Month: January 2023

Surviving the Wind

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Reflecting on the Grist… the inspiration and the process

I was riding my bicycle from University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa to downtown Honolulu when these lines came to me:  My mother once told me that I was as trustworthy as a viper.  She should know.  It takes one to know one.  I could feel it was the beginning of a story, and I knew if I just held on to those lines, the rest would follow.  When I arrived at work, I began writing it.  It just flowed. 

It is written in first person, through Angel.  It begins and ends in present tense, and uses past tense to tell the reader about the events that lead up to Angel’s escape.   

I workshopped it in ENG 414 and with my writing group with Ian MacMillan.  Later that year, in December 2005, I performed it for a required assignment in my graduate class with Achy Obejas.  It was included in my MA thesis, The Grace of Dark Times.  

A few years later, when I was enrolled in my MFA for Professional Screenwriting program, I adapted it into a full-length screenplay.  It went through many versions, too many to keep track of.  I pulled a couple of scenes and created stand-alone short screenplays to be used by students in the creative media program, a sister program to the screenwriting one.  Different versions of the short pieces were turned into short films over four years.  It was interesting to watch characters I’d imagined come to life on the small screen.

One of the many screenplay versions was included as part of my MFA thesis.

Apology Accepted

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Reflecting on the Grist… the inspiration and the process

This is a story about two people who crossed paths decades before for a short period of time–a fall semester in which he was an English teacher and she his student.  It was a difficult time for both of them for different reasons.  He holds onto the year book, even though he only taught for that one semester, and she holds onto the memory of that semester and the experiences from that class.  They cross paths at the point where they have both made life-altering choices for reasons the reader doesn’t know.  The reader might guess by her actions that something has happened to her marriage or to her husband–something too difficult to survive.  And even though there are no clues as to why Mr. Sorenson has made his choice, he has prepared for it.

The story is told in third person, beginning from his perspective and then at the point where her apology has been delivered and he falls to sleep, the perspective shifts to hers.  It is told in present tense, so the reader can feel the immediacy of their actions.  

It was workshopped in class and in my writing group, both under the mentorship of Ian MacMillan, and included in my MA thesis, The Grace of Dark Times. 

It’s been many years since this was workshopped, but I remember clearly that Ian’s feedback inspired the detail of the blade catching the medial tendon and the flaw in the wall paper.    

Visiting Mrs. Albert Souza

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Reflecting on the Grist… the inspiration and the process

One day I was driving down Kailua Road and saw an elderly man sitting in a chair, smiling.  The sun shone through the leaves of a sheltering tree, and I remember thinking, “He’s waiting for his daughter to pick him up.”  And the story unfolded from there.  His daughter picked him up on Sundays, but this Sunday she wasn’t coming; she was sick.  When she does visit him, it’s in his dreams as a memory, or in his waking life as a ghost.  

Although this is fiction, I drew from my sons’ Portuguese grandparents’ traditions of faithfully visiting family graves, although candy was gifted, not beer.  

During editing, I chose details that honored my sons’ grandmother by using her middle and maiden name for Mrs. Albert Souza and my grandparents by using their birthdates for the dates of her birth and death.

It’s told in third person.  The tense changes, first to represent a past routine, then to reflect the present, and lastly to portend a future event. 

I received feedback in Ian MacMillan’s ENG 313 course, workshopped it in my writing group with Tammy and Chris, mentored by Ian, and included it in my MA thesis collection, The Grace of Dark Times.

The Brothers at Pearl

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Reflecting on the Grist… the inspiration and the process

In the late 1990s I attended a weekend film school through Pacific New Media taught by Doug Olivares, a cinematographer, and the following year a group of us started a film club.  A theme was suggested, and we had a month to create a short film based on it.  This story began as a short film based on the theme of “forgiveness.”  I wanted to avoid clichés and create a subtle message.

I had been inspired by the many stories of U.S. and Japanese veterans of Pearl Harbor reaching out and making peace with one another during the December memorials.  To me, these men were the embodiment of forgiveness and peace.  

To create the film I used still images, photographs of my sons and grandparents and real headlines from the 1940s.  I turned the color photographs black and white to be consistent with the era.  I did the voice over.    

I was really happy with the way the short film turned out, and I received compliments on it by my peers at the film group, so I used it as the basis for a short fiction.

To frame the story I used the daughter helping her mother sort through photographs and artifacts as an opening to discuss Pearl Harbor.  The story takes place in December, during the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.   

Regarding timing… the story was written twenty years ago.  The daughter would be my parents’ generation, as my grandparents were in their 30s when Pearl Harbor was bombed.  Today she’d be in her 80s.  

It is told in first person and present tense, and it does a time jump from the visit prior to the reunion to the visit after.

I once read it at a library event, Out Loud in the Library, and someone thought it was a true story.  It was nice to know someone believed it so authentic to be true.