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“What a fantastic essay! I love it more with each reading!”
~ Sylvia Legris, Editor, Grain Magazine
~ Sylvia Legris, Editor, Grain Magazine
For the first time FREE on Amazon, my short essay SIX PIXELS OF SEPARATION. Love, literature, evolution, the Holocaust, Oregon, Quebec, the Nez Perce Indians, Wikipedia, AIDS, sex...in short, the whole catastrophe.
Then-editor Sylvia Legris liked it so much, she submitted it for consideration to The Pushcart Prize and Canada's National Magazine Awards (the latter in TWO categories!).
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| The 2010 Fishtrap Fellows Cabin, Fishtrap Writers Conference & The Gathering, Wallowa Lake, OR |
Excerpt:
I: Irrigator evolution
A couple of
summers ago, I flew from my home in Montreal across
the continent to Oregon
for the first time, on points cadged from my husband. He travelled a lot for
work. Because I quit science to pursue art several years back, I sponge off him
shamelessly these days. And not just for plane tickets.
From
32,000 feet, it was clear how parched the West is. I flew over mountains and
deserts, greys and browns and ochres interrupted by the occasional mystifying
emerald disk, round as a wedding ring. Until I saw the incomplete ones, pies
with a serving removed, I thought the circles were waste pools, for mine
tailings, say, or reservoirs of nuclear leftovers. It turned out they were crop
irrigation circles, verdant patches in the desert created by enormous metal
irrigators. Later, seeing these behemoths up close, I was reminded of bicycle
wheel rims—the irrigators appeared to be composed of hundreds of them, as
though the wheel rim was some missing link that the irrigator had ascended from
via dark evolutionary forces of increasing complexity.
The
next day, Rich Wandschneider—the outgoing, founding, and
soon-to-be-ex-executive director of Fishtrap,1 the conference I was
attending—drove a group of us from
Portland, 260 miles inland, to Wallowa Lake, the site of the conference. Only
the third owner of an irrigation system ever makes any money with it, Rich
confided, “The first two owners go bust."
...Tonight,
reading a collection of Raymond Carver’s short stories, I discover he is from Oregon. Clatskanie,
according to the book jacket, not far from Portland. Born in 1939. Because these facts
come from a book, I may have more confidence in them than in those gleaned from
Wikipedia. Wikipedia is unreliable because, as Conrad Black wrote me, it “can
be written by anyone.”2 In this new knowledge economy age, though,
large-scale creative collaboration is also considered a strength. The Carver
book is What We Talk About When We Talk
About Love.
Actually,
this piece you are reading might just as properly be called “What we talk about
when we can’t make love.”
My husband and I could not see eye to eye tonight and so I am in my son’s bedroom, seeking consolation from Raymond Carver...
Always free for Amazon Prime Members.
