#And if he writes it in a journal with hearts and your names mashed together so what!!

[jadewritesficshere]

Eddie x fem!reader (reader wears lingerie, no other descriptions of reader given except mentioning hitting that spot just right)

Contents: lingerie, both are a lil pervy tbh, humiliation, crying, praise kink, sub!Eddie, this is literally just horny ramblings

18+ only

It wasn't every day you came back to your house and your best friend had broken in. Maybe, every other week at best.

Usually, Eddie would be high eating your snacks (you were thinking about getting a lock for the cabinets). Or he would be watching whatever show you recorded and tease you about spoiling it (you threatened to use the VHS to beat him over the head and strangle him with the VHS ribbon if he did).

But, you had no clue Eddie was even in your house today. His van wasn't parked in your driveway when you came home. His shoes weren't in a haphazard pile at the front door. You had 0 clue he was there.

Not until you heard a thump coming from your bedroom. Which, your first thought went to the knickknacks you had that someone could be stealing (they wouldn't cause to a normal person it was junk but to you they were memories).

You grabbed a knife from the kitchen (you weren't gonna die without a fight, besides you learned a thing or two from the horror movies Eddie made you watch). You quietly pushed your bedroom door open and-

Shit.

Eddie was standing in your room in front of your mirror. Miles of pale skin just on display, scattered with contrasting dark tattoos he had. Nothing on, save for your lilac lingerie.

The palest purple lace bra, you can see from the back isn't even clipped correctly, missing the hook entirely. But the color is striking on Eddie. The lace thong cuts high on Eddie's ass, and you try not to gawk at the little black heart tattooed on his cheek. Eddie's scars seem softer amongst the lace.

How often did Eddie do this? Come over and put on your lingerie? Stand in front of the mirror and rub his fingers over his one hardened nipple. You couldn't see from where you were, but you knew his cock was hard. He'd be leaking all over your underwear, marking them.

Eddie lets out a little moan and it ignites a fire in your gut. You lick you lips as you watch Eddie, which maybe makes you a pervert but really it is your house and he is wearing your clothes so if anyone is-

Fuck why is it so hot?

"So-" you clear your throat. Eddie let's out a screech (that you are pretty sure ruined your eardrums) as he whirls around. He tries to cover himself with his arms, curls in on himself. And Holy cow he is hard.

He is big, so big, the tip just peeking out of the waistband of the panties. You can see the pearly translucent precum already dripping onto the underwear.

"I- fuck, I'm aha listen I can exp- i can explain!" Eddie fumbles over his words. You blink a few times tearing your eyes away from his massive dick (oh it would feel so good it would hit every spot just right).

Eddie's face is red, tears welling up in his eyes. "Oh Baby, no," you rush over, pausing when Eddie flinches. You gently put a hand out on Eddie's shoulder, drawing him into a hug, " It's- it's okay. Please don't cry." "Don't hate me." You gasp in shock, pulling back to look in his eyes," I could never!"

Eddie's eyes are wet, filled with unshed tears. His nose is turning a bit red, from embarrassment, shame, or sadness you can't tell. But his cheeks are such a pretty pink you think it'd look nice elsewhere on his pale skin.

Eddie hides his face with his hair, shuffling his feet a bit. "So..." you pause unsure how to ask it politely so you just go for it," I can see this is a kink thing...but like, what kind?"

Eddie shrugs," Wanted to feel pretty..." You frown," You are pretty Eddie." Eddie shakes his head and gestures to his abdomen," Not with these."

Eddie really should not be drawing your eyes any further south then his face. Cause your pulse kicks up and the fire inside you lights back up your spine. You can't help but notice his dick is still hard as a rock.

"You are too pretty." "Not really." "Yes!" Not-" You shove Eddie lightly, causing him to stumble back and fall onto the bed. Eddie's eyes widen in shock as he peers up at you.

"Don't talk about my best friend that way! You are too pretty. And handsome. Funny. So talented," You sigh and step forward, into Eddie's parted legs. Eddie leans up on his elbows and blinks rapidly at you. "You're so fucking pretty Baby." You murmur, hand reaching out lightly touching his thigh.

Eddie let's out a whine before looking startled at himself. You can't help but notice his dick twitch under the pale purple lace. "You like being called pretty?" You smirk. "Like when you call me Baby," Eddie replies softly.

You aren't sure who moves first, but suddenly your arms are wrapped around each other. Your lips meet Eddie's without hesitation. His are slightly chapped but still soft, molding perfectly against your own.

You run your hand down Eddie's neck, to the pale bra strap and snap it. He gasps and you take the chance, slipping your tongue into his mouth. He tastes of weed, mint gum, and just Eddie.

Eddie moans against you, hips bucking forward seeking friction. You pull back, gasping for air. Eddie let's out a whine," No, come back-" "I ain't going anywhere Baby."

Eddie's eyes flutter shut as he bites his lip. He hums as you kiss his jaw, lightly nipping at his pulse point. He shivers against you, hips bucking forward again. You suck lightly as you decide to give him some relief.

Your hand snakes down, grasping him firmly. You lightly squeeze through the lace, giving just enough friction as you move your hand.

"Look so good in my lingerie Baby, you should wear it more often." You murmur between kisses. Eddie nods absently, gasping and moaning beneath you. "Got a red pair that has some nice straps, you'd look so metal and so so pretty."

Eddie freezes, mouth falling open. His brow wrinkles slightly as he moans, pleasure overtaking him. His hips spasm, even his thighs twitch, as he comes. You can feel your underwear get soaked along with part of his stomach.

You stroke him through it, extending his pleasure until he whimpers and pushes at your hand. You pull back, smiling softly at his face. Eddie's eyes flutter open, darting down to your lips. "Kiss?" He asks quietly, unsure. You simply smile and kiss him again.

[windvexer]

kind chicken, if i may ask for your advice, i'm at a moral dilemma. i'm so utterly entranced by the idea of the figure of the horned one within tradcraft, but also having the cultural knowledge and hindsight of the great variety of entities that tend to get lumped into this entity feels ... wrong? inconsiderate? appropriative? i'm not sure, i can't in my mind look at an entity with purported links and faces within so much - Woden, Gwyn ap Nudd, the Devil, Lucifer, Dionysus, Pan, Silvanus, Saturn, Cernunnos, etc - and just accept the careless mashing together of different cultures and put aside all the differences and details and contexts. it just feels to me like its disrespectful to all these cultures and mythologies to just "create" an ambiguous figure from all these other figures derive, and yet it also /feels/ right to me. it's kept me in stasis for so long in my craft because i want so badly to point at a name and say "THIS is the horned one" but they're never quite right, never quite perfectly encapsulating of what feels like the scope of this entity. i know this is rambling, but this has genuinely bothered me for years and i just don't know how to get over this hill to be able to fully connect with the horned one. the logical part of my brain is just locked in a tug-of-war with my heart and intuition because theres just too much that we know to be able to boil something down to a single archetype, because thats not how culture works. and how can i hope to work with something if i don't even know their nature? i can never know if i'm just making it up and being insensitive. if you or anyone else could help me out in this line of thinking, i feel like i could finally take another step forward.

I think you have got a nice logic puzzle here, my bud. You have made serious strides into solving this problem for yourself:

You know your guy has to be in there. You just haven't found him yet.

Witchfathers are not exclusively gods of lore. It's like going through the top 15 Hollywood A-list actors and saying you can't cast someone in a roll. There are still five million actors in Hollywood alone.

Witchfathers may be ancestors, or faeries, or wights. Or something that is all three. Your Witchfather may be the Oak whose roots you woke up in the last time you left this earth, before you were reborn. He may be a spirit of the land, who is only recorded in the journals of mystics who have lived where you lived, and five Livejournal posts published in 2005 edited for anonymity.

There is not now, and I do not believe there will ever be, a comprehensive list of all entities that can be a "Witchfather" in Traditional Witchcraft.

So I must ask you:

What would happen if you were never able to discover the lore name of your Witchfather? What if there is no lore name, because he's unrecorded?

And I must also ask:

Why do you need a name?

If we imagine all these named entities as being like stained glass stacked on top of each other, then they all combine together to influence the concept of the Horned God archetype. There seems to be a shape illuminated in this symphony that resonates with you.

So why not just cut out that same shape from black paper and let the light shine through it?

That's the shape of your god, I imagine.

You do not need a name. You can start with what you know. Writing your own poetry and hymns is a good way to start.

"To the Nameless God seen in the reflection of polished horns." That kind of thing, you know. Where do you see him? How do you know him? Write it down. Record the traces of him you find like a biologist lovingly recording tracks of a rare animal.

"To the Witchfather whom I know by feel but not by name, the hidden one that calls to me from the spring green fog." What feels right? Is he not behind a green fog? I think you would know. Maybe he is behind sheets of rain, crashing onto the rock in a cacophony.

He's got epithets. You will know them because you will be able to feel if they're right or not. Is he the Thunder-Blackened Face of the Battle-Oak? Is he the Jewel-Drenched Meadow of the Summer Rains? Is he the Frozen, Endless Lake?

It's not for an archetype. You're not trying to define the archetype, right. You're just trying to outline a guy you know has to be in there.

For offerings, for rituals, it's all the same. "To the North I call the Hidden One who exhales stars, whose hoofprints make lakes and valleys, who carries the sun and moon on his horns."

How do you work with someone if you don't know their nature?

But I think you do know his nature. I think you know his nature very well, but you are trying to pin it to one of a handful of very popular gods, which of course it does not fit.

Because I do not think yours is any of them.

[writing-for-me-at-this-point]

Pragma | Alucard

Request: Hi, I love your blog. Would you mind writing about what it would be like to for Alucard to fall in love with the reader post season 3? Thank you! Keep up the good work!

Word Count: 1826 words

Page Count: 5.2 pages

A/n: hope you enjoy this!

Tags: @catherinedm​

        All Alucard could do was deny that you held no ill will towards him. He had found you when you were running from a cultist like group, ready to burn you alive just for learning older sciences, he could only laugh at the bitter irony. Your legs were whipped and tired, your chest was bruised and the rest of your body was worse than you could have imagined, and so he took you in when he knew you were not a threat. Or would be conscious for a good while.

        "I seem to only get more and more desperate for heartache, don't I?" He whispered to himself as he looked to you, your body was freshly cared and cleaned for, and yet he found on the other end of the room near the opened door. His fear that gripped his heart made him feel like a child, wanting to be held and cared for by those around him, yet cannot seem to overcome going up to an adult for help.

        When you woke up days later, cleaned and cared for, your body aching like never before- and the man in the room staring at you like you had just killed his mother in front of him, full of shock and fear. Speaking with him in this stage of your relationship was scarce, only what needed to be said was put into the air, either met with silence or acknowledged with muted nods and small hums.

*****

        Alucard was never known for his temper. He was a sweet and gentle boy according to his parents, something he wished to be after seeing his mother be... her, he was never to freak or lash out on those around him. When he realized this, it had been to late, his hands were running through his hair as tears slipped effortlessly from his eyes- curled in his bed with his knees to his scarred chest. He had been helping you walk more, working on your legs and helping them gain muscle, when you had fallen near him while he fell as well.

        You both had slipped due to the old rugs folds getting caught in his foot, making him slam onto his back while you managed to land on your knees, and when you turned to see if Alucard was alright he looked at you in pure fear. He shook as he saw you on your knees, on his right side, like her. Just like she was when they both locked him onto his bed, tied with the burn of silver, looking at him with such hate and disgust.

        Your eyes held worry though. Worry for his well being. Care. Your heart was opening up. But in that moment, he saw back to that night, her. His face contorted into anger, yelling at you while his lungs burned for air, profanities settled into your mind as he was cursing your existence. 

        "I trusted you! Gave you everything! And here you are again, having me on my back, a knife to my fucking heart!" He was leaning upright at this point, while you crawled backwards away from him, the fear evident in your eyes but he didn't see. It wasn't you at that moment. It was the flickering image of Sumi and Taka.

        Once he had caught his breath, he closed his eyes, hands coming to his hair as he shook violently. You realized what was happening, your father was a soldier and suffered from delusions like this, and your mother would come running to anchor him back into the present once his past came to torment him again. 

        "Breathe. Alucard, breathe. Evenly. Exhale longer than when you inhale, please." You coached him gently, your hands in front of you in case he were to look up, you weren't a threat to him- he knew that. You told him when to inhale and hold, before letting out the breath that wavered less and less. You needed to anchor him back to the present, he wasn't seeing you yet, but you would make him to help with his sanity.

        His breathing evened but tears still came, flowing against the flushed pale skin, and you made your way closer to him. You held out two fingers, mimicking your parents, and waited for him. He saw, and pulled out two gloved fingers to wrap around yours, his shaking would start to still after a few moments.

*****

        You hadn't seen Alucard in two days, his mind was taking its toll on him, and you managed to figure out the basics of his situation. His mind was sending him back to the most stressful moments of his life, the wound on his mind hasn't been stitched and is now bleeding into his daily life.

