Tag Archives: Writing

In Which the Pen Name, Nickname, and Legal Name Meet Each Other

Who? More authors than I can count have used a pen name at one point. Dean Koontz has used Aaron Wolfe; Charlotte Bronte used Currer Bell; Daniel Foe, being the creative genius that he was, used Daniel Defoe, not to conceal his identity but to convince his readers he was more gentlemanly. My favorite is Daniel Handler’s pseudonym Lemony Snicket, because Snicket becomes a character in Handler’s Series of Unfortunate Events, one who navigates the reader through the troubling plots. I’ve never imagined myself using a pen name, until I realized how many names I’ve gone by.

For most of my life, I’ve gone by my middle name Keene. In middle school, I got tired of correcting people who thought I said Ken or Keenan or Keith, and I also wanted a name requiring no spelling correction. Not Keen, not Keane, not Frank, but Keene! I tried my first name Jeffery, but even then most people misplaced the R, spelling it Jeffrey. So I shortened it to Jeff. This was also around the time I started writing, and I wrote my earliest stories as Jeff Short. But Jeff was not a very pleasant person, nor a very good writer. He was obnoxiously political, and was competitive in music, writing, and grades.

Along the way, I decided that I liked Keene better. Keene Short. It’s a good name for a writer, and frankly I like Keene as a person more than Jeff. Whereas Jeff was picky, Keene embraced just about everything. He had a better sense of humor than Jeff. Most importantly, he gave up competitiveness. Keene wasn’t concerned with being superior with distinction, but with enjoying the show. Jeff slowly diminished into a forgotten nickname.

In the last years of college, I adopted another name: JK. The nickname originated in the place I worked, the NAU Honors Writing Center, which I can only describe as a mythical realm where the drawers are stuffed with candy and sarcasm flows freely from the tutors. My boss began calling me JK, and soon I started signing emails, letters, and even blog posts as JK. Keene now blogs as JK, who can withhold his sarcasm and be somber when the time calls for it but prefers to be lighthearted. You do not know everything about Keene; you don’t need to and I don’t want you to, which is why JK is here as a literary filter.

But I will always be Keene Short, even in publication. JK is a nice nickname, but I can’t see critics taking Collected Stories of JK very seriously. Maybe JK is just the fictionalized version of Keene, and I’m content with that. I don’t think of Keene Short as a pen name because Jeffery Short, to me, isn’t a real person. I’d be lying if I published under Jeffery or Jeff, both strangers to me. I am simply Keene Short.

-jk

The Summer Limbo

Leave a reply

Giant wheel bw

The sun rises earlier, the nights are warmer, yellow pollen is in the air, and Flagstaff’s population shifts from students at the University to tourists on their way to the Grand Canyon or Lake Powell. Like birds in migration, people move backward or forward in summer, propelled into greener forests, taller mountains, warmer beaches. Among those birds in migration, I am absent. I am still perched in Flagstaff.

My time at Northern Arizona University is over; my time at the University of Nebraska has yet to begin. Now I’m in limbo, with no schoolwork, no tests, and lots of free time on my hands. I still have to pack up my life and move to a new state, but I will not be moving for a while, which means I suddenly have no major obligations. After four years of deadlines and assignments, I hardly know what to do with myself.

So far, I’ve been spending my time exploring parts of Arizona I haven’t seen much, like Prescott and Jerome; I’ve been camping, doodling, learning to play the mandolin, working through my reading list of over twenty books (I’m seven books in), and trying to teach my dog that fetch requires letting go of the ball.

I’ve also taken advantage of the free time by writing, or trying to at least. But I feel like I’m in an episode of The Twilight Zone, “Time Enough at Last,” in which the main character Henry finally has enough time to read all the books he can after he becomes the only survivor of a nuclear war. Being The Twilight Zone, poor Henry’s thick glasses slide from his nose and break, rendering him too blind to read. Like Henry, I have plenty of time to do what I love most, more time than I’ll probably ever have again, but something about this summer limbo is blinding me from my creative intuition.

Being in Flagstaff is a nice way to spend the summer. I may not need greener forests, taller mountains, or warmer beaches, but I do need something to realign the way I see my writing, a new perspective, something wrought from a new experience. I’ve had some fantastic experiences this summer, but being stuck between two worlds, physically and emotionally, is disconcerting. Hopefully I’ll break out from this creative complacency soon.

