A riddle about writing fiction

 I ran across one of Claire Keegan’s koans about writing fiction: 

A short story begins after what happens happens.

 

In the way of koans, I ran across one possible meaning before running across the koan. The illumination arrived with the Story of the Week from Library of America. This is from one of Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, “Now I Lay Me.”

 

I had different ways of occupying myself while I lay awake. I

would think of a trout stream I had fished along when I was a

boy and fish its whole length very carefully in my mind; fishing

very carefully under all the logs, all the turns of the bank, the

deep holes and the clear shallow stretches, sometimes catching

trout and sometimes losing them. I would stop fishing at noon

to eat my lunch; sometimes on a log over the stream; some-

times on a high bank under a tree, and I always ate my lunch

very slowly and watched the stream below me while I ate. 

 

The story begins after what happened. What happened was that a solider was wounded. The story is about what he does when he can’t sleep.

• Source: Ernest Hemingway story “Now I Lay Me” is available at Library of America’s Story of the Week site:

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/07/now-i-lay-me.html

A poet’s inventiveness

 Someone said that poems should offer the reader little surprises along the way. Perhaps you could say the same for books of poetry.

Kim Stafford’s books often have sections of poems on recurring themes: the wonders of the natural world, the influence of family, the corrosiveness of American politics. But his books also have poems that surprise, as in “What is this doing here?”

Here are six examples from Singer Come from Afar:

• “New House Rules” — It’s a list of phrases politicians use when they don’t want to hear what constituents are saying while pretending that they do.

• “Practicing the Complex Yes” — Since saying “no” cuts off conversation, here are phrases you can use to say “yes” (kind of).

• “All My Relations” — Almost every book has an acknowledgments section. This is the poetic version.

• “Poetry Doctor” — A physician is asking a poem what’s wrong. The exam involves a checklist. “Does your heart ever skip?”

• “Ostracon” — This is a series of phrases and fragments you might find scratched into pottery shards, which ancient Athenians used as ballots and notepads. “Pain is a substance, a stain.”

• “Stories from Dr. Zeus” — Imagine that we had tales of the Greek heroes told in the style of Dr. Seuss. Can you imagine Agamemnon as a toddler?

If someone asked me how to be happy, today I’d say: Buy Kim Stafford’s books and read them.

• Source: Kim Stafford, Singer Come from Afar; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2021.

Stafford: ‘Enough’

 It was cold, but we had been cooped up in the house for two days. So we bundled up and walked along the Yellow River. Most of the leaves in the woods had fallen. You couldn’t see the trail. Everything was covered in a blanket of leaves.

There’s a stand of beech trees on a bluff over the river, and the autumn light seemed to go through the leaves, rather than reflect off them. Beech leaves don’t fall in autumn, but they get thinner as they lose their chlorophyl, becoming almost translucent. Looking up, you could see sunlight more than leaves, but the leaves were green, yellow, gold, tan, brown.

We stopped and stared and lost track of the time.

Nan Shepherd said that people keep going into wild places because they can’t bring back the memories. You go out and see something spectacular. You remember how it made you feel. But you can’t keep the details — the colors, the smells — in memory. So you go out again.

Kim Stafford’s poem “Enough” is the best I’ve found at describing that feeling. Stafford saw a small dun bird running a rapids, “bobbing and trilling.” He could barely believe it:

 

and I felt — enough, that’s enough this life

has been, coming to this.

 

I can understand that: not wanting a single thing more, having seen enough for a lifetime. That gratitude is sincere. The fire is cozy. It’s too cold to go out. And yet …

• Source: Kim Stafford, Singer Come from Afar; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2021, p. 70.

Cold snap with yellowjackets

 The forecasters were right: It was cold, 34 degrees, so I donned the bee suit and poured 5 gallons of soapy water down the entrance of a yellowjacket den in the woodlot.

These yellowjackets are burrow dwellers. There might have been thousands inside. I’d seen dozens hovering at the entrance before the cold snap.

