Accumulated Layers: Literacy shaped out of struggle and the past

 

I’m expecting a fight.

“Give me a second,” she starts, eyes down, focused.

My writing lies like a freshly fallen carcass, splayed across her desk. Professor Trueblood just sits there, pen in hand, inspecting it. I wait for the conference to begin, and I try to find a comfortable position on the lumpy office chair. There’s no way to find my balance on the damn thing, and I start to suspect that might be on purpose. It feels like an uneven meadow, like the meadows I trekked as a kid quail hunting.

You’d better come correct with Kate. She’ll fire questions at random, target anything. Her style is scattered — birdshot ammunition. Books overflow on the office shelves, press in from every conceivable angle, and her desk looks just as cluttered as my thoughts. Papers, pens, an empty granola bar wrapper, and an old Mac laptop that hums and chirps litter the top. I puff up my lungs with a passing draft of wind that trails through her open window and out of the cracked door behind me — I smell a million fir needles, and all of the leaves on the other side of the window shake like tambourines.

“It’s a good start,” she begins, “the way you zoom in, anchor us in detail.”

“Thank you.”

“You need to suspend it more, stretch out the scene. I can see the brewery, the bartender, the journal, and, then, out of nowhere, the scene just ends, moves on.”

I feel my blood circulate, pump, rush disproportionately to my face. I try to focus on her critiques, but all I can see are the blue marks that leech like blood through my wounded paper. Words fly in every direction — it’s as if she let a hunting dog loose amongst the prose. It’s forced out all of the misspellings, the improper quotes, the poorly formed sentences. I watch issues burst from that worded underbrush towards the sky. Each ones movement vies for my attention, and images of Kita, my friend’s wire-haired pointer, carrying a lifeless quail in her mouth flash through my consciousness. My hands clam up like they would before I’d pull the trigger hunting; my palms feel like they’re speckled with dew drops, condensation, and my heart seems to be trying to flee down its own trail, out of my chest.

“I’m sorry,” I begin, my voice tripping over itself.

“That’s okay, that’s okay,” she says, “this is why we have rough drafts. This is your first real attempt at fiction, right?”

I nod and wonder what she means by “real”.

“You obviously have a story that you need to get out, you need to write. If you can take these concepts and use them throughout your writing, I think you’ll have a better time conveying your message.”

“Absolutely,” I reply, as she hands the draft copy back to me.

“We’ll have more conferences, so, don’t worry, there’s plenty of time. You are always welcome here if you have more questions.”

“Thanks,” I reply, quietly, still lost amongst the fog of the conference.

I get up and leave, brush past the next student as she enters, the smell of her perfume trailing into my nose. The writing feels dead in my hands. I remember all those little quails and all the little pellets in their breasts. My boots click down the hallway, and Trueblood’s encouragement continues to ring, grow steadily, in my ears.

After the hunt we’d defeather quail, clean them, and roast them in the oven. The act of killing gave way to a lovely meal, the carcass transmogrified. As I step out of the Humanities building, I resign myself to this process. I need to hunt my story. I want the courage to kill it, clean it. Next time, instead of a carcass, I’ll bring her a lovely meal. I’ll bring her nourishment.

 

By: Ivan Murphy-Dlouhy