        You wanted to learn how to help people mend their minds, ranging from trauma to genetic ailments, the human mind was so vast and complicated so of course it drew you in. In doing so, you met an old vampire in Athens, she was kind and sweet- teaching philosophy and medicine to those she knew would use them appropriately.

        Alucard was depressing himself further into his mind, and you needed to help him, though helping him would need to be paced. He needs time and luckily you both have plenty of it. You made your way around the castle and found a few empty notebooks (not wrapped in human skin), a few books on meditation and spiritual awareness, and some recipe books next to fictional ones that held important meanings on self worth.

        Should you be looking through his things?

        You didn't care. He needed help.

        You then split the books into two piles, one for Alucard to journal in and write all his thoughts in and the other for you, to write tips and other important information for Alucard to read so he can understand what is going on and how he can help himself cope with his own mind. The books that helped with meditation would help him order his thoughts and understand how to calm himself in case he couldn't find an anchor, (you hoped the spiritual awareness would be a plus? Dracula had lots of books so it wouldn't hurt.), and books of things you thought he'd enjoy in general when he needed an escape.

        Once all was finished, you placed everything into a small net bag, limping your way to the kitchen, you decided the man needed something to eat. After all, food made everyone happy, right? Right. A simple dish of grilled chicken and veggies, with a side of mash potatoes and some water, you slung the bag on your shoulder and made your way to his room.

        You didn't hesitate to knock, but you made sure it was soft and non demanding, before calling his name in the same manner. You heard shuffling, but the door never opened and you never were welcomed in, but you knew you needed to intervene and help boost Alucard onto a support line.

        "I'm coming in, in a few moments, so if you need to ready yourself please do, Alucard." You heard nothing on the other end, and waiting for about two minutes with your head against the door, you pushed it opened slowly to allow yourself into the dhampires room.

*****

        When you had managed to get Alucard fed and on a routine to help himself more and more each day, he had apologized to you for the outburst, and decided that leaving you on your own when you had trouble walking was not the best idea. He was surprised you accepted his apology and brushed his actions off, deciding to help him instead, it was a reaction different than what he had expected.

        Allowing himself to be near you much more often, he opened up a bit after a week of sitting by your side, setting you into the nine circle of his mind. You peeled back the shallower layers at his pace, setting him for a more favorable way of opening his heart and mind up, and seeing how he thought and felt about everything.

        He was intriguing and intelligent, you found yourself tearing through your own heart just to open up and show him the exposed muscle, opening yourself up to him inevitably as he did to you. He felt warmth bloom in his chest that only rose up when he was in your presence, and while you helped him heal the wounds inside him, he continued to help you heal and gain your strength back physically.

        A mutually beneficial relationship is all.

        Yeah, no.

        It was a puppy love shrouded in pain and betrayal that was settled into an old wound, the bleed has now stopped, and the clotting had begun, a deep scab was there before the skin would over take it in a tough light pink blanket. There was healing when there used to be a knife digging itself deeper into the soft flesh.

*****

        "Do you plan on leaving?" His voice was soft and scared, his breath was shaky while pale arms wrapped tightly around your waist, the sheets covering the both of you blanketed the intimate scene of a boy begging for the girl to love him back- to not leave him, though he thought he deserved it, it started to become less of a thought on his mind.

        He accepted himself for what he is and what he has done.

        He knows what he wants and what he needs.

        You were on the top of both lists.

        He was being selfish, but you told him that was good, he was learning how to realize his worth in what he wants. He was still respectful of any decisions you made, but he begged everything in the universe for you to say no, no you wouldn't leave him. You wouldn't abandon him, you'd stay and love him as you do now, and for the rest of your time together.

        "Depends." You chuckled, rubbing his arms that were secured on your waist, your eyes were closed as you felt him curl around you.

        "Depends?" He mumbled into your hair.

        "Do you wish for me to stay?"

        What? Of course, he wanted you to never leave him, and he was sure he never gave the impression of being disinterested. Hell! The position you were in now speaks for itself! He sighed, realizing you were just teasing him, and settling his mind down.

        "Of course. I never want you to leave."

        "Then I never will."

        His heart had burst at the affirmation of love, a tear slipped from his eye as he smiled wide, the supernova in his soul sparked his love for you to become brighter and stronger.

        "Thank you."

[recentanimenews]

FEATURE: Will The Future Rule? Making Sense Of Chainsaw Man's Anime Adaptation

  Chainsaw Man is a comic where the hero rides on the back of a shark through a hurricane. It’s also a non-stop series of narrative rug-pulls exploring the psyche of a teenage boy struggling to grow up in a world where everything and everyone is expendable. Chainsaw Man is one of my favorite reading experiences of last year: I laughed, then cried, then yelled at the sheer audacity of what was happening on the page. A mash-up of Devilman, FLCL, and grindhouse schlock, it wormed its way into my heart in a way a comic has not in a while.

  And I’m not alone: Look online and you will find Chainsaw Man animation reels and Chainsaw Man MADs. You’ll find these two excellent fan-made EDs, and this great (but spoilery!!)  write-up on The Comics Journal. You’ll find plenty of fan-art and folks shrieking 24/7 about Makima, Aki, and Power. As the joke goes, “Why animate Chainsaw Man when all of Chainsaw Man is animated already?” Well, joke’s on them. Do you hear that sound in the distance? The shriek of metal against metal? Chainsaw Man is getting an anime, folks.

    Adapting Chainsaw Man is a tricky proposition. At first glance, the comic was practically made for it, with its cinematic layouts and spectacle. But the monster designs are complex, and the balance of tone and content is deceptively easy to spoil. Focus too much on the character drama and you miss the comic’s knowing stupidity. Gloss over Denji’s weakness and the story tips over into insufferable power fantasy — or depending on your tastes, an even more insufferable power fantasy. Adaptation is about interpretation, and about choice; rendering Denji’s story as literally as possible on the screen would be a fool’s errand, especially for a comic that so deeply loves movies. 

  The trailer MAPPA released is pre-animated, but that’s fine! As sakuga fanatic and anime industry expert Kevin Cirugeda has pointed out on Twitter, some of the best anime productions of all time started with pre-animated trailers. We don’t know release date details or its final look, but based on what we’ve been given, we can make educated guesses.

    What stood out immediately to me on the list of staff were two names: Kensuke Ushio and Kiyotaka Oshiyama. Ushio’s a former member of the great rock band LAMA who’s since composed for anime including Ping Pong the Animation and Liz and the Blue Bird. Oshiyama’s a genius, capable of everything from monster designs to directing and animating whole episodes of anime by himself (plus, he directed FLIP FLAPPERS!) When did these two folks last work together? On Masaaki Yuasa’s Devilman Crybaby, of course! Ushio composed the score, while Oshiyama was put in charge of devil designs and directed an episode as well. Now they’re back in the same positions, with Ushio writing the music and Oshiyama handling the monster designs. 

  The director of the series is Ryu Nakayama. Some might call him “inexperienced,” but this isn’t quite true: looking through Nakayama’s past work reveals some impressive credits ranging from directing and storyboarding an episode of Fate/Grand Order Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia to handling GAMERS!’ entertaining opening sequence. Best of all, Ryu Nakayama collaborated with character designers Mai Yoneyama and 7ZEL to direct “raison d'etre,” an animated music video for singer-songwriter EVE. EVE’s YouTube channel of music videos is shockingly consistent, starring a murderer’s row of talented animators. “raison d’etre” is up there with the best of them, featuring striking color design and an ever-changing oneiric cityscape. I can’t say this early on if Nakayama will succeed in grappling with what is sure to be a challenging production, but the chance to see what one of EVE’s collaborators might make of a series like Chainsaw Man is a gift.

    There’s another name on this list that’s just as important as Nakayama’s: Tatsuya Yoshihara, credited as the Action Director. You probably know Yoshihara from his work directing Black Clover. I know him from Muromi-san, a series with a truly deranged opening animation that begins with cute dancing mermaids and ends with shrieking heavy metal and the complete extinction of life on Earth. Yoshihara and Nakayama have collaborated in the past, most memorably for me on an episode of Yatterman Night. Nakayama contributed a significant amount of work to Black Clover, and now Yoshihara has his back on perhaps the most important project thus far of Nakayama’s career.

  The remainder of the staff list is similarly loaded. Yusuke Takada is an art director who’s contributed great work to series like The Eccentric Family, where he worked directly with Chainsaw Man’s current color designer Naomi Nakano. Hiroshi Seko’s a scriptwriter credited on countless popular action series, such as the best action series of the past decade Mob Psycho 100 — but also on last year’s weird science fiction extravaganza DECA-DENCE! Technical director Makoto Nakazono acquitted himself well at Trigger on SSSS.Gridman and Little Witch Academia. Yohei Miyahara’s an accomplished photography and CG director. There really isn’t a weak link on this team — the folks producing the series clearly want a hit, and they’ve hired the talent to ensure that is what they will get.

    Will the Chainsaw Man anime be good? I’m personally very excited! But I don’t know. Anime is hard to make. Too much of it is made too quickly. Producers in the anime industry have been ramping up their efforts to recruit more foreign talent so as to fuel the industry machine, and Chainsaw Man’s production will likely result in the line between “anime fan” and “animator” becoming even muddier. This isn’t even including the factor of continued COVID-19 prevalence in the world. There are a lot of variables, and any one of them could make life difficult for folks on the Chainsaw Man team.

  Here’s what I can say: I’ve watched that Chainsaw Man trailer an embarrassingly large number of times. I believe that Nakayama and his crew are capable of creating a worthy adaptation. I trust that MAPPA currently sees the series as their golden goose, regardless of where things stand in a year or two. It’s almost certain that this show is going to make or break many, many people’s careers. Until it airs, all I can hope is that those working on the project are given the time and resources they need to do their best work. After all — THE FUTURE RULES!

  Are you a fan of Chainsaw Man? What’s your favorite EVE video? Do you think you could defeat Kobeni in Dance Dance Revolution? Let us know in the comments!

      Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. When he is not playing this very challenging video game, he sporadically contributes with a loose group of friends to a blog called Isn't it Electrifying? You can find him on Twitter at @wendeego

    Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a feature, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: Adam Wescott

[jinjikook]

House of Cards: An Ace (M)

word count: 4.8k

genre: super angst + references to smut; non-idol AU ; set in i need u + run mv universe, references to other mvs

pairing: ot7/reader (includes all pairings but enforced yoonseok, vhope, jikook, yoontaeseok, sugamon, yoonmin, jinkookmin)

summary: all eight of you were just trying to live life, go with the flow. unfortunately, fate had much more awful plans for you all.

warning(s): lots of angst, plenty of major character death, suicide, self-harm, depressing thoughts, cursing, sex (straight and gay), murder, violence, eating disorders, codependency, drugs, smoking, verbal, physical and mental abuse, sexual situations, use of the word slut and whore (both used only once), promiscuity, mentions of being arrested

a/n: this is suuuuper angsty so please read the warnings beforehand because it has a million things that could trigger someone. this was inspired by the song listed, along with a video edit that i’d love to link but unfortunately, the one link i had seen it from was a repost with no luck in finding it so if anyone recognizes the edit to go with the song, please let me know!

music: dynasty - miia

masterlist

There was no definition for you all.

Lost.

Distant.

Drifting.

Just following your hearts until it inevitably led you over the edge; into the unknown, the deep dark abyss of which you never thought you’d welcome so familiarly, like a distant cousin or old friend from kindergarten. Like someone you’d lost touch with and barely remembered their name but you still had shards and fragments of their memory, burned and etched into your mind in a million insignificant, nonspecific ways—from how the bitter taste of your coffee was like the candies from their mom’s purse or the hollow sound of your desk drawer reminded you of someone’s hollow eyes, empty smile full of promises you knew neither of you would keep.

You couldn’t say you all hadn’t tried to stay together, amongst it all.

When Taehyung’s dad would beat him to a pulp, you all vowed to make it the glue to hold you closer. When Yoongi’s music went nowhere, it just solidified your need to stay united. When Jimin’s love rejected him, it just made you all codependent on each other, saying how no one’s love could compare to the bond you all had.

Even when Hoseok swallowed a bottle of pills, you all realized that it made the group tighter, as you huddled around the too-stark-white hospital bed, stench of chemicals and medicine in the air; with the boy who used to breathe life in everything he did, his sunshine warm skin now pale in comparison to the milky sheets he was laden in. All your knuckles matching the empty color along the bars of the bed, gripped tight and the fabric below just darkened with tears as they soaked into them, only making Hoseok look that much more devoid of life.

But sometimes, life had its limits.

As much as your little ragtag gang liked to test them, push past them and tease Mother Nature by screaming in that bitch’s face with as much malice as you could muster, at the end of the day there were things that you all just weren’t capable of withstanding, holding up like a weak twig on an already bare tree, trying to weather the hurricane that came rushing at millions of miles an hour, determined to break you off and sweep you into the whirlwind until you’re forever forgotten, spread across acres as only bits and pieces of who you used to be.

Soon all would remain are those stale, empty, hollow memories.

Like how a strip of aluminum foil just made you think of the burrito joint Taehyung danced on a table at, how a candle’s gentle flicker would remind you of Jeongguk’s birthdays, his favorite thing to do being blowing out them out and waiting with his eyes scrunched shut and wish being plotted for his friends to smash his face with frosting and bits of cake.

