Confessions of a Serial Describer

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

It is November on the 50th parallel. The scrub White Spruce is still a vibrant green while the surrounding ferns have turned a rusty mocha. Bright lichen florets make the rocks stand out in bold contrast.
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It is late November. Where the hell is the snow? I can only truly enjoy Mexico if my friends at home are completely miserable.

Man, that was descriptive. Phew! Chills. Need a tissue?

Except the last part.

Let me reverse digress.

Setting, tone, pace, narrative arc, word choice, description, dialogue, exposition, themes and plot — all of these and more are at play in the creation of fiction.

It’s a lot for a small-brained lad to keep track of and yet I must! I have to admit that after twenty years of having product imagery, branding, price and audience as my guiding lights, I need to do some relearning.

Many writers, editors and readers today prefer a “leaner” kind of writing. This includes several key style considerations. One important factor is the interdiction of adverbs. Shoot them out of the air before they can land and defile your verbs with those filthy ly-suffixed words!

Adverb avoidance makes sense — no argument here. Let the verbs do the work.

Exposition or summarization is seen today in literary fiction as unnecessary and dated. A knowledgeable editor I know stresses the need to “show not tell”. At the same time, I’ve often read that many classic pieces of literature are filled with exposition and they are still loved today. Would those classics succeed if written now? Probably, but contemporary conventions can be powerful and I believe a writer needs to be both skilled and confident in their approach if they choose to buck these trends.

Note to self: don’t buck around with trends unless you have a good reason to do so.

SIDEBAR: I think there are some outliers here – the editor I referred to states that she personally is less inclined to enforce a hard “no exposition” rule. Additionally, my personal experience may indicate that not all regions are on the same wavelength when it comes to exposition. London literati may take a different view than their Vancouver cousins, for instance. Certainly, literature is more global than ever and regional idiosyncrasies are hard to prove, but my own anecdotal experience suggests some commonalities based on geography.

Furthermore, my editor friend highlights the fact that, “exposition is very much alive in genre fiction (romance, sci fi, fantasy, suspense thrillers). However, there’s no doubt that too much telling stops the pace of the story and causes the readers (who we are told these days have very short attention spans) to become less interested in reading on.”

Description is a story-telling tool that I use a lot. It is not a favoured structure by all. There are those who see it as simply “copyism” — the tree is green and the surrounding plants are brown. Big deal.

I get the point. Description stops the action and is a close relative of exposition in terms of not sufficiently trusting the reader to figure things out.

But. Yes, I have a but – a small one (God willing, it will continue so). I love to describe things that may be out of the experience of the reader. Or it may be that description can help to support a feeling or mood or to otherwise move the story along. The examples that follow are personal favourites: “Big Two-hearted River” and “Islands in the Stream” by Hemingway, and “Robinson Crusoe” and “Moby-Dick”, as well.

In the Nick Adams short story “Big Two-hearted River”, we are told exactly what the man eats; the types of trees in the forest and swamp; and the temperature of the water as Nick wades into the current to cast. Hemingway describes the way the grasshopper – used as bait – spits “tobacco juice” on the hook. All of these minute, intimate details put the reader in the place and time with the Nick Adams character and condition us to be curious to understand and empathize with him. “Why is he so sad?” is the thing that occurs to readers even as the detailed description continues to push us away from this central question.

In “Islands in the Stream” our dread is raised by the calm, clinical depiction of the sea, the waves, the colours of the water, the sky, and the sea bottom while the giant hammerhead shark bears down on a young boy who is oblivious; “goggle fishing” in the shallows. Thomas Hudson, the father, fumbles as he loads his rifle and sights on the shark’s fin, firing and missing — and each miss is described in excruciating detail. It raises the hair on my neck just writing about it!

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the ocean, Defoe’s numerous, lengthy, arcane descriptions of Crusoe’s fortifications and the architecture of his island home are famous examples of description. I loved every six-penny nail!

Last, I remember lying in bed at home, recuperating after a nose operation at about age thirteen. (As an air passage, it made a pretty good coat hook.) I had ordered Moby-Dick from the University of Manitoba Extension Library. The book arrived, wrapped in brown kraft paper and bound with butcher’s twine. A white sticker on the front read: “1.) Melville – Moby-Dick 2.) Young – A Boy at Leafs’ Camp”. Home early from work, my dad delivered it, coming into the warm bedroom, snow dusting his winter parka. He tossed the bundle on my bed. “Your books came in the mail,” he said. “How’s the schnase?”

