On May 8, 1968, I was a 12-year-old first baseman from Steinbach, Manitoba. Catfish Hunter was pitching in Oakland against the Twins and a Minnesota station re-broadcast the game. It was a hot night — strange for May — and I could not sleep so I went downstairs and turned on my parents’ RCA Victor console stereo radio. I listened to that game as it bounced in off low clouds to me, far to the north.
It was one of my fair sister’s birthdays, but I got the perfect present.
allfornow – Mitch
Update: My prickly story about the conflation of business, big church and politics appears on SickLit Magazine today, May 15.
This is a reprint of the story which first appeared on another of my favourite literary journals, Literally Stories.
This is what SickLit Senior Editor Nicole Ford Thomas had to say about it:
“I really like “The Business of Saving Souls,” as it seems at first like a warm and fuzzy church parable about doing good, but down deep, it’s a lesson about standing up to corruption–all corruption–and fighting to take care of each other.”
SickLit recently ran a reprint of another of my stories, “The Rothmans Job”, which first appeared on the vibrant Canadian literature site, CommuterLit. I have a total of seven stories on CommuterLit and another five on Literally Stories. Thanks to the editors of all of these exceptional online literary journals!
I hope you enjoy the pieces and welcome your comments.
Special thanks to the editors at SickLit. They are awesome sauce. (Or, “hosanna!” as they’d read responsively at the NTCCF.)
Allfornow – Mitch
Hi, all!
My short story, “A Fisherman’s Story” appeared in Rhubarb Magazine about six months ago. Since that time, I have written two complementary stories around it, literally, to create a trilogy.
“The Bottom of the Sky” is a continuation of the fisherman’s story that was in Rhubarb. There’s a prequel – Part 1: Acapulco 1955 and a sequel – Part 3: Mismaloya 1977 that bracket the original story of the three-piecer, now going under the name – Part 2: Puerta Vallarta 1975.
So: would you like to give 3-pieces a chance? (All we are saying…) I am looking for pre-readers or “beta readers” (the cool name) to read and relate their observations. Literary stuff like, “Toews! Your brain is a rotting cesspool of dog vomit!” Or really tough criticism – whatevs.
Anyhoo, if you would like to give it a read, drop me a note and I will send you a dbl-spaced, TNY 12-pt Word doc with 1″ margins to accommodate your red ink.
Warning: it’s not very Mennonitish and has little to do with relationship break-ups, zombies, or kinky sex among the snow-birds of Phoenix. (Just threw that last one in there to see if you were still reading.)
Danke sehr, gracias amigo mio!
Mitch Toews
Rennie, MB
My noirish crime fiction, “The Rothmans Job”, has earned a reprint in SickLit Magazine. Readers seem to like the characters in this story. Me too.
SickLit is an online zine with the tagline, “Bringing the real. Keeping the weird.” I suppose that this twisted tale fits that mandate. Thanks to SickLit for picking me up on such a cold, dark night. Thanks too, to CommuterLit, who ran the story originally.
Like ‘Rella, in the story, I remain optimistic. “Against all odds”, is not such a bad place – at least you know where you stand. If you like this story – please share it. If you hate it – hit me in the face a few times and I promise not to counter-punch or argue. I’ll just get back up and keep trudging until I disappear in a flurry of snow.
allfornow – Mitch
@Mitchell_Toews
Source: I am Otter by Mitchell Toews
This just in!
BOTUS* Accepts Resignation of Favourite Driver, “Not reliable!”
The 9 degree, stiff-shafted driver has been shown, under a stream of Presidential oaths, to be, “unreliable under pressure,” Trump stated in a 4:55 a.m. tee-time tweet from Trump National in I-Hate-Scotland, Florida, his home course.
“Ball go right, into voods,” commented Trump’s long-time caddie and nuclear advisor, Igor “Fall-Out” Badenov. “Alvays right. Iss bad. Beeg league.”
“I am soooo disappointed,” Trump shouted to the gallery, the largest crowd ever to listen to a fat, old guy with a red cap whine about his driver.
