The blocks of the Westside development whipped by us. All the houses bled into one another, a single stroke of adobe beige. No veterinarian had settled into this part of Albuquerque—it was too new, plastic, hollow. If one had…
We search the face of every old Puerto Rican man we meet, hoping to see our grandfather’s face looking back at us. The way to and from school is paved with old brown Boricua men. Up Riverdale and Rockaway,…
Moores lived next door. He worked construction; she stayed home. I don’t know how old he was, but I remember that on her birthday, she turned twenty-two. It seemed old. I was twelve. Moores had a baby, Sidney. Their…
Ugly, ain’t it? The whole fuck of it. The way the doctor’s fingers patted the rim of skin on Mummy’s concave chest. The twin rims where she, Doctor Small Tits, had cut off Mummy’s two breasts, golden brown to…
Last Cut All firsts. You let me drive. You let me choose the radio station. You rested your huge head against the headrest, closed your eyes. Never a willing passenger. Seventy-five quiet kilometres to the London Regional Palliative…
At dusk the light goes diffuse, like slow motion, like simple. The backyard trees are velvet; cirrus swift brushstrokes make the sky seem safe. The railroad rattling through the front yard slows too, whistle filtered through the gloaming until…
I want to be a better person, so I hide my bad habits. When I lived alone, in a chilly, oceanside city, I let the evidence accumulate like flotsam around me. Now, I’m twenty-seven and I live in my…
On the Big Island of Hawai‘i, Honokaa is the town tourists drive through to get to Waipi‘o Valley. At the top of the valley is a scenic overlook, which provides an unobstructed view to the black sand beach, river,…
I become quite pretty in the winter, in the dim afternoons with sheet metal skies. I line my lips with brown, burgundy, wine and whiskey stains. I crave bright fruits as though they’ll substitute the daylight—sunset persimmons, sunrise grapefruit,…
Let’s say you follow her home. The barefoot girl on the corner of Union, where Nut Creek gnaws at the back steps of a church and the struggling crisis center. She cuts her own hair, with garden clippers. Let’s…
At this point in my many years of making work, I am much less a determiner, less in charge of things—consciously anyway—and much more of a conductor/conduit/follower. I studied poetry in Iowa, but my public success has been as a novelist. And what I really want to be when I grow up is a musician (of sorts).
I go through my life in a creator state of mind. There are numerous writing projects underway (in all stages of completion or abandonment); scads of paintings, 3D, photos, and video art projects filling more and more real and virtual space; and increasingly, making and manipulating sound is taking my time and filling my spaces. Ideas and beginnings gather and collect. Too, I have several projects that combine all of these elements. Through diligence and intention, I have learned to quell any pressure to complete, to perfect. Anything. I have endeavored to be present in the making of whatever idea presents itself to me. And they always do, those ideas. I’ve learned to love and wallow in the creative process, with limited attention to what the final product has to or must be. Be like. The result is that I finish a lot of work (on its schedule rather than mine). Then I move on to the next thing.
It’s been years since I’ve written a poem. That one came to me as a surprise, and I did nothing with it except give it to my wife. Recently, and between video projects, I fell into a flash fiction hole. Found a rich vein there; two dozen and counting. And of those, “Let’s Say, Triptych” started life as that last poem. Much of the meaty parts of the poem are present in the first panel of the story’s triptych. But I was in full-on fiction writing mode, and following, not leading. Following. There’s a thirty-year old idea in the story. There’s a tomato sauce stain from last week.
I was very pleased with where the narrative led me.
Though most of STEVEN SHERRILL’s years and public success have been as a novelist, he was born a poet. Somewhere along the way, he took up banjo and synthesizer. He’s having so much fun in this realm of short-short-flash-micro. It feels like home. In the end, in the stories, he’s hurling himself against the potential for love in almost everything.