See what I mean?

See three of my descriptive short stories on the outstanding Canadian e-zine, CommuterLit, edited by Nancy Kay Clark — one of the top five Nancy Clarks in all the land!

allfornow – Mitch

 

Copyright Mitchell Toews ©2016

#amwriting

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

I have not blogged for a few days, but I have been hard at work on a lot of other writerly tasks.

  • Rowing on the lake; hiking the trails in the snow; scattering miniature marshmallows for the suspicious Whiskey Jacks (I save the sunflower seeds for myself!); prepping my workshop/writer’s studio for winter and otherwise bobbin’ and weavin’ and feeding my soul .
  • Working on a major re-write slash tune-up of a new story that I have in first draft stage. It is a satire. I received a little expert advice from a great writer + blogger with some chops in this area. Gonna incorporate her mentorly comments. Maybe send her a ring of Winkler sausage or two.
  • Re-did this blog a bit. Put in a Publications page now that I have a few places online and in print where my stuff resides. I’ve also replaced the stock photos with a few Samsung snaps of the place where Janice and I live and drink the wild air 1.
  • Waiting for some expert editorial assistance on a story a few of my “early readers” have enjoyed. I have high hopes for this sad tale of resistance and regret. I hope to knit up my ravell’d sleave 2 and enter this one in some contests! If you’d like a preliminary copy of “The Log Boom” to read and possibly flop me an op, (RSVP a POV?) lemme know!
  • Part way through a new story about Hartplatz (Steinbach on a sunny day in my imagination) narrated by an inanimate object. “Graperoo” should be done soon!
  • I have been cleaning up some existing stories that I hope to submit to some of my fav lit sites and maybe some new ones too. Now that I have a small portfolio of acceptances, I am hopin’ to scramble a bit higher up the mountainous submission piles of some of the bigger-name Canadian literary journals. It is a big hurdle, that. Afterall, I am naught but a humble country mouse who LOOKS like a Trump deplorable (but sure ain’t) and has no discernible prose DNA, except for a famous surname that some may suspect – oh, so wrongly – I have usurped. Maybe I should try a pen name? How about “Rich Davis” — that’s what my real name sounds like when I say it with a stuffy nose. Or, “Carly Menno Simons?”  A virtual gender swap might shake up those weary slush pile readers who sputter, over-caffeinated – “What, exactly, IS a Rennie, Manitoba?”
    rejection-letter-schultz 3

