It’s that time of year again. On April 24 we celebrate the birthday of Anthony Trollope (1815–1882), every writer’s role model for getting the job done. He wrote most of his 47 novels by rising at 5:30 in the morning, writing for 3 hours—250 words every 15 minutes—before going to his day job.

And because that job was as a civil servant, in the post office of all places, Trollope has always had my sympathy. I imagined that the only flights of fancy he experienced were in his head during those early morning hours; then off to the dry, dry salt mines of pettiest bureaucracy.

Although the story of Trollope’s writing/work travail isn’t exactly apocryphal, it is not as simple—as simply dreadful—as the short version makes it sound. Upon doing due diligence (taking my cues from The Trollope Society — www.anthonytrollope.com — rather than Wikipedia), I discovered two facts that might turn sympathy for this man into envy.

1. His post office job involved travel, and not just across town or country, but to Europe, the Middle East, Egypt, South Africa, the West Indies, and Central America. Through these journeys, he acquired a taste for seeing the world that led to personal trips to the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Trollope was one of the most widely travelled men of his time. And everywhere he went, he wrote, and many of his novels reflect his familiarity with exotic locales.

2. He loved his job. The everyday job he went to in London was ripe with quotidian detail that found a way into his writing. In Framley Parsonage, Trollope describes the route of a letter from night mail cart to branch line train and then main line train, and finally via foot post, to its arrival on Sunday and being ignored until Monday “as the Framley people have declined their Sunday post.” When the letter finally reaches its destination, and “on that wet Monday morning, Mrs Robarts was not at home,” the journey of a piece of mundane mail becomes the story’s inciting incident. Write what you know, and he did.

Heather Newton, a member of the Great Smokies writing community, also writes what she knows. [Please see Tommy Hays’ “Good News Has Its Place,” this issue, for more about Heather.] Unlike Trollope though, instead of confining her writing to three hours a day, she wrote her first novel in what she describes as “seven years’ worth of Fridays.” On other days, she was a lawyer. In the Spring 2011 issue of The Great Smokies Review, Heather wrote, “I believe that being a lawyer has made me a better writer. From my work as an attorney I know what it is like to have a child taken away by Social Services, to be struck by lightning, to have one’s body wear out working at a manufacturing plant—all things that have shown up in my fiction.”

Writer-as-worker musings continue in this issue of The Great Smokies Review. For example, Wendy Kochenthal’s poem, “Production Pots, No More,” considers the problem of creative work that becomes driven by the necessity to produce: “Imagine painting 6 round plates / laid out in an assembly line / losing desire for radiant red, butterscotch yellow, bone black lines.” In her author comment, Wendy says: “I felt I had lost my creativity and my sense of self for the sole purpose of selling my pots.” But she “was inspired while reading about archetypal symbols,” and that inspiration, combined with the work itself, guided her to a higher writing place.

Also in this issue, Mark Prudowsky (“Writers at Work: The Poetics of Electricity”) discusses the confluence of everyday working with writing. “In some ways, my present means of paying bills—chasing electrons (much easier when I was younger, quicker)—is similar [to achieving concision in writing]. Someone calls me when half of a house or a restaurant is without power. I ask what happened and when, trace the circuits to find where the problem resides. I gather the facts, focus on a solution, make the repair, get paid, and move on. Again, concision.”

Recently, a writer told me that if he ever won the lottery, he would do two things: work out and write. I thought that his plan did sound like paradise, except that my workouts would consist of longer walks, more yoga classes, and (see photo) felling dead wood. And then, with all those extra hours in a day, freed at last from the nuisance of necessity, I would write.

Or would I? Would you? What would Trollope do?

For more about Elizabeth, go to www.elizabethlutyens.com

They say if you remember it you weren’t there. Well, I do, at least most of it, and I was definitely there.

My friend Jay and I had been sitting on the boardwalk near our rental in Wildwood, New Jersey, in early August of 1969. We were tired of the heat, of the summer, of the crowds and drugs, and I felt drawn to the event being touted as the “biggest music festival of the year” in Woodstock, New York.

“So, wanna go with me?” I asked him. We’d hooked up for a bit, but now we were mostly just hanging out together.

“Really? You wanna go? You wanna drive up there?” he asked.

I looked at him, his brown, shoulder-length hair all wavy, rhinestone earring, barely a moustache and beard, thin, wiry frame, and knew he’d be a good travel mate. He didn’t talk much and was pretty easygoing, no tension between us. And I had already mentioned this trip to other friends who had hastily declined. “Too far!” they’d said. “Too crazy.”

“My car should make it fine.”

I glanced over at my ’62 Chevy Impala convertible. It was turquoise with silver and white trim, a new white roof. Shortly after I’d bought it second-hand earlier in the summer, the old black roof had to be replaced. I had parked it under an apple tree and in a bad storm, and a few too many apples were blown down onto it, leaving four or five small, round, cookie-cutter holes in the fabric. Sun rot. It set me back a bit, but this was my dream car. I’d been able to buy it after many hard waitressing and cleaning jobs.

I was ready to get out of town. About to start my senior year in college, I was a little nervous about transferring for my last year to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The summer had been crazy. Not just in Wildwood, everywhere. Nixon had begun the long-promised troop withdrawal from Vietnam after a year of national conflict over the war. Charles Manson had gone mad and killed all those Hollywood people just as movies like Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider documented the cultural distance between long-haired youth and Middle America. We were still in mourning for Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy (and Ted Kennedy had just been given a pass on the details of Chappaquiddick), and we feared more riots like those that had rocked D.C. the previous spring and summer. College students threatened campus building takeovers and protests, with SDS and Black Panthers fanning those fires.

Apollo 11 had just put two men on the moon. Most everyone can remember where he or she was when that historic moonwalk took place. I was in a motel room in Wildwood. I sat with my sister Bryan and several other friends, stoned, watching it on TV. The moment before Neil Armstrong made his famous comments, live on the air, watched by millions the world over, the door to our room opened and a man we’d recently met stepped into the room, raised his arm, aimed, and fired a gun at Bryan.

The echo left a silence, a stark chasm of disbelief—an unfathomable interruption. I looked at Bryan, saw her eyes wide, jaw dropped, both hands pressed to her chest. The room froze, for how long I’m not sure, likely just a second, but not one of us moved.

Then the guy laughed hysterically. “They’re blanks! You’re fine. It’s just a joke!” He turned and left. I heard the news announcer saying something like, “This is history in the making.”

Somehow, the moonwalk was forever diminished for us. When people later asked me, “What were you doing when men landed on the moon?” I could think only about my sister getting shot at. Neil Armstrong couldn’t hold a candle to that. I didn’t try to explain it to people very often.

With several friends from school in Charlotte, I was renting a small, musty, three-bedroom basement apartment in Wildwood for the summer, only a block from the beach. Our landlady was mean, and she lived in the top part of the house. She was always sitting at her window, the curtain pulled aside, as she frowned at our comings and goings. We could only ever see part of her face; it looked like gray clay with a gash smeared with red lipstick, a bit of a lumpy cheek and nose, a glint of light reflecting off one lens of her glasses. She wouldn’t let us park in the driveway, though it stood empty most of the time, so we incurred parking tickets all summer long. I had to go to court for those tickets and thought it would be interesting to take a hit of LSD before answering my summons. Once in court, reality hit me.

“Bryan, Krissy,” I ever so slightly nudged them in the ribs. “I think we have to leave.”

Their eyes were wide with concern. “Why?”

“Because, see those guys up there along the wall?” They looked up, then back at me, and nodded. “They’re plain-clothes pigs!” I whispered. They nodded again. “Ready?”

I led the way and kept moving; we were out of there before they got through the first case.

Driving back to the apartment, I safely dodged all the parked cars that kept moving into the middle of the street right in front of us even though there was no one in them.

…

Bryan joined us at the shore despite my parents’ disapproval. I had just turned twenty-one, and she eighteen, just out of high school. The plan was to work and save some money. It started out well. We got cleaning jobs at a mid-priced, two-storied motel a few blocks from our apartment. It was very white, almost dazzling, with its pebbly, shining stucco surface and neon lights that burned day and night. It was fairly appealing to tourists, I guess, as it was usually full. We were the maids.

“So, you want jobs for the summer?” the owner had asked.

“Yes,” all four of us said.

