"A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places." -Isabelle Eberhardt
"A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places." -Isabelle Eberhardt
I registered for a Short Story class at Lighthouse Writers Workshop
and as I wait for class to start, I am reading as many short stories as possible. I love short stories, especially before bed. Sometimes, it seems all my attention span can handle is a short story. The very first short story I remember reading and loving as an adult (Well, in college at age 19…If you can consider that adult.) is “Coffee” by Richard Brautigan, from his Revenge of the Lawn Collection
. I had a copy of this collection in class and I remember my professor asking what I was doing reading Brautigan. At the time, it made me feel very worldly.
In “Coffee,” the narrator goes to an old flame’s house and asks for a cup of coffee, which is funny because I recently broke up with a guy because of the way he asked me for coffee (Ok, ok, that wasn’t the only reason). My favorite lines from this story are, “Her clothes adjusted themselves to her body. I won’t.” I sometimes wear as many as three shirts at a time and will often complain about them being in an argument with each other. I wonder if this is why.
Anyway, the first old flame isn’t happy to see him and leaves him the ingredients to make his own coffee (noted). So, he heads to another old flame’s house and she does the same thing. In the end, he didn’t want coffee at all and realizes, “They say in the spring a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love. Perhaps if he has enough time left over, his fancy can even make room for a cup of coffee.”
Amen to that.
Another favorite from this collection is called, “I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone.” Brautigan, in less than two pages, makes me want someone describe me in similar fashion. He describes the girl in relation to a movie which, “showed Electricity like a young Greek god coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life.” He ends the story, “I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio. That’s how you look to me.” If that’s not romantic, I don’t know what is.
There’s another one called, “Lint,” that is about four sentences long. This encourages me. Maybe I can figure out how to tell an entire story in only four sentences!
Another collection called, The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings , includes a few stories but is primarily very, very short poems. Here are a few of my favorites:
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