The smell of fresh strawberries made you retch, only able to recall the sweet taste you used to savor, Seokjin’s chapstick melding with your own countless nights, only for you to be torn away and forced to mash lips with Yoongi right after, just because he was always the one to taste you last, to leave with your tongue on his.

Some called you a slut, a whore.

For what? Just letting things run their course?

You weren’t sure if you’d ever end up with any one of the guys, feeling like all it would ever be is whirlwind romances, quick fucks in closets and stairwells with palms muffling sounds until you reached your high, going lax in their grip and smiling contentedly at your inner beast being satiated, while whoever was with you finished quickly. It was never a chore but it was something done daily, just another aspect of humanity you all indulged in.

Sometimes it was with one of the guys, sometimes they did it with each other and sometimes you just took care of it yourselves.

Not that big of a deal you always told yourself, because it really wasn’t. You loved them, and you always hoped the feeling was mutual amongst them as well.

“Hey Y/N, wanna blow me?” Jeongguk asked one night and all you could do was shrug and tug his zipper down, wetting your lips because you knew he liked things sloppy. Not once did you doubt their intentions, fear that they’d speak ill of you or treat you like some object because your friendships ran deeper than that.

Hoseok and Yoongi were close, Taehyung somewhere sandwiched in the middle there. Jimin was fond of Jeongguk and the latter was protective of Jimin, Seokjin being the Taehyung in their pairing. Namjoon and yourselves just slotted in the cracks in-between, being something along the lines of rubber cement in the shredded wallpaper lining your friendships.

Somewhere along the line, the rain began to trickle in and soften your hold, the boys slipping from your grip one by one.

Taehyung was the first to go.

He had always been a rebellious guy, loved to go tagging with Namjoon and mock fast food workers for giving into society’s ploys. Never one to back down from a challenge, he’d participated in more orgies than you could count on your fingers and toes and you’re sure he’s never said no to a dare—having slept with a teacher, gone streaking past a police station and even slipping in a tab of ecstasy on his tongue, just for shits and giggles. You swore he’d be the one to go kicking and screaming if anyone even thought about threatening your groups bond.

But one day, it was just too much.

Too many bruises on his skin, too many harsh words spat at him and his sister, too many days where he wasn’t sure if the sun would rise and he’d be alive long enough to see it.

So he made sure one day he would see it, but his father wouldn’t.

He ran for days after it happened, after someone called about screams and wails of anguish; after his apartment was littered with cops, each inspecting the spatters of blood along the floor and window of the small room, swabs in clear cases turned purple to indeed confirm it was exactly that, blood. Tests were ran to show the fingerprints on the broken beer bottle indeed were the dead man’s son’s, the boy with a record for graffiti and public indecency. The boy with a boxy smile that charmed all the female officers whenever he’d be brought in, the boy who you felt inside you too many times to forget.

It wasn’t like any of you hadn’t tried to find him, countless days of searching and shouting and hoping he’d turn up like a lost dog, ears perked and stomach receded until you finally brought him in to have a big meal and a warm bath.

But he never came.

Someone spoke of a boy with pretty eyelashes and dead eyes standing by the ocean, muttering about how sorry he was, how he wished things could’ve been different but he wouldn’t have changed a damn thing because every small, seemingly insignificant detail in his life led him to you, to your friends. To his lovers and exes and all the in-between that you couldn’t name or define. That same someone said they watched as he took a deep breath and jumped over the railing, taking a plunge and never emerging from the dark waters of the stormy shores.

The hurricane powered on.

It took ages to even sort of recover, Yoongi went back to smoking and as many times as Jeongguk would blow out his fire to keep him alive a little longer, it only served to double his cigarette count. Namjoon always kept a journal on hand, writing the most obscure details of the days in it because he was worried one day, something else would happen to another one of them and he didn’t want anyone’s memories to die with them, for their days to be meaningless and forever lost in the wind. He had a black hair tie always on his right wrist, a running joke that he just wanted to give it to a pretty lady one day just to make her life easier but you knew what it was for. You at least commended him for taking the tamer route in hurting himself, unlike Jimin who—no matter how many sweaters he’d wear even on the hottest of days—couldn’t hide how he befriended a razor, the dotted lines of scabbing and scarring flesh being his only lifeline, as ironic as that was.

Hoseok lied and said the orange bottle in the trash wasn’t his and Seokjin would just keep dealing out cards on game nights, as if nothing happened, as if he wasn’t putting out stacks for eight players when there were only seven of you seated. As if Taehyung’s cologne wasn’t still sitting there in Jeongguk’s gym bag right where he forgot to grab it. As if the scratch marks from when Yoongi fucked him too hard on the table you were sitting at weren’t prominent still, the grooves dipping under where your dug your nails into, hoping to cover them up with your own tracks.

You want to say it was unexpected, that you all had no idea it was coming.

But really, it was just a matter of time before someone else came crumbling down, an unfortunate victim to the Domino Effect.

Jeongguk was covered in bruises, supposedly not from the car that carelessly drove straight into him. The medical examiner said he was in a fight, two different assailants with big fists and a drive to kill but the stake in his coffin, the final nail, were the headlights that he stared into before it barreled into him, splattering him onto the pavement.

It was poetic, how his blood looked so similar to Taehyung’s father’s, to Jimin’s when his wrists began to leak down his arm. It was just blood, it flowed in everyone and despite the fact that when you donate it, you have to be so specific when you scribble it down on paperwork, it all looked the same on the ground.

“Kiss me.” Yoongi looked at you with disgust, his lighter a constant flicker in his fidgety fingers.

“What is it with you people? Two of us are dead and we’re supposed to act like it never happened? Like we can all go through the motions without their presence around?” It was the first time someone had verbalized it, made it real by saying it out loud. The room was pin-drop quiet—not like it wasn’t already—but now everyone’s eyes were on Yoongi.

“We’re not forgetting about them, Yoongi,” Namjoon corrected. His pen already blindly scratching down the date and time of this incident to forever keep in his records.

“Just because you put a few things in your little dream diary doesn’t make them alive, Namjoon. They’re fucking dead, in the ground and lost at sea forever. At least with Jeongguk, we got some fucking closure but Taehyung… he’s still out there, floating like trash or sunken like…”

“Like treasure.” Hoseok finished.

Taehyung was always closest with Hoseok and Yoongi. Jeongguk also but…. he wasn’t around to speak his mind right now.

“Maybe we just need to be with them then. They’re waiting for us, probably. God knows Jeongguk can’t do anything without one of us to hold his hands anyways.” Jimin mumbled, fingers toying with what laid under his striped sleeves, his skin marred in a similar pattern. You don’t even know why he even bothers with the sweaters anymore, it was no secret what he did to himself.

“Jimin. Never say that.” Seokjin chastised, fingers wringing out excess water from the sponge he was using to clean up the drink Namjoon has spilled on the table. The table that still has sticky sweet liquor inside the grooves that Taehyung left behind.

“It’s not like we aren’t already headed that way anyways. Hobi has tried and so have I. Pretty sure Y/N attempted to too, after Jeonggukkie died.”

“Don’t call him that.” It was Yoongi’s turn to chastise the younger, eyes shutting as he tried to push the rotten, beautiful memories of Jeon Jeongguk in his prime, chasing after butterflies and having the stars in his eyes.

“So what if we’ve tried? Clearly, God doesn’t want us, that’s why we haven’t succeeded.” You picked at the stray tweed from the sofa, knowing you were not only unraveling the lining of the cushion but also in the patched layer of your friends. “He wants the good kids, it’s why he took Tae and Guk. God is a selfish prick, he can suck me.” You seethed.

“Or you could.” Yoongi looked at you with his dead eyes, and you knew he probably couldn’t get it up if he had swallowed as many Viagras as Hoseok took pretty white pills in unmarked bottles. But it didn’t stop you from getting up and tugging his belt off.

The calendar marked today as some off-brand holiday, something that a store somewhere would profit off of. It marked that it’d been a week since you choked on Yoongi’s limp dick in front the rest of your numb friends. The red circle on the date, however, was because today was yet another tragedy.

In your dreams, you pictured Jimin to die in the tub, the water murky with his blood and something poetic inscribed in his forearm, a picture or something of equal significance burned into scorched soot by the clawed feet of the porcelain bath.

You didn’t think it’d be Seokjin found like that instead.

Namjoon wrote in his journal, tore out the page and burned it the minute he finished with it. The hair tie on his wrist was replaced with something sturdier, more industrial. The colored rubber band snapped harder, louder and left a bigger welt. He tried to take pride in the fact that he still hadn’t resorted to pills or fire or the end of a blade but honestly, this was so much worse. He lived a lie, a façade that he was alright just because his choice of pain wasn’t that of vulgar taste. He lived among the common faces of the world, blurred in the crowds but nothing would make the bright green on his wrist blend into the bland, colorless world.

Jimin tried to cry, the tears burning at his retinas but nothing ever came to fruition, his fingers scratching at the scars he chose to keep visible to the world today.

Of-fucking-course Kim Seokjin would ask to be cremated, to be turned into soil for trees. It was such a “him” thing to do, something he probably read on FaceBook or saw on Pinterest. You honestly thought if he was to be reincarnated into anything, he’d ask to be a pressed into a diamond, so he could always be has beautiful as he said he was. As he really was. No one was as beautiful as Seokjin, both inside and out.

The screen of your phone was shattered and you couldn’t bring yourself to get it fixed, the constant swiping on the glass leaving shards in your thumbs and making you smile whenever another cut embedded itself into your skin. You were just as weak as Jimin, though you hoped that you looked a little more civil since at least you didn’t have to wear jackets in ninety degree weather.

“What are we ordering for takeout?” Hoseok flickered through the several menus in his hand, mind caught between Chinese and pizza. Namjoon just shrugged and Yoongi pointed his chin at the one in Hoseok’s right hand, the Chinese menu. He scanned the options and asked what meats and sides for everyone. When he reached dumplings, Seokjin’s favorite, Jimin ran to the bathroom and left the door wide open as he puked into the toilet.

It was a resounding no for dumplings that night.

“Do you ever think… we’re being punished?” Namjoon started one night, his journal long forgotten as he inhaled deep, passing the joint to Yoongi before puffing out a big cloud of dragon-like smoke.

“For what? Fucking a lot and tagging some abandoned buildings?” Yoongi bitterly spat, Jimin next to him flinching with every venomous syllable. His body was constantly trembling, fingers unable to stay steady unless they were gripping something, anything. This time, it was Yoongi’s own shaking hand.

Hoseok took his own inhale of the drug before giving you the rolled up papers, the joint looking more and more displeasing to you as you stared at it.

“Maybe this is why we get out every time we’re put in a cell, because our ultimate justice will come from a higher power.” Hoseok drawled; weed always made his tongue slow and his eyelids heavy. He’d probably pass out on your shoulder any minute now.

“I think we’re just bad people getting what’s coming to us.” Jimin whispered, eyes still stuck on the break in the floorboards where Jeongguk drunkenly fell, his ass breaking the wood but no one caring because Jimin was on top of him, making out heavily mid-party. You all cheered for the two of them, watching their sexual tension unfold and you yearned for those days back, when you’d skip school and come to this little shack of a home, broken and frayed at the edges but still home. Just like you and your friends; your family.

“Stop repeating what your deadbeat alcoholic of a mother says to you, Jimin. She’s more worthless than any one of us.” Yoongi tightened his grip on Jimin, his squeak of pain doing nothing to ease the tension in his fingers. He didn’t want to lose him too, to watch him slip through the cracks.

Hoseok began to sing, slightly off-key but still melodious, somber in the empty house with broken furniture and too many memories to stay sober near. Namjoon couldn’t sing to save his life but his voice joined, a low murmur along Hoseok’s. Soon, the scratch of Yoongi’s voice intertwined like the threads in Jimin’s crocheted sweater before he too, began to sing. He harmonized with them, a missing link tying the bridge to the chorus. When you finally gave in, it was when you’d all reached Jeongguk’s name, singing Happy Birthday to him one last time.

 “Did you know the Song dynasty ended in 1279 but it coincided with the Liao and Western Xia dynasties as well?”

“Who gives a fuck, Namjoon?” Yoongi pulled off Namjoon’s dick long enough to try and shut him up, hoping he’d just be quiet for once and take the damn blowjob without making a damn lesson out of it.

Hoseok was asleep on the couch, Jimin and you in a heated battle of black jack, currently you had 20 and you could chance it and hope you’d pull an ace and win all the graham crackers you’d put in the pool or you could play it safe and hope Jimin had less than you. He wasn’t a great card player but lately, all his expressions look the same so his bluffing was the same as his genuinely sad face, making you lose your cookies too many times in a row.

You used to use real money when you played, back when you had a reason to want to win. Back when you’d cheer for taking all of Taehyung’s money and you and Seokjin would go out to spend it on stupid shit that you’d regret a day later but in the moment, it just looked so useful and convenient.

When Jeongguk would win it back the next day just to see Taehyung smile again, to have him underneath him that night to repay him for his chivalry.