“And do you have any experience cleaning?” She obviously hadn’t read the applications where we’d all described our experience: cleaning our houses well, keeping our rooms at college tidy, cleaning latrines at camp. How hard could it be? My mother had tried to train us to clean house until the bathrooms and kitchens sparkled, and make beds with the linens pulled tight into hospital corners.

“Will you stay for the whole season?”

A chorus of agreement, whatever it took to get the jobs. And right then we did intend to stay through August.

…

I learned how much I hated cleaning other people’s bathrooms that summer. This was the motel we were in when the moon landing occurred, and I was sick of the place. Drugs were everywhere. You know that song “Under the Boardwalk”? Well, that’s where all the dealers hung out, and pot, LSD, and speed were easy scores. We bought our share, and though none of us were newcomers to this scene, we definitely expanded our horizons. I really needed a change of scenery.

So, with Jay in the passenger seat, on that hot August 14th, 1969, we headed for Woodstock. At the last minute, I decided to make a quick stop at my parents’ house. We drove up the Garden State Parkway over to the New Jersey Turnpike, west on Route 22 to Clinton. Five miles further west, I turned right at Johnny’s Truck Stop onto the familiar back roads to R.D. (Rural Delivery, or cow country) Hampton.

“What’s that smell?” Jay said. I laughed. The farmer on the right had just cleaned his barn, the manure’s familiar ripeness flaring my nostrils as we drove by with the top down. I breathed deeply. I liked that smell; it was earthy, country, home. The air got fresher, and it felt cooler as we left the interstate’s fumes, heat, and whine of the semis, and drove more slowly past familiar farms, neighbor’s houses, the one-room schoolhouse I’d attended for kindergarten, up the last hill past the little Norton Methodist Church whose graveyard abutted our yard and was a favorite playground for hide and seek.

Both cars were in the driveway when I pulled in just after dinnertime, and a few of my younger sibs were out on the patio jostling over a pogo stick. They immediately dropped it when they saw me, and they came trotting around the corner of the house.

Bruce, eleven, and Bernadette, ten, one of our two sets of “Irish twins,” reached me first. “What are you doing here?” they asked. “Can we have a ride in your car?”

“Hey! How are you guys?” It was good to see them, although, truth be told, I hadn’t missed my family all that much since I’d left home for college. The whole scene was difficult for me, for many of us. There were so many, and my parents were always tired, tense, worried about money. And, it seemed, they had decided I was bad, their “trouble” child. I was glad to have moved out when I did.

“We’re going to a concert in New York, and this is on the way,” I said, hugging them. “Where’s everybody else?”

“Inside.” I headed that way, Jay in tow. I suppose I thought he’d be a buffer—not fair to him. He soon bailed.

“Hellooo?” I said just inside the door. I heard cleanup noises in the kitchen. Two of my younger sisters, Blake and Brett, were at the sink and looked surprised to see me.

“Hey, hi Bon. What’re you doing here?” they asked, smiling at me. More hugs.

“Hey guys, this is Jay. We’re going to a music festival. Wanna come?”

“Yes! Really? Yes! Of course!”

“Where are Mom and Dad?” I asked.

“Down in the basement. Good luck,” Blake added, rolling her eyes. We’d all discovered in our own ways that our parents were not very comfortable with teenagers.

I headed out of the kitchen towards the basement stairs. Jay hung back, then said, “I think I’ll wait outside.” He must’ve sensed some of the tension our arrival brought with it.

Years later, my brother Jimmy asked me, “Why did you always have to make trouble?” I didn’t mean to make trouble–that’s just where my parents and I were with each other then. My dad was a conservative Republican prison guard, and I was a Democratic anti-war pacifist. He had been at Nixon’s inaugural ball while I was marching in protest. I smoked dope. He drank alcohol. I had long hair, wire-rimmed glasses like John Lennon’s, wore embroidered blue jeans and revealing shirts. He wore a uniform. I hated the “military-industrial complex,” and had told him so after a recent protest on my campus in support of the Black Student Union. My mom didn’t trust me “as far as I can see you.” The previous summer she’d found birth control pills in the bottom of my dresser drawer under my clothes and thrown them at me and me out of the house.

We hadn’t really talked since they had “surprised” me in Wildwood with a visit on my birthday in June, and they’d found some locals, obviously stoned, in my apartment. I had just walked in a moment before, after my drive back from Atlantic County Community College where I was taking a summer course in math, which I hated. The point was, I didn’t know they were coming. I might have done things differently had I been warned.

“You’d better send your friends home, Bonnie,” Dad said. I was stung by their expectation of obedience from me, and their assumed right to control me in my own living space, in front of my friends. Unable to support me financially, they had basically washed their hands of me once I went off to college, yet now claimed to be in charge of my friends, my values, and my activities.

“No, I won’t do that,” I said quickly, in a small voice, my legs suddenly shaking. I had never blatantly disobeyed my parents to their faces. “I didn’t know you were coming. You should have called me.”

They had several of my younger siblings with them, and I was embarrassed in front of them. This was just a bad scene. I smelled disappointment, anger, pot. My other housemates made themselves scarce, going off to bedrooms or out the front door. Bryan faded into a distant corner of the room.

“Let’s go,” Mom said, giving me one last look of disgust. She did tell me years later that she had been worried about me and wanted to “punch those boys in the face!” But at this moment, there was a huge gulf separating us from any caring that might have patched the gap.

They all filed out. Just like that, gone. I heard myself breathe; then my stomach muscles cringed. I stood there, unmoving, staring at their lingering images. Tears fell. After a few minutes, I said, “You guys should leave.” They did, without speaking. It was one of the worst judgments of my life; I had chosen smalltime drug dealers over family.

Now, back in their house only six weeks later, I was suddenly aware of my precarious position in the family. Before I could go down to the basement, both my parents came up, having been alerted of my arrival by one of my siblings. I had ten in all, seven of them currently living at home. My youngest sister, Brooke, was not yet two years old, a stranger to me, having been born during my freshman year in college.

“Hello,” my mom said, her face stony. I noticed her upper lip pressed down onto her lower one, an expression she often donned when not happy. “Why are you here, Bonnie?”

I turned to go back into the kitchen–a smallish room, smaller when we all squeezed in at the breakfast table–saying as I did, “I just wanted to stop in and say hello.”

I continued into the living room where there was more room, a window-filled wall, pine paneling around, big fireplace, many seats. I hoped to breath more easily in there, find more space. My parents followed me, as did most of my brothers and sisters. This was definitely a gathering.

My father lit a cigarette and sat on the couch looking down at his feet, just looking. He closed one eye as the smoke curled upward and into it after his inhalation. He held it a long few seconds before exhaling, then picked a fleck of tobacco off his lip.

“Bon,” he said, looking up at me. “I hope you’re not going to upset your mother.” Why did I come here? I thought as I felt heat move into my head and face.

“I hope not too, Daddy. My friend, Jay and I, Jay, he’s outside somewhere,” I turned and peered out the windows, stalling a little. “Uhh, we’re going to Upstate New York for a concert they’re having, an outdoor musical festival, and, well, I thought, well, this was on the way, and I thought maybe Blake and Brett might want to go with us to hear some good music. I’m sure it’ll be safe.” I looked hopefully at my sisters, who were fifteen and sixteen years old.

They said, “Yeah, I wanna go! Can we go?”

My dad closed his eyes, squinched them up tightly. Deep furrows appeared on his brow, and his head sank to his chest. He shook his head slowly and just made a grunting noise, a “nnh” sort of disbelieving sound, as he pushed out the breath he’d been holding.

My mom said, “No way.”

Dad laughed a little, opened his eyes, looked at me and said, “You’re kidding, right? Bon, don’t you know there’s no way I’d let them go up there with you and your friend, wherever he is. Is he one we saw at your house in Wildwood? One of those stoned hippies?” His voice got progressively louder as he went on, and I moved backwards a bit. “Not a chance!” Dad said. “With all that marijuana and free love? Then what?”

Mom sat there, her eyebrows raised, lips pulled in and tight, a straight line, her face quite ashen, long and drawn. Then she said, this time to Blake and Brett, “No, you’re not going. That’s all there is to it.”

I looked at my parents, my sibs looking at me, Dad studying the floor, Mom’s eyes now closed. I brought my shoulders a little closer to my ears, then waved to my sisters and brothers in one sweeping gesture, turned and walked out the door. “Okay, well, bye then,” I said, letting the screen door close behind me.

