Everything I Read This Summer

While I didn’t get nearly as much reading done as I wanted to over the summer, I was still able to get through quite a few books. Here are brief, reductive reviews of all of them:

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck: My family made fun of me for choosing this as my beach read, but it was beautifully written enough to be worth it.

Year’s Best Science Fiction 14: Like most anthologies, is was pretty hit-or-miss. Some stories were fun, some were excellent, some were boring, a lot seemed weird purely for weirdness’s sake.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman: By the end of it I was nearly moved to tears with nostalgia for six hours ago, when I had started the book.

Neon Green by Margaret Wappler: It’s basically about aliens, suburbs, and the 90s, and doesn’t treat any of those the way you’d expect (well, maybe the 90s).

Nine Tales of Terror by Edgar Allen Poe: Maybe I’m not as easily scared as the first readers of these stories, having been desensitized by much less subtle forms of horror, but the elegance of the writing hasn’t lost anything with age.

Zot!: Sometimes the chapters tackled deep moral and personal issues of hope, death, freedom, and the nature of reality. Other chapters featured two characters in a room, talking about whether they wanted to have sex or not for sixteen pages. And then there was that chapter where everyone got turned into monkeys and just sort of went with it. All in all, it averaged out to a pretty good comic.

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link: The title story made me feel exactly how I felt discovering Avatar: The Last Airbender when I was eight. It’s rare for literary fiction to bring such a specific, unique emotion to the surface, which makes me appreciate it all the more.

White Noise by Don Delilo: The only distinctly bad book I read this summer. Satire can be powerful, but for it to work the writing has to be legitimately funny. Similarly, novels can only be powerful so long as we give a damn about the plot or characters or anything besides whatever pretentious code the author is hoping will get us to smirk at.

1984 by George Orwell: An excellent palette cleanser for White Noise. Finally: a novel ideas where you actually care about the characters or the plot (or the ideas, for that matter).

The Green Mile by Stephen King: It might be that I grew up with five church services a week, but the Jesus metaphor came off as a little on-the-nose. Still, it was a well told story all the same.

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee: I didn’t enjoy it as much as To Kill a Mockingbird, I didn’t agree with it as much as To Kill a Mockingbird, but I think I learned more from it than To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s easy to decide whether or not we should kill an innocent black man, it’s harder to decide whether we can ever forgive people who think we should. 

Small Gods by Terry Pratchett: How did it take me this long to find Terry Pratchett? Easily the funniest thing I read this summer, and it entertained some religious questions I’ve been mulling over without ever getting too dark. Also, it’s sort of like something else I’ve written.

Sula by Toni Morrison: An excellent refutation of binary thinking, wrapped up in characters and plot worth caring about. People say Edina High School focuses too much on writers of color (a ridiculous argument in its own right), but so long as Toni Morrison isn’t required reading, they really haven’t gone far enough.

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell: I’m so glad I went to his reading before starting on his book. The language is beautiful in its own right, but even more so when you know how he’d say it.

Lost at Sea by Bryan Lee O’Malley: This captured so many little things that I’ve felt deeply but have never seen depicted so honestly in fiction. Also, cats steal souls, apparently.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: Among other trenchant observations on young adult life, Eugenides writes: “English was what people who didn’t know what to major in majored in.” Yeah, like I needed a reminder.

The Sculptor by Scott McCloud: This book put me on the brink of an existential crisis about life and art. I’m not sure if that’s a recommendation or not, but hey, some people like crises.

Loverboy by Victoria Redel: My teacher at the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute wrote this one. After listening to all her rules for how to write well, I expected to find some catharsis when I found out she didn’t follow her own rules. But, somehow, she actually did.

And, in case anyone’s curious, here’s the haul from birthday-presents, New York State Summer Writer’s Institute signings, and garage sales that I’m hoping to get through soon: 

Animal Farm by George Orwell, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain*, Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell**, Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes by William Kennedy, Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart, The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt, and The Grata Book of the American Short Story.