“Hobi, did you want me to suck you off too?”

Silence.

“Hobi?” You murmured, looking over in his direction. Jimin’s sad eyes followed.

Namjoon tucked himself back in, not zipping up the rusted metal in his tattered jeans.

You put down the card in your hand, moving from where you hovered over the deck to turn and watch as Yoongi crossed the room to shake Hoseok, his voice incomparable to the ringing in your ears as he screamed for Hoseok to wake up, to just wake the fuck up.

Jimin didn’t look away, Namjoon frozen in place as Yoongi continued to slap and shake his best friend, his lover, his confidant, hoping he’d wake up from some deep slumber. You turned back to your game, hand back on the deck as you decided it was time to give fate a chance. You pulled a card, the black butterfly in the middle telling you what you never hoped for.

An ace.

You won.

It used to be “us against the world” with you eight, a force not to be reckoned with whenever you all banded together. When you originally met, it was through friends of friends, mutual interests and one through a really interesting Tinder profile. You all had sworn fate brought you together for a reason, happiness meant to be share amongst the lot of you.

You wish you’d never met them, not a single one.

“Jimin? Could you let go?” You touched his shoulder, his body no longer jerky with anxiety. He was desensitized, no longer feeling anything. His eyes stayed on the cascading waves as he released the urn he had clutched against his chest, as if Hoseok still radiated his warmth through the pretty patterns and decorative top.

He wanted to be spread into the ocean, to find Taehyung. He didn’t want to leave him alone out there, knowing that Yoongi could be strong and handle him being gone. His note read:

“Just because I was weak, doesn’t mean you have to be. Let us live on in your hearts, let them beat for the rest of us. Taehyung was a tragedy, Jeongguk an accident, Seokjin an unfortunate chain of events and I, an outlier. Don’t make us into martyrs, something we’re not. We’re just kids, dealt a bad hand. But you all still have your game faces on, so come on Yoongi, pull an Ace for the rest of us.”

Yoongi set fire to his bedroom instead; with the lighter Jeongguk used to blow out, the very one Seokjin used to light his birthday candles, the one Taehyung bought at the gas station at the corner of where you lived. Namjoon threw the remainder of his journal pages in there, Jimin tossed his sweaters inside the flames. You stood by and warmed your hands by the fire, feeling your tears dry from the heat until the firetrucks came screaming and the hoses put out the fire that was in Yoongi’s heart. They killed him. Right before your eyes.

  And then there were three.

Jimin never ate, walking bones that creaked and cracked whenever he moved. Namjoon refused to give up his rubber band, switching to a thick red one that turned white when he stretched it beyond his limit, matching the color of Hoseok’s pills, the mayo that globbed out of Seokjin’s burger, the come that Jeongguk would get on the bed after round two, the boxy grin Taehyung used to get everyone in more trouble than it ever did help. The same color that burned when the ignited fire got to its hottest, right in the core. The color of Yoongi’s skin when he found his friends dead, one by one.

“Should I take up the flute?” Jimin shook his head and told Namjoon his fingers weren’t dexterous enough, that he’d never manage the fine skill it took to play such an instrument. You nodded, knowing the damn thing would break the minute it slipped between his grimy fingers.

“Taehyung liked the sax, maybe you should try that instead.” At the sound of his name passing your chapped lips—lip balm no longer appealing to you because every flavor reminded you of someone different, someone dead—Namjoon stiffened, Jimin motionless like always. You’re sure any sort of use of energy from the younger male would cause him to pass out, the hunger in him always there but food never enticing enough for him to give into the temptation and give his body the energy it so desperately needs.

“Yeah, maybe.”

Another tack on the wall as Namjoon robbed a music store and let the cops gun him down. You never thought Namjoon would be the kind to go out in a blaze of glory, let alone one to own a gun. He was a pacifist, but when the crime scene investigator told you that the initials M. Y. were on the handle, messily scratched with probably some house tool, you knew what he’d done.

  Jimin stopped holding hands, not having the nutrition in him to making his fingers tighten around yours, the bones probably seconds away from turning into dust. Your throat was dry, like the days you used to love. The days where the sun burned something serious and the boys only wanted to run around outside, despite your protests. Those were the days that everything seemed so simple, so cut and dry. So… easy.

You really hoped that Jimin would be stronger than you, that you’d finally give in and join the others so you wouldn’t have to deal with the pain of yet another piece of your soul, your very being, shot dead right in front of you. So you wouldn’t have to go to another funeral or service or spread another’s ashes or read another’s will; so you wouldn’t ever have to hear crying wails or heartfelt apologies, hushed murmurs about how tragic it all was and how you all slipped through the cracks, the school system and your parents all failing you. So you wouldn’t have to etch a seventh mark, as you found Jimin, strung up from the ceiling fan.

The bedsheets were Jeongguk’s, the bandana Taehyung’s, the dishtowel Seokjin’s, the rubber bands Namjoon’s, the shoelaces Yoongi’s, the scarf Hoseok’s, and the sweater Jimin’s.

All knotted together to create a perfect noose, just like you all were meant to come together as. Only good for bringing the worst, death hovering over you all like an ominous storm, threatening to rain on the parade you’d created for yourselves.

All that was missing from Jimin’s perfect noose was yourself.

So you made sure to remedy that.

Putting yourself next to him with the aid of a rickety dining table chair; your hands wrapped around his throat to create a vice, to wrench the last breaths from his body, knowing that his heart was weak but his eyes weren’t; finally there was a spark inside his irises, something more than fear and dismay. You felt his body go limp before you finally checked his pulse, confirming that he indeed, was gone.

You sat down on the ratty couch, the same one you’d had sex with each and every one of them on; the same one that hosted countless movie nights and had popcorn tossed all over it whenever Hoseok got scared or Taehyung too excited. The couch that cradled Jimin when he cried at night and when Jeongguk would hold him for hours, promising to never leave him. The same couch that Yoongi would always fall asleep on, Seokjin covering him because he knew he’d catch a cold if he wasn’t kept warm. The couch that sat Namjoon when he’d heard the news on the phone:

“Kim Taehyung has committed murder.”

It felt like weeks, months, years scrawled by before you heard the front door open, slowly and then suddenly. The creaking something similar to Jimin’s bones, his body still hanging from where he killed himself; where you killed him.

Taehyung walked in, eyes on Jimin then you.

“How’s Hell?” You murmured, knowing damn well he could hear you clear as day.

“I just got back.”

You smiled and let death sweep you up, leaving just one. The first, the domino that started this terrible chain of events. The butterfly on your card, the Ace you needed.

Taehyung took one small breath before taking your life, making sure he followed right after.

Maybe you’d all meet up again, in some maze of chain link fences and pristine white ribbons like the bedsheets of Hoseok’s hospital bed, the suds in the sink where Seokjin scrubbed, the wax of Jeongguk’s birthday candles, the hoodie Taehyung always wore, the blond of Yoongi’s hair, the pages in Namjoon’s journal, the nailbeds on Jimin’s small hands. The white on the back of your playing cards, the ones built to be a steady house but instead crumpled in on itself.

But for now, you just welcomed the white and hoped that no one else would follow in this Butterfly Effect.

[bentchcreates]

Beyond Light and Darkness, A Kathbute Anthology (Part 2)

Let me begin 2018 with an awesome review of our awesome book! I’m very proud of this – I was part of the new writer judging, the editing, and I wrote the preface! – and if you want to know this book’s journey from conception to publishing I wrote a lengthy blog on that last year.

In this second part of the #BLaD blog posts, I’ll be reviewing it as a reader and I’ll try to review it as objectively as I can. ;) Here’s what I think of the 11 stories by the Kathbute Authors, because while a general review of the book is appreciated, it always feels great for anthology authors to read about their works individually.

I. Love Bits

1. The Watch Repairman’s Son – H. Bentham Prompts: A broken wristwatch, peppermints, and a hug that goes too far.

LOL at reviewing this objectively! XD This is my work and for me it’s the best! Hahaha!

Anyway, a trivia about this story: This is actually my first Sancho de Guerra story. I finished writing this almost a full year before “Guide for A Day” appeared in Summer Feels but this took a while to see the light of day. The town I envisioned here is a wee bit different from the one I imagined for the later story, but you wouldn’t really notice. All the bits that got published can go together, and as of this writing, I declare it as canon. ;)

2. Can I Stay? – Nigel Libranages Prompts: Tarot Cards, the coming winter, a pair of old leather boots

This is more of a romantic fiction than romance but the feels, especially the melancholy, is on point. The tone seems levelheaded, but there’s something subtle in how it’s presented that tugs at the heartstrings just right. I must commend both the clever interpretation of the given prompts and the vivid visualization of the settings. Sandra’s characterization is also well fleshed out, justifying her decisions through the end of this short story.

II. Spell Crafts

3. Potion Lunacy – Irina Jean Prompts: The first day of school, a love note, a recipe with a significant mistake

The YA Fantasy theme in this one is cute and reminds me so much of quirky 2000’s anime. Feisty Portia is stubborn but also a bit insecure and her love interest, Gelen, is just the right amount of clumsy and torpe to be endearing. The fun and fast-paced banter depicts the youthfulness of the characters accurately. And the magic parts, though light, are solid and well thought of.

4. Etienne and Amelie – Johanna Lee Prompts: A supporting fairytale character, a lake, pretenses

This retelling of your favorite fairytales retains the fantastical magic of our childhood reads. I’m not going to say which tales get beautifully mashed-up because I think the figuring out is part of the story’s charm. The visualization and choice of words are commendable, as well as the surprising twist at the very end. You have to read this carefully. Blink, and you’ll miss it.

5. Man in Between – Trix Luna Prompts: old train, jewels, an inconvenient truth

This story wasn’t in the original manuscript I got to read in the editing phase so reading it for the first time in the book is quite an experience. It is told in the second person POV, something I rarely get to read and the spec fic theme is also somewhat fresh to me. I don’t know how best to describe it without spoilers except that I thought it felt transcendental. The choice of words really got to me and it was…unsettling, in the way good fiction affects readers even after the story ends.

III. Distortions

6. The Time Banker – Raine Rillera Prompts: A name, a prison cell, music

The sci-fi/spec fic concept for this one has been wonderfully executed, and the interpretation of the prompts, though subtle and downplayed, were key elements in the advancement plot. This is one of the stories chosen after our writing contest and I remembered that even the rough draft of this one was solid so the edited version in the print made for an awesome reread.

7. The Trial of the Tainted – Trix Luna Prompts: A heroic villain, an old parchment, an unforgivable sin

Space and time-travelling were the themes of this interesting short story. I loved the world-building in this one and the twist and turns it took to get to that ‘heroic villain’ bit. There is also an underlying subtheme of a familiar story that everyone knows by now so the marriage of sci-fi elements to that story kind of updated the mysterious plot.

8. Word Wisp – AlaraChan IDA Prompts: aerobics, a secret diary, something unpleasant under the bed

With prompts like those, familiar stories immediately come to mind about monsters and inner demons, yada, yada…but this interpretation of the boogeyman trope is fresh and brilliant. The monster here isn’t a thing, more of a concept, and it doesn’t kill, but rather consumes something everyone often takes for granted. I especially loved the world apocalypse scenes and the people’s reactions to it in this story’s universe.

IV. Penumbra

9. Allegro – RK Sanchez Prompts: A name, a prison cell, music

Our cover artist also contributed a story here, and it is one on the darker themes. This time the mystery is more psychological and less fantastical but is just as interesting as all the other stories.  The author takes a different turn with the interpretation of the prompts and offers a sweet twist toward the end.

10. Thirty-Seven – Yelle Felicenny Prompts: A stolen ring, fear of spiders, a sinister stranger

This was one of my anticipated reads in this book because I only got to read the first part during the editing phase. There’s a bit of action, adventure and mystery here but what really got me was the dark turn of events at about the final quarter of the story.

11. Darker Than Night- AlaraChan IDA Prompts: a campfire, a scream, a small lie that gets bigger and bigger

This is uniquely written in epistolary style/journal entries, and is a dark but captivating read. I don’t read a lot of horror stories (everyone knows I’m a coward, lol) but I couldn’t put this down! I wanted to know what happens to the aswang and the military party that’s pursuing it!

5 of 5 Stars. Because I’m super proud of our work, and it is an honor to have worked on this with awesome writers and awesome people!

Blurb: The 11 stories in this anthology showcase the interpretations of the Kathbute writers to the theme of light and darkness in the genres of Romance, Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Mystery.

Buy Links:

Right now it’s only available in print here: bit.ly/BLADBatch2

I’ll update this when the Kindle version is released. J

For the meantime, put it in your GoodReads TBR shelf? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36995364-beyond-light-and-darkness-a-kathbute-anthology

About the authors:

Nigel Libranages Nigel Libranages is a licensed chemist but dreams of becoming a marine biologist and take care of sea turtles. Born as a genuine sinker, the closest that he can do about his dream is own an aquarium. He has pitcher plants for pets, and he loves reading about myths and folklore. He writes before he forgets. Dedication: To those who are strong enough to hold on, and brave enough to let go.