I stopped on the gravel path to the driveway and looked out at our yard, the vegetable garden at the far edge of the mowed area, my mom’s rock garden fading a bit with the heat of the summer, the pastures and pond beyond the fences, a part of me. I heard “Bye, Bon. Bye. Have fun,” come softly from an upstairs window, and looked up. I couldn’t see my sisters, but their voices came to me.

My parents needn’t have worried about my influence on them–most of my sisters and brothers got stoned and pregnant without my help. And there had already been one shotgun wedding and one abortion, the latter unknown to my parents.

Jay and I headed for Route 31 North and the New York State line without additional traveling “com-pan-yones,” as Arlo Guthrie would have said.

After sleeping at a rest stop somewhere near the Catskills, we arrived in Bethel, New York, early the next day, before the celebrated announcement, “The New York State Thruway is Closed!” was broadcast over the national airways that evening, and well before most of the 500,000 young people crowded onto Max Yasgur’s farm outside Woodstock, New York.

The paved road off the Thruway, marked by signs for the festival with arrows pointing “Woodstock this way” soon became a dirt road flanked by green fields. At the top of a knoll, we slowed; cars were parked along the road and in fields. We weren’t sure exactly where to go. Just beyond what appeared to be a possible entryway for the concert was a line of cars. We parked in a jumble of junkers, moms’ station wagons, and brightly painted vans. Parking was easy. Locating our car three days later was not.

With knapsacks holding a few essentials, Jay and I made our way up to the main entryway. We had tickets but couldn’t find anyone to hand them in to. Later we heard it had been declared a free concert.

Looking down upon the rolling fields, we saw the crowd had begun to gather in a grassy natural bowl in front of a black stage with massive scaffolding on either side. Rows of speakers rose toward the sky. Heading down the hill, we were able to get within seventy-five yards of this regal, larger-than-life centerpiece, close enough to see crew members setting the scene for what would turn out to be one of music’s greatest cultural moments, certainly, in our lives.

“Holy shit!” I said. “We’re here. We’re really here!”

“Yeah, dig it man, this is too cool.” Jay had a big grin on his face. We laughed. “Let’s put our stuff down and then go look around, check out all these freaks.”

We found a spot, spread our blanket on top of the tarp I’d insisted on bringing, and greeted our perfectly familiar stranger-neighbors, mostly college-aged students with long hair, bellbottom jeans with embroidered repairs, and muslin shirts, tanks and tees, no bras. The smells were enticing–patchouli, Dr. Bronner’s soap, and marijuana.

“Hey, man,” Jay said to a guy beside us. “I’m Jay. This is Bonnie. Can you believe this, man? We made it!” The guy introduced himself and his “old lady,” and the others in their group did the same. We shared a joint and small talk, asked them if they’d watch our gear, and went off to find porta-potties.

Waiting and watching the crowd swell was as exciting as the music soon to come. The stream of young people coming down the hill behind us lengthened and widened through the late morning and into the afternoon.

“Look at all of us–we’re growing!” I said to Jay. It was true–within hours of our arrival, the numbers climbed exponentially, and kept multiplying throughout the afternoon and night, and the next day and night.

Returning to our blanket, we watched a lot of scurrying up on the stage, long-haired techies coming and going, moving amps and wires. Soon, microphones were placed and re-placed around the stage. It was actually quite minimal for all the bands expected in the days to come. But these items too would grow in number over time. One mic was moved to center stage, and a plain wooden stool put behind it. Big drums—bongo types—and guitars were brought out and placed like props, part of the spectacle. Then, without fanfare, the music began.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Richie Havens.”

A cheer went up as Richie walked on stage, sat down, looked out at the crowd, and without more than a slight smile strummed hard on his guitar. He tuned up a bit, asked for more sound for the guitar, and then his familiar raspy voice broke out in song. He played for more than two hours. We later found out that the musicians who were supposed to follow him were late. They couldn’t get through traffic on the Thruway and had to be brought in by helicopter. Richie had to hold down the fort. He sang every song he knew, so when called back for an encore, he improvised.

Those massive speakers filled the air with the sound of what is now, perhaps, his most famous song, “Freedom.” We were silenced by his cry for freedom. It was so quiet that I might have been alone on that hillside when he began. But as he wrapped up the last few chords, the sound of clapping built and a thunderous roar echoed over the hills. I felt like this was home. This was my family, my people, and I belonged here. I cried.

Richie Havens sang our message, charging the country to change or else. We were a powerful body, a threat, a movement not confined to Yasgur’s farm. We were bigger than these fields, but this felt like our official debut. We knew we could change things, free our country from the chains of the military-industrial complex and end this fucking war. It all seemed possible on that hillside that night.

Richie started it out right. But it’s Joan Baez I think of more often when I think of that first night. As the thunder and lightning threatened to silence the musicians and cancel the long-awaited gathering, she sang war protest songs to us with resonant passion, finished after midnight.

And then the skies opened.

“Oh shit, Jay, we don’t have any damned rain coats or umbrellas. And here it comes.”

I could hear the people all around us moving, huddling, scrambling for cover. Our neighbors to one side had a big tarp.

“Here,” the guy said, “come closer to us, get under this with us.” Grateful, we did.

“If we sit on our tarp and use yours over our heads, maybe we’ll stay dry,” I said. With some rearranging, we managed to combine our spaces using the two tarps and kept a good bit of the rain off us. The smell of wet, sweat and rain was everywhere, filling my nose, my head, the air. We stayed close, moving the tarp periodically when a small river of rain would course down a corner onto our backs, legs, or shoulders.

Then, we heard Joan’s voice, her brave voice telling us, “Stay calm, people, this is when you need your neighbor. Take care of one another, stay with me. We’ll be fine, we’ll ride this out.”

For the next few hours as the heavens doused us, Joan Baez kept “half a million strong” calm and in one place, huddled under our blankets, turning the mic on periodically and talking us through our psychedelic haze of fear that we might all be struck by lightning, or swept away by flood. Despite the “purity” of the LSD, most of us were scared shitless, sure we’d meet our demise that night. But for Joan Baez, we might’ve panicked and fled.

Such was the drama of the night, enhanced by the spirit of the packed masses clinging to one another and the drugs. But we were calm. We were very quiet, waiting, smiling at one another through our fear, waiting for the rain to stop. Jay and I held onto each other tightly, found each other’s strength, and tried to discern reality from the psychedelic surreal.

Joan told us they had to turn off the power, including the lights and mics, because of the rain, but not before another voice, a man’s voice, told us, “People, I hate to bring this on, but you need to know there’s some bad stuff going around. Don’t take the pink acid–it’s not good. Hear me, it’s bad shit. Stay away from the brown acid too. If you have taken it, go to the first aid tents immediately.” He went on to describe the whereabouts of those tents. Finding it would have been a near-impossible feat given the dark, the rain, the drugs, and the size of the crowd. I was relieved Jay and I didn’t need to worry–ours had been yellow, brought with us from the Shore.

Periodically, during the ensuing downpour, they somehow turned the mics on and a man’s voice came to us out of the darkness.

“People, please come down off the scaffolding! It’s way too dangerous with the rain and lightning. Please stay off the scaffolds. They can’t hold all of you.”

“Are there really people climbing up on the scaffolds?” Jay asked me.

“I think so. I think I see them. Watch when there’s a flash of lightning.”

We waited for the next bolt, and when it came we strained to see what was happening up on the structures that had grown larger and more frightening in the dark.

“Yes, look, did you see them?” I asked.

But, as another bolt lit up the sky, I was no longer sure those were people—maybe fragments of clothing snagged in the stark angles, fallen branches of trees clinging to the bars.

“It’s not people,” Jay said. “It’s weird stuff, like garbage, man.”

“No, I saw people, and I think they were yelling for help.”

“No, if anything they were laughing. I think they’re having fun up there. Maybe singing.”

“You’re nuts,” I told him, none too sure he wasn’t right.

The same anonymous voice that applauded the calmness of the crowd assured us that the storm would soon pass. All those voices are still in my head–Joan’s, and Richie’s, and the others.

As the rain stopped, most people slept right where they were, having no place to go, really. I later saw many who had arrived after us set up tents on the periphery of the crowd. Smart. I didn’t own a tent. We settled in a heap with our neighbors, our newfound comrades, trying to find warmth through the dampness of our clothes. Luckily, it was a warm August night despite the rain.