_____________________________

* I got those four at a garage sale last week for a quarter each. When I tried to buy them, the lady running the place cackled, “What kind of middle school boy reads Sylvia Plath?” When I told her that I was actually a rising junior in college and an English major, she replied, “What kind of English major hasn’t read Huckleberry Finn? What are you, a foreigner?”

** I’m almost done with that one, actually. Nearly every book I read this summer had a romantic plot or sub-plot of some kind, but none struck me as deeply as that one.

Measuring up to a Masterpiece

The great and terrible thing about graphic novels is how fast they go. Since there are sometimes only fifty words per page, you can take your time to see the subtleties of the artwork and still burn through a hundred pages without even trying. I hoped that Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor, which is heavy enough to give you a concussion if dropped from the proper height, would keep me occupied for a few days, but I went from cover to cover in a single sitting. Still, as beautiful as it was and as much as I wish it had kept on going, it’s fitting to the story that it all went by like a dream, over before you can quite tell what’s happening.

The story is about a struggling artist who gets sculpting-specific superpowers in exchange for a death date less than a year away. It sounds like the most generic “Wish with a downside you really should’ve seen coming” story, made to fit an aging artist’s autobiographical struggles and fears. And it sort of is, but within that archetype McCloud makes a personal story that feels real, even as he uses the rules of the format to play with reality. Maybe it won’t sweep along everyone the way that it did me, but it hit on my hopes as a writer and existential anxieties perfectly.

It was around noon when I finished it, and after lunch and a run I fell into that weird kind of boredom you get when you’ve seen or experienced something so deeply moving that it feels wrong just to continue your day as if nothing had happened. The most fitting things I could think to do was ride my bike to library and work on my novella.

Over the past month or so I’ve been working on revising a novella I wrote a year ago. Since I like being able to physically cut and add to and rearrange my writing rather than doing it all on a computer screen, my weeks of work have turned a nice stack of printer paper into a mess of loose sheets covered in ten pens worth of ink. Aesthetically, I like having an artifact like that to show for my work. But it’s been a real pain to type it all up.

Typing at the library the day I finished The Sculptor, I had to move into a private room when people around me got annoyed at how often I muttered, “This is so stupid,” to myself. I spotted three plot-holes in a single paragraph. The dialogue tried so hard to be quirky that it lapsed into incomprehensibility. And the whole story suddenly seemed ridiculous. Had I really spent a months writing and planning this mess? No matter how bad the first draft was, it couldn’t be any worse than this. 

And all the time I couldn’t stop dwelling on how much worse than The Sculptor it was.

Maybe part of it was that I picked a particularly bad chapter to start out on, but part of it was a fallacy in my thinking, something so obvious that any grade-school writing book would discredit it but that I’d only recognized recently. I always assumed that writing a great book was a lot like reading one, that some newly unearthed creative organ in your brain takes you on a journey you never could have imagined. In a way that’s exactly what it’s like, at least in the planning stage, but then you have to transfer it all onto the page. And in that transfer inevitably something gets lost and you have to clean it up and reorder it so someone other than you can understand it, and that process takes time and skill. 

When I was a kid I thought that when I grew up I would invent a machine that could let people project their imaginations into others, so anyone could create stories without having to know how to write or draw and everyone would see them just as perfectly as the author did. I think I’m still a little stuck on that idea. And, fittingly enough, it’s an idea that McCloud investigates in The Sculptor by letting his protagonist trade his life in for that very ability: to make art without time or skill. 

But, in the end, not even that is enough. The titular sculptor still struggles to make his art into anything other people can understand. The only work he makes with real worth is a representation of the life he lost in order to make the art. 

