When Pigs Fall in Love premiere at Café des Artistes

The first reading from the first edition of When Pigs Fall in Love took place last week at Café des Artistes in Fallbrook. Kit-Bacon Gressitt runs a great reading. Kit-Bacon was one of the first editors to publish my fiction.

The short story "My Fear of Snakes" appeared in her publication The Bridge Illustrated. Although I thought about reading it from When Pigs Fall in Love, I instead read "The Lost Tribe of Boston," a fiction based on The Boston Tea Party of 1773. After all, it was nearly 237 years to the day.

The story is told by Gerald Folger, a colonist with nautical experience, who's has been promised a reward if he leads the less seaworthy Sons of Liberty in a raid on a ship loaded with tea in Boston Harbor. The narrator begins to feel self-conscious about being disguised like a Mohawk when he sees in the crowd Ruthie, an indigenous woman his father once kept as an indentured servant:

When the tea leaves again pile so high that they spill back on deck, Gerald Folger kicks them out onto the harbor’s mud flats. Wearing nothing above the waist but a layer of burnt cork over his skin and chicken feathers in his hair, he has been moving fast to stay warm in the cold December daylight, but the tea leaves keep coming as if they grow below decks. So far they’ve hauled over 200 tea chests out of the ship’s hold and emptied them overboard. They’re a tad past halfway through. The leaves are wearing down the party guests. 

Although set in Boston, the story makes sense to me as only it could to a boy growing up near The San Luis Rey River. I play history like a jazz musician plays a Broadway standard so it is recognizable but more than itself. And of course, there is music in the story

I also read some poems: "The Long Pass" from Driven into the Shade and "The Cough of Dissipation" and "Men in Trees" from Light in All Directions. 

Kit-Bacon invited me back for National Poetry Month. Of course I love to perform my poems, but there were moments in "The Lost Tribe of Boston" that eveleoped me in the scene and the feeling was sustained. I had a chance to read "Lovers Lie" a couple of months back at Mt. San Jacinto College and had the same eveloping experience. Both stories are in the first-person POV. The challenge with reading fiction is first to create the emotional intensity and then sustain a character’s emotional range. 

For reasons of scale, short stories rarely fit at open readings. I’ve asked myself, If I can't find a story's internal stakes within five minutes, what went wrong? Are they there, and I haven’t found them yet, or do I need to write longer to discover them? 

The difference between stories and poems as spoken word seems to be that stories are arranged primarily within scenes; poems are organized by lines. I wasn't conscious of the difference. At least for today, I feel as if stories hold me by scenes and poems hold me with images and sometimes the music of a line. 

(From 12/16/10)