Author Archives: d.perry
Morgan Talty
Q: How did you arrive at a structure of interwoven short stories?
A: By pure accident, and maybe intuition, and I think respect for the idea of story. If there were no human beings on this planet, story would still exist, there would still be the ability for stories to be told and seen and witnessed, but by whom is the question – the animals and the earth. I don’t think story is something that human beings invented; it was there, and we found it. At a certain point when I’m drafting something – this sounds New Age-y or whatnot – I really feel like I’m communicating with this other thing. I don’t like to plot or plan anything because I feel like I need to figure out what the story wants. It’s sort of like this collaboration. I’m collaborating with art, in a sense.
Buying Time
With the money they made by stealing our land
They have bought themselves some time—
Air time
Water time
War time
And underground time.
By that they believe that they have bought history.
But when I look back, past the hundred of years
Of history they claim to own,
Through our own thousands of years,
And when I think of the million of red flowers
That opened each Spring of those thousands of years
No matter how white the winters,
I see hours like stars in the eyes of our children.
—Jimmie Durham
There is another world above this one; or outside of this one; the
way to it is thru the smoke of this one, & the hole that smoke
goes through. The ladder is the way through the smoke hole; the
ladder holds up, some say, the world above; it might have been
a tree or a hole; I think it is merely a way.
Fire is at the foot of the ladder. The fire is in the center. The walls
are round. There is another world below or inside this one.
The way there is down thru smoke. It is not necessary to think
of a series.
Excerpt of Through the Smoke Hole by Gary Snyder