The morning brought to light a dismal reality. We were wet and hungry and life was a mud field. There were not enough porta-potties, so people headed for the bushes. The concert producers had expected 200,000 and were grossly underprepared; food vendors were not to be found, sold out within hours of opening. People walked around looking dazed, seeking food and water. Seeing a gold mine, some local residents sold hastily procured wares for prices most of us couldn’t afford. Others, I heard later, were more generous.

People reached out to help those who were “having a bad trip” or were lost. Many wanderers lost their way back to their “spot” in the sea of music worshipers. Others tried to reassure and help them navigate. “What color is your blanket?” “What color shirt is he wearing?” “Were you on the right or left of the stage?” Markers sprang up–sticks found in the brush with shirts, bandanas and hats tied to them.

“Jay, I gotta pee.”

“Me too,” he said. We got up, stretched, realized our soggy state, and took off in search of the johns. Somewhere along the way Jay stopped to smoke with some people he’d met the day before. “I’ll catch up with you later,” he said.

I kept going until I found a porta-potty. Then I wandered down a dirt road into the nearby woods, and saw signs for “The Hog Farm.” I heard the music behind me fading only slightly as I made my way with others down the trail.

The Hog Farm was a fairly well known commune based in New York City that had been hired by the concert producers to provide security for the Festival. They dubbed themselves the “Please Force” and convinced the producers to allow them to set up a free food kitchen. They rode around the periphery on Harleys, flashing peace signs to all as they maneuvered through the crowds to aid and assist. Wavy Gravy, their leader, had become famous after a performance with Abbie Hoffman at the 1968 Democratic National Convention while presenting the Hog Farm’s candidate, a pig named Pigasus. When asked by the national press what they would use to maintain security at Woodstock, Wavy assured them that “cream pies and seltzer bottles” would work just fine.

As I walked through the food line, smiling young men and women greeted me. “Enjoy the food. Have a peaceful day.”

“Thanks. I will.”

“Take care of yourself. Namaste,” they said as they filled my plate with a rice-vegetable porridge-like mound.

This was a good sign. I had taken a few yoga classes, and had tried fasting one day, but failed by 11 am. I knew people who said “Namaste” were enlightened, and I understood I had a ways to go in that department. I was in good company here. “Thanks, man, this looks great,” I said. I was surrounded by smiles.

As I moved out of the food line, I saw a large white teepee set up in a clearing in the woods. It seemed to rise twenty or twenty-five feet into the air. A few Hog Farmers in long skirts with, yes, flowers in their hair, invited people into the teepee to warm up or dry out. I decided this seemed like a very good idea, damp and uncomfortable as I was, and followed the direction indicated.

Opening the triangular flap, I stooped only slightly to let myself in. I entered a very large, dimly-lit haven. There was a good-sized wood fire burning in the middle of the teepee, with five or six large logs set up in teepee fashion, embers burning red below, flames dancing a good foot above, and smoke curling slowly upward. I followed the smoke’s path with my eyes until I found its exit point, an opening in the very top center of the teepee held open by a long pole, supported by at least five, perhaps six, other large poles, the bones of the cathedral itself. I was in a holy place.

Twenty or so other people in this earthen-floored room ranged in age from fifteen to fifty, and, with the exception of what I determined were the few maintenance workers and me, they were all without clothing. It dawned on me that this was natural and practical given the circumstances, though I had never taken my clothes off in public before. Not even at home, in the bedroom I shared with five sisters; no, we dressed in the adjoining bathroom most of the time, or kept our back to the group area, or even stepped into our closets while hiding our private parts, as my mother called them.

There were ropes strung between the side poles of the teepee, and on these were hung, in orderly fashion, the drying clothes. The people were seated in a circle on benches and seats of all size and fashion around the perimeter of the fire, not very close to it though, as it produced an impressive amount of heat. Faces had a rosy glow in the dim light. Most eyes were fixed on the fire, savoring its warmth, its comforting crackle. The flavors of smoke and wholesome food filled the tent.

I set my plate down, and, as if it were commonplace for me, unzipped my jeans and stepped out of them, slipped off my shirt, and was at once as naked as the rest. As I walked over to the line to hang my clothes up, I hoped there was nothing stuck to my butt that shouldn’t have been there, and ran a hand across it nonchalantly to make sure. Reassuring myself that I also had nice enough breasts, I turned around. I was greatly relieved to note that no one was actually looking at me, at least not overtly.

I picked up my plate, turning first and doing a lady’s bend, then chose the nearest seat and sat down. I’m sure I sighed with relief. After a while I actually relaxed, subtly glancing at the naked bodies surrounding me, not too long at any one, and began to eat. I don’t remember any conversation. Perhaps no one talked. It didn’t seem important. We were in the inner sanctum; silence was perfectly acceptable and perhaps most appropriate. So were curious glances and friendly smiles. In the distance, I heard the music, now muted by canvas and trees.

When my clothes were dry enough, I, like the other sojourners, donned them and went back to our spot on the crowded hillside, feeling much more mature, a little more accomplished and perhaps a bit smug: I had been in the Hog Farm’s teepee–naked!

Things looked up. John Sebastian and his band welcomed the sunshine. Everywhere were loving, friendly people dancing, singing, laughing, and crying. The music played on. I found my way back to my “place” with no trouble. Around us people came and went; there was constant flux. You couldn’t just sit there for seventy-two hours straight.

In the moment, it was exciting and seemingly normal. Not until later, in retrospect, would we realize what an historic cultural moment we had been part of. These were the big name bands playing for us: Arlo in all his curly glory, with “Comin’ into Los Angeleez, bringin’ in a couple a keys”; Sly and the Family Stone got the crowd singing; Canned Heat and Santana sort of run together in my memory, but one of them took us “higher, higher!” Imagine a half million in a sing-a-long! Country Joe and the Fish had the entire crowd singing about the Vietnam War. And it’s one, two three–what’re we fightin’ for, don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn, next stop is Vietnam! Of course, we did give a damn, and that was partially why we were here. “See our solidarity, Washington? Can you hear us now?”

Janis gave us “…another little piece of my heart.” The Who, having just released their smash hit rock opera, “Tommy,” played so long I fell asleep. I missed the Grateful Dead completely and never heard the end of it from friends. The Incredible String Band, Jefferson Airplane, The Band, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Ten Years After–this was the only time I ever heard many of these greats in concert. What did they play? I haven’t a clue. But I was there.

By Monday morning the farm looked like a landfill. Mud threatened to swallow garbage, lost clothes, sunglasses, cameras, pipes, sleeping bags, and here and there a still-sleeping body. Two deaths and two births occurred but no violence to speak of. I didn’t see crazy hippies fornicating everywhere as the news reports would lead America and my parents to believe. Granted, I wasn’t everywhere, and maybe I did see a few who should’ve rented a room, but most of us were there for the music, the experience, seeking community, as we tried to make sense of a world gone crazy.

And then it was over, or at least we were done. My body felt close to my bones, my stomach empty and taut, my teeth hurt from clenching, normal after taking acid.

“Ready?” I asked.

“I guess,” Jay said. “How did we get all this in the packs?”

We wandered up the hill in the general direction of our car. Our soggy sleeping bags were heavy. We kept walking, searching, straining to see over the rows of cars and the moving wave of people.

“I was sure it was right there,” Jay said, walking in front of me.

“I don’t think I can carry this stuff much longer, Jay.”

He looked back at me, then around us again, neck stretched. Things looked so different then, just three days and a million light years since we’d arrived.

“Wanna stay here with the stuff? I’ll take this bag and find the car, then come back and get you.”

“You sure?” I asked.

“Yeah. I’ll find it.” He looked not so sure in his mirrored aviator glasses, slightly askew from having been slept on.

I lay down right there, on the grass, up near a string of cars somewhere on the edge of a field next to a very tall telephone pole with heavy wires anchoring it to the ground. Slumped beside my pile of damp blankets and clothes, staring up at a brilliant blue sky, I’m sure I looked like the lost soul of my mother’s imagination.

I listened to Jimi Hendrix still playing back on the stage. His was the closing act that Monday morning, and we had walked off in the middle of it, agreeing we’d had enough. But now, I listened. I heard him, and it hit me. Lying there, listening closely to his rendition of the national anthem, I cried—for the America I’d known, an America before the Vietnam War, and America now.

