"Manhunt," an Excerpt...

Flashlights
Originally uploaded by Yogi

Here is a short excerpt from the memoir I recently had published in "Watershed: A Journal of the Susquehanna." Growing up out in the country in the Susquehanna Valley, I was one of about twelve or so kids in our neighborhood. In the spring and summer, we used to play flashlight tag between the yards. This excerpt picks up after the younger kids have been called in for the night. Left to our own devices, the older kids embark on a more dangerous game called Manhunt... In the scene preceding this, I had actually discovered my supercrush, the neighborhood ninja's hiding place, no small triumph, let me tell you. He's so cool, it's terrifying, and I'm afraid he's going to make me pay back my insolence tenfold in the upcoming game of manhunt.


“Who wants to play Manhunt?”

Manhunt was a game only similar to flashlight tag in that it involved hiding and then seeking with a flashlight. The older kids told us the stakes were higher, and had never allowed anyone under fourteen to play in the past.

“We’ll play in teams of two,” Matt announced.

He had hypnotized simply by asking us to hang out with him. He had always been a center for us to gravitate to. When we were small we often sought him out for answers to complicated gaming questions, or to help us create new games. Unfortunately his games often involved violence and cruelty, while he oversaw the results from far enough away to not be directly associated with things if somebody’s parents came along.

Much to my surprise he had paired himself with me. All of the teams were opposite gender, “To even out the odds,” he said. Was his teaming up with me a vendetta, an opportunity to get me alone and knock me down a peg after having discovered him during flashlight tag.

“So who’s going to be it first?” Hands on hips, Eve tossed her hair in a boyish, flirtatious fashion. She’d been paired up with Ed, whom she’d had a crush on since the third grade.

“Do your stupid bubble gum game, Eve.” Matt smirked.

She had to feel stupid kneeling down, “Bubble-gum, bubble-gum in a dish. How many pieces do you wish?” She had stopped on Gary’s shoe and he answered five. “One-two-three-four-five, if you want to stay alive hope that I don’t count you out, ‘cos you are it!”

There wasn’t enough money in the world that could have forced me to purposely humiliate myself in front of Matt like Eve had done. Most times I felt like breathing was humiliation enough. I glanced down at her finger tapping shoe-tops, waited for the extended version that landed the tip of her nail on top of her brother’s shoe just after, “. . . who will be the next one, and you are it!”

“I’ll fucking kill you, Eve.”

“You said to do it, Matt!” She hopped up.

Under ordinary circumstances, I’d watched him pummel her for being cocky in the past, but instead he shrugged and said, “You better hide good. If I find you, you’re dead.”

The partners huddled close and disappeared whispering into the blue darkness. Matt and I watched, and for awhile I could still hear Eve and Ed’s voices and then nothing except the first frog songs of spring. I was Little Red Riding Hood all alone with the big bad wolf. I glanced toward him and felt my stomach twist inside with nerves. He leaned against the wooden support beam of the pavilion, head back, and I thought his were eyes closed.

He was so cool, even cooler than Han Solo. I hoped he’d never find out, or else it might swell his already enormous ego.

“Come here.”

Was he talking to me? I moved toward him, taking small, awkward steps. He reached out to grab my arm and drew me closer. I nearly fainted when his arms looped around me, one lowering slowly down my back in repeated strokes, “How’s that?”

I swallowed, “Fine.”

“You’re freezing,” warm hands brushed across the bare skin of my forearms. “Move closer. Do you want my sweatshirt?”

My vocal cords were paralyzed with shock. Within seconds he had tugged off his sweatshirt and draped it over my shoulders. It had all happened so suddenly that only one thing seemed able to explain it: I was dreaming.

“You’re nervous,” he lowered his face to mine, and the warmth of his breath sent shivers through me. “You’re shaking.”

The greater part of me wanted to pull away and run home because this wasn’t Matt, at least not the Matt that I knew. The Matt I knew would never help Steve win a game of flashlight tag, or offer someone his sweatshirt. In fact, earlier in the summer he had convinced me that the character Madeline Usher, in the movie Fall of the House of Usher, was going to reach out from under the chair I was sleeping next to and strangle me in my sleep because my name was Jenny. He’d chased me around for hours repeating my name in zombie tones.

“You’re intimidating,” I said.

“Intimidating?” He laughed and held me out at arm’s length. He had probably enjoyed my admission; intimidation had been tactic of choice. “I won’t hurt you.”

I wanted to believe him, so I relaxed and as my body loosened he drew me closer. “Shouldn’t we be counting, or something?”

“I am counting,” he looked into my eyes. I could tell that he was calculating something, whether it be the number of minutes they’d been hiding or something else.

“When should we look for—”

His mouth pressed against mine in a silencing kiss and I stiffened against him. He hadn’t been my first kiss. Earlier that summer all the girls in the neighborhood had taken turns kissing David’s friend Greg. Matt was the first kiss I’d dreamed of since I’d come to know that kissing and cooties had nothing to do with each other. His slow arm moved along the length of my spine, instigated relaxation. Trapped in his arms, I should have been in heaven, but instead I felt like a rabbit just out of reach from a vicious dog’s chain.

And then, just as if nothing had ever happened, he pushed me to his left and said, “Let’s go.”


If you are interested in obtaining a copy of "Watershed: The Journal of the Susquehanna," contact their staff at: river@bloomu.edu for more information.

Pictures of you....