allfornow – Mitch/Rich/Carly

~~~
1 – R.W. Emerson
2 – you know who
3 – C. Schultz, but you prolly knew that one too

 

Copyright Mitchell Toews ©2016

Coming Attractions

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

Well, as Facebook will attest and remind – should I ever be mercifully allowed to forget – my birthday is coming up.

“Get plastered, you bastard,” was the line in the cover version of the Happy Birthday song we used to sing to celebrate these milestones. Now, my consciousness-indicator (an app I use to show Jan when I am awake and when I am asleep) goes into the semi-awake mode when I crack my third beer, so getting plastered won’t be on the agenda. (I fall asleep before the plastering can take place.)

The one possible exception was when Jan left me alone with my Irish son-in-law and his dad. James and Tom showed me a thing or two about how to drain a St. Catherines craft brew. Several, in deed. Some parget activity did, in fact occur there among Canada’s rich and famous, but the only manifestation that I could observe was that our stories were truly hilarious.

Speaking of draining…back before I was a son-in-law, and also before I had any sons-in-law of my own, my buds and I used to say, “draining”, as in,

Q: “What are you doing on Friday night?”

A: “We’re going draining. You?”

Other fine turns of phrase from them days:

Paving, being paved, on a paver. This is a lyrical conjugation. Paving is when a teenager with too rich an ingested blend of greasy food and alcohol, must expel a portion of it. When the expulsion takes place out of the window of someone’s car, and the expelled material falls beneath the rear wheel of the slowly moving vehicle – that, eager students of higher learning, is paving.  Being paved is when one is inebriated and is likely to do some paving. By logical extension, being on a paver is – usually on a long-weekend – an extended  period of paving and being paved.

Shaker. A shaker is a party. But, more than that, a really good party. Women, inebriants, a few existentialists, a little knuckle justice. If the shaker were to wane, it might spawn a…

Country Tour. Accompanied by John Prine, Emmy Lou, Kristofferson, Leonard Cohen (RIP) or that lad from Hibbing, a group of teenagers drive slowly along gravel mile roads on the prairies. The car, powerless to refuse, is set in Drive or first gear (if a standard) and it idles along while deep discussion ensues. Synonym: Booze cruise. Disambiguation: when a lot of singing takes place, it may become a “drinkalong”. Related Terms: If the driver falls asleep or is busy paving and the car runs off the road, the vehicle becomes a “tree machine”.

As you can see, mine was a rich adolescence, filled with the type of sophisticated experiences that have made The Simpsons a popular show for 28 seasons.

Anyway. Just before my next birthday – this Sunday – I will read aloud my story, “And So Are They All” at the launch of the seventeenth edition of the semi-annual print journal, Voices. It is published by the Lake Winnipeg Writers’ Group and the event is at the McNally Robinson book store on Grant Avenue in Winnipeg @ 2:00 PM. The story has absolutely nothing to do with paving, tree machines, et al. Here is a snippet:

Second only to the Hedy Lamarr beauty of Em Gerbrandt was the beguiling feminine charm of the Gidget-like Ms. Froese, our teacher. Of course, Ms. did not exist then, only Misses and she was one. Around five feet tall, bobbed blonde hair, saddle shoes, cashmere sweaters and rocket bras. I am sure I had no distinct thought then of that conically constrained part of her anatomy, only that it was soft and pleasing when she leaned over to help you with a problem and she happened to make fuzzy impact with your head or shoulder.

Soon after, another story of mine will be released into the wild. On Tuesday, Nov 22 my short story “South Oromocto Depths” will be published on Literally Stories. It is a story with some connection to the aforementioned tomfoolery, although this perspective is a bit more obverse – it looks at some of the negative aspects of drink. Here’s a teaser:

I padded silently across the cold floor, pulling a hooded sweater over my head. Surveying the scene, hands on my hips like a construction supervisor, I shook my head slowly. The glass ashtray on the blue Formica kitchen table was jammed with white cigarette butts, overflowing. “Alpine” was printed in menthol green font and many butts were on the table. Black ash was mixed into spilled beer, the crummy remnants of a bag of Cheezies was in a large mixing bowl and orange bits also joined with the wet beer-ash mixture on the table.
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The place smelled like bum. A single, long Alpine cigarette was planted in a round-edged pound of butter that rested on its unfurled aluminum wrapper. The cigarette stood proudly up from the butter – a lone palm tree on a deserted yellow beach. Evidence of a few taps of ash decorated the foil.

Today, Nov 17, incidentally, is Literally Stories second anniversary. Please remember that those are internet years, so multiply X seven. Happy Fourteenth, LS!

allfornow – mitch

 

Copyright Mitchell Toews ©2016

Chicken Fingers, Fritos and Frankensteins