Jimi wasn’t performing the national anthem; he brought to life the sounds of war, of planes flying low and loud, of “the bombs bursting in air.” They screeched from those towering speakers, over and over, explosions reverberating against my stomach, my heart, my being. I heard them whine and howl, saw them land on towns and villages in a small hot country far from us, on fleeing people who didn’t ask for a war. Jimi made his guitar scream for them, and in doing so touched the hearts of this half million strong and all the others who wanted to be in Woodstock, New York, that summer of 1969. He brought us the sounds of a country at war, a country divided and at war with itself. He played America’s lament.

We headed back to the Jersey Shore. Looking over at Jay, I noticed he had a little smile on his face, one that mirrored my own. He’d turn to meet my eyes, and we’d shake our heads and laugh, letting it all replay in our minds.

Many people have asked me, “What was it like?” I have a hard time finding words to describe Woodstock. Imagine an instant city, Woodstock Nation. I was changed, all of us there were. I usually end up saying, “you really had to be there. You shoulda been there.”

Bonnie Parker is a retired nurse and educator from Princeton, New Jersey, where she ran an adolescent health and education center for over twenty years. She moved to Asheville two years ago, and is now pursuing her life-long dream of writing and being a good steward of the Earth.

About Woodstock Nation–This piece is part of a memoir in progress, consisting of stories about growing up as the second oldest of eleven children in rural New Jersey.

We were late to arrive at the prison. Colin’s release was set for 8 a.m., but with the five-hour drive from the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, we kept him waiting.

Colin had been “up north,” as our family called it, for over three years. We had seen him intermittently, but he found the visits painful, a reminder of how he had disappointed his family, had betrayed our trust. Each visit forced him out of his isolation, made him long for the outside, for a life without restrictions, a life that was not forever changed. We also found visits hard. Paul felt anger that his older brother could have been so stupid, causing him humiliation at school; and we, as parents, felt a visceral anguish at seeing our firstborn behind bars, a convicted felon. As a mother, the hug that was allowed at the beginning and end of each visitation was vital to my wellbeing, a tangible way to pass my love through to him.

We would meet in the Visitors Room, a small square room without windows, a room with two doors—one leading to the free world and the other back into the cellblock. The Visitors Room had two bathrooms, a desk for the guard, and four round tables with uncomfortable, straight-back chairs encircling them. To the left was a row of vending machines. On usual visits we would come into the Admit Building, leave our coats and any purses or backpacks in a locker, and then receive a thorough pat down. Allowed to carry in only a clear bag of coins, we walked through the gates and inside a wire-enclosed passageway that led to the Visitors Room, not quite into the heart of the prison but protruding from its side—within the razor-wired facility but apart. The coins were for the vending machines. Prisoners were not allowed to touch the money, so we would feed the machines coin after coin until they gave forth their unhealthy snacks of soft drinks, candy, and chips, denied at all other times.

While we sat and talked, other prisoners in the cellblock would walk near the glass-fronted door, peering in to see whom each prisoner was entertaining. And the variety was extreme. There was the girlfriend with the short skirt, badly dyed hair, and low-cut blouse, who always sat facing the door so that the other prisoners could get a glimpse of her breasts as she leaned forward across the table. The gaunt father, sitting across from his inmate son, would play checkers for hours and say little. The visiting mother, both loud and obese in bulging sweatpants, was eventually caught trying to pass drugs to her son. She had brought in cocaine stuffed down in her underwear. And then there was our family: college-educated parents who still didn’t believe what had happened and the younger brother who had always been the family hellion and was now being shocked into better behavior. We had been the kind of parents who made sure evening meals were shared together, who tried to keep communication open with our teenagers—parents who assumed our children would choose a moral road. We didn’t belong here, but did any family feel comfortable in this place? As we visited with Colin, we would sit and talk for a period of three to four hours while feeding him the normally forbidden Cokes and candy bars.

But today was different. Today Colin was coming home.

We walked into the Admit Building to find Colin sitting there with his prison footlocker at his side. Instead of his prison blues, he was dressed in thin tan cotton slacks and a matching work shirt. Both were badly sewn, not a surprise, since they were made by prisoners somewhere in the great state of Michigan. Colin’s dark blonde hair was cut short and choppy. Each clump stood distinct and separate from the others, obviously the work of a blind barber. But Colin looked great. Relief was shining in his eyes as we approached.

Our son was being released early. Michigan had passed its Truth in Sentencing Act after he committed his crime. Otherwise, he’d be sitting inside for another two or more years without the possibility of early parole. Even so, he hadn’t just sat inside. His job had been in the frozen food supply room for his unit’s kitchen. There he had unpackaged and shelved frozen beef from Brazil that was already past its sell-by date and chicken that was equally too old to eat. Some of the food packages were marked “not for human consumption,” but then prisoners had given up the right to be considered human. Other prisoners working in the freezers would slip meat into their pants to cook later on hotplates that were allowed in the cells. Colin told us the meat was barely worth eating in the cafeteria, much less risking trouble in the cell.

The first thing we all did in the Admit Building was to hug and kiss, the pleasure of the occasion bubbling up in laughter and jokes. This was the first time in over three years that the whole family—Bob and I, Colin, and Paul—had been together. Prisoners couldn’t have more than two visitors at a time, so Paul had always come up with one of us or with a friend.

With Paul helping Colin carry his footlocker to the car, we left the building. The footlocker must have weighed 150 pounds. Inside it was Colin’s prison life. Books on philosophy and religion that he had studied, including the Bible, the Koran, and books on Jewish mysticism and Buddhism; letters from people in our church; his calligraphy pens and inks that had earned him prison money from other inmates when he penned their letters home in beautiful script; crafts he had purchased from other prisoners (so that he would have gifts for us when arriving home). These gifts included a pencil holder made out of pebbles found in the prison yard and a perfectly formed long-stemmed rose made from bread and paper clay. Inside the fences other prisoners made useful crafts such as shanks fashioned out of toothbrushes, but Colin didn’t have one of these. Handcrafted weapons would be routinely confiscated when the guards conducted surprise inspections of cells, tossing mattresses, looking inside radios, and emptying footlockers. He had avoided those “crafts,” as they meant more time to be served.

Muscling up while incarcerated had brought protection and self-esteem. Besides his job and reading, Colin spent two or three hours a day in the yard lifting weights. Summer or winter, he was out there. In winter—and the winters were long—the temperature would remain around zero degrees and the wind, bitter and biting, would assault the yard. Feet of snow had to be shoveled around the equipment before exercise could begin. Cotton gloves that gave no protection from the frigid weather kept the hands from sticking to the bar. By lifting weights, he was not bothered by the bullies and sociopaths who inhabited his life. Strong and powerful, he now had a massive chest and upper body, nothing like the lanky build of his childhood and adolescence.

We could not leave the prison fast enough. As we drove out of Kinross, the small, desolate town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, we passed the other prison in town, larger and even grimmer than the one we had just left. The only industry in this area was incarceration. The land was deforested and flat with no beauty. This was a place to leave, never to return.

Crossing over the bridge into the Lower Peninsula, we asked Colin if he was hungry. He was starving, so we stopped. It was still morning so we ordered breakfast with coffee. While Colin ate scrambled eggs and hash browns, sausage and a stack of pancakes, and juice and coffee, we also ate with vigor and watched him. He was different, sure of himself but closed off emotionally. His language had changed in three years, morphed from the politeness of a middle class vocabulary to prison speak, a dumbed-down dialect of double negatives interspersed with the predominate adjective: “fucking.” His voice, deep and carrying well, caused families with children and older couples to turn. Being polite didn’t earn respect in prison, and Colin had forgotten the niceties of please and thank you. Being middle class could cause retaliation and abuse, so that too was hidden. The perfume of prison—that unpleasant, slightly unclean smell of too many men living together without hope—was still upon him. This was not the unwashed, wet dog smell that he had as a child, when he came inside, dirty and scuffed, on a summer day, but an institutional smell. The smell would wash off with soap and water, but the language and remoteness would take months to go.