-jk

Instructions for a Camping Trip: An Interactive Short Story

2 Replies

I love camping, so I wrote a short story (in the form of an instruction manual) about it.

shadows

Step One: Pack matches, a tent, sleeping bags, pads, pillows, snacks, beer, camera, books, flashlights, water, knives, and then proceed to follow directions from printed maps, a GPS, and a passenger’s memory of “shortcuts” from five years ago.
If you make a wrong turn, proceed to Step Two.
If you miraculously make all the right turns, proceed to Step Four.

Step Two: Following one of several misleading directions, you find yourself in a condo development several miles off course. Find the nearest dirt road back to the freeway.
If you make it back to the freeway, proceed to Step Four.
If you find yourself in a deserted farm with fifteen scarecrows all facing you, proceed to Step Fifteen.
If you stop and ask for directions, proceed to Step Three.

Step Three: After finding the right directions back to the freeway, having asked between one and thirteen grizzled old farmers holding shotguns and potted daisies, you get back on track two hours late but determined nevertheless. Proceed to Step Four.

Step Four: You pull into the campsite, pay the grizzled old camp director holding a shotgun and a potted daisy, and proceed to set up the camping equipment.
If the tent you brought is not broken, proceed to Step Seven.
If the tent you brought is broken, proceed to Step Five.

Step Five: Use everything in your car to fix the tent (clamps, chairs, knives, potted daisies, etc.). Proceed to Step Six.

Step Six: After fixing the tent, you find yourselves exhausted and take a nap. Missing an hour of daylight, you wake up and realize
that someone forgot the bug spray and you are surrounded by bees (proceed to Step Sixteen), or
that you all brought and used bug spray but it inevitably failed and you are nevertheless surrounded by bees (proceed to Step Seven).

bees

Step Seven: You set up all camping equipment, including a bee trap fashioned from a plate of syrup well away from your tent, and you proceed to make a campfire.
If you succeed on the first try, proceed to Step Ten.
If you fail on the first try, proceed to Step Eight.

Step Eight: Nobody can get the fire started.
If you put your heads together and manage to build a successful fire using old copies of Dan Brown novels, proceed to Step Ten.
If you insist on starting the fire the way you saw that survivalist on TV do it involving a shoelace and several ounces of beer, inevitably failing, proceed to Step Nine.

Step Nine: You all give up and decide to camp without a fire, end up freezing, and drink what little alcohol is left for warmth. Proceed to Step Sixteen.

Step Ten: The tent is up, the fire is going, and you are all sitting comfortably in a circle making s’mores and drinking frosty cold beers. You lean back, gaze up at the stars, and
realize that you are insignificant but stranded beautifully on a fragile planet, and that it is your responsibility to care for your world (proceed to Step Eighteen), or
realize that you are insignificant, which induces an existential crisis causing increased alcohol consumption (proceed to Step Nineteen), or
fall backward in your chairs and wonder why you went camping in the first place (proceed to Step Eleven).

Step Eleven: Annoyed at camping in general, you all pull out your phones to see which celebrities have started dating each other, but discover there is no service in the woods.
If this frustrates you, proceed to Step Twelve.
If you return to toasting marshmallows, proceed to Step Thirteen.

Step Twelve: Your unquenchable desire for modern technology drives you to wander into the woods holding your smartphones into the air hoping to find a signal. Proceed to Step Seventeen.

Step Thirteen: Somebody pulls out a harmonica and plays a soulful rendition of Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.” Proceed to Step Fourteen.

Step Fourteen: You realize that a desire for luxury is the last chain enslaving humankind to capitalism, and that if we all lived a minimalist’s life together in a commune and devoted ourselves to art and human companionship, the corporations would all go extinct and we would open up the doors to Heaven on Earth. Proceed to Step Eighteen.

Step Fifteen: Now stuck countless miles from any sign of human life, you all get out of the car and proceed to argue. Proceed to Step Sixteen.

Step Sixteen: Furious at one another for your collective insensitivities, self-centeredness, and refusal to accept responsibility for your mistakes, you use all the camping equipment to kill each other. Proceed to Step Seventeen.

Step Seventeen: You are all eaten by coyotes. The End.

