www.richardjespers.com
  • Home
  • Books
  • Journals
  • Blog

Behind the Book—MLPR, "Snarked"

2/4/2015

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
A paranoid is a man who knows a little of what's going on.
William Burroughs
Born February 5, 1914

Tweaking SnarkY

Behind the Book is a weekly series in which I discuss the creative process it takes to write each of the fifteen narratives included in my latest collection, My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories. Scroll to the bottom of the post to locate links to previous Behind the Book posts.
Picture
During the last ten years of my teaching career, I taught at a central-city high school that really housed two populations. Roughly one half consisted of the largely Mexican- and African-American students who lived in the neighborhood. The other half were students who transferred in from the mostly “white” part of town to take advantage of the academic magnet school that eventually gained Blue Ribbon school status, an award conferred upon the school by the US Department of Education. Many of our graduates matriculated at Ivy League schools, Stanford, Caltech, and other distinguished institutions of learning.

As a pre-AP and International Baccalaureate English teacher, I primarily taught students from the latter group (which also contained black and Hispanic youths, as well as Indians and Asians). A few semesters, however, I was called upon to teach “regular” classes, both during the Monday-Thursday schedule and on the shortened Friday schedule. This apparent racial division always bothered me. Prior to teaching high school, I’d worked in elementary education for seventeen years. There the nitty gritty of forced busing (the school board’s rancorous rhetoric) hit me every day, but with a certain sensitivity to both sides, we teachers were able help students see that it was a good thing to intermingle. It now seems to have been prophetic. Our larger world becomes more racially diverse each voting cycle, and yet I wonder where those former students of mine are today. Does race matter to them? Do they have a diverse group of friends? Might they, hope upon hope, still know some of the kids they became acquainted with when they were stuffed into the same classroom?

Anyway, this issue becomes background noise for the story “Snarked,” in which I take a term that widely means one thing (to be snarky is to be sharply critical, sarcastic) and turn it on its head to mean something else (a bit of onomatopoeia, in which “snark” becomes a nasal sound, snaaaark, acquired by one of the above populations to be obnoxious/the other group’s members are called . . . the fags). I write the story from the first-person point of view of a seventeen-year-old boy (a “fag,” but actually one of those many invisible heterosexuals) going to this El Centro, Texas, high school some time in the late nineties. Again, as in “Basketball Is Not a Drug,” I allow the young narrator to overtake my psyche. It is fun being “young” again. Having observed such behavior for ten years, I feel like I might be able to capture a certain insouciance, an arrogance that high school kids acquire until . . . uh oh . . . they’re suddenly pushed out into the big bad world on their own. Enjoy “Snarked.” I think it’s a lot of fun!

A PASSAGE FROM THE STORY:
The fag girls feel sorry for me; the snark girls laugh behind their hands. Other fags offer me rides until I find an old Corolla my dad buys for me. The snarks . . . snark . . . make that obnoxious laugh as I walk to my new wheels. It’s said they patented the sound when a principal caught onto their yellow bandannas around the neck, trying to get around our no-can-do dress code. We can’t wear earrings either, so snarks invented this laugh that makes like a loud snore attached to the syllable “ark.” It’s such a great sound that even the fags imitate it when no one’s listening. If you want to make fun of one of your fag friends, you snark him, like this. Snaaaaaark! (227).
"Snarked" was originally published at FRiGG Magazine, an online journal that features (if I may say so) fine fiction.
Click here to buy a copy of My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories, where it is available at Amazon.

NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2015


CATCH UP WITH EARLIER POSTS OF BEHIND THE BOOK

11/13/14 — Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
11/20/14 — "My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
11/27/14 — "A Certain Kind of Mischief"
12/04/14 — "Ghost Riders"
12/11/14 — "The Best Mud"
12/18/14 — "Handy to Some"
12/25/14 — "Blight"
01/01/15 — "A Gambler's Debt"
01/09/15 — "Tales of the Millerettes"
01/15/15 — "Men at Sea"
01/22/15 — "Basketball Is Not a Drug"
01/29/15 — "Engineer"

Comments are closed.
    AUTHOR
    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

    See my profile at Author Central:
    http://amazon.com/author/rjespers


    Richard Jespers's books on Goodreads
    My Long-Playing Records My Long-Playing Records
    ratings: 1 (avg rating 5.00)


    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011



    Categories

    All
    Acting
    Actors
    African American History
    Alabama
    Alaska
    Aldo Leopold
    Andy Warhol
    Arizona
    Arkansas
    Art
    Atrial Fibrillation
    Authors
    Authors' Words
    Barcelona
    Blogging About Books
    Blogs
    Books
    California
    Cars
    Catalonia
    Colorado
    Cooking
    Creative Nonfiction
    Culinary Arts
    Deleting Facebook
    Ecology
    Education
    Environment
    Epigraphs
    Essays
    Fiction
    Fifty States
    Film
    Florida
    Georgia
    Grammar
    Greece
    Gun Violence
    Hawaii
    Heart Health
    Historic Postcards
    History
    Idaho
    Iowa
    LGBTQ
    Libraries
    Literary Biography
    Literary Journals
    Literary Topics
    Literature
    Maine
    Massachusetts
    Memoir
    Michigan
    Minnesota
    Mississippi
    M K Rawlings
    Musicians
    Nevada
    New Hampshire
    New Mexico
    New Yorker Stories
    Nonfiction
    North Carolina
    Novelist
    Ohio
    Pam Houston
    Parker Posey
    Photography
    Playwrights
    Poetry
    Politics
    Psychology
    Publishing
    Quotations
    Race
    Reading
    Recipes
    Seattle
    Short Story
    South Carolina
    Spain
    Susan Faludi
    Teaching
    Tennessee
    Texas
    The Novel
    Travel
    Travel Photographs
    #TuesdayThoughts
    TV
    U.S.
    Vermont
    Voting
    War
    Washington
    Wisconsin
    World War II
    Writer's Wit
    Writing


    RSS Feed

    Blogroll

    alicefrench.wordpress.com
    kendixonartblog.com
    Valyakomkova.blogspot.com

    Websites

    Caprock Writers' Alliance
    kendixonart.com

    tedkincaid.com
    www.trackingwonder.com
    www.skans.edu
    www.ttu.edu
    www.newpages.com
    www.marianszczepanski.com
    William Campbell Contemporary Art, Inc.
    Barbara Brannon.com
    Artsy.net
WWW.RICHARDJESPERS.COM  ©2011-2023
                    BOOKS  PHOTOS  PODCASTS  JOURNALS  BLOG