As we traveled home, talking and beginning to reconnect, I recalled the night Colin was arrested. The doorbell woke Bob and me at 1:30 a.m. Flashing lights from the three police cars in the driveway were visible from our upstairs window. Bob hurried downstairs, pulling on his robe, meeting the police at our door. There was no warrant, so he didn’t let them inside. Also woken, Colin and Paul hurried by me as I stood in my nightgown at the top of the stairs. As our sons joined their dad, the police asked Colin to step outside. Handcuffing Colin with his hands behind his back, they read him his rights. I remained rooted in the upper hallway, crying, unable to move, horrified at what was unfolding. I had guessed that Colin and his girlfriend were the criminals in the robbery of a liquor store in our town, which they had held up using a paintball gun. The police had called the house several times. I had told none of this to Bob, hoping it would go away. But, of course, it did not.

Colin told me later that he had committed the crime to prove to himself that he was a man. Surely there must have been a simpler way.

My original feelings were all of guilt. Where had I failed him? Had I been so engrossed in my own pain of having HIV that I had neglected him? Had I failed to model the right behavior? Ultimately, I blamed the HIV. That was the easiest. The virus had spread its evil over the entire family. Although I was the only one infected, Colin was contaminated with the fear of a mother dying, the inability to talk about it with others because of the reality of rejection, and the unvoiced anger resulting from loss of innocence. He had been our creative child. He had been the one who was always making sculptures in his room. The one who turned cardboard boxes, toilet rolls, and other household waste into fanciful creatures held together with rolls of tape. He was the child who had shown his fellow students in the English primary school the joy of breakdancing with complete abandon. But things changed when we told the boys of the HIV. Colin was in junior high and turned inward. In high school he suffered panic attacks and depression. Despite seeking help, he found an outlet in drugs and a wild girlfriend. The crime that followed was his terrible, life-changing decision.

But now we were arriving home. Colin noticed the greenness of the lawn and the lushness of the trees. Prison had been gray, an environment devoid of color and beauty. While locked up, he saw a sameness in everything, a numbing monochromatic grayness of paint and metal, everyone in uniforms, both prisoners and guards, and surrounding it all, tall double fences topped with rolls of razor wire. There was someone always watching and always controlling his actions. Growing up, Colin had spent hours drawing, loving all things beautiful, and now, returning to a world with choice, privacy, and visual stimulation, he slowly relaxed.

There would be hardships ahead that continue today. Doors would still be closed for employment ten years later even after he obtained a college degree.

Using kung fu and exercise, he continues to work through anxiety and feelings of frustration. Reading philosophy stretches his mind. Colin is now working in landscaping, for a stonemason, building walls of stacked stone. Re-contouring the sloping topography of his own yard into terraced levels, he is adding steps and stone walls, crafting a unique environment that he first pictured in his mind. Built without mortar, these walls are held together and supported by the interlocking of stones, each carefully chosen. There is strength and simplicity in hand-built walls. Their beauty lies in function. These walls do not imprison but provide escape and empowerment through physical labor and imagination.

Lorraine Cipriano lived the first thirty-two years of her life in Lake Jackson, Texas. Married with two sons, she moved first to Michigan and then to England. Now retired, she lives in Weaverville, North Carolina, with her husband of many years.

About Coming Home—Brought up in Lake Jackson, Texas, a small middle-class coastal town, I put my faith in Walt Disney. You were meant to live happily ever after, particularly if you whistled while you worked. Contracting HIV in 1983 through a blood transfusion, I saw my life view shattered. This story centers on one of the struggles that my family experienced in the ensuing years.

Elmore Leonard’s best-selling Ten Rules of Writing inspired the (U.K.) Guardian editors to ask more writers for theirs. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one] Here is a sampling:

Margaret Atwood

1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

Jonathan Franzen

9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

Roddy Doyle

1. Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

6. Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine; e.g. “horse,” “ran,” “said.”

Richard Ford

1. Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.
2. Don’t have children.

…

Inspired by the proliferation of rules, members of Elizabeth Lutyens’ Spring 2011 Prose Master Class came up with a few rules of their own. The following is a selection from their lists:

Michael Hopping

1. Find a way into the story’s world and write from there—as guest not dictator. Stories establish their own rules. Learn and respect them.
2. Focus attention where the story wants it; avoid provoking questions the story doesn’t want asked.
3. Depart from standard language usage only to serve the work.
4. Be sure-handed on the page. No unnecessary scatteredness, equivocation, conditionality or uncertainty. Don’t fake what could be researched.
5. Readers notice beginnings and endings. This applies to clauses and sentences as well as paragraphs and entire books. Take advantage.
6. Engage the reader’s gut with vivid sensory detail, allusive imagery and tension. Use rhythm, sound, sentence structure, etc. to enhance atmospherics.
7. Disconfirm expectation. Readers sleepwalk through what they think they know.
8. Don’t weigh readers down with fat or wear them out with excess complexity.
9. Sweat the modifiers.
10. The only absolute rule for fiction writing is: This is the only absolute rule.

R.R. Brooks

1. Tell a story in which change happens.
2. Be sure that some part of your story makes you feel good.
3. Incubate and then edit.
4. Edit and then incubate.
5. Read aloud to the dog. Respect her feedback. Expect nothing from the cat.
6. Read as if you are an editor, red pen in hand.
7. Ask “why” about every action in your work.
8. Embrace a comma after the penultimate item in a list.  Unless you mean “peas and carrots” as one dish. In which case, precede it with “and.”
9. Fear not the Internet.
10. Use a critique group to kick your butt as a writer.

Lenny Bernstein

1. Tell me a story. Character development and scene-setting are important, but it is action that keeps me reading.
2. Keep it simple. I stop reading if I have to go back more than once or twice in a story to re-read some of the text to understand what you’re trying to tell me.
3. Keep it believable. Unless I’m reading science fiction or fantasy, I don’t want magic or unbelievable coincidence.
4. Stay on track. Secondary plots and side stories make the primary story more interesting, but they shouldn’t take over.
5. Don’t assume that I’m a psychiatrist. You may leave clues in your story that would allow a psychiatrist to develop a profile of your character, but they aren’t going to mean anything to me. I need some overt indication in your story before I will conclude that a character is misogynistic, psychotic, schizophrenic, or anything else.
6. Apply Occam’s razor. If your story can be interpreted in two ways, I’m going to pick the simpler one. If that’s not the one you want me to pick, rewrite the story so that picking your interpretation becomes the simpler choice.
7. Children should be child-like. Children, including teen-agers, are usually self-centered, impulsive, and thoughtless. Portraying them in any other way is unrealistic.
8. Inanimate objects are not characters. Characters have to be able to act and react.
9. Be true to your time and place. You wouldn’t give an 18^th century character a cell phone. It makes no more sense to give him or her 21^st century attitudes.
10. Don’t overdo the sensory detail. Description is fine, but I don’t need to know every object in a room or the color of every article of clothing a character is wearing.

Pete Solet

1. Read what you like and what you don’t. You can learn a lot.
2. Do not think about craft until you are well along.
3. Tell the truth. This is more important than talent or accomplishment.
4. Do your research.
5. Be grateful for everything that’s happened to you, good, bad, and ugly. They got you where you are.
6. If you tend to go through many revisions, go back to your original draft and couple of early revisions and see what you have lost.
7. Try not to think about readers when you write. You are probably delving into unknown, sometimes difficult territory when you write. It can be a spiritual experience. Respect it.
8. If in a workshop, there may be feedback that is especially helpful, not only that which gives you a different perspective on your own writing but also, and perhaps more importantly, will make you a better reader.
9. Remember that you are acceptable the way you are and that you are loved.
10. To thine own self be true. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Writing is not the most important thing in the world.

Maggie Marshall

1. Listen to what your story wants to be, not just what you want it to be.
2. Try getting rid of the last sentence of any paragraph or section and see what happens.
3. Start the story as far into it as you possibly can.
4. When stuck, lie down and make yourself “dreamstorm” about your characters.  Take the road not yet taken and see where it leads you.
5. When really stuck, take a break and read someone else’s good work.
6. Plot.  It’s a good concept. Worth incorporating into any story!
7. Read your work aloud as much as possible, not just to check dialogue, but for rhythm and pacing.
8. Make physical descriptions organic –preferably from a character’s of point of view, rather than emanating from some omniscient narrator hovering above the scene.
9. Cut dialogue in half when editing (I never seem to follow this one but I know it works).
10. Don’t choose as your public place to write a café with the best scones in town, unless you want to gain an unattractive amount of weight around your middle. You will then have to take away a good part of your writing time to exercise off the aforementioned scones.