Step Eighteen: After waking up to the sound of birds and running water the next day, you feel spiritually and socially invigorated and return to the plastic confines of civilization with a renewed sense of meaning and a deeper understanding of the divine, determined to be a better person to the world as a whole. You then sell all the pointless crap you’ve spent decades accumulating, give the money to charity, and finally start playing music again. The End.

Step Nineteen: Having had too much to drink, you sob about the terrible state of the world, the wars, the power that big business has over you, how expendable you are in the scheme of things, the fact that Unfriended was ever produced in the first place, and wander around the campground despondent and terrified.
When the camp director finds you, he
uses his shotgun to “motivate” you back into your tent for a night of silent introspection (proceed to Step Eighteen), or he
uses his shotgun to “motivate” you out of the campground entirely (proceed to Step Seventeen), or he
kindly offers you bread, water, and painkillers, then proceeds to teach you about Zen Buddhism, which you diligently listen to as long as drunk people can before falling asleep (Proceed to Step Eighteen).

Campfire

For more information on camping, consult your nearest grizzled old farmer.

-jk

A Brief Note About the Best Weekend of the Year*

5 Replies

*or, That Time I Went to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs 2015 Conference in Minneapolis

Conference 1

“Listen to the language you start with in the first paragraphs. That will shape the rest of the story more than you are aware.” –Pamela Painter on first drafts.

Every year, thousands of writing programs, small presses and literary magazines, publishing companies, writers new and old, writing teachers, and students flock together to share their books, writing programs, new releases, and innovations in the literary community. Thanks to the NAU Honors Program, I joined several friends in attending the conference, and it was one of the most beneficial experiences of my academic life.

“The MFA program is useful because it’s a break from the capitalist shitstorm. It lets you work without giving you black lung, and lets you focus on writing. The problem is that it doesn’t prepare you for life back in the capitalist shitstorm after it’s over.” –Claire Vaye Watkins.

Conference 2

Despite our travel plans going wrong, we made it. Because Arizona does not acknowledge daylight savings time (but Greyhound does), we missed our bus by an hour. We decided to take a shuttle to Phoenix and ended up taking two different shuttles an hour apart, but eventually gathered in Sky Harbor with enough time to bankrupt ourselves from airport food. By late afternoon and with much applause, we landed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, amidst rain and snow.

“One of the hardest things for an Arab to accomplish is to live apolitically.” –Hayan Charara on whether or not writing should be political.

The conference has two features, an exhaustive list of panels and a colossal book fair. I spent most of my time in the less popular conferences, and tried to explore as rich and diverse a selection of topics as possible:

conference swag Literature from communities in diaspora, featuring Vietnamese-, Korean-, and Arab-American writers; a reading of flash fiction, from six-word memoirs to 1,000-word short-shorts; a reading from Cuban poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez and a signing of his newest collection With a Strange Scent of World; a set of memoir readings from U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; a discussion on translating Brazilian minority poets; a lengthy discussion from MFA teachers about the usefulness of seeking an MFA in Creative Writing in the first place; a panel on the usefulness of historical fiction and the rules one can break with it; a beautiful poetry reading from Iranian Farzaneh Milani, Syrian Mohja Khaf, and Iraqi Dunya Mikhail plus a list of historical women poets in the Arab-speaking world; a panel on writing as advocacy; and a reading of creative nonfiction about the value of speculation in nonfiction works.

“The ‘other’ for the writer is simply everyone.” –Elizabeth Kadetsky on the relationship between writers and the world.

The conference reinvigorated my love of writing, but unmasked a great many myths and expectations upon which I had previously built my understanding of the writing life. I now understand that the MFA racket is not all it’s cracked up to be; though certainly useful if applied correctly, MFAs are neither necessary nor financially sustainable if one wants to be a writer. I now have a greater appreciation for the need for good translators, and how deeply politicized translations can become when meaning and identity are at stake crossing the thresholds between languages. Flash fiction is more than an exercise in economizing language but a growing form of art itself.