Wattpad: @libranages

Raine Rillera Born and raised in Baguio City, Raine has a natural affinity to cold weather and “vintage” clothing (i.e. ukay). Her first paying job was as a puppeteer, when at 8 years old she staged her own puppet show at a birthday party. Since then, she has been telling stories through whatever medium was available.

Wattpad: @purple_porpoise

H. Bentham H. Bentham was born and raised in the Philippines but now resides 1,481 miles away from home. He battles homesickness with his various hobbies and (mostly) procrastinating on the internet. When he's done being bored, he writes stories; and when he's feeling particularly profound, poems. He adores turtles and bettas, enjoying the slow, quiet companionship they provide.

Wattpad: @bentchbites|Facebook: H Bentham Writes | Twitter: @bentchbites| Instagram: @bentchbites

Irina Jean Irina Jean is an elusive mushroom who indulges in anime, manga, video games, and most of all, art. She believes that writing is a unique form of art too, for she can express herself with words as her paint and her laptop as her canvas. When she's not writing, she's usually binge-gaming with friends. She dreams of being a webcomic artist and, if possible, a space witch. (Actually, any kind of witch would do.)

Wattpad: @Cygneux|Facebook: Irina Jean

Trix Luna Trix is the self-proclaimed duchess of the East of the Sun and West of the Moon, a place where there is always light when you need it. She’s still waiting for her Hogwarts acceptance letter even though she is already sorted to Ravenclaw. She’s not adept at any game ending in –ball (basketball, football, volleyball, etc.) other than Quidditch and Scrabble. She has a one-sided relationship with music and strongly opposes to divorce with it, believing that music will learn to love her singing voice…eventually.

Wattpad: @lunatrix|Facebook: Trix Luna | Twitter: @3xLuna

AlaraChan IDA AlaraChan IDA is a kabute who like books, cats, and hot chocolate. She takes long quiet walks, bike rides, and binge-watching a number of TV series to keep her muse alive and kicking. She dreams of becoming a pod racer, a dragon-tamer, and a space pirate. She recently took up watercolor painting and is now torn between writing and the arts.

Wattpad: @AlaraChan| Instagram: @alara_arts

Johanna Lee Johanna Lee is a Filipino writer based in Western Australia who writes poetry, and fictional stories in the genre of Chicklit, Romance, and Paranormal. A published Tagalog Romance author, Radish Fiction writer, and a Children’s-storyteller-wannabe. She finds joy in her collection of toys, books, stationery, and old-fashioned writing tools.

Twitter: @ilivewritenow| Instagram: @ilivewritenow

Yelle Felicenny Felicenny is an awkward melange of multiple extremes: an artist hemmed in a thriving tycoon’s body. While business is her field of study and training remote communities is her passion in public service, her heart belongs to art, poetry and travelling. Bus rides, sunsets and coffee shops are among her favorite things, for the untamed muse beckons the most - inked on bus tickets, receipts and table napkins.

Wattpad: @Felicenny| Facebook: Yelle Felicenny

R.K. Sanchez R.K. Sanchez is a teacher by profession, but is fond of learning a lot of things from her students. Her hands are often dirty as she is a right-handed artist and guitarist, often having guitar string marks on her left hand fingertips and paint stains all over her right hand. She is an introvert who has always been afraid of meeting and approaching new people, but never afraid of approaching stray cats and dogs.

Wattpad : @PrivateHeroine| | Facebook: Skribsinner | Instagram: @skribsinner

[cosmosogler]

hello i am here. i took a break from pokemon today except to check up on the pelago for about two minutes while i was waiting at the doctor’s office. and i guess i’ll do the daily stuff in fifteen minutes.

i have been having weeeeird dreams again. i think it’s the birth control... i very rarely have dreams like that when i’m NOT on birth control. it involved me watching a let’s play of sonic adventure 2′s two-player thing and the players couldn’t figure out what to do despite the directions showing up on the screen. i wanted to scream. 

then i was looking at sky scrapers. i recognize them in retrospect - they’re in the Big City. i am not usually up that high to see the top of the buildings. there was a family-owned sub sandwich place with a big sign that read “We Cater!” in yellow cursive. it was on top of a radio tower. i mistook it for a billboard until i leaned over and saw the counter with the meat and bread and stuff. there was absolutely no room for a kitchen or tables and the restaurant, or room, was about 10 by 10 feet with glass walls and the sign over the door. i asked “how did this happen?” out loud and then i woke up.

the early part of the dream was me wandering around in the fog on a dock that was also a college campus. i had to get an ark down from the mountain. because i needed more bible symbolism in my dreams? there was some kind of party going on, because every now and then people would appear from the fog wearing bright colors and carrying balloons and prize bags and kazoos and stuff. i think they spoke simlish, or something i didn’t understand very well. i ended up getting the ark down by doing a weird optical illusion thing. i was standing far away from it, so it looked small, so i just picked up the small ark between my thumb and finger and put it in the river. then when i got close it was big again. i think that’s where they were playing the video games. it was in a wooden room at least.

the thing that makes these dreams weird is that they are even more disorienting and mashed together than usual. generally there’s some kind of theme connecting my dreams, like the colors or mood or some phrase or motivation. or i will deliberately try to leave one dream if i don’t like it, and once i leave i forget what i was doing and have the new dream. there’s nothing particularly sexual or anything in these dreams, as you can see, but :/

i don’t like it at all.

i felt that disorientation all morning. the shower was a haze, and right after i washed my hair i couldn’t remember if i’d washed my hair yet or not. there was still soap in my hair so i figured it out. when i left to drive to the doctor’s i forgot the garage door was broken. then when i was driving i started dissociating really bad. i was trying to watch the road, but i was also like observing myself driving and everything looked really far away and it was hard to focus. usually when i’m driving and something like that happens a million alarms go off in my head, and that happened, but it was also hard to care. i made it to the doctor without incident though. when i checked in i noticed they had monsters inc on in the corner and there was a little kid watching it with her mom and that cheered me up a little bit.

the doctor changed up my birth control prescription, so hopefully i won’t be so sore and sick all the time next month. she also recommended that i start keeping a food journal to see if there are patterns in what makes me sick and less sick. so i will make more of an effort to write down what i ate and how i felt afterward. i totally forgot to take my anti nausea meds twice today but it was ok.

i was ok driving home. i put on some music i like. i decided to hold off on picking up the new meds until tomorrow to see if my other prescriptions are ready by then. i still have some time left before i need to get more wellbutrin and stuff, so hopefully if there’s a problem i can get a refill from my doctor on monday.

for lunch i had my leftovers from manuel’s. a spinach enchilada and some espinaca con queso. it’s a pretty cheesy meal, but i did ok. i felt just as sick as yesterday and i ate roughly the same amount, which was about three quarters of what i had rationed myself. after that i was doing something on the computer... i don’t remember what it was. i think i was looking at some videos i didn’t have time to get to yesterday and when i finished that, my brother and dad had moved all the bookcases out of the hallway and into my sister’s unoccupied room. so dad asked me to clean the floorboards. so i took a rough cloth and wiped off the dirt. dad is going to paint the hallway sometime in the near future. i was going to say he didn’t need to bother, but, thinking about it, it really needs it. there’s still crayon markings from when my brother was a toddler a few years after we moved in.

after that i called the outpatient hospital thing that my therapist recommended! i am going to be “assessed” on monday. it meets for like nine hours a week. i am hoping i get in, and i am hoping it will be helpful, although i am not sure what it entails or how many weeks i will theoretically be attending. i will have to remember to ask those questions on monday. i also looked up some reviews online and there weren’t any comments on being “treated like an animal” or “left in the waiting room for 7 hours” so i am hoping it will be good. they also take my insurance.

after that i bummed around on tumblr until i realized it was too late to also call the school about my tuition. maybe tomorrow...

dad and i went to thai food for dinner. i started feeling really sick about halfway into my soup but i forced myself to continue eating because thai food is my favorite. like, i have liked almost every thai dish i have ordered at any restaurant. this one doesn’t make the very best food, but it is very good, and they also do vegetarian soups which are magnificent and i can’t seem to find any other thai place that makes them. so dad and i go to this one. i decided to try something new and got “spicy noodle.” which was basically black pepper with some noodles and broccoli. it was pretty good!

dad was too tired to go to the game store to play terraform mars so we went home after dinner. i set up onitama and got him a beer and we played a round of that. it took like 25 minutes, while with asher they usually took 10 to 15 minutes. dad ended up pulling a very unexpected win in literally the last turn after i’d put pressure on him since turn 3 or so. it’s like chess except more crowded and fewer options. it’s hard to explain without the board and pieces in front of me.

after that i sat and thought for a while. my sister used to have a very similar problem to the one i am having now. constant stomachaches, feeling nauseous, stuff like that. that started when we were very young, like “eating solid food now” young, and seemed to still be happening when i left for high school. when i see her next, probably on easter for the family gathering, i will ask whether or not that ever stopped or if she just started hiding it better. i think she started feeling better after having a nose surgery... so it might not be the same problem. i have a much wider nose and don’t have a lot of breathing problems except a weird respiration cycle that probably developed because of my heart problem.

after that i was talking to asher and i brought up that game where you find a young teenager with like a sparkledog oc and you draw it and make the kid happy. an artist named coral did that for me once when my secret santa was a no-show one year. i was 14. it blew my mind! i spent so much time after that trying to draw like her. my style is much different from hers now, but i think i am about at the same level technical wise. i have never been a popular artist but i think having someone with practice draw your first oc is kind of magical regardless.

so i spent like two hours combing through the internet looking for goofy ocs made by kids. i noticed that my little pony and five nights at freddy’s is very popular. i don’t know much about those... but i found a few examples of “baby’s first character” so i will try to at least do some sketches tomorrow evening. maybe it will help me start drawing again.

i wanted to go to bed at 11:30, but now it is 12:30, because i am dumb and said “i’m just gonna write something really quick” at 11:30, which is when i ran out of resources to find mostly unironic eye-searing sparkledogs.

also in one of the “young artist” groups on deviantart there was tentacle porn and i don’t know how to feel about that. (it was... pretty vanilla actually.) and some vaguely sensual shirtless photo realistic paintings of star wars fan characters. and there was one folder with pages upon pages of ms paint anime drawings by one person from 2010. 

i don’t miss being a kid.

i’m going to try to sleep and hope my hellacious dream torment ends soon.

[thesinglesjukebox]

SAM HUNT - DRINKIN' TOO MUCH [5.33] What've we got here? Why, it's a CONTROVERSYBOMB!

Ramzi Awn: A bold experiment with a few good ideas, "Drinkin' Too Much" employs dark moments of candor to highlight a muddled mix. [5]

Olivia Rafferty: The heart and soul of country music is storytelling, which is why this track works so well. "Drinkin' Too Much" shifts the typical country subject of alcohol abuse to the context of sad man R&B, aka Drake's genre. The spoken verses contain a rawness that could only be conveyed with that style of delivery, and the lyrics themselves are so vivid. Lay this over a subtle blend of 808s and slide guitars, and you have a solid attempt to influence the direction of country music. Let the genre-mashing begin. [8]

Anthony Easton: John Prine, in a recent Rolling Stone cover story, spoke about how Dylan's Nashville Skyline broke apart country music for him (he was a folkie at the time): "Man, there's something there where their two paths crossed. My stuff belongs right in the middle." This is also in the middle: between soul and hip-hop, between the drinking and heartbreak of Nashville and the fame-wasted ennui of Kanye and Drake. But it's also at the bottom: the bottomed-out production, how Hunt trips over details, how he extends stories, how he never quite brags about his money, how his self-loathing bubbles up like swamp gas. It's the opposite of all those party songs, the opposite of Moore and Eldredge and Gilbert. It has a singular voice -- a songwriting voice, but also how he sings, a gravelly push that reinforces his production choices. It is the smartest thing he has done, and maybe the most heartfelt. [10]

Alfred Soto: I'm no country corn pone. I like electronic whooshes and the kind of manipulation of space more common on Drake or "Climax"-era Usher, but Sam Hunt can't even talk-sing without his sockless boat shoes tripping on his ill-lettered cadences. He comes off like a lunkier Chainsmoker, in the market for any hook that'll get him on the radio and laid -- two of his more admirable virtues. Find better songs, dude, and don't try so damn hard. [4]

Thomas Inskeep: This non-single posted on SoundCloud is the audio equivalent of a viral video, and like many viral videos, it's also essentially a journal entry set to music. Frankly, it's not up to snuff: this is him doing his rhyming couplets (he loves rhyming couplets) with a woozy rhythm track from Pro Tools or whatever. It also sounds a lot like a demo for Justin Bieber. Most of all, this is slightly creepy oversharing; I want a Silkwood shower after listening to it. [0]

Elisabeth Sanders: Everything about this is deeply embarrassing, and that's why I love it. While I can't pretend I like this as much as anything off Montevallo, it makes up for it with "I wish you'd let me pay your student loans," and I'd like to submit this as a great entry into a music category I'd like to call "voice-memo pathetic-wave." (The other artist in this genre is Mike Posner with his great, deeply pathetic album At Night, Alone.) The song approximates, sonically and with almost nauseating accuracy, the feeling of being just too drunk enough that the room is spinning a little, being very sad about something that might be your fault in a crowded place at 2 in the morning. BEEN THERE, SAM. [7]