The applicable point here is that creation of any sort needs time and skill and revision, that it’s unreasonable to expect that anything will turn out perfectly the first time. The more abstract point is that art never has worth in its own right, only in how it relates to the real world. But actually, the two points are really the same. It’s ultimately a good thing that I never got around to inventing the imagination-telepathy machine (one more reason why a psych major wasn’t for me), because the process of revision, frustrating as it may be, slows art down and gives life a chance to work its way in. Which, in the end, gives the whole thing meaning.

Dispatches From a Kraft-Brand Notebook

I’ve had a pretty productive three weeks off the blog: I went to the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute, spent a week on a remote Canadian isle cut off from all civilization, transformed a novella I wrote last year into a mess of cut-up pages and scribblings that might be a full novel once I type it up, and nearly filled the Kraft-branded notebook (featuring a bizarre poem that heralds a Mac-N-Cheese maker as a bastion of creativity). Here are a couple of the mote presentable scraps from that notebook.

1: A Political Cartoon From Judas's Perspective

2: A Bullet Point in the Middle of my Extensive Notes on Garth Greenwell’s Reading

My legs hurt.

3: A Story Written Entirely in One-Syllable Words for Some Reason

It is not hard to rob a bank. You don’t need brains or strength or an in with the right crowd, just a gun and a mask and a plan you stole from some crime film. You need luck, too, at least if you want to get out at the end.

Life after the deed takes skill, though. You have to live low and find a thing that’s worth it to do for the rest of your life. Lars took some time to learn that. When it takes no more pain to live, it’s hard to know why you should keep it up.

He bought a house in a place with class and found a wife with just as much. The wife, Kim, thought that Lars had made his cash in a high-stakes bet. In a way he had. She made art, and it kept her fed, so in a way she had too. Quite a pair, those two,

“I wish I could be like you,” Lars told her many times, most of them when he drank. “You found what you could do well, and keep it up. Me, if I do what I do well one more time, I might lose it all.”

“Not that I want you to,” Kim said. “But if you lost your cash, I would still love you.”

Lars knew he would lose more than cash.

For some time, he did not need more than love. Love can feed you, but food can get you fat. You need a thing to do, to use that love, to burn it off. So he had to give it one more go. The touch of the cold gun in his hand, just the right weight. The fear in the crowd, like all his fear was put on them.

The second time, Lars had the gun, the mask, the half-brain you need to make a plan. But he did not have the luck you need to get out at the end.

4: A Dream I Wrote Down in the Middle of the Night (Before my Fine-Motor Nerves Woke Up, Apparently)

So I just had this really weird dream that I need to write down. [Indecipherable writing that gets progressively larger.] AND I THINK IT ATE OLEK! [Indecipherable writing that I don’t think was even trying to be language by the end.]

5: Some Stuff I Wrote During an Unusually Boring Reading

Blessed flowing through my mouth. The dryness like flaking paper on my flesh dissolving under the fast-running fluid. What we need water for is interior, but we never have thirsty throats, thirsty stomachs, thirsty blood. All we feel is the need for trivial spit.

6: A Response to the Prompt “A Bus to the Moon”

Okay, I gotta crap out of a video game. 

I used to be a real bummer at dinner parties, back when I thought game design was an art form. Especially when I described the knock-off Nintendo I worked for as, “A youth-centric creator of visual, interactive storytelling.” 

But you can put lovely details in every frame of a game, and kids buy it and play it and forget it the same as they would have if you’d just crapped out at game. So screw it. 

You need a final level? Sure. Let’s see, what better games can I steal from? Majora’s Mask, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Super Mario Oddesy, they all have a finale on the moon. If it worked for the best, it can work for us hacks, right?

How do they get there? Take a bus? Sure. Kids won’t know any better, and any critics who accidentally care will eat it up, say it invokes childhood whimsy. Maybe it really does, though. You really believe, when you’re too young to know better, that you could got to a bus stop and use your transfer pass to go to the heavens, to that shrinking and growing orb, not a lifeless mass of rock but a real place, a magic place, all the more magic because you haven’t been there yet.