One of my favorite writing outlets is the personal memoir. I didn't realize this until I took a creative non-fiction writing course in college with one of my favorite writing professors. I had always viewed non-fiction as history, essay and hardcore fact, completely forgetting that some of my favorite non-fiction books were actually auto-biographies and memoirs. The thing that makes memoir-writing exciting to me is that no one ever remembers the same event in exactly the same way. You could have four different people experience an event, and two weeks later have all four people write down the memory of what happened. You can almost guarantee that while all four stories have a similar theme, each one will be completely different.

Not everyone experiences things in the same way. Not everyone processes things in the same way. It's one of the reasons that there is often discord within society. Mankind just wants others to see his point of view, to experience things in the same way he does, but it's just not possible. Sure, we meet up with people that we share views with all the time, but that's not the same thing as trying to get someone to see things exactly the way you do. This is where a good memoir comes in.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in Pennsylvania farm country. Though if you had asked me as a kid how fortunate I felt about that, I would have laughed in your face. My family bought a home slap-dab in the center of a middle-class neighborhood that housed about fourteen kids ranging in age from seventeen years to one year. Because of where the neighborhood was nestled, at the base of a small mountain and just above the banks of Muncy Creek, the fourteen kids in that neighborhood had more potential for adventure than you could possibly imagine. Even within the smaller branches of the group, generally based on age, we saw tragedies, wonders and learned a lot about ourselves from each other.

My memories of the way things were are probably much different than the people I grew up with. My views were shaped by perception and personal experiences that none of the others had gone through. My emotions were often altered by my own dealings with those other people, shaping my reactions and experiences. I often wonder how the people I grew up with would react if they were to read some of the stories I've told about our quiet little neighborhood. The revelation of a number of skeletons would probably horrify some, while drawing others together in mutual acquiescence. I often wonder what parents will think when they read some of the things we got up to, and not just my own parents, but parents I respected as a kid immensely. I wonder who would call my memories lies, and who might call them exaggeration, as both have been known to happen where memoirs are concerned, but in the end I don't care.

Those experiences were my own. They were some of the most vivid and colorful years of my life, even on days the color was a hideous shade of blackish-green.

If you've never taken the time to write a memoir before, I can tell you, the experience itself is liberating. All you need for inspiration is an old photo album, maybe some old letters, or just a little time strolling down memory lane. You can start out the process by telling and retelling stories to others by mouth. After all, the art of story telling itself was once verbal, and the more you tell your stories aloud, the easier it will be to write them down.

Many of us who are adults today grew up in a time uniquely different than the one we live in today. There were no cell phones or personal computers when I was a kid. There was no cable television or satellite in my neighborhood. We grew up so far out there that the cable company refused to run a line out our road. Kids didn't spend all of their time indoors battling imaginary video game forces. Sure, we had systems. I grew up on Atari and Sega Genesis, but we knew when to put the paddles down and go outside. As writers, even better as memoir writers, we owe it to our time and to the people who will never get to experience that time, to share our memories. Otherwise they'll be forgotten.

So next time you're wracking your brain for inspiration, and you just can't find a plot, why not take a trip down memory lane? Once you're on the path it'll come rushing back in ways you never dreamed, and that's the stuff history is made of.

Taking the Glimmer Train to Memoir Town

Glimmer Train is running a Family Matters submissions category through the month of October. Though I have had zero luck with Glimmer Train (or true understanding of what they're actually looking for despite pouring over a dozen issues in the last three years...) I put together a short memoir this morning that I plan to polish up and submit.

I've been thinking a lot lately about memoirs. So many strange, painful and interesting things happened to me while growing up that I think constantly about writing them. In the past I got wrapped up in the emotional side of reliving the memories while writing memoirs, and while that can pack a powerful punch into a story, it can also make it seem too edgy and personal for every day people to relate to. A part of me worries too that my family will be offended by my memory of things. My dad believes my memory is warped and unkind, that my imagination allows me to color the truth with creative lies. He has convinced himself that many of the things my siblings and I remember are figments of this liar's imagination...that I have the power to change the memories of my brothers as well. Who knows, maybe I do.

I do know that all of my publishing success this last couple months has been with memoirs. It's like some kind of sign for me to get back into the creative side of nonfiction even if it isn't pretty or even along the same vein of memory for everybody else who experienced it.

The area I grew up in, and returned to raise my own child in after spending a year out in the world, is one of the poster children from the Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful campaign. Rich in wildlife and long stretches of forest and farmland, it's the kind of place where kids run barefoot in the yard and learn how to swim in the Susquehanna River. I want that atmosphere to flavor my work, which is something that blows my mind when I think about how the first 18 years of of my life were a struggle to get out of this area.

Now I never want to leave.

Upcoming Publications

I'm excited to announce that in the last 12 days I have had two of my stories accepted for publication. Both stories are creative nonfiction memoirs. The first to be accepted is titled "Manhunt," and recaps a romantic game of flashlight tag from my youth. It will appear in the January 2009 edition of Watershed: The Journal of the Susquehanna.

Tonight I got notification that another creative nonfiction piece I wrote about my daughter growing up titled, "I Do Believe in Faeries" is going to be published in the November 2008 edition of MotherVerse Magazine.

I'm stoked. I haven't written many memoirs since graduation, but both of these publications have me a little itchy to get persona in my writing again. I think it may be just what the writer's block doctor ordered to get he creative juices flowing again.