Jonathan Bradley: In which Sam Hunt pens a letter to Montevallo's Courtney From Hooters On Peachtree and proves himself to not be country music's Drake, but rather its Mike Skinner. The hook is the weakest part; it doesn't resolve Hunt's thoughts but elides them. (The austere "8pm" take works better and is worth a point or two more.) There is frisson in a lyric that pushes too far past the fourth wall, threatening to combust as it reaches the event horizon -- for the non-country, non-rap examples to which "Drinkin' Too Much" draws nearest, look to emo acts like Cursive's The Ugly Organ or Say Anything's "Every Man Has a Molly." "Hope you know I'm still in love," Hunt closes, except it's a correspondence that is only intimate the way a performance is, and so his words are combustible as well as heartfelt. The sour sense that this song bears too much truth is its most compelling point but also its most repellent; Hunt is too casual in his exhibitionism. [5]

Will Adams: It feels right; we've reached the level of bleakness in our pop music that songs can now just be actual shitposts with first draft choruses tucked in. [3]

Katherine St Asaph: Did we need another country "Marvin's Room"? In every country review I keep harping on artists telling the same generic story addressed to the same imaginary sorority girl, but here's a lyric and addressee that are certainly not generic or imaginary, and I'm not sure what to think. If Sam Hunt's byline didn't scare off the traditionalists, the first vocoded note is almost deliberately scheduled to shoo away the rest (none of the subsequent vocal is so blatant), leaving a smaller audience of fans and an explicit audience of one specific, named girl. There's something inescapably creepy -- voyeuristically creepy for the listener, manipulatively creepy for the artist -- about this, this couple chords and a tirade. Most of his target demographic will hear this as romantic, but for those unfortunate enough to have been stalked, the details are so familiar as to be textbook: presenting her with his un-rebuttable imagination of her life, in which she stages the Everytime video every time she wants to cry, in which there's nowhere else in Georgia she can buy peaches, in which everything reminds her of him, or at least does now; reminding her of her debt while holding Montevallo money over her head; apologizing for boosting her profile while writing her name into a huge triumphant chorus; pondering "whether it's OK to lie" while careful to mention none of the indiscretions that got him there -- merely their consequences, which now seem unreasonable. Better to address this as fiction, then -- like most "autobiographical" songs by celebrities, somewhere between songwriting exercise and publicity stunt, because you don't cross over into pop and stay without some dating drama. What's left is slapdash: accurate-sounding candor spewed over a couple identikit country choruses, each piece well-crafted but only assemblable by a real-life happy ending. Which is the point, and the problem. [5]

Megan Harrington: Too much of my instant dislike of "Drinkin' Too Much" hinged on the preposterous way Sam Hunt apologized for (more or less) doxing his then ex-girlfriend, now fiancé Hannah Lee Fowler on his debut album Montevallo, only to turn around and close the song by singing her name. In case there were any straggler fans out there who hadn't quite put her identity together, I guess. It was incongruous in a way that grated on me until I realized that it was the perfect synecdoche for the song, one that indulges overwrought production as 40 as it was country and several different singing styles, including plain old talking. It's right there in the way he names her his first fan and then cheats on her, the way he dismisses her sisters as "matchmakers" but hopes her dad still prays for him. Real life is messy and filled with leaps forward followed by half-steps back, relationships are chaotic and confusing, and Hunt captures all of it, ending hopefully with a (sort of, he hopes) romantic pledge to win her back. And it (sort of, I think) worked? [7]

Crystal Leww: The first time I heard "Drinkin' Too Much," I did not like it. I did not like the 40-esque production, the sad sap lyrics, the way that Hunt called out his ex-girlfriend. Then I listened to the 8pm version, stripped of the production flourishes, and figured that it was just the production that was bugging me. The lyrics were sad, but they were so specific: peaches in Pelham, a hotel room in Arizona, and that devastating, heartbreaking "hope your dad still prays for me," a reminder that breakups are the deaths of families, too. I've never liked the comparisons to Drake -- Drake is someone who has clearly never been in an adult relationship with a real woman rather than a built-up image of a woman, but Montevallo and "Drinkin' Too Much" feel like they're about real adults who have genuinely loved each other and created lives together. I still like the 8pm version more, but I've come around on the full version. It's dramatic, but I appreciate the attempt to appeal to a broader audience, and it highlights that Hunt's lyricism shines through anything, even snaps and strings. [7]

Josh Langhoff: A prof used to tell us, "People who are sorry weep bitter tears." I don't buy Sam Hunt's sorrow. Nor do I buy that this song has a melody or a beat, that it has any connection to country or R&B, that this is the same Sam Hunt who did "House Party," or that picking peaches is anything but the pits. More schnapps! [3]

Katie Gill: Look, I'm sorry, I can't hate this. With the exception of that "I hope your dad still prays for me" bit, the verses are awful, not singing but the Sam Hunt Spoken Word Poetry Hour. They swing between endearingly hokey and the awful Nice Guy sort of patronizing that was the entirety of "Take Your Time." But the chorus is AMAZING. It's so silky and smooth, perfectly mixed, and Hunt shows that he has a halfway decent R&B(ish) voice. But the two never really meet. The transition between verse and chorus is awkward every time, as the buttery-smooth chorus butts up against the not very smooth speaking voice of Sam Hunt. [6]

Joshua Copperman: I keep singing this title to the tune of Twenty One Pilots' "Ride", attempting to remember what little melody this song has ("I've been drinking too much, help me..."). Until the bridge -- which would make a better chorus -- nothing is worth remembering: not the strings, not the drum machine, and especially not the single strum of guitar to signify that it's still country. What made "Marvin's Room" work was the honesty and subtextual self-loathing that Drake would spend the rest of his career distilling. This seems less stream-of-consciousness and more trying to write stream-of-consciousness, which rarely works as well and results in lines like "I wish you'd let me pay off your student loans." The dramatic piano ending makes clear Sam Hunt's lack of shame in copying Aubrey, but that just makes him sound even less authentic, even though the backstory contains more than enough drama for something genuine. [3]

Edward Okulicz: The first time I misheard the line as as "I'm sorry for making the album Montevallo," but this sketch wouldn't be a repudiation even if he were sorry for that. And it's really not that much more than a series of lyrical fragments and a chorus, but I find myself nodding along at some parts, and being frustrated at the lack of detail in others, and going to the "Personal life" details of his Wikipedia article to see the resolution. So that means it's fairly compelling for its limitations. [7]

[Read and comment on The Singles Jukebox ]

[how2to18]

CRABAPPLE, PRICKLY GOOSEBERRY, bittersweet, and devil’s walking stick — are these the names of thorny old monsters in some dark children’s fairy tale? Nope. They are simply the flora that vine the paths of the forests and hollers of the Smoky Mountains. A brave five-year-old girl named Ernestine must journey through these persnickety snatchers in the early morning shadows in order to deliver mason jars full of fresh milk to the neighbors who live far away. It is 1942, and the husbands are away at war. The wives and mothers run the farms, raise the children, milk the cows. These country neighbors take care of one another in their time of need.

This is the framework for Kerry Madden-Lunsford’s Ernestine’s Milky Way, an achingly poignant tale of independence, resourcefulness, and good old-fashioned neighboring as seen through the eyes of a strong-willed little girl in the wartime South. The illustrations, by Emily Sutton, brush the pages like the powdered wings of butterflies. There are sturdy rock houses and old wooden fences, hand-sewn blankets and dusty banjos, everything surrounded by watercolor bursts of soft country colors — trees, leaves, grass, and plants. Flowers and vines are like their own characters. The facial expressions of the people make you ache for home. Any city-dwelling child is bound to look up at the parent, or teacher, or sibling, or babysitter reading them this story and ask, “Can we please go the woods tomorrow?”

I met Kerry Madden-Lunsford during my first MFA in Creative Writing Residency at Antioch University in Los Angeles. I was immediately drawn to her; she emanates a warm and welcoming vibe, with sparkling blue eyes and a wide, down-home smile. She dresses like a hippie teenager from the ’60s who has met her future self, an older, wiser earth-mother. Currently she directs the Creative Writing program at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, where she covers the desks and tables of her classrooms with books — dozens of picture books and chapter books, and middle-grade and YA, and, sprinkled in between, weathered copies of classics, like cherished relics from a magical library. Reminiscent of your favorite elementary school teacher, she actually writes out the lessons — infused with words of wisdom and anecdotes — in a comforting cursive on the board. She connects with everyone. She connects with their work. She was my first workshop leader, and her editorial letter about the 20 pages I had submitted told me everything I needed to know about her — namely, that she was a very old soul with a very young heart. You can sense this about her. You can feel it flowing from the pages of her books.

I recently visited Kerry at her home in the hills of Echo Park. We sat together over bagels and coffee with her husband Kiffen and their dazzling little dachshund, Olive, to talk about her latest release, the aforementioned Ernestine’s Milky Way, as well as her prior work. 

She is the author of eight books, including the lauded Maggie Valley Trilogy set in the Smoky Mountains of Appalachia. The first in that series, Gentle’s Holler (2005), was a PEN USA finalist in Children’s Literature, and it’s easy to see why. The book shares some strands of Ernestine’s world as it explores the life of a 12-year-old girl and her adventures, with her eight brothers and sisters, in the Smoky Mountains in the early 1960s. It’s heartwarming and heartbreaking at once. Imagine a mash-up between A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Coal Miner’s Daughter, and you’re nearly there. Mountain country folk ridden with worries about money and bellies swollen from hunger are the characters that anchor Madden-Lunsford’s work. But the families in her stories rely on mutual affection and a resourcefulness that flows like pure mountain spring water to get them through the rough times.

Her December 2018 essay in the Los Angeles Times, “The Christmas Suit,” is a blistering meditation on family addiction — a deeply caring mother’s despairing attempt to stave off the crippling inertia of frustrated emotion. It’s a different side of Kerry, a flip of the coin. It reveals something tender and truthful about a majority of authors who write picture books, middle-grade, and YA: that they are seasoned individuals whose brave flights of fancy trying to survive adult life are the pearls of wisdom hidden in the sealed-shut shells of books that celebrate innocence, or the end of it.

¤

TIM CUMMINGS: Where did you grow up?

KERRY MADDEN-LUNSFORD: That is a complicated question, though it shouldn’t be. The short answer is that I grew up the daughter of a college football coach, and we moved all the time. For years I said that I lived in 12 states, but my daughter, Norah, reminded me that it’s actually been 13 states. Alabama is lucky number 13. I used to remember all the states by mascots and teams rather than towns. My father’s first coaching job was for Father Lopez’s Green Wave (High School). He married my mother in between football and basketball season.

He was both the coach for both outfits, so he had the basketball season printed on the wedding napkins to build up team support. “Follow Janis and Joe on the Green Wave.” Always the coach, he informed the principal, Sister Annunciata, that the school dance should be held in the library, so the students wouldn’t mess up his gymnasium floor in fancy shoes. He only told me this story a few weeks ago or it would have been in Offsides, my first novel about growing up the daughter of a football coach. Sister Annunciata shut that suggestion down flat, and the dance was held in the gym. I asked him if he chaperoned, and he said, “Hell, no.”

Because some people are going to think that I am the daughter of John Madden, which I am most definitely not, I finally had to write an essay called “I Am Not John Madden’s Daughter.” My father has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dementia and he sometimes wakes up from naps, talking old football plays or what defense he ran at the Sugar Bowl in 1977 as the defensive coordinator. He did this while we were in Rome a year ago, and my mother said, “Snap out of it! You’re in Rome!”

How did you come to writing?

I’ve told this story once or twice, but I really do credit my fourth-grade teacher, who told me I was a good writer. It was the first time a teacher ever said any such thing. They usually said, “Aren’t you a nice tall girl who listens well?” They said this because I was shy. So it was a relief when a teacher noticed more than height or shyness. That day, I walked around my neighborhood of Ames, Iowa (Iowa State Cyclones), noticing everything, and wrote a story called “The Five Cents,” thinking it was about the “the five senses.” I never was a good speller. I remained a shy kid, and later some of the nuns began to suggest I might have a vocation to join the convent. I wrote about everything, but mostly I read — I read all the time and that absolutely formed me as a writer.

Who are your greatest influences?

My parents were great influences for humor and resilience, but I rebelled quietly because I was not a girly-girl or an athlete (unless field hockey in ninth grade counts, along with golfing on the boys’ team in high school), so I set out to find ways where I could create my own identity away from the gridiron.

I was definitely influenced (terrified) by Helen Keller and facing her fate when I had to get glasses in third grade. The doctor told my mother, “she’s blind without them,” to make a point. When I sobbed in my father’s arms about my horror of going blind (I think I also threw up in the bathroom), he shouted, “By God, nobody is going blind in this house!” I cried, “But how do you know?” “Because I said so!” It made no sense whatsoever, but I believed him.