No. Can’t get distracted with this stuff. Crap out a game. Just crap out a game.

7: Disappointingly Unfunny Thoughts on Humor

People act like you can’t care about something a whole lot if you joke about it. That’s not how it works, though. Sometimes the only way you can really understand or respect or love something is with well-constructed humor.

8: Really Not Sure Where I Was Going For With This One

Cliff chomped the edge of the quarter until it was sharp enough to cut flesh, then opened the print of his middle finger. Money was prohibited at the institute, as coveting and greed naturally festered when currency was present in any form. The cutting potential of coins was only an incidental concern. But Cliff had smuggled it in in the sole of his shoe, knowing it would be good for something. And it was. Not for buying something, as he’d expected. If there was a black market here, he hadn’t sniffed it out. No, the coin was good for making a blood pact with Margret.

9: A Chart of Feedback Reactions

9: A Response to the Prompt “Genesis is an Allegory”

I thought I’d be immersed in a world of high-class scholarly exchange, going to such a prestigious liberal arts university. Instead I’m nearly pulling my hair out trying to understand why my professor thinks Terminator: Genisys is an allegory for the human condition.

“It’s a really dumb movie, though,” I say.

“That’s not the point!” my professor declares. “Man mixing with machine rendered by digital technologies, the past story of the future affecting the past remade in the present, the ideologies swirling around Schwarzenegger’s governorships, not to mention the Biblical allusion-”

“Does it even count if the book of the Bible it alludes to is misspelled?”

“What would you rather have me assign a term paper on? Would you like to pick apart the filmography of one of your auteurs, your patron saints of pretension?”

“Yeah, that’s be pretty great.”

He sighs so despairingly. I wonder what’s happened to academia.

10: A Map, Presumably For Some Kind of Project, Though I Never Got Around to Writing What the Letters Mean and Then Forgot About it so Really I Have No Idea

New York Writers Institute

With a lot of writers I’ve talked to, there’s a certain fear and evasion of writing retreats. It’s a feeling I can completely understand. The beautiful thing about writing is how simple and easy the basic act of it is. Sure, it takes years of practice, but all you really need to get started is a notebook, a pen, and literacy*. At it’s core, I love storytelling for the same reason I love running: even if it takes technique and practice to get good, at its core it’s really more of a basic human instinct than a talent. So wouldn’t time going to readings and workshops (time you could have spent doing actual writing) muck up the purity of the process? Isn’t spending money on some expensive retreat just a way to buy your way out of the hard, simple, long process of writing every day?

Yeah, maybe. But, all the same, the New York Writers Institute at Skidmore was one of the highlights of my life.

On its face, what I loved about it so much really doesn’t have much of anything to do with writing. The people were simply great to hang out with. During the two-week session we’d traded a memoir’s worth of anecdotes and generated a dictionary’s worth of inside-jokes. It was just plain fun to hang out with smart, interesting, funny peers in a beautiful college town. Being writers didn’t really have much to do with it.

Except it did. Even if most of our conversations weren’t about writing, there was a certain literary, observant element in everyone there, along with a knack for storytelling that made for great conversation. I don’t want to make the claim that writers are just plain better than normal people, but maybe really good writers are. And I don’t think I’m bragging by saying the rest of the people there were really good writers, because I was definitely in the back of the pack among them.

It was fascinating to meet the people at the institute as people first and writers second. I might be plagiarizing myself a bit here, but it was like how you need two eyes, two points-of-view a little bit removed from each other, to see anything in all its dimensions. People have parts of themselves they only reveal in writing, and parts of themselves that they edit out of anything they’ve written but that come through in the kind of comfortable conversation you only get after spending two weeks in very close contact with the same few couple people.