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

NEXT TO A LAKE ON A SUNNY DAY IN NOVEMBER, I just want to say, with reverence, that writing short stories is hard as hell.

Do tell – or whine on – you might say. I will, but only the former – I promise. Plus, there is the opportunity to learn about the fascinating world of pencil grooves and ink wells.

It is non-fiction to say that there are many people writing fiction. They comprise a lot of young writers and a teeming, grey pool of boomers, unshackled from their jobs. With the barriers to entry not seemingly insurmountable, there are a lot of contestants in the race. Especially now that self-publishing has made so many Frankenstein monsters — and some beautiful strangers.

Nonetheless, a large pool of skilled writers are active. So many stories are wonderful – the kind that make you want another one right away. Like chicken fingers.

To even out the score, there are literally thousands of places where a writer may submit a story, both print and online. That is a good thing for aspiring writers, but the competitiveness of the literary journal segment makes those publishers exceedingly tough on new voices. The vast majority of lit journals make it their business to deliver new authors to the scene, but they must be, and are, ruthlessly diligent in finding the best of the new writers.

There are a lot of journals, but so many are new that the available financial income – not abundant in the first place – is spread thin. As a result, there are a lot of dedicated volunteers, working late and dusting Frito crumbs off their keyboards as they toil on the slush pile. Sometimes, response times can be too long and, well, I’m not getting any younger. 

In addition, the aging white man narrative is one that is not at the top of editors’ short lists these days. My stories have to soar because they are not supported by a mandate or precondition. Women, LGBTQ, People of Colour, Feminists, People with Disabilities and many other cohorts have specific themes – or whole journals – available to spotlight their particular segment. This offers them an enhanced opportunity to be seen. To be discovered.

Now before you push back and say, “here we go,” hear this: I have no qualms with that approach. It is, in many cases, overdue and given the need to bring in fresh, first-person experience, necessary. A single mom, working two jobs and supporting three kids does not have the time to write. Offering her a forum with an inherent fast-track makes sense.

So it’s just a fact and I deal with it. Besides, if I tough it out, without any fast-tracks, I could benefit as a writer by being borne solely by the popularity of my stories; by the quality of my writing. I can’t forget that.

So too, is it of value that most editors are younger than me. That may create obstacles because of dissociation – they might not know what my references mean (see the “Featured Image” above). But once again, it forces me to write better. If I am lazy and rely on an old, fuzzy-edged meme to support my point, I will fail with an editor who does not intuitively understand the embedded inference.

My objective must be to give readers experiences like this:

“Crystal clear details of a world that I do not know. A journey to another place.”

And the little town slept.

I will battle on. I’m not exceptionally patient and wish I was more so – that would help. I tend to press a little and maybe get a little too self-promotional. It is part of the old white guy songbook – when your life occasionally feels like the last few bars of Stairway to Heaven (pardon any dissociation) you tend to want to get shit done.

allfornow – m

See LINKS to the scribblings of mine that made it past the Frito crumbs of the slush pile, HERE.

 

Copyright Mitchell Toews ©2016

Gratitude for a Loyal Colony

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

The internet is much like a sea filled to furious capacity with fish. Viewed from a height, such as a high flying gull might attain, larger fish can be discerned and the general trends of schools and shoaling fish can be observed.

But should that gull swoop down low to snatch a morsel, it will find a teeming confusion – a frothing, overabundance of individuals each pushing and straining to the surface. The madding crowd, where many are not fish but are foul.

And yet, in all of this tumult and to my surprise, a few have found my pan-sized offerings and have returned for more. To these loyal wingmen (hens and drakes alike) I offer today’s labour – working on my short fiction, “The Log Boom”; a little story that I hope can become a big fish.

I’ll do that writing after I frame and case a pocket door and build a backsplash. The unrelenting, land bound needs of our 66-year old cabin come first. Plus, like my writing, there’s a lot of editing required.

Meanwhile, here is a short excerpt from, “The Log Boom”, for loyal Early Readers and other lone birds who have landed here:

This changes everything. This changes nothing, Marty thought. He had wondered how people react when they were told this. But he still did not know. He was quiet.