I adored my babysitter, Ann Kramer, who was a wild tomboy in Ames, Iowa. I loved the coaches’ wives because they were such good storytellers. I was incredibly influenced by my first best friend, Pattie Murphy, in high school because she was so funny and irreverent, presenting a good girl persona to the powers-that-be and then whispering to me filthy things that were horrible and hilarious. We got caught cracking up laughing in the worst places — in class, at midnight Mass, on stage in Ten Little Indians. She was the first friend to make me laugh. We were miraculously “the new girls” at almost the same time in a school, Knox Catholic, where the kids had been together forever; even their parents and some grandparents had attended Knox Catholic.

I was very influenced by my Aunt Jeanne, who gave me books, and my Uncle Michael, who taught me about art. I lost them both to suicide when I was very young, and I wrote about them in Offsides as a way of atoning for not paying more attention. I wrote an essay about that this past summer.

I do think I was most influenced by getting to study abroad at Manchester University my junior year in college. A group of British drama students adopted me and showed me a whole world of art and theater, and I worshipped them for their hilarity and brilliance. I also had wonderful professors in England, who paid attention to me in ways I had never experienced during my first two years at the University of Tennessee. Plus, nobody in England cared if I went to church or watched football. They wanted me to write plays and “drop the grotty trade school occupation of journalism,” and I was very happy to oblige. I’m now writing a novel inspired by that time called Hop the Pond, which also has themes of addiction and features the Brontë sisters and their brother, Branwell.

When I returned to the University of Tennessee from Manchester, I often pretended to be a British exchange student (yes, I was insufferable because I couldn’t bear leaving England for Tennessee). I changed my major to theater, and I came to know my professors in Tennessee who taught us theater history, acting, directing. I was grateful for the encouragement and attention they gave me as a student (and a girl in the South) who wanted to write plays. The only contemporary playwright I knew of at that time was Beth Henley, and I hadn’t yet heard of Wendy Wasserstein.

Our theater department was still cranking out suggested scene study pairings of mostly Inge, Albee, and Williams, and maybe, once in a while, Lillian Hellman. I wanted to write plays, so I stayed in Knoxville after graduation and began an MFA in playwriting. I was the only student in the course at the time, but it gave me two years to learn to teach “Voice and Diction” and to write plays while working at a bookstore. Those two years in Knoxville influenced me because that is when I fell in love with Southern literature. I dropped the faux British accent, and my patient friends were grateful.

Finally, I think my greatest influence just happened this year. She is my cousin, Maureen Madden O’Sullivan — or, simply, Mo. We met for the very first time last May; her grandfather and my great-grandfather — Patrick and Joseph Madden — were brothers in Roscommon, Ireland. Mo and I have lived parallel lives in Los Angeles for 30 years, with many friends in common. She has been sober since 1982, and I have a family member who suffers from addiction, so she has taught me how to really let go — to breathe, to meditate, to eat better, to make gazpacho, to take walks by the sea. She also has stage-four cancer and is doing everything to live and take care of herself, from chemo to acupuncture to meditation to plant medicine to sound therapy to massage to simply taking joy in everything. She is the light of my life, and when I complain about us not meeting sooner, she says, “We met at the perfect time.” She is more evolved than I am.

I have gathered all the letters and texts we have written to each other since May in a compilation, and it’s currently 440 pages. It’s ridiculous, I know, and I don’t know what the project will be, but I am so grateful for Mo. I know I’m a mother, and I love being a mother, but around her I am not a mother. I’m just me again. A friend said I should call the book or whatever it’s going to be: 23 and Me and Mo.

Could you talk about your dual life as director of Creative Writing in Birmingham as well as a working author, teacher, and mother in Los Angeles? 

I’ve been living this unplanned dual two-state life since 2009. I wrote an essay about making the decision to accept a tenure track teaching job in Birmingham, Alabama, and living on an air mattress for a while. I came alone the first year; the second year, my sixth-grade daughter, Norah, joined me and she was like a little cultural anthropologist. She came home from school the first day and said, “We played the name game and we had to say what we liked. And all the kids said they liked only Auburn or Alabama. I know they like their state and ‘auburn’ is a very pretty color, but what I am supposed to choose? When it was my turn, I said, ‘I’m Norah and I like books.’” I realized I had given the child no information about Alabama, so we had a crash course in football so she could catch up. Whenever I hinted at wanting to return to Los Angeles, she would say, “You can go be with Daddy. I like it here. I love it here. All my friends are here. Alabama is great!”

When I realized we were in it for the long haul, we got a rescue dog, Olive, who flies back and forth with me to Los Angeles. I had a terrible flight before we got Olive, awful soul-sucking turbulence, and Norah thought I was crying out “Hell Mary’s” instead of “Hail Mary’s.” After the trip, I vowed to drive or take the train, but it only took a four-day train ride from Los Angeles to Birmingham sitting up in coach class to get me back in the air. Then I got Olive. She has rescued me in countless ways every single day. And she truly is my emotional support animal on planes, along with the occasional emotional support Bloody Mary or glass of red wine.

I love my job as the director of Creative Writing at UAB. I love my students. I learn from them all the time. They come from all walks of life and many of them are first-generation college or they are returning to college later in life. I do miss living with my husband, who has four more years until he retires from LAUSD, but we get to spend summers and holidays together. We also cook and watch movies together. We do this by saying, “One-Two-Three — Go!” and then we hit play at the same time and mostly we’re in sync on Netflix. And because he is a wonderful man, he also goes to visit Mo, and we all have dinner and Skype together.

Our son is in Los Angeles, our middle daughter is in Chicago, and our youngest lives in the dorm at UAB. During the academic year, I live with Olive in what I call my “Alabama Retreat House.” Lots of sweet students and kind faculty drop by from time to time and other friends, too. Birmingham is such a cool city — a bright blue dot in a big red state. One of my L.A. friends visited, and she looked around the house and said, “You’ve created a little Echo Park in Birmingham.” I have filled the place with books and art from mostly “Studio by the Tracks,” where adults on the autism spectrum make art. Started by Ila Faye Miller in what used to be an old gas station, it’s a fantastic studio located in Fannie Flagg’s old neighborhood of Irondale.

I’m currently working on three novels — two are children’s books and one is for adults. I’ve adapted Offsides into a play, and I’m writing a little poetry and always picture books. I am thrilled that Ernestine’s Milky Way, written in this Alabama Retreat House and edited in a 1910 bungalow in Echo Park, has found a home at Schwartz & Wade.

What are your thoughts about the MFA Creative Writing programs these days?

I think they’re valuable because they allow students to find their people. I didn’t find my people in an MFA program, because I was the only student in my program at the time. However, I kind of made my own MFA with a writing group in Los Angeles — we met for 15 years, regularly. Those writers are still some of my dearest friends. I’ve also joined an online group of children’s picture book authors, who are brilliant, and a wonderful local group here of smart women writers. I find I need the feedback and connection with other writers — a kind of forest-for-the-trees thing with all the teaching I do. We also show up and support each other when our books come out.

That is the most valuable aspect to me of the MFA program — finding our people and getting to teach upon graduation. I feel incredibly fortunate to have taught in both a traditional BA and MA program here at UAB and a low-residency MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles.

What’s the most important thing you relay to your students?

I hope I encourage my students to trust themselves — to know that they do have a story to tell. I use play in the classroom (storyboarding and making book dummies) and I get them to take risks or chances with writing sparks, exploring narratives. I also talk about the importance of showing up for each other when success comes along. In other words, go to the reading, buy the book, go to the play — it’s such a long and lonely road to go alone, so I encourage them to cheer each other along the way and offer a hand. It’s so much better than being competitive and harboring jealousy.

Of course, it’s natural to feel envy, but I have been so fortunate to have friends who show up and are genuinely pleased, and I hope I do the same for them. I encourage my students to be good literary citizens and also to spend less time online. I offer the advice I need to listen to myself, especially when I fall into the online rabbit hole.

Can you tell us about your love of picture books and children’s literature?

I read to our three kids all the time. My son’s favorite book was Where the Wild Things Are. I even read that book last year to a group of incarcerated men at Donaldson Maximum Security Prison who had never been read aloud to before. I wrote an essay about that experience.

Anyway, I loved reading to our children when they were small, and my husband was a fantastic reader, too. I used to seek out books with great writing and stories. I hid the Berenstain Bears from the kids because I hated books where we had to learn a lesson. I never really thought of writing for kids because I was writing plays and novels for grown-ups. But I began falling in love with stories like Swamp Angel by Anne Isaacs, and anything by William Steig. The kids loved Chris Van Allsburg, as did I, and of course we loved Eric Carle, Margaret Wise Brown, Ruth Krauss, Roald Dahl, Ann Whitford Paul, Cynthia Voigt, Eve Bunting, Jacqueline Woodson, and Lane Smith’s The Happy Hocky Family. There are too many to begin to even name. One of their favorites was “What Luck A Duck” by Amy Goldman Koss, who later became a friend.

We read stacks of books, and as they grew older, they began to tell me what books to read. My son, Flannery, begged me to read The Giver and The Phantom Tollbooth. My daughter, Lucy, fell in love Laurie Halse Anderson’s book, Speak. She wasn’t a huge reader at the time, but she liked that book a lot and said after school one day, “Mom, I felt like reading it at the lunch-table with all my friends around. What it is up with that?”

I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn out loud to them and we watched the movie together. Norah used to have a little shelf of books in the minivan, because she was terrified of finishing one and not having another at hand. She used to ask me, “Can I bring three books?” and I would say, “You may bring them, but I am not carrying them.” When we moved to a different house a few years ago, we donated 20 boxes of books and it still has not made a dent in all the books we have.

¤

Tim Cummings holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. His recent work has appeared in F(r)iction, Lunch Ticket, Meow Meow Pow Pow, From Whispers to Roars, Critical Read, and LARB.

The post Echo Park in Birmingham: An Interview with Kerry Madden-Lunsford appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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CRABAPPLE, PRICKLY GOOSEBERRY, bittersweet, and devil’s walking stick — are these the names of thorny old monsters in some dark children’s fairy tale? Nope. They are simply the flora that vine the paths of the forests and hollers of the Smoky Mountains. A brave five-year-old girl named Ernestine must journey through these persnickety snatchers in the early morning shadows in order to deliver mason jars full of fresh milk to the neighbors who live far away. It is 1942, and the husbands are away at war. The wives and mothers run the farms, raise the children, milk the cows. These country neighbors take care of one another in their time of need.

This is the framework for Kerry Madden-Lunsford’s Ernestine’s Milky Way, an achingly poignant tale of independence, resourcefulness, and good old-fashioned neighboring as seen through the eyes of a strong-willed little girl in the wartime South. The illustrations, by Emily Sutton, brush the pages like the powdered wings of butterflies. There are sturdy rock houses and old wooden fences, hand-sewn blankets and dusty banjos, everything surrounded by watercolor bursts of soft country colors — trees, leaves, grass, and plants. Flowers and vines are like their own characters. The facial expressions of the people make you ache for home. Any city-dwelling child is bound to look up at the parent, or teacher, or sibling, or babysitter reading them this story and ask, “Can we please go the woods tomorrow?”

I met Kerry Madden-Lunsford during my first MFA in Creative Writing Residency at Antioch University in Los Angeles. I was immediately drawn to her; she emanates a warm and welcoming vibe, with sparkling blue eyes and a wide, down-home smile. She dresses like a hippie teenager from the ’60s who has met her future self, an older, wiser earth-mother. Currently she directs the Creative Writing program at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, where she covers the desks and tables of her classrooms with books — dozens of picture books and chapter books, and middle-grade and YA, and, sprinkled in between, weathered copies of classics, like cherished relics from a magical library. Reminiscent of your favorite elementary school teacher, she actually writes out the lessons — infused with words of wisdom and anecdotes — in a comforting cursive on the board. She connects with everyone. She connects with their work. She was my first workshop leader, and her editorial letter about the 20 pages I had submitted told me everything I needed to know about her — namely, that she was a very old soul with a very young heart. You can sense this about her. You can feel it flowing from the pages of her books.

I recently visited Kerry at her home in the hills of Echo Park. We sat together over bagels and coffee with her husband Kiffen and their dazzling little dachshund, Olive, to talk about her latest release, the aforementioned Ernestine’s Milky Way, as well as her prior work. 

She is the author of eight books, including the lauded Maggie Valley Trilogy set in the Smoky Mountains of Appalachia. The first in that series, Gentle’s Holler (2005), was a PEN USA finalist in Children’s Literature, and it’s easy to see why. The book shares some strands of Ernestine’s world as it explores the life of a 12-year-old girl and her adventures, with her eight brothers and sisters, in the Smoky Mountains in the early 1960s. It’s heartwarming and heartbreaking at once. Imagine a mash-up between A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Coal Miner’s Daughter, and you’re nearly there. Mountain country folk ridden with worries about money and bellies swollen from hunger are the characters that anchor Madden-Lunsford’s work. But the families in her stories rely on mutual affection and a resourcefulness that flows like pure mountain spring water to get them through the rough times.