The workshop, the readings, but above all the conversation probably put my writing years ahead of where it would be otherwise (which still isn’t great, but it’s still better). Which is strange to say because I don’t think I can list a single rule for good writing that I learned there, or at least not any that I think are applicable in every situation. That’s the thing about writing, there are so many ways to do it that no one philosophy on the subject is going to be entirely satisfying. The best you can hope for is to submerge yourself in a buzz of advice, every seemingly universal rule contradicting about twelve others you’ve heard, and sort it out however you like.

I realize that I’m being very vague about the specifics of what went on there. That’s partly for other people’s privacy, partly because I don’t want to turn this into a parade of inside-jokes. So to give it some human element, I’ll list a few random memories: being body-slammed by a Princeton hammer thrower. A passionate debate about whether or not cross country is even a sport. Smoking a cigarette. Regretting smoking a cigarette. Being laughed at for how bad a job I did of smoking that cigarette. Writing a story about being bad at smoking a cigarette at an impromptu flash-fiction throw down. Too much ukulele music. A byzantine drinking game that I’m pretty sure they made up as they went along. Being surprised to meet people who use words like “byzantine” in normal conversation. Learning about a water tower out in the woods that college students wander towards on summer nights to buy drugs, apparently**.

Around the end of my time at the New York Writers Institute, I compared the experience to doping. The same way that cyclists draw blood at high elevations and inject it when they need to compete, I wished I could extract all the creative energy I felt there and pump it back into myself the next time I needed it. That’s a pretty weird analogy, and it even becomes stranger when you consider that I hardly wrote at all during the two weeks I was there, and for a month after I came home I couldn’t stick to any one project for more than a few days. But I think my time there did energize me in the way that I wanted, in that the advice and inspiration I got from Skidmore powered me through writing two novels (one worth revising, one definitely not), one novella, two scripts, every post on this blog, and more short stories than I can count. 

After that last novel, though, I think my creative energy needs a bit of a recharge, which is why I’m looking forward to my return to the New York Writers Institute later this week.

__________________________

* Actually, working with disabled adults at Cow Tipping Press this summer, I’ve learned that even those requirements aren’t real. I copied down some truly excellent writing dictated by people who can’t read.

** If you want more out-of-context memories from an awesome two weeks, check out this video by Miguel Escoto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLhn6SpBtuA

Novel Excerpt

I spent a lot of time on the opening lines of my recently finished novel, but looking back on it, it seems almost certain that I'll scrap it all in the second draft. It just seems so scream "YOU ARE READING THE BEGINNING OF A NOVEL!" without providing any actual introduction to the story and sets up plot points that the reader will only get to at the very end, long after most of them have forgotten the exact wording of the beginning. That said, I'm still proud of it and want it to be available somehow, so I'm posting it here.

Notebook #1

[It is an spiral notebook with “pre-calc notes” on the front cover, more carved than written. Most of the pages are water-stained, so the lines blur to make the bottom half of the page a pale blue color. Despite the title, the content jumps from math to literature to history with little discernible pattern. The notes are meaningless without context, and mostly unintelligibly written anyway. Clearly the notebook has endured a number of boring classes, sometimes half the page is taken up with doodles: stick figures slaughtering one another, tiny mountains, various weapons, or just random dots and squiggles. The artist had great variety in subject and some level of imagination, but no artistic talent. This continues for the first fifty four of the eighty page notebook, and then…]

June 18, 2013

I’m going to try telling the truth for once. 

It’s a novel concept, I know, but my philosophy on this part has always been based on the assumption that no matter how much I lie to other people, somewhere in my mind there’s an unabridged copy of everything I know. That’s not the way it’s going to be for long, though, if the previous example holds. Pretty soon a big chunk of last year will be one huge missing scene, and the scar under my left eye proves that I can’t even forget on my own terms. So I might as well remember while I can, so I don’t fill in the blanks on my own later on. Because no matter how bad the truth is (and it’s pretty damn bad), I trust my imagination will do worse.

