Stories

This is a large picture (somewhat like Dennis's Minnesota beer collection but not as tasty), and yet if you can open it up and look closely, what you'll find is interesting. Here's the life story of a tree told in its rings. Such a tree witnesses more of what passes in this world than most other "living" things.

The story I'm trying to get started is "Witness Tree," and I'm trying to figure out how to work in some of the history surrounding a tree such as this, a tree that has stood in my fictional Runion community since before it was established as a "place." I think a display like this one in the museum at Grandfather Mountain might be the ticket. The difficulty, however, is in working this in and at the same time giving the piece more narrative flow than it would have if it were just history or just science.

So I'm floundering about, trying to figure out where to begin. I have most of the structural details to begin creating "Witness Tree," but I don't know what the story is. I'm thinking about it a lot, but then I'm also distracting myself--with things like writing this blog--to escape my unproductive thinking about it.

My lack of a story for "Witness Tree" seems also connected to a fear that it'll be seen as a cheap imitation of James Joyce's "The Dead," the final story in Dubliners and one of the finest pieces of short fiction ever written (as far as I'm concerned). The ending is beautiful. The lead character in the story, Gabriel Conroy, is in a hotel room with his wife Gretta, where he has just learned (or been reminded) that a boy named Michael Furey had once loved her so much that he seems to have died for her. In this final scene, a private moment after a large Christmas party and then a few minutes talking in the room with his wife, Gabriel stands in the darkness while his wife sleeps.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

I have a Christmas party in mind as well. Trying to keep "The Dead" out of my head is difficult, so until I come up with a story I want to tell, I'll continue to think about it.

Maybe I'll do the work of a dendrochronologist and chart the history of the community via the life of a tree.