about, now is a good time to do it before my summer and fall schedule fills up.  

I'm so excited for things to come!

I've been rereading Kathryn Stockett's The Help and remembering how much I like novels with multiple narrators. I'm not a fiction writer but I imagine it's hard enough to capture the personality, cadence and diction patterns of one narrator, let alone three. William Faulkner was a master of it but Stockett might even be better. 

Imagine if non-fiction stories could be told this way. It would eliminate all the attribution that I always think gets in the way of story flow. An unreliable source could be challenged by the next voice in the "chapter."  It would be a huge step away from the old inverted pyramid, and I wonder if it would be a disservice in today's multi-tasking society where people might only read the first few grafs and move on. This kind of journalism would take a commitment from the reader to get to the end so you'd need a really compelling story -- like Charles Johnston's maybe. I wish I'd thought of this idea a couple years ago. 

Thoughts on approaching stories this way?