A WRITER'S WIT
Cut off a person from all contact with tales and he will assuredly begin to invent some—probably about himself.
A. E. Coppard
Born January 4, 1878
Parping Cloudlets!
Doug Dubois January 5, 2014, Colin Barrett, “The Ways”: Pell, sixteen, must retrieve her younger brother Gerry from school in this Irish town, because he’s been suspended after a fight. ¶ This story seems to be what we’re all taught a short story should be: a tiny sliver of time or life. We learn that Pell has dropped out of school after her parents’ death from cancer, two summers apart. Pell’s older brother Nick, twenty-five, is working in a hotel, attempting to hold the family together. Gerry likes to play a video game called Blood Dusk 2 set in North America; he’s memorized and explored two hundred square miles: Indian graves, buffalo, other wildlife—things he may never see in his own life. The pain of these three children, their loss, is always just beneath the surface of their talk, their lives. The language is raw, strange to American eyes and ears:
“Besides, Gerry would go spare if Swanlon’s rusting wreck of a car, parping cloudlets of straw and dung out the exhaust, came up the school drive to collect him” (55).
Raw but beautiful. Beautiful.
Barrett has written Young Skins.
Photograph, Doug Dubois
NEXT TIME: THE NEW YORKER PROJECT 4—INTRO
“Besides, Gerry would go spare if Swanlon’s rusting wreck of a car, parping cloudlets of straw and dung out the exhaust, came up the school drive to collect him” (55).
Raw but beautiful. Beautiful.
Barrett has written Young Skins.
Photograph, Doug Dubois
NEXT TIME: THE NEW YORKER PROJECT 4—INTRO
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