Death Rattle Writer's Festival, Dead Geese, and Old People

I attended an Open Mic reading for the Death Rattle Writer’s Festival in Nampa Friday evening just before I went to work, which actually means I only went to part of it. There are some oh-so-glorious parts of working an evening shift (not graveyard; I still sleep at night), and one of those is that people like to schedule fun things in the evenings because they assume that’s when people don’t have work. Oh well.

The Festival was a two-day thing, and while I wish I could have gone to more events, I’ll take what I can get. I also wanted to read some of my paragraph fiction, since it’s like pocket-sized prose, perfect for an Open Mic, but it turns out they had a sign up beforehand. Again, oh well.

So I got to listen to three people read their work, and I was surprised and pleased with the quality (does that mean I’m cynical? Yes). The first was a short story about a widower who has fallen in love with his daughter’s bus driver without knowing her name or ever talking to her. The second person read some poems, one of which was about how she startled a goose and it died by running into a telephone pole or wire, she wasn’t sure which. Her other poems were a bit more nostalgic and thoughtful in content, and she managed to bring that goose around to being philosophical; but it still says something that it’s the goose I remember, not the profundity she was going for (note: create fantastic images in your writing, because that’s what will stick out).

The third reader read a short story about this old woman who has fallen and broken her hip, and she spends the bulk of the story trying to get through to her Alzheimer’s-stricken husband, asking him to bring her the phone so she can call 9-1-1. That last story was the one that captured me the most from the Open Mic. I would have to reread all the pieces to know if the writing had anything to do with it, but I feel like the reason is that it was, to me, a new aspect on a familiar part of life. It was a tragedy, and one that wears normal clothes, making it even more tragic. This could be happening somewhere right now, and the possibility had never crossed my mind until Friday. I hope that story goes somewhere.

Perhaps this idea stuck out because it was so well illustrated by the image assigned to it. The dead goose stuck out because of the imagery alone, but then the poet philosophized and I have forgotten whatever concept she was trying to convey, leaving me with a dead goose and nothing more.

Jacques Derrida: Literary philosopher, deconstructionist.
Fun name to throw out if you feel like being hipster.

The woman with the broken hip, though, naturally portrayed an idea all on her own, so when I remember the image, the idea comes naturally with it. The writer did not have to explicitly state the idea anywhere in the story, and there was absolutely no stretching going on for the sake of making a point. Jacques Derrida once philosophized about how “the center is not the center.” I think this goes in that category. The story was so much about how this is a familiar tragedy that it didn’t have to even acknowledge the dead horse, much less beat it. The audience knew the horse was there just the same.

I wish I could put an excerpt from the story here so you could see what I mean. I’m kind of floundering here trying to explain it.

Lesson from today: A well-told story containing strong imagery can embody an idea that sticks (if the audience is receptive to it). Imagery that merely connects with an idea is a dead goose; if you wanted to eat goose, though, that’s just fine. Sometimes a story can be just that: a story.

I can feel a literary term being born here. “Dead goose”: an image that transcends the idea a writer has tried to attach to it.