“The king or Prime Minister or poo-bear of Sweden had the same club. Totally couldn’t hit it. But, I thought, hell, that’s a GD Swede! Might even be a woman, I frankly don’t care. No folks, that club is a BAD DEAL. It’s sad,” Trump declared at a press conference near the OB stake on the first fairway.
When reached for comment, Russian horsey-back rider and new “Celebrity Apprentice” host V. Putin was quoted as saying, “And he calls ME a hacker?”
George W. Bush, the new, non-ironically, favourite, former-President-who-is-not-Barack-Obama said, “Now watch this drive!”
Meanwhile, Wolf Blitzer of the so-called Fake News Network smiled, hugged himself and murmured, “Russia, if you’re listening, you are friggin awesome!” over and over and over.
-30-
*BOTUS – Biff of the United States
allfornow – Mitch
Hardworking Old Dude…
I am in the middle – eight hours today – of editing a collection of short stories. 200 plus double spaced, TNR 12 font pages of prose from Toews.
As a formality (I thought) I searched for “ly” in Word and to my dismay, TO MY UTTER DISMAY, I found that my manuscript contained 768 ly words. Lots of adverbs like “nervously”, “amateurishly”, “hopelessly”, “f*ckishly”, and the always-lyrical, “rejectingly”. Non-adverbial LY words like “family” & “only” were present in the text and were not guilty of a felony, but still: 768??
768 is a lot. That number is the total combined career home runs hit in major league baseball by BROTHERS. It’s an easy Google search, but how about a FREE ZWEIBACH BUN for anyone who can name these brave-hearted brothers, without looking it up.
That is almost four adverbs on every page — too many for a self-proclaimed* “dirty realism” adherent like me.
“The adverb is not your friend.” – Stephen, “The Adverb-Slayer”, King (No less!)
So, having pulled my short fiction collection together, created a TOC, and an Acknowledgements Page, I thought I was pretty close to crying havoc! and pressing send. After all, most of these stories have been accepted by literary journals and have been edited and re-edited many times. Some have gone under the knife so often they look like zombies on The Walking Dead! So they should be somewhat adverb-free. Nope.
As a result, this Sunday was spent curbing my adverbyism. “Out, Out! Damn adverb!”
In Search of Art…
“What is Art?” you might ask. Good question. For a Mennonite, the answer could be, “Art Martens? He’s a farmer,” or “An EMBer,” and so on.
But I ask, “What is Art?” because that appears to be what I am working for: Art for Art’s sake. To scratch the creative itch.
It has come to my attention, thanks to a wonderful article in Broken Pencil Issue 74 by Suzanne Alyssa Andrew (The Hustle, page 20) that, in Canada, “the market for art, writing, and music is broken.”
The author goes on to present these disappointing, but true, statistics for the True North:
I worked my guts out from 1977 to last year so that I could finance food, heat, power, beer and wine AND write me some fiction. Now it seems like I should have quit in 1998 to become inky.
More dire stats showing the 19-year, and counting, slide away from the ever-increasing COL for l’artiste:
For me, this is unfortunate but not debilitating. However; had I followed my dad’s advice back in the seventies and followed the creative trail – trying to make a living from the artistic side of the dirty, confused world – it could have been a hard go, with things getting worse every year. I worked for forty years to finance my current slim pickins, so it’s not as bad por moi as it is for the many young artists today working one or two part-time jobs to finance their passion.
Ideas…
I suppose I could pay starving artists $0.10 per adverb for pest control in my short stories? But, with some perseverance, I can eradicate them myself. (Note how I did not write, “Hopefully, I can eradicate them myself.” Eh? Ehhhh!!!?)
What about:
The artist wins, your wife is lookin’ at you kinda funny (the good funny) after her third glass of free merlot, AND you are up $25 bucks! Tax-free!
(PLUS… you have just read an LY adverb-free article. No extra charge.)
allfornow – Mitchly
I LIKE AMERICANS. I also like Somalis. Or, de Dutch. Or Bull Riders. (Some examples.) I like most people I meet, so I may not be the most discerning guide.