On Finishing a Novel

People don’t usually think of writing as a exhausting work. After all, it’s not like you burn many calories typing on a keyboard or moving a pencil across a page. But yesterday, after a five-hour writing session, my bladder nearly bursting and my fingers ached and my eyes were burnt out from staring at a screen all day. I was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. I was so sick of words of any sort that after I was done I stuck to activities where I could think without language, mostly Minecraft and mindlessly sorting Legos. It felt like I’d just finished a long race or an AP test, where I could waste away the rest of the day recovering because I’d already gotten the most important part of the day over with. It was the exact kind of marathon-level exhaustion that I think the end of a novel deserves.

Yesterday was a numb, patriotically colored blur. This morning, though, all the feelings that come with finishing a writing project that I’ve been working on for three months, that I’ve been trying to write for three years, that I’ve been planning for seven years hit me. I’d sort of lived in the novel the past few weeks, when the rush of being near the end pushed my daily writing quota up to 4,000 words a day. I’ve had vivid and terrifying dreams taken straight from the pages I’ve written. I would’ve answered to my protagonist’s name as readily as my own if someone called me by it. During the Confession of Sin at church I accidentally prayed for forgiveness for something one of my characters had done. And now it’s all over. Before, I always thought that writers were being hyperbolic (something we’re pretty good at) when they said that their characters spoke to them, but during this novel I finally felt it. I thought I’d be glad to be done with this novel, but since it’s a stand-alone story (the ending makes no sense if there’s ever a sequel) I feel like I should mourn them.

Which isn’t to say that my story is perfect. Actually, the other half of what’s been plaguing me since finishing it is that there’s so much wrong with it that I can’t help but want to dive back into it and try to sort it all out right away. When I’d been writing I’d had little trouble moving from one scene to the next without looking back, but now that I’ve capped it off, all the problems that I’d been able to put out of my mind are haunting me. Big things, like unrealized character arcs, as much as small things, like my inaccurate representation of central Texan weather patterns in the summer of 2013. At the same time that I’ve been writing this novel in the evenings, I’ve spent my afternoons literally cutting up the draft of a novella I wrote last summer and taping in new sections where needed. It’s my first major editing project, and I’m shocked by how little of the first draft remains and how much I have to rewrite. With the memories of how much time I put into this draft fresh in my mind, it’s hard to think that when it comes time to edit it, most of it will end up deleted and rewritten.

I’m tempted right now to open the document again, delete the last few paragraphs where I closed the last of the loose ends, and get to work again. It seems like it’d be so nice to let the characters keep on living, to get caught up in writing the next scene so I never have to look back on all the mistakes I’ve made. I might actually do that right now, if it weren't for what my main character has been telling me.

This novel is epistolary, meaning the text of the document exists in the world of the novel. It’s the journal of a high school student over the summer, recounting the very eventful last couple months of his junior year. Near the end, which I wrote when my bladder was just about to burst and the cafe employees were giving me dirty looks for going five hours without buying anything, the protagonist writes, “I’m almost done with this story and the chapter of my life that it represents. I’m anxious to get it over with entirely and get on to the work of forgetting. Not to mention this notebook doesn’t have too many pages left.” If there was ever a case of a character speaking directly to the writer, this is it. I had a sort of Dr. Frankenstein moment when I realized that my creation was begging for its own destruction. 

The novel might not be finished, and it's not anywhere close to publishable yet, but the story is definitely over. It’s hard, but in the end I think I can accept that.

The Edina Horror: My First Publication

My Junior year in high school, the school newspaper put out a call among the staff for a short, not-particularly-scary, Edina-specific horror story for the October issue. I got this down during a particularly slow Biology class. It was accepted by the next period, since my only competition was something about a specific math teacher eating specific students in graphic detail (which was probably some kind of catharsis). Even though this story is somewhat tainted in my memory since I later expanded it into a full-length, absolutely awful novel, I'm still proud of it. It was the first fiction I ever got published, and it got me into the Iowa Young Writers' Studio.