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As they drove, Marty looked out at a tugboat towing a boom of logs on the Fraser. The logs flowed down the inexorable river, riding the current. Frederick noticed Marty looking at the boom and feeling the tension in the moment was happy to focus on it as well.
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“Wow. That is huge – how many separate booms are strung together?” Fred asked.
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“At least three,” Marty said as he pulled the truck over at a spot where construction vehicles had a ramp down to the river. They sat together and watched the tug as it guided the immense weight of the logs past the pilings of the Alex Fraser Bridge.
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“The boom is going downstream, so it is relatively easy to control, I suppose,” Marty commented. “But I guess you still have to be pretty sharp and plan the path carefully.”
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“Do you think it’s harder to tow them upstream?” Fred asked, glancing at his dad, his eyes moist.

allfornow – mitch

 

Copyright Mitchell Toews ©2016

“Why Do You Write?” he asked, one dark and stormy night.

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

OK, this sounds completely boring and self-important, but it is really kind of a tough question.

At the risk of becoming even more internet repellant – sonetimes I feel like I am RAID! for followers – here goes. Please weigh in, or whey in (feeling cheesy?) or shoot over a scathing one-liner or an interesting comment. Or if you are intrinsically repellant like me, just do whatever it is we would do instinctually and hope that it is opposite day.

A fellow writer asked on twitter,

“Why do you write ? For money , or for a release ?”

I am of course tempted, repeller that I am, to jump in with a juvenile comment of the “That’s what Phlegyas said,” type, but I will restrain myself.

SIDEBAR: If you DID NOT have to Google ‘Phlegyas’, then please send in a pithy comment. You could definitely offset some of my native repellency. A pronunciation guide would serve to validate your braininess.
If on the other hand, you immediately thought of Steve Carell saying, “That’s what SHE said,” in a ten-year old episode of The Office, then, welcome, fellow repeller; meine abstoßenshaft.
SIDEBAR P.S. – writing things in German that you obviously just translated online to make it seem like you actually speak another language is classic repellency. 

If – like me – you thought, “Define release,” then please read on. I actually responded in a kind of mildly non-repellant way. I base this on the reply from the OP (which stands for Objectionable Person in the Internet Repellency club, of which I am the President. And Past President.) I answered the OP (onomatopoeia producer? I know OP stands for something relevant and internetty, but I can’t think of it.) by saying that, “release is closer, but misses”.

Pretty good, eh?

He replies, “What hits the nail?”. Also good.

So what is it? What is the answer that Orion’s Pantleg seeks?

Here is my half-serious, not trying to be funny rather than being gutty and layng it out there, slightly non-abstoßen response:

For me, it’s a kind of compulsion; almost involuntary.

It is analogous to splinters, for those of you who – like me – get a lot of splinters (slivers: wood or metal) in your hands. If you can’t get the splinter out right away, it sits in there for a while until a little pus cocoon develops around the splinter and then, one evening, while you are re-reading Inferno by a roaring fire (naturlich), your body just EXPELS the splinter.

Bloop. A little wet spot shows up on your hand and there is the splinter: wet and shrunken and looking way less fearsome than when it shoved its intrusive way in there.

The point is, once the sliver (let’s call that THE IDEA) enters the skin (THE CREATIVE MIND) it must be dislodged (WRITTEN) by the pus (THE STORY).

In my experience, this is true for gardening, writing, art, innovation, marriage, child-rearing and sometimes, survival.

Also blogs.

allfornow – m

 

Copyright Mitchell Toews ©2016

The Three-Fingered Man

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

I AM NOT EQUIPPED to fully understand the why of it, but I do have an active mind – for good or bad – and I know that I can personally attest to it.

It, is, in this case, the power of certain childhood memories. I hear a meadowlark and I am instantly transported to the roof of the plywood fort I built in my backyard in Steinbach, Manitoba. It was surely MY backyard, not my parents’, by the way. Somehow, a meadowlark’s syncopated song is permanently bonded to a memory of a particular summer morning. I can always smell the leftover red house paint I used.

Likewise, when I smell a leather baseball or hockey glove, I am suddenly on Creek Road, where I am walking home from hockey and it is a million below zero, and Orion is out and I forgot my toque in the dressing room and my ears are freezing. Literally freezing – turning hard, people.

An ear woody.

If someone starts talking about Sunday School, it won’t be long before I take a look at my arm. I’ll explain that one. I remember going to Sunday School to please my grandma. It was important to her and we agreed, aided by some fast Grandma-speak and abetted by fresh biscuits and jelly, that it was important to me too. I look at my arm because of what happened on one particular summer Sunday, when I had other places to be, like my fort, but I had gone to Sunday School to please Grandma.