…in the flute’s haunting, birdlike notes, the god breathes on the listener and infinite and finite are momentarily experienced as one.

— The Book of Symbols (Taschen, 2010), p.664

Tonight in a city parking lot,
harried by a frantic life,
I trace the note beyond
a filigree of leaves
to a silhouette, flute in hands,
embraced by warm light.
Pied piper soothes.

…

Silver notes ride
rays of moonlight,
glisten on dew damp leaves,
cross dark shadows eyeless,
summon us.
Phantom figures, we leave campfires,
duck branches,
wend our way,
drawn by
the pull,
as strong as the tides,
to the source:
a lone figure
standing on moist earth.

…

Under a canopy of reverence
a child at the altar
summons those same silver notes;
in the rear, unseen,
I support the melody circling higher to the rafters.
Worshipers, surprised by unrehearsed harmony,
seized by the eternal,
know sacred space,

…

Star memory twinkles bright.

Alexandra Burroughs, a retired English teacher, grew up in the Catskill Mountains. She now lives beside Williamson Creek, where she is a member of the Wordsmiths of Transylvania County critique group. Bedtime Story and Other Poems was published in 2004. Her poems have also appeared in The Lucidity Poetry Journal, The Cove Rincon, and in the anthologies, Out of Our Hearts and Minds and Clothes Lines.

About Star Memory—In “Star Memory,” I attempted to capture the uncanny way we can feel the breath of God upon us, in the most ordinary places and times, through the clear notes of a flute. Immediately we are filled with the wonder, beauty, and terror of the unknown, the truth of our existence.

THIS HOME

is a green cedar-shingled and leaf-shrouded shelter,
a balm in Gilead,
wood-hewed and rambling, wrap-around decked,
concrete comforting, pebble-paved and brightly painted, a welcome,
a refuge from storms, miraged and real, roof-leaky, slap-dashed,
image-maker and imagined, and loved.

Is my deepest self, searched for,
longed for, begged for, must be paid for,
symbol-seeker, child-maker, soul feeder, a reader, a writer,
a jumbled Jew-Christian-Buddhist-Animist-Agnostic wanderer,
a melody, a mother.

And is furthermore a marriage,
for who amongst us finds ourselves without the other coming,
a spirit-abode,
coupled in union,
sin-sick souls, healing and healed,
root-sustained, root-provider,
silence.

This home is an ivy-laden stone walled archetypal web
shining with a full spectrum of colors,
ephemeral and eternal,
a dual-abiding dwelling of communion and solitude,
of ripeness and loss,
of connection and separateness,
of suffering and oh such joy,
not just Hansel and Gretel lost in the woods,
nor the lights in the cottage ahead,
both Odysseus at sea and Penelope weaving,
Eve-fallen and followed, The Three Graces,
misunderstood and misleading,
a disquieting contentment, a story sought,
an adventure,
a blessed conundrum when
the door is flung open,
and the guest is welcomed.

Mary Jo Amani lives in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Her poem, “If I could understand the last line of that poem I might just eat another slice of that cake,” was published in WNC Woman, and the poem, “Helicopter Seeds,” was runner-up in the 2011 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition. Besides poetry, she also writes short stories and children’s books. The children’s book, Excuse Me, I’m Trying to Read, winner of the 2010 NAESP Foundation Picture Book Award, will be published by Charlesbridge Publishing House in March 2012.

About This Home —“This Home” was written as part of an assignment to try something outside our normal writing style that encompassed an archetype we felt represented our life now. I used “This Grizzly” by Reg Saner as my inspiration.

Larry and I had gone to Times Square, despite the sixteen-degree temperature, to welcome in the New Year, because the furnace in our building was broken, and the inside of the apartment was forty-something, and the landlord was unavailable in Florida, and Larry said that being in a crowd of people had to be better than freezing our asses off at home.

We merged into the crowd at 42nd Street and stared up at the ball that would announce the arrival of 1963. My breath steamed the air, and the blackness of the sky above intensified the cold. I snuggled between Larry and the stranger on my right to absorb their warmth. At the countdown, we all leaned forward to watch the ball. When it reached bottom, Larry yelled, Happy New Year, took me in his arms and kissed me—a kiss that made me forget the cold. As he pulled away, I tried to hold onto him, but he was kissing the girl next to him. The guy next to me grabbed me and planted one on my mouth. I backed away from him into Larry, who was kissing the girls around him. Happy New Year, I yelled in his ear.

He hugged me, took my arm, and led me out of the crowd into the dark streets for the bleak walk back to East 28th Street. We left behind the comfort of Times Square, where the night had sparkled with the promise of what the New Year would bring. Larry believed absolutely in that promise. Believed that 1963 was the year he’d make it big as an actor, meaning Broadway. His acting teacher said he had the talent; all he needed was the luck. Larry believed in making his own luck, which was why, the day he arrived in New York City from Springfield, Illinois, he’d changed his name from Sammy Joe Odom to Lawrence Wolf. That name has star power, he said.

By the time we reached our corner, the sparkling promise of the New Year had turned bitterly cold, and that last block home looked endless. I stamped my feet and clapped my hands to keep the circulation going.

Come on, slowpoke, Larry called as he took a couple of running steps and slid like a skater on the frozen sidewalk, the ice left over from a snowfall earlier in the week.

I walked toward him with short, mincing steps. Larry, sure-footed and nimble, laughed at the way I waved my arms for balance. The only way to walk on ice, he had told me, is to plant your feet firmly, keep your knees bent, and glide across the surface. He’d learned how to keep his balance and how to fall, he said, during summer vacations from college when he traveled the Midwest with a small circus as a tightrope walker and trapeze artist. The trapeze was now in the closet of our apartment.

He exaggerated the glides, waved his arms, saying, Oh-oh, like he was going to fall. As if to show me how, he let his feet go up in the air and landed in a perfect pratfall. I burst out laughing. His exaggerated struggles to get up made me laugh even harder, until I was afraid I would fall.

It’s not funny, he said. Help me up.

I thought you did that on purpose, I said, still thinking it was a joke.

Hurry up, dammit. It’s cold.

Somehow I got Larry up, slipping and sliding as I did, almost landing beside him. He leaned so heavily on me as we walked the short distance to our building that I thought he’d take us both down. I got him inside and handed him over to the banister so he could lean on that instead of my shoulder.

Our building was really a tenement, our apartment a tub-in-the-kitchen sixth-floor walk-up. Winters, we froze because the boiler always broke, and the landlord was always in Florida. Summers, we sweltered because the sun baked the tarred roof with furnace-like heat that came down through the ceiling and out the soles of our feet. We stayed because the rent was only forty dollars a month, all we could afford on my eighty-one-dollars-a-week salary.

Larry refused my help on the stairs, so I said I’d go on ahead and left him clutching the banister, about to take the first step up the first flight. I hurried to get to the apartment to light the oven and open the sofa bed, but also to spend as little time as possible on the second floor where the ancient Mr. Wang lived. Mr. Wang picked up newspapers and discarded food from the street, and brought everything home in a shopping cart. The stomach-turning smell coming from behind his door permeated the hall. His was a rear apartment in the same line as ours, and I was sure that the roaches running around our kitchen came from his.

I unlocked our door, reached in, turned on the light, and waited a few seconds to give the roaches a chance to hide. I didn’t look toward the sink and tub, but went to the stove and lit the oven, turning the temperature to four hundred degrees. It was an old-fashioned stove, enameled in pale yellow with light-green trim, standing on four legs. The oven was on the left side, the same height as the burners, which was nice because I didn’t have to bend over to put things in and take them out.

I got my pj’s from the closet in the small back room. It was supposed to be a bedroom, but Larry used it as an office. Back in the kitchen, I opened the oven door and draped the pj’s over it. By the time he got to the apartment, it felt almost warm. With the sofa bed ready to receive him, all he had to do was undress. He couldn’t bend to untie his shoes so I knelt down to help. I can do it, he said, moving the foot away. But he couldn’t, so I did. I also removed his jeans, pulled layers of sweaters over his head, one at a time, held the blankets as he got into bed, uttering loud groans, and covered him.

I got in next to him, to mingle the heat of my body with his. He moved to the far side of the mattress and turned his back to me.