Lastly, and most importantly, being a lone writer, while romantic, is terrible; good writing can only ever come from the experiences a writer internalizes and interprets, so I must accumulate as many experiences as possible, good, unpleasant, awkward, funny, humiliating, beautiful, terrifying, or calming. Time is not what I need as a writer; a community of friends, loved ones, people who inspire me, are what I really need. This trip generated more ideas for stories than anything I’ve done inside a classroom, and it is to my friends that I owe my ability to write, if I can say I possess such an ability in the first place.

friends

-jk

The Case of the Empty Inbox

Leave a reply

The Vast Unknown In December, I submitted five short stories to small literary presses and journals for potential publication. One sent me a rejection within a week, but the rest took their time. Four months later, I had received one new rejection, leaving three still looking over my work or letting it rust in a fat stack of emails from countless other writers.

Curious about the long wait, I looked up each remaining journal to check the reading periods, see if they posted information about a delay, or (I vainly hoped) had published my work and simply forgot to tell me. I remembered that one journal had not sent a confirmation email, and I discovered that it was no longer active, and indeed no longer available. Their links on databases for writers only took me to empty Could Not Be Found pages. Information about it existed on other sites, blogs, and five-year-old lists of calls for submissions, but the journal itself was simply gone. I know it was up and running in December when I sat at a cold kitchen table adjusting my cover letter and drinking Christmas-gift coffee. It’s not surprising that small online journals struggle, even stop publishing, but what would prompt it to vanish from the face of the Internet?

Somewhere in the foggy bays of the web sits an email containing a short story, a cover letter, and my name at the bottom. Is it still drifting along in the electronic waves, lost forever? Did it find itself to the inbox before the editors abandoned their little island? Did anybody bother to unpack the document in its cargo? Did other emails not make it in time and drift away into the darkness? I once read a sample of short stories and poems from this journal, not only defunct but scuttled and drowned, without proof that anybody once perused its archives, and it’s a bit spooky. I will probably never know why the little journal disappeared. The mystery may go unsolved forever.

-jk

The Snow, the Writer, the Time

4 Replies

Campus Snow Day

Yesterday started so safely. It was overcast and raining, but the roads were clear. By 11:00 AM, though, the city of Flagstaff was covered in snow and slush. Ponds sprouted in road dips and parking lots became marshes. Northern Arizona University cancelled all classes after 2:00 PM, after everybody was already on campus and desperate to get home. Students, faculty, and staff were told to leave before it got worse.

Com Building

I opted to stay on campus and not wait in the snow swamps amid dozens of tense drivers. I chose not to risk driving down Milton or Butler to get home, not wanting to wait ninety minutes because some inevitably bad drivers congested traffic after skiing their cars into each other. Instead, I found a warm corner on campus and set up shop with everything I needed: my computer, hot chocolate, a lengthy playlist of folk music, and a window giving me an unmitigated view of the snowfall.

Cline and Tree

I not-so-secretly harbor an obsession with snow. It’s often a subject in my writing. I’ve written many poems about snow alone, how it feels against my skin and glows under streetlamps. I’ve set numerous short stories in a mountain town in December, a Russian field in January, a Montanan cabin in February, or Flagstaff in March. Snow delights me immeasurably, and imposes an opportunity to sit back and do what I have so little time to even contemplate. When it snows so monstrously, I refuse to let the cold and darkness drag me down. Instead, I accept them as unexpected gifts. I don’t think sitting in front of a cold window improves my writing, but it often gives me direction and motivation. Yesterday, it forced isolation upon me, and isolation prompts writing. I’m grateful for being ushered indoors sometimes. Otherwise, I might never begin sewing the words together.

-jk

In Search of the Perfect Beer Milkshake

2 Replies

“If a man ordered a beer milk shake, he thought, he’d better do it in a town where he wasn’t known. But then, a man with a beard, ordering a beer milk shake in a town where he wasn’t known–they might call the police.” -John Steinbeck in Cannery Row.

My favorite author, John Steinbeck, is known for his epic novels about the lives of the working poor like The Grapes of Wrath. While I love his longer works, the Steinbeck novel that has had the most influence on me is Cannery Row, more a collection of interconnected stories than a novel. I first discovered it four years ago, and I have reread it every fall to rediscover the magic of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row in Montery, California, which he calls “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

In one story, the main character Doc remembers somebody commenting that he loves beer so much, “someday [he’ll] go in and order a beer milk shake.” Because he is safely out of town, he takes the bet and orders one, providing the following recipe: “Put in some milk, and add half a bottle of beer. Give me the other half in a glass–no sugar in the milk shake.” Because Doc is one of my favorite literary characters, I attempted to make a beer milkshake following Doc’s specifications.