In our Sunday School class that day, my Aunt – who also went to that church – had dropped me off with a new teacher. He was a butcher in real life and somewhere along the line, I supposed, he had not paid attention and his pinky finger had gone onto the pile of cold cuts. I can’t recall whether he actually was the victim of an overactive rotary slicer or my over-achieving imagination. He was missing his little finger and he worked in a grocery store; those are the incontrovertible facts and there had to be some reason why that pinky was not with him.

At some point that day – I was about nine – I misbehaved. Another incontrovertible fact. The teacher, let’s call him Pinky, to protect the innocent, was annoyed and escorted me roughly out into the hallway. God’s hallway. But Pinky was a little over exuberant in his accompaniment of me to the hall and he had a pretty good grab on my skinny arm, bare as it was in my Sunday short-sleeved summer shirt. So…when I looked down at my arm where he had grabbed me, I saw the imprints of his grasp — just like one of those CSI programs on TV now, except I was not a cadaver. The imprint on my arm showed three fingers and a thumb. No pinky.

I looked at the unusual evidence on my arm and I did the inevitable – I snickered. He stood stooped over me, giving me some kind of lecture and when I laughed, looking at the weird, three-fingered tattoo that was now slowly fading from my bicep, he too laughed. Just a bit.

Now, the short story writer in me – back then I was more of a comic book reader than a writer (one may have begat the other, come to think of it) – would probably have prefered him to have back-handed me, or to have carried some dark grudge that resurfaced later in life. Something portentous and profound. But nope. He just giggled. I laughed some more, he wagged his finger (one of the attached ones) and we went back into the Sunday School classroom to learn. We could have learned about saw safety. We could have learned to see the humour in things. But I think we chose instead to learn about how God drowned (almost) the entire human race or some other inspiring bible story about hungry whales or bearded, bathrobe-clad, unemployed dudes padding around the desert in sandals eating desert fish and drinking desert wine.

allfornow,
Mitch

P.S. – Please be on the lookout for my story, “Heavy Artillery” which will be published @ FICTION ON THE WEB tomorrow, October 30, 2016. No digits were lopped off in the making of this story. 

1961-025a-heavy-art

@fishcharlie, #fictionontheweb, #pinky, #shortstories,#amwriting, #canlit, #writerslife #desertwine

 

Copyright Mitchell Toews ©2016

 

 

 

Tafelberg

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

Last week, I included Chapter 1 of my W-I-P sci-fi thriller novella, “Tafelberg”.

Here is a chunk of Chapter 2 (1,151 words):                                                                                                

 

Excerpt Two from: Tafelberg

By Mitchell Toews

Chapter 2 – The Landing

 

The thing that brought us here in the first place was the combination of bad timing and proximity. When our Dash-8 lost an engine en route from Costa Rica we landed at the nearest possible airport – Hato in Curacao. We were fortunate, we thought, as our second engine sputtered and died ominously just after landing when the plane turned to taxi back to the terminal building.

As we walked across the silent, windswept tarmac in the setting sun, Willem and Jan came roaring across the runway, each in a matching, gleaming new Mercedes G-Class SUV with miniature Curacao flags snapping urgently on the front fenders. Their horns honked incessantly, like a presidential procession, as they sped towards us.

Our pilot and co-pilot were still in the plane – trying to determine the cause for the normally reliable Dash-8’s sudden drop out of the sky. They were about a 3/4 of a mile back from us.

Willem screeched up to us, shouting incoherently at us in Dutch and then German, then pidgin Papiamentu – demanding that we get in the lorries immediately. Jan, seeing the maple leaf t-shirts some of us wore, had called to us in English and French and we understood.

When we left Costa Rica, we knew that there had been some kind of disaster on Curacao, but for the most part, we had only seen stories about a multitude of US warships and UN troops surrounding massive tent camps that had been set up to quarantine evacuees on Aruba and Bonaire. It had furthermore become an international political incident when Dutch Navy vessels were not permitted entrance to Venezuelan ports, during the crisis. The whole situation was highly secretive and we only knew that the airport was closed – but we could not go anywhere else, so we had landed despite our misgivings and several terrifying full-burner fly-bys by US Navy fighter jets.

With the sun setting, we all shouted questions at Willem as he leaped out of one of the Mercedes and began grabbing us and pushing us inside, throwing our luggage aside. “Hou je bek dicht! Kijk uit je doppen, kakkerlak! Kakkerlak!”