…

That spring, the smell from Mr. Wang’s apartment became so bad that Mrs. Leary—third floor, front—called the Department of Health. The inspectors broke in and found Mr. Wang’s decomposing body. It was the same day Larry got the male ingénue part in the touring company of a Broadway show.

I told you ’63 would be my year, he said. He’d be on the road a year-and-a-half, but the time would fly by. And with the money he’d be making, we could afford a nice apartment—in Greenwich Village with two bedrooms and a full bath, he said, like placing an order with a waitress. He left the beginning of May.

In June, I found an apartment on Waverly Place to Larry’s specifications. I moved us the beginning of July, the same day Mrs. Leary left to live with her daughter on Long Island because Mr. Leary’s heart condition had finally caught up with him on the stairs coming home from work.

Larry’s show was in San Francisco at the time. I included the news in my weekly letter, adding, as always, that I missed him and loved him; he sent postcards back saying ditto. I wrote I could take two weeks off in January when the show would be in Chicago for a month. He wrote he was counting the days.

I landed at O’Hare late afternoon expecting to be met by Larry. Instead, the PA system called me to the Travelers Aid desk with a message from Larry: Take a cab to the hotel. I looked on the other side for something more. An explanation? An apology? Blank.

I got to his room expecting the usual bed and bath, but found a living room/kitchenette and bedroom, and another note: Sorry. I’ll be there soon as I can. Love you.

I hung a few things in the closet and noticed he had some new clothes, including a suit. He had refused to own a suit in the three years we had lived together. The rest of my belongings I put in an empty dresser drawer. I saw a stack of books by the bed: mysteries. The road trip had made him a reader. I sat in the living room and dozed as I waited.

Larry rushed in at six o’clock. Sorry, sorry, sorry, he said. The show has a new cast member, and the director called an extra rehearsal. He stripped off a dirty white shirt and a sweat-drenched t-shirt. God, you look good enough to eat, he said. So do you, I said, moving toward him. He held up a hand. I wish I could, he said, but I have to get back to the theater. He finished changing. Come backstage after the show.

Dinner? I asked.

After the show. There’s ham and stuff in the fridge if you’re hungry. There’ll be a ticket for you at the box office. He paused at the door, grabbed his crotch and repeated: After the show. He blew me a kiss and was gone.

I picked up the white shirt, put it on a hanger, hung it and the t-shirt on the shower rod in the bathroom, and waited for show time.

Dinner after the show was pizza and beer with the cast and crew in the room of the stage manager, Don, and his wife, Brenda, an older, Mom-and-Pop-type couple. Although everyone was pleasant to me, I felt like a girl whose boyfriend has brought her home to meet the family.

A game of Monopoly followed dinner. The younger members of the group got down on the floor to play. Larry said it had been a tiring day and we were going to bed. Among the distracted murmurs of good night, Cheryl, an intense blonde who played the female ingénue, said in a snide voice, Get a good night’s sleep. Her moist blue eyes, which some people would call dewy, looked at me with wide innocence.

Be nice, Cheryl, Mama Brenda said.

Back in Larry’s room, I asked about Cheryl’s hostility.

What do you mean? he said.

Come on, Larry, she made it plain she doesn’t like me. Why?

Oh that, he said. She’s got a crush on me and is jealous of you. Ignore her. It’s you I love, he said as he unbuttoned my blouse and kissed the exposed skin.

Of course. Girls always took Larry’s flirtations seriously. I surrendered to the kisses as he continued to undress me. Besides, given Cheryl’s stringy hair, damp eyes and doughy skin, I had nothing to worry about. She wasn’t his type.

…

In June, the show played Boston. Again I went. This time, Cheryl was relaxed and friendly, but the new wardrobe mistress—tall and thin with dark hair and blue eyes, a description that fit me—gave me looks as cold as that Chicago winter. I watched how she was with Larry, how her hand lingered on his arm, and saw the intimacy in the look she gave him. And then I knew: Larry had been screwing these women while I was in New York waiting for him.

I skipped that night’s performance and went to his dressing room after the show. He sat before the mirror tissuing off makeup, the jar of remover open on the table. His face still had that fresh Midwestern look, and his smile still radiated boyish charm—a charm he used to win people over, especially girls. I never took his flirting seriously because he told me over and over I was the only one he loved, which may have been true. But I wasn’t the only one he wanted to have sex with.

I looked at his reflection in the mirror and asked how many women he’d been fucking. His eyes dropped to the jar on the table. He picked up the lid and carefully screwed it on.

Who told you? he asked.

I shook my head, said I was going back to New York, and that he’d have to find someplace else to live when the tour was over. I walked out on his protestations of how much he loved me.

When I got home I threw out the trapeze.

Genève Bacon’s articles and stories have appeared in various publications. In 2004–05, she was awarded an Emerging Artist grant from the Asheville Area Arts Council; in 2007–08, as a member of the Flatiron Writers, she shared a second grant with fellow group members Toby Heaton and Heather Newton to publish the collection of short stories, Irons in the Fire.

About New Year’s Eve, 1962—The inspiration for this story came after I read Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids. I started out writing a memoir of the 1960s, but the more I wrote, the more fictional the story became.

Tonight the spider creeps out from under the dresser.
The spider senses the darkness. She senses that all others
are asleep in this place. She senses these things for
she is a spider who creeps out at night. In some circles spiders are

called arachnids. She is not out foraging. She is
going for a walk. The arachnid is going for a walk like
we might on a Sunday in the park. She carries a passel
of spiderlings in the satchel on her back. She has

eight beady eyes. Her eyes are cold—these are the
eyes of an arachnid. They contain no emotion.
She is an emotionless spider out for a stroll in the dark.
The spider leaves the room where the human sleeps.

She inches into the kitchen. The spider
detects the pets who slumber on the floor
around the corner. The arachnid creeps toward
the snoozers who sprawl on flimsy, stinky

cushions. Now the spider has a destination
but still no purpose. What impels Spider’s nocturnal journey,
one may ask. Who knows, but by the time Arachnid
has crept to the edge of the kitchen, the first shaft

of morning light squeezes through the shuttered windows.
Sunlight stings her tiny brain.
Spider with her sack of babies scurries back
into the darkness beneath the stove. This night’s journey

is done. Arachnid and her spiderlings will never return
whence they came. Weave a new web and start again.

Jerry Willis lives in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, where he has practiced law for the past twenty-five-plus years. Poetry is one of his fondest avocations, both reading it and writing it.

About Nocturnal Journey—The idea for this poem came to me late at night as I lay in bed. While my dogs were sleeping in the next room, I wondered what other creatures were stirring in my house.

You take me for a ride in the country. I sit behind you in your ancient open car. Like a good mother you stop when I ask to look at a downy woodpecker perched in a bush beside the dusty road. While I watch, the little bird whirls and swells into a red vulture with a face black as the devil’s cloak. His wings droop and his amber eyes are as sad and cold as river stones.

Why are you here? the vulture demands. I don’t know. My mother brought me. His eyes brighten when he sees her. Your mother and I met years ago when she came here to hang her wash on that old snag.

Suddenly, I am sitting alone in a posh restaurant. A waiter brings me a steak, blood forming a ring round the inner rim of the alabaster plate. I cannot eat.

John Oravets was a newspaper copy editor for forty-three years before retiring in 2004.

About The Red Vulture—This prose poem is based on a dream. As an admirer of Carl Jung, I have kept a dream journal for many years. Jung said that occasionally we have a “Big Dream,” and my encounter with the Red Vulture seemed to be one of those.

Imagine glazing 6 sushi plates
at once…to make them all look like
the original…the one everybody loves.

Imagine combing your hair impatiently,
fast…unconsciously…without feeling
the long rose wood teeth tickling your scalp.

Imagine painting 6 round plates
laid out in an assembly line
losing desire for radiant red, butterscotch yellow, bone black lines.

Imagine soft, silk hair flowing, sliding
between fingers, slowly, patiently…with loose
love, long thin caresses wanting.

Wendy Kochenthal lived in New York City as a child and young adult, fled to the Maine woods and ocean, and now lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

About Production Pots, No More—I wrote “Production Pots, No More” at a time when I felt I had lost my creativity and my sense of self for the sole purpose of selling my pots. I was inspired while reading about archetypal symbols.