When the Spartans fight singly they are as brave as any man, but when they fight together they are supreme above all. For though they are free men, they are not free in all respects; law is the master whom they fear, a great deal more than your subjects fear you. They do what the law commands and its command is always the same, not to flee in battle whatever the number of the enemy, but to stand and win, or die.
- Demaratus, advisor to the Great Persian King Xerxes
The name for this story was half-stolen from a science fiction novella by Timothy Zahn. I say half-stolen because I couldn't even get that right; the title for the original story is 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home'. Nevertheless, the story germ and prose writing is 100% that of my own. It's a monologue by - well, a very disturbed individual, as you'll come to see.
The more astute of you might also realize that, since I just graduated from high school, I probably didn't live through the Vietnam War. The references I used in this story are all taken from the first-hand experiences of Joe Haldeman. In particular, his books None So Blind and 1968 provided some helpful source material.
This writing came out of an exercise I found myself doing to wake myself up one morning. I'd been kicking around a play about a Vietnam vet inside my head for a year, and I thought it was time to commit something to paper. Although the story I ended up writing has very little to do with that high concept, it's still a pretty enjoyable emotional roller-coaster.
This should show you young 'uns the value of drafting. *grin* When I showed my friend Carmen the previous version of this little tale, she looked through it very carefully, looked back at me, looked back at the writing, and then uttered perhaps the single most important critical praise I've had in a long time: 'This is a sick story.' She was right. More than that, I felt heartened because it meant that I had come eerily close to capturing the true human tragedy of my protagonist. So I went back to the proverbial drawing board. This time, I ironed out the few flaws I found, and added in a lot more of my own personal idiosyncracies. The metaphors of the man-as-god, religion vs. war, Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, and death-as-release-from-life are some of my favorite themes, and things that I've dealt with in other texts. I think it turned out to be a much more effective modern horror story, the second time around. What do you think?
I recently substituted the original title of this piece ('Mother's Child') with something I felt to be much more appropriate. Throughout the whole story, it is the nameless speaker who, by once again delving into the core of his hollow past, tantalizes and intrigues the reader. I felt the story was reasonably successful because of the 'nested narrative' technique I used. We learn almost nothing about the speaker through the first section of the story, other than his life has taken him down a bitter road. We do not even know his name (one of the key elements in raising the tension of the story as it progresses). But by the time he has finished speaking of his childhood and returned to the present, we understand the truth of his existence much more clearly. I've never used flashback with quite the same emotional impact either before or since I wrote this story. 'For the Man Who has Everything' is - above all things - a story of coming-of-age, of the relationships forged between a family in the wake of tragedy.
Ah. A series of poems which demonstrate the versatility of my moods. The first, 'Dialect of the Soul', is very much influenced by an interpretative reading of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It regales the reader with a speaker who is trapped in the depths of his own loneliness, quick to condemn others for their naive obliviousness. Yet at the same time, I wanted the poem to touch on questions of a grander nature. The speaker, ironically enough, presents a detached understanding of his own emotions ('all things must pass... in and out...'), which in turn, has the effect of making him all the more detached from humanity itself.
The second poem, by comparison, is a very personal tale of the joys in literature - and indeed, the imagination. 'Wanderlust', as it is called, takes a speaker enraptured in mythology and heroism past, caught by the desire to leave his worldly sorrows behind. Whereas the speaker of 'Dialect' is content merely to criticize the world, the speaker of 'Wanderlust' seeks to escape it completely.
'Hymn to Her', the third poem, is - quite simply - a love poem. It takes the extended metaphor of the sea and applies it to both structure (the rhythm of the piece) and content (imagery). At the same time, the combination of desperation and longing creates an ending that harps on everything tragic about unrequited love.
'Perspective' doesn't really need an introduction. Of all the poems here, I think it speaks the most directly for itself. Unfortunately, it has a tendency to be misinterpreted, just on the strength of the words themselves. It actually started out as a poetic interpretation of a scene in a movie, where an actor defeats his stage fright for the first time. But...*shrug* Feel free to interpret it any way you want.
A fifth poem - 'Picturesque' - expresses some of my horror at the burning of Indonesia. And a bit of my obscene interest in human savagery.
Finally, the last and truest poem - 'Hourglass'. Like the story 'Local God', this idea took shape in a creative writing exercise. I took the stylistics of a Sylvia Plath story, married it to my own concept (the hourglass) and ran with it. This is my favorite poem to date.
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