We argued, some of the boys running to retrieve their bags. “No, no, no! Just get in! Vee having to go, NOW! The bugs are coming soon.” he screamed. He was unshaven and his eyes were bloodshot and his lips blistered. The boys looked to me and the other coach, Eddy.

“What about the pilots?” Eddy said, to me, and to Jan and Willem, who were tossing boxes out of the vehicles, to make room.

“Where?” Willem implored. Eddy pointed back to the Dash-8. Willem looked, then stared at his watch. “No time, no time,” he shouted. “Jan! U zeg!”

His friend, Jan, stared at the mangrove trees – strangely bare and brown – that fringed the runway. “Geen tijd! No time, guys, we gotta go now or we won’t make it back up da hill! No room either. They be OK in the airplane for night – let’s go tell’em!”

With that, Willem resumed physically pushing us into the trucks, urging us to throw out any cargo that prevented us from getting in. We left everything on the runway and filled the trucks to absolute capacity. “Windows shutting! Tight!” Willem yelled, then jumped in and floored the SUV, heading for the airplane where the two pilots were now walking swiftly towards us in the dying light.

“Hoe laat, hoe laat?” he shouted into a ship-to-shore handheld walkie-talkie. Jan’s voice came back, urgently, “Zeven!”

“Accchhh, shit!” Willem growled, slamming his hand on the dash. “Seven o’clock, seven o’clock!”

Then we saw it. As we rushed forward towards the plane, we saw some debris and dust come up from the mangrove forest near the two men. We could see the pilots, looking over their shoulders at the noise of it and then saw them pick up their pace, running earnestly with their arms pumping. They had reason to be afraid, even though the bugs were slower than them; they had outflanked the men and had a good interception angle on them.

Willem made sick, guttural sounds; they may have been words, I was not sure. I heard Jan honking his horn – a single long blast as he accelerated slightly, nosing ahead of us. I glanced at the speedometer, we were doing 140 KMPH. Just when we began to be able to see the men’s faces – sheer terror – Willem slammed on the brakes. The tires shrieked and we could smell the melting rubber in the cab. As he braked and we slid across the hot pavement, the host of giant beetles engulfed the running men. The two, their white shirts standing out in contrast, disappeared as in a wave, not 150 yards in front of us. The line of insects now piled up, pulsating and churning furiously on top of the point at which the men had been swallowed by the swarm.

We stared in disbelief. Then, all of us in our SUV saw at the same instant that Jan’s vehicle had kept going and was braking hard now, all four wheels locked and the big SUV slaloming from side to side as though the runway had been lathered with foam. It punched into the front edge of the quaking pile of bugs but they appeared unconcerned; if anything, mildly repulsed by the hot engine.

We held our breath and Jan blew the horn again. Then, miraculously and as if out of a dream, the Costa Rican co-pilot, Leonardo, stood up at the edge of the ghastly spectacle, a dozen or more of the huge bugs clinging to him. He shook himself violently, almost falling, and then stumbled like a zombie towards Jan’s Mercedes. The passenger window opened and our trainer, Teresa, reached out and pulled Leonardo’s head and shoulders into the truck. As she did so, Tyrus, one of our setters – an Olynyk from Winnipeg – leaned out from the rear window and began pulling and batting the squirming roaches off of Leonardo.

As all of this happened, Jan reversed the powerful vehicle, speeding back away from the throng that now moved hesitantly forward. Seeing this, Willem gunned our vehicle and drove directly into the gap between Jan and the wave of bugs. Ours was like a car speeding along the edge of the high-water mark on Long Beach on Vancouver Island, sending a plume of water – in this case, crushed giant cockroaches – spraying out from the tires.

We cheered as one when we saw Tyrus and Teresa clear the last of the bloody roaches from the co-pilot and he was hauled inside of the automobile. Our SUV followed, charging across the eerily empty runway in the gloaming light, leaving the bugs behind us.

“Which way?” squawked the radio as Jan called Willem, who knew the roads better.

<SNIP>

 

Copyright Mitchell Toews ©2016

 

“We’re All Just Here to Fart Around”

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

Living at the lake and trying to write every day has the combined unintended consequence of making quite a few things seem preposterous.

I mean, really. My existence here is a bit strange in relation to the things we all typically accept as being important. Yesterday I watched a beaver take ten minutes to drag a branch through a culvert under the highway to its lodge in the ditch. It was so absorbed in what it was doing that it did not notice me or maybe just chose to ignore me. I stood close enough to hear it panting. Yes, beavers pant. Why wouldn’t they? In fact, I am almost sure I heard it say, “Holy shit!” when it was finally finished tugging that branch through the tunnel.