The Wise Woman bought the bee suit without asking and insisted I wear it. She was right. Despite the cold, I was met by a dozen sentries.

I don’t like killing — not even rattlesnakes, scorpions and black widows. But I also have a sense of myself as an animal with family members who are less murderous, and thus more vulnerable, than I am. I accept that some animals can’t live next to others.

I have had friends who’d be outraged. They’d tell me I was in the yellowjackets’ habitat.

I’m not sure that’s true. I’d say the yellowjackets and I are in disputed territory — not theirs, not mine.

They won Round 1. I took Round 2.

A note on Veterans Day

 During the 1930s, Stalin purged the Red Army. He got rid of every officer he thought was not personally loyal to him. He got rid of people whose thinking struck him as suspicious — and he was suspicious of people who could solve problems that were beyond his own abilities.

A lot of talented, capable officers disappeared. 

The Soviet Union was a big country and shouldn’t have been pushed around by Nazi Germany. But the Nazis came close to subjugating a bigger, stronger opponent in part because the Soviets lacked competent commanders.

You’d think that kind of stupidity would be rare in history, but it’s not. The Athenians were winning the war against the Spartans until they started executing their own generals and replacing them with people appointed by demagogues.

I think the Current Occupant of the White House is a despicable human being who has done a lot to make this a weaker, more vulnerable county. He has weakened our military by running off officers who rose to the top because of their competence, expertise and leadership.

The U.S. military deserves better.

Getting through it

 It was 72 degrees Sunday afternoon as we covered plants in the garden and put insulation around the drip irrigation lines.

It’s supposed to be 34 this morning and 26 tomorrow.

I filled the bird feeders, thinking of Kim Stafford’s poem about a sparrow, giving itself instructions, worried about the eggs.

 

Use your body to be the tent over tender pebbles,

lopsided moons. Then wait, warm, alert, still

through wind and rain, hawk-shadow, owl night.

 

Stafford says that when we humans are enduring hawk-shadow and owl night, we ought to learn from the sparrow. Use instinct, thought and wisdom, the poet says. Get through it.

Before bedtime, I put logs and kindling in the fireplace, ready for morning.

• Source: Kim Stafford, Singer Come from Afar; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2021, p. 18.

The find at Aguada Fénix

 I have spent the past 50 years thinking that the civilizations of Mesoamerica built up gradually. I thought that local chieftains built mounds with temples and tombs. As the civilizations got more sophisticated, with larger populations and better organization, larger monuments were possible.

I’ve visited Teotihuacán near Mexico City twice. I sat on the pyramids, which were built between 100 BCE and 550 CE, thinking I was sitting, if not on the apex of Mesoamerican civilization, at least on one of the peaks of the range. I’d grown up on stories that the pyramids in Egypt were built by myriad people enslaved or coerced by an absolute ruler with a sophisticated bureaucracy. I’d absorbed the idea that something similar had happened with the succeeding civilizations in Mesoamerica. I’d thought that works on the scale of Teotihuacán weren’t possible without the hierarchy.

This past week, we learned that an earlier people built a bigger monument at Aguada Fénix near the Guatemalan border. The complex — a series of nesting crosses with a long plateau and a series of canals — was built between 1050 and 700 BCE. The axes are 9 by 7.5 kilometers.

Researchers haven’t found evidence that this was the work of a great ruler. It seems that Aguada Fénix was built in a pattern that represented a common understanding of the cosmos. The possibility that the workers who built it weren’t coerced — that they came because they wanted to help build the monument and to live near it — is exciting.

To me, this is news. It’s also humbling —yet another case in which my basic understanding of the world has proven wrong.

• Source: Tekeshi Inomata, Daniela Triadan, et. al., “Landscape-wide cosmogram built by the early community of Aguada Fénix in southeastern Mesoamerican; ScienceAdvances, Vol. 11, No. 45, 5 Nov. 2025. It’s here:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aea2037