I know more Americans than I do Somalis. Also, the Somali leader’s activities do not generally affect my investments, the Canadian government, my sleep, and I am not bombarded with news about it, 24-7.
So, I pay attention to Americans. It’s hard not to. I am pleased when we Canadians resist the immense pop culture spill-over and continue to think and act like Canadians. I don’t like Tim Hortons coffee, except as a metaphor. As a handy symbol for Canuckness – I LOVE my cuppa Timmee dubble-dubble, or whatever you tastebud-dead people say eight-squillion times a day, your cars idling in the line-up like Mike Duffy’s stretch limo on the Confederation Bridge at rush hour.
Somalis looking for jobs and Syrians holding babies are not scary to me. Many say, “Paus opp, Toews!” (Mostly that comes from our alarmist Plautdietsch neighbours – squirrels and crows and the like.) And while no Mennonite trusts Russians, nor are we afraid of them because we can out-farm them any day. Wary as I may be, I am not seeing masked soldiers roaring out from behind rusting granaries near Whitemouth in old Datsun pick-ups, waving black flags and parting my hair (figurative hair) with a machine gun. I don’t believe they will be taking my job (my semi-job) or doing other bad guy stuff that used to be the responsibility of Chuck Norris and Rex Murphy to fix. I don’t think they are going to ruin our economy or wreck our education system or blare call-to-prayer loudspeakers into my bedroom at dawn.
If they do that last thing, the loudspeakers, I may have to go ballistic (you’ll get it in a minute, keep reading) and don my spandex shorts and do my yoga out on the yard. That would at least give me a bargaining chip (and give them an unshakeable mental image).
So, when I hear James Earl Jones doing the promo it’s like a dinner bell to me. I think I’ve been slipped a mickey – a CNN roofie.
Anyway, as you can see, I am normally not that interested in international affairs. Justin has not called me up to discuss foreign policy and so, I’m leaving it to him. But, we do have a TV and we do get CNN. So, when I hear James Earl Jones doing the promo it’s like a dinner bell to me. I think I’ve been slipped a mickey – a CNN roofie. I sip coffee and shout liberal platitudes at the screen. I scroll through tweets and think of puns like, “He’s on Flynn ice!”
But now it’s getting really scary as the local otters are taking Korean lessons online and my financial guy is either having caviar baths or making cat food and peanut butter sandwiches. He seems “uncertain”.
I don’t know what to think. If Trump is a success, I am scared we will get a made-in-Canada clone – O’Leary; Relic from The Beachcombers; Don Cherry; that guy from the A&W commercials… it’s a spooky list.
Here’s hoping that Trump gets in big trouble with the principal (that Bannon guy and his Blue Ox); gets his twitter account put on a time-out for a few years; does a bunch of very, very unfair things that make my investment guy buy cigarette boats by the carton and then… after a totally embarrassing sexting scandal with Arnold Schwarzenegger (so predictable) fade away into the Presidents-that-shoulda-been-impeached seats at Yankee Stadium.
Then the Democrats can put that ballsy Yates lady in charge for eight years and she can repeal deplorable laws, like:
You heard it here first.
allfornow – Mitch
Waiting for Poland, in the North End, with Thunderella and Pegasus. A caper gone wrong, but maybe not.
January 30, 2017 UPDATE
TODAY, this twisted Canadian yarn, born in absurd truth and transported on the wings of a fictional 1991 prairie storm, is published by CommuterLit – a Toronto based online purveyor of morning short stories, lox and bagels. (And they are all out of lox and bagels.)
If a Neo-Noir Xmas Tragicomedy sub-genre exists, then this story belongs there. If not, then maybe this story inspires it?
A snowy night. An unlocked warehouse. A characterful materfamilias.
The Rothmans Job – EXCERPTS
By Mitchell Toews
.
A STORM LIKE THIS was rare. Snowflakes blocked out sky and sun and moon and stars. The flakes – as big as baby fists – had been falling for three days. Light and dry, they flew, then settled, then flew again – whipped by a dodgy north wind. At night, the tops of buildings disappeared except for the occasional glimpse of a red tower…
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Mitchell Toews 