So, yes, that experience put things in perspective and suddenly the most recent Trumpism, where he hits a woman with a rolled-up newspaper and yells, “See! It just makes a loud noise but doesn’t REALLY hurt them…”  well, it doesn’t seem any less bizarre but it does increase my relative admiration for beavers.

Anyway, I am determined to have a  good week. Yesterday I transplanted some White Spruce ( Picea Glauca, Manitoba’s Provincial tree) from the neighbour’s yard into ours. At the neighbour’s request — I ain’t no tree pirate. Today I will pretend to be a finishing carpenter and do some baseboards and casing.

On Thursday, a story of mine runs in Literally Stories, a UK-based online short story site. It is my third story on this site so far and I am excited to see the response. I chewed 500 words out of it and made some other major changes and I am quite heavily invested in it! Like my buddy the beaver, I am convinced it is all worth the struggle.

On Friday, I may go and rig up a little pulley system in that blasted culvert.

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Please see my stories on Literally Stories, 

The Fifty Dollar Sewing Machine

and

Breezy and the Six-Pack Sneaker

and look out for Frozen Tag on Thursday, on the @LiterallyStories website. 

 

Copyright Mitchell Toews ©2016

To the Crocus Born

Posted on by Mitchell Toews

My wife and I are home in Manitoba for the first winter in nine years. We spent the last damn-near-decade in Chilliwack, BC – where every Manitoba Mennonite has a relative and where the view is better but the pews are just as hard.

Not that I would know about the pews, but maybe I’ll start my own Mennonite Conference – ACC or Pac 10, if they don’t mind sharing the name – and become an expert.

Anyway.

Incidentally, “anyway” is a word that I need to use frequently when I blog. (OK, Fussy Frances – when I write in my blog.) I need it so much that as the self-decreed prose laureate of Jessica Lake (including the islands) I also decree that “Anyway.” is a proper sentence. Grammatically correct, for all prose written at Jessica Lake (and the islands).

It’s like dirty sex talk — the rules of grammar may be suspended, by mutual consent, for proper effect. Not that I would know about such, but for the sake of argument.

Anyway. (SEE!? I was totally down a descriptive rabbit hole there, and AbraCadabraIjustWannaGrabYa, I write an ‘Anyway.’ sentence and I am OUT.)

Back to the topic. Jan and I are facing the prospect of a Manitoba-length winter, REASONABLY truncated by a term in Mexico, but still long and cold. But what I have noticed is that even after a stretch on the coast, in Canada’s best weather/insect/insufferable loud-mouth schnook combination climate (two outta three), we are still Manitoba stock. We are grizzled. We are hardy – and I don’t mean the familiar for Hartmund, although some of the nicest people I know are Hartmunds. (“Robusto” in Spanish. Now there’s a freakin’ name!) I mean tough, dude.

Here’s my Top Ten ‘TOBA TUFF TELL-TALES. (Out-alliterate that, you Ontario pantywaistes!)

Note: There may not be ten, as counting is made ‘toba Tuff because I may have lopped off a digit or two working construction in the summers, and/or I am slightly blind from a youth filled with Uncle Ben’s Beer/Anti-Freeze.

1 – I have frozen my ears often enough to have a doctor tell my parents that if I freeze them, ONCE MORE, they will fall off. My Mom still tells me I should wear a toque (rusty or otherwise) and I am bloody sixty!

2 – I think it’s OK to have cyclists pedal on the 2-5/8″ wide yellow stripe on the edge of the pavement, next to the gravel shoulder. The only paved shoulder in the province is still that commemorative stretch out by Portage where the Queen pulled the motorcade over to spit, right? Hasn’t changed?

3 – I would waterski in the Red River. I would waterski in the Red River, fall and then squirt a mini-geyser of river water out through the tiny gap between my two front teeth until (deep breath) …until it plugged.

4 – I could identify Nick Hill by voice alone on an episode of CSI Miami (the one out by Portage) before the DNA could come back from the lab.

5 – I have played Fris-beer in winter; in the snow; by headlight. Bonus points – I did it while stoned on Rosemary from Ben Friesen’s Mom’s spice rack. “Nice rack, Mrs. F.,” I said, and then we all laughed for a really long time.

Anyway.

That’s about it. These blog things should be kept short so that my devotees are not delayed from also playing Words With Friends. As long as they don’t send me a thousand of those stupid Candy Crush requests. Oh but ignorant.

#

If you want more reading punishment of a similar nature, please visit this awesomer than average site where more of my real stories — ones where the “Anyway.” bylaw is not in effect — may be found. It is a UK site and everyone knows they are terrible smrt, so be sure to mention that at coffee tomorrow: https://literallystories2014.com/authors-k-z/t-u/toews-mitchell/

The website is Literally Stories and the tagline is “Short story fiction from around the world and especially Manitoba”

SKILL-TESTING QUESTION: What do the English call the two items in the picture?

Hint: The one on the left is a glass of water from the Red River.

 

Copyright Mitchell Toews ©2016