Her December 2018 essay in the Los Angeles Times, “The Christmas Suit,” is a blistering meditation on family addiction — a deeply caring mother’s despairing attempt to stave off the crippling inertia of frustrated emotion. It’s a different side of Kerry, a flip of the coin. It reveals something tender and truthful about a majority of authors who write picture books, middle-grade, and YA: that they are seasoned individuals whose brave flights of fancy trying to survive adult life are the pearls of wisdom hidden in the sealed-shut shells of books that celebrate innocence, or the end of it.

¤

TIM CUMMINGS: Where did you grow up?

KERRY MADDEN-LUNSFORD: That is a complicated question, though it shouldn’t be. The short answer is that I grew up the daughter of a college football coach, and we moved all the time. For years I said that I lived in 12 states, but my daughter, Norah, reminded me that it’s actually been 13 states. Alabama is lucky number 13. I used to remember all the states by mascots and teams rather than towns. My father’s first coaching job was for Father Lopez’s Green Wave (High School). He married my mother in between football and basketball season.

He was both the coach for both outfits, so he had the basketball season printed on the wedding napkins to build up team support. “Follow Janis and Joe on the Green Wave.” Always the coach, he informed the principal, Sister Annunciata, that the school dance should be held in the library, so the students wouldn’t mess up his gymnasium floor in fancy shoes. He only told me this story a few weeks ago or it would have been in Offsides, my first novel about growing up the daughter of a football coach. Sister Annunciata shut that suggestion down flat, and the dance was held in the gym. I asked him if he chaperoned, and he said, “Hell, no.”

Because some people are going to think that I am the daughter of John Madden, which I am most definitely not, I finally had to write an essay called “I Am Not John Madden’s Daughter.” My father has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dementia and he sometimes wakes up from naps, talking old football plays or what defense he ran at the Sugar Bowl in 1977 as the defensive coordinator. He did this while we were in Rome a year ago, and my mother said, “Snap out of it! You’re in Rome!”

How did you come to writing?

I’ve told this story once or twice, but I really do credit my fourth-grade teacher, who told me I was a good writer. It was the first time a teacher ever said any such thing. They usually said, “Aren’t you a nice tall girl who listens well?” They said this because I was shy. So it was a relief when a teacher noticed more than height or shyness. That day, I walked around my neighborhood of Ames, Iowa (Iowa State Cyclones), noticing everything, and wrote a story called “The Five Cents,” thinking it was about the “the five senses.” I never was a good speller. I remained a shy kid, and later some of the nuns began to suggest I might have a vocation to join the convent. I wrote about everything, but mostly I read — I read all the time and that absolutely formed me as a writer.

Who are your greatest influences?

My parents were great influences for humor and resilience, but I rebelled quietly because I was not a girly-girl or an athlete (unless field hockey in ninth grade counts, along with golfing on the boys’ team in high school), so I set out to find ways where I could create my own identity away from the gridiron.

I was definitely influenced (terrified) by Helen Keller and facing her fate when I had to get glasses in third grade. The doctor told my mother, “she’s blind without them,” to make a point. When I sobbed in my father’s arms about my horror of going blind (I think I also threw up in the bathroom), he shouted, “By God, nobody is going blind in this house!” I cried, “But how do you know?” “Because I said so!” It made no sense whatsoever, but I believed him.

I adored my babysitter, Ann Kramer, who was a wild tomboy in Ames, Iowa. I loved the coaches’ wives because they were such good storytellers. I was incredibly influenced by my first best friend, Pattie Murphy, in high school because she was so funny and irreverent, presenting a good girl persona to the powers-that-be and then whispering to me filthy things that were horrible and hilarious. We got caught cracking up laughing in the worst places — in class, at midnight Mass, on stage in Ten Little Indians. She was the first friend to make me laugh. We were miraculously “the new girls” at almost the same time in a school, Knox Catholic, where the kids had been together forever; even their parents and some grandparents had attended Knox Catholic.

I was very influenced by my Aunt Jeanne, who gave me books, and my Uncle Michael, who taught me about art. I lost them both to suicide when I was very young, and I wrote about them in Offsides as a way of atoning for not paying more attention. I wrote an essay about that this past summer.

I do think I was most influenced by getting to study abroad at Manchester University my junior year in college. A group of British drama students adopted me and showed me a whole world of art and theater, and I worshipped them for their hilarity and brilliance. I also had wonderful professors in England, who paid attention to me in ways I had never experienced during my first two years at the University of Tennessee. Plus, nobody in England cared if I went to church or watched football. They wanted me to write plays and “drop the grotty trade school occupation of journalism,” and I was very happy to oblige. I’m now writing a novel inspired by that time called Hop the Pond, which also has themes of addiction and features the Brontë sisters and their brother, Branwell.

When I returned to the University of Tennessee from Manchester, I often pretended to be a British exchange student (yes, I was insufferable because I couldn’t bear leaving England for Tennessee). I changed my major to theater, and I came to know my professors in Tennessee who taught us theater history, acting, directing. I was grateful for the encouragement and attention they gave me as a student (and a girl in the South) who wanted to write plays. The only contemporary playwright I knew of at that time was Beth Henley, and I hadn’t yet heard of Wendy Wasserstein.

Our theater department was still cranking out suggested scene study pairings of mostly Inge, Albee, and Williams, and maybe, once in a while, Lillian Hellman. I wanted to write plays, so I stayed in Knoxville after graduation and began an MFA in playwriting. I was the only student in the course at the time, but it gave me two years to learn to teach “Voice and Diction” and to write plays while working at a bookstore. Those two years in Knoxville influenced me because that is when I fell in love with Southern literature. I dropped the faux British accent, and my patient friends were grateful.

Finally, I think my greatest influence just happened this year. She is my cousin, Maureen Madden O’Sullivan — or, simply, Mo. We met for the very first time last May; her grandfather and my great-grandfather — Patrick and Joseph Madden — were brothers in Roscommon, Ireland. Mo and I have lived parallel lives in Los Angeles for 30 years, with many friends in common. She has been sober since 1982, and I have a family member who suffers from addiction, so she has taught me how to really let go — to breathe, to meditate, to eat better, to make gazpacho, to take walks by the sea. She also has stage-four cancer and is doing everything to live and take care of herself, from chemo to acupuncture to meditation to plant medicine to sound therapy to massage to simply taking joy in everything. She is the light of my life, and when I complain about us not meeting sooner, she says, “We met at the perfect time.” She is more evolved than I am.

I have gathered all the letters and texts we have written to each other since May in a compilation, and it’s currently 440 pages. It’s ridiculous, I know, and I don’t know what the project will be, but I am so grateful for Mo. I know I’m a mother, and I love being a mother, but around her I am not a mother. I’m just me again. A friend said I should call the book or whatever it’s going to be: 23 and Me and Mo.

Could you talk about your dual life as director of Creative Writing in Birmingham as well as a working author, teacher, and mother in Los Angeles? 

I’ve been living this unplanned dual two-state life since 2009. I wrote an essay about making the decision to accept a tenure track teaching job in Birmingham, Alabama, and living on an air mattress for a while. I came alone the first year; the second year, my sixth-grade daughter, Norah, joined me and she was like a little cultural anthropologist. She came home from school the first day and said, “We played the name game and we had to say what we liked. And all the kids said they liked only Auburn or Alabama. I know they like their state and ‘auburn’ is a very pretty color, but what I am supposed to choose? When it was my turn, I said, ‘I’m Norah and I like books.’” I realized I had given the child no information about Alabama, so we had a crash course in football so she could catch up. Whenever I hinted at wanting to return to Los Angeles, she would say, “You can go be with Daddy. I like it here. I love it here. All my friends are here. Alabama is great!”

When I realized we were in it for the long haul, we got a rescue dog, Olive, who flies back and forth with me to Los Angeles. I had a terrible flight before we got Olive, awful soul-sucking turbulence, and Norah thought I was crying out “Hell Mary’s” instead of “Hail Mary’s.” After the trip, I vowed to drive or take the train, but it only took a four-day train ride from Los Angeles to Birmingham sitting up in coach class to get me back in the air. Then I got Olive. She has rescued me in countless ways every single day. And she truly is my emotional support animal on planes, along with the occasional emotional support Bloody Mary or glass of red wine.

I love my job as the director of Creative Writing at UAB. I love my students. I learn from them all the time. They come from all walks of life and many of them are first-generation college or they are returning to college later in life. I do miss living with my husband, who has four more years until he retires from LAUSD, but we get to spend summers and holidays together. We also cook and watch movies together. We do this by saying, “One-Two-Three — Go!” and then we hit play at the same time and mostly we’re in sync on Netflix. And because he is a wonderful man, he also goes to visit Mo, and we all have dinner and Skype together.

Our son is in Los Angeles, our middle daughter is in Chicago, and our youngest lives in the dorm at UAB. During the academic year, I live with Olive in what I call my “Alabama Retreat House.” Lots of sweet students and kind faculty drop by from time to time and other friends, too. Birmingham is such a cool city — a bright blue dot in a big red state. One of my L.A. friends visited, and she looked around the house and said, “You’ve created a little Echo Park in Birmingham.” I have filled the place with books and art from mostly “Studio by the Tracks,” where adults on the autism spectrum make art. Started by Ila Faye Miller in what used to be an old gas station, it’s a fantastic studio located in Fannie Flagg’s old neighborhood of Irondale.

I’m currently working on three novels — two are children’s books and one is for adults. I’ve adapted Offsides into a play, and I’m writing a little poetry and always picture books. I am thrilled that Ernestine’s Milky Way, written in this Alabama Retreat House and edited in a 1910 bungalow in Echo Park, has found a home at Schwartz & Wade.

What are your thoughts about the MFA Creative Writing programs these days?

I think they’re valuable because they allow students to find their people. I didn’t find my people in an MFA program, because I was the only student in my program at the time. However, I kind of made my own MFA with a writing group in Los Angeles — we met for 15 years, regularly. Those writers are still some of my dearest friends. I’ve also joined an online group of children’s picture book authors, who are brilliant, and a wonderful local group here of smart women writers. I find I need the feedback and connection with other writers — a kind of forest-for-the-trees thing with all the teaching I do. We also show up and support each other when our books come out.

That is the most valuable aspect to me of the MFA program — finding our people and getting to teach upon graduation. I feel incredibly fortunate to have taught in both a traditional BA and MA program here at UAB and a low-residency MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles.

What’s the most important thing you relay to your students?

I hope I encourage my students to trust themselves — to know that they do have a story to tell. I use play in the classroom (storyboarding and making book dummies) and I get them to take risks or chances with writing sparks, exploring narratives. I also talk about the importance of showing up for each other when success comes along. In other words, go to the reading, buy the book, go to the play — it’s such a long and lonely road to go alone, so I encourage them to cheer each other along the way and offer a hand. It’s so much better than being competitive and harboring jealousy.

Of course, it’s natural to feel envy, but I have been so fortunate to have friends who show up and are genuinely pleased, and I hope I do the same for them. I encourage my students to be good literary citizens and also to spend less time online. I offer the advice I need to listen to myself, especially when I fall into the online rabbit hole.

Can you tell us about your love of picture books and children’s literature?

I read to our three kids all the time. My son’s favorite book was Where the Wild Things Are. I even read that book last year to a group of incarcerated men at Donaldson Maximum Security Prison who had never been read aloud to before. I wrote an essay about that experience.

Anyway, I loved reading to our children when they were small, and my husband was a fantastic reader, too. I used to seek out books with great writing and stories. I hid the Berenstain Bears from the kids because I hated books where we had to learn a lesson. I never really thought of writing for kids because I was writing plays and novels for grown-ups. But I began falling in love with stories like Swamp Angel by Anne Isaacs, and anything by William Steig. The kids loved Chris Van Allsburg, as did I, and of course we loved Eric Carle, Margaret Wise Brown, Ruth Krauss, Roald Dahl, Ann Whitford Paul, Cynthia Voigt, Eve Bunting, Jacqueline Woodson, and Lane Smith’s The Happy Hocky Family. There are too many to begin to even name. One of their favorites was “What Luck A Duck” by Amy Goldman Koss, who later became a friend.

We read stacks of books, and as they grew older, they began to tell me what books to read. My son, Flannery, begged me to read The Giver and The Phantom Tollbooth. My daughter, Lucy, fell in love Laurie Halse Anderson’s book, Speak. She wasn’t a huge reader at the time, but she liked that book a lot and said after school one day, “Mom, I felt like reading it at the lunch-table with all my friends around. What it is up with that?”

I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn out loud to them and we watched the movie together. Norah used to have a little shelf of books in the minivan, because she was terrified of finishing one and not having another at hand. She used to ask me, “Can I bring three books?” and I would say, “You may bring them, but I am not carrying them.” When we moved to a different house a few years ago, we donated 20 boxes of books and it still has not made a dent in all the books we have.

¤

Tim Cummings holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. His recent work has appeared in F(r)iction, Lunch Ticket, Meow Meow Pow Pow, From Whispers to Roars, Critical Read, and LARB.

The post Echo Park in Birmingham: An Interview with Kerry Madden-Lunsford appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2CMGjGb