A STORY. 11. A EUREKA FROM THE AUTHOR
I have been hitting a bottleneck. You know a bottleneck with traffic. Things are moving smoothly, then you need to brake. A slowdown. Often you grind down to a crawl.
The poems are not the bottleneck. They have been written, often for decades. Quite a number are online.
The bottleneck comes from my vision of A STORY, where you can listen to the poems and read along. A lot was done maybe 5 years ago. That’s when I created the look of the cover, and of the pages, but got stuck. Now I was delighted to come back to those pages, just about ready to go.
There was still a lot to do - recording and editing the sound, for one thing.
ALMOST came together almost effortlessly.
Then there was GENTLE RAIN.
But already with GENTLE RAIN, there was a major bottleneck. Time.
A part of me keeps going: that’ll only take 5 minutes. The truth is that it takes closer to 5 hours - and longer. So many decisions. I care to get things so that they feel really right to me. Tiny adjustments.
That brings me to my Eureka!!!
To present the poems as poems. For you to read. But still to keep the look of the book. That I can do quickly. I have the image of the cover of the book, and can easily do the image of the first few lines of the poems. As for the poems, they exist.
I can feel so much eagerness in me to get them out to you. Still in a flow, poem to poem. Just not recorded.
Eureka!! I believe I may have found the next bit of my magic formula.
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And now I have another comment from me to you. I’m thinking of a book I really like, and have enjoyed teaching - a more complex book than most of my students - college students - were used to reading. The Wars, by Timothy Findlay. It starts something like: “She stood at the edge of the tracks, watching the empty trains go by.” For a full page you are with her, at the edge of the tracks. The last line on the page is a bit dislocating for most readers: “She was riderless. She waited, pawed the ground in front of her.”
There is a bigger dislocation coming. Soon after the opening of the book, you are in archives, along with someone (the author?) going through old boxes, pulling out photographs from long ago, from World War I. He stops at one picture.
Students have often loved the book - if we went into it slowly, one dislocation after the other. Otherwise, if they tried to make sense of things on their own, they tended to get lost.
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With A STORY, there’s no risk of your getting lost. But you’re used to something smooth, none of these interjections by the author. You’re almost certainly not used to reading a book as it emerges, along with my Eurekas.
But . . . adventures can be extra special.
Now on to HEAVY RAIN.
NEXT:
A STORY. 12. YOU TURN THE PAGE
https://elsaiselsa.substack.com/p/a-story-12-you-turn-the-page
A STORY. ALL THE CHAPTERS ... UP TO NOW
https://elsaiselsa.substack.com/p/a-story-table-of-contents-up-to-now
Posted March 20, 2024