“Any ideas on clubs or people we could feature this issue?”

“Are there any left we haven’t already done?”

“What about that new cultist group that popped up this year?”

“What?” I asked. I had been slumped over in my chair, half asleep while Zephyrus* brainstormed concepts for articles. The word cultists snapped me right awake.

“The Brotherhood of Infinite Hellfire, yeah, weren’t they at the activities fair? A bunch of guys in black robes, murmuring in some arcane language?”

“That would be pretty interesting. Anyone willing to do the article?”

I raised my hand out of some impulse to see if this was some bizarre joke that I wasn’t conscious enough to interpret. But the Editor-in-Chief said, “Okay, John Osler’s down for the cultist article. Next order of business, do we want to publish ‘Top Five Tastiest Water Fountains at EHS’ or ‘Looking Back: Ten Coldest Days of Last Winter’?”

The next day I went down to room 317 to interview the cult leaders. The door was a copy of every flimsy, wooden door at Edina High School, except it didn’t have a window in the top right corner. I reached for the metal handle but it dissolved in my hands, as did the door, melting away like snow in sped-up footage of the first day of spring. In seconds there was no door and no doorway, just gaping dark hole in the side of the dirty white wall. Beyond the hole was a cave, lined with rows of spiked stalactites. The cavern was dimly lit by torches in the wall, despite the fluorescent lighting from the hallway which should have flooded out the darkness. And in the center of it all was a figure, his face masked by a dark hood.

“We’ve been waiting for you.”

He led me down the cavern, which spiraled down deeper and deeper until it was as if we were just walking the same loop on endless repeat. I tried to ask him my pre-written questions from my spiral notebook, but it was a difficult task, both because the torchlight made it hard to read and because the mysterious figure rarely answered with more than one sentence.

“What would you say the purpose of your club is?”

“To raise The Ancient One.”

“Who is your advisor?”

“Some call him The Doombringer, The Shadow King, He Who Consumes Worlds. I call him Locklear**.”

“When do you meet?”

“Only on the midnight of the winter solstice and Collaborative Wednesdays***.”

“Where do you usually meet?”

“Right here,” he said, motioning to the room we’d just come to.

A fire pit burnt in the center of the room, illuminating the other dehumanizing activity in devilish flame. Teens in tattered Spanish Club or YSY or Robotics t-shirts threw issues of Zephyrus, old yearbooks, and set pieces Fiddler on the Roof into the flame, building it higher and higher. They moaned and shrieked as robed figures whipped them, maybe to encourage faster work but probably out of pure cruelty. Other robbed figures read from ancient texts, proclaiming demonic rituals in ancient tongues.

“What is all this?” I asked, my eyes wide with terror.

“We must capture members of inferior clubs. We must burn the fruits of their labor..”

“But why?”

He laughed deeply yet hollowly. “To raise the school spirit, of course!”

Then the fire began to rumble. The inferno shook back and forth more intensely, writhing, growing, as if the fire was something alive, something trying to break free. Robed figures and student slaves alike ran for their lives. In a flash of light the flame burst across the entire cavern. I closed my eyes, yet the fire burnt so bright that it leaked through my eyelids. I could tell when it changed colors from red and yellow to green and white.

When the flame subsided I stood up, somehow still alive even after my notebook had been reduced to ashes. I looked and saw a monstrosity hovering above the carnage, a being of milky white wings, green flesh, and a long tail ending in a razor-sharp stinger. It was The Edina Hornet, no longer a cartoonish logo but a real thing, staring at me with dark, inhuman, intelligent eyes.

“Behold!” cried the robed figure who had led me to this nightmare, “The true entity of our great school! The embodiment of all we are! The Edina Horror!”

__________________________________

* The Edina High School newspaper.

** The Edina High School Principal.

*** Edina High School’s ill-fated experiment with giving students control of their own time.