It turned out dreadfully, so I worked on changing the recipe. Because several restaurants have already experimented with beer milkshakes, one can probably find several recipes online, but here, I offer my own.

1 bottle of beer (preferably a flavorful ale or stout)

3 scoops vanilla ice cream

1/4 cup milk

1 tablespoon sugar

2-3 icecubes

Combine all ingredients in a blender and serve fresh and cold.

I tested numerous variations of the beer milkshake. With dark beers, I tried adding chocolate sauce. With ales, I tried using only ice cream and beer, nothing else. I don’t know what Steinbeck was thinking when he wrote about Doc’s excursions into the world of beer milkshakes; he wrote that “it wasn’t so bad–it just tasted like stale beer and milk.” I may have taken Steinbeck fandom to an extreme, but his work is dear to my heart. For now, I’m content to read my favorite writer, take his jokes too seriously, and remember his reflections on the world:

Cannery Row’s “inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.”

Where Has All the Introspection Gone?

Leave a reply

“However, the self, every instant it exists, is in the process of becoming, for the self does not actually exist; it is only that which it is to become.” Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death.

I may not be a depressed Danish philosopher, but I still appreciate the above quote whenever I try to examine my life. The problem, however, is that I have not actually examined my life for several months.

This past semester was one of the most challenging I’ve had. Apart from school, I applied to eight graduate programs, balanced a new job with my old one, and dove into numerous extracurricular activities. Every date on my calendar was a deadline, so I kept going and going, nonstop, without a moment’s rest. Now that I have a break between semesters, I can pause, breathe, and look at myself in the mirror.

But for the past several months, I have not had a single moment of introspection. I confined my thoughts to academia and packed all my energy into other projects, research assignments, and work. I spent so much time looking out that I’ve nearly lost my ability to look in. Now, I find it difficult and even painful to examine my own life, to place my actions under a microscope and investigate the mechanisms of my identity.

Introspection is at the heart of my ambitions, artistic, intellectual, spiritual, and social. I need to examine and reexamine how I treat others, criticize myself before criticizing others, and spend more time watching my self become what it is constantly becoming. I agree with Kierkegaard; I think our identities are always changing, like water traveling from the ocean to the clouds, from the clouds to the land, and from the land back to the oceans. I cannot resist that change, but maybe self-examination can let me influence the direction.

-jk

The Publication of a Poem

Leave a reply

My poem “Dublin” has been accepted for publication by Burningword Literary Journal, an online journal featuring poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. It’s my first published poem, and I hope that many more will come.

For me, this is no time to be complacent. This is a signal that I should keep writing and keep sending my work off for publication. But for now, I hope you all enjoy reading my poem and the other stories and poems published in the seventy-second issue of Burningword.

-jk

London, 1945

2 Replies

Some flash fiction set in London, late November, 1945.

Because his favorite pub was closed for repairs, Simon hobbled into a new one, closing his umbrella and dripping puddles onto the hardwood floors. The room was mostly empty, but warm and dry. He set his hat and coat on a rack and leaned the umbrella against the wall, next to four other identical coats and hats, each one drier than the last. Four men sat at the bar drinking a pint and reading copies of the morning paper. None of them spoke or looked up, not even when the news correspondent on the radio described the mess of Poland and Germany and France. It was only when Simon hobbled toward the bar, leaning on his cane for support, that he realized he had forgotten a key element in his post-war life: a newspaper. When he sat down, he leaned the wooden cane next to him and ordered a pint from the barkeep, a gaunt woman with a fat scar on her left cheek.The four other men turned to look at him, each head tilting slowly to the right.

“Forgot my paper,” he mumbled.

One of the men looked back at his own paper, but the other three men, none of whom had completely dried off yet, glared at Simon for several seconds longer, then returned to their reading. The barkeep placed a dark beer in front of him, the foam sloshing over the top and down the side as she set it down.

Simon drank idly and listened to the static-ridden BBC radio from the corner. Radio was only so helpful in describing the ugliness of warfare, Simon thought, but he did not need any help remembering.

“Excuse me,” he asked as the barkeep passed. “Could you switch to something else? I think the London Symphony might be on this evening.”

“The radio?” she asked. Simon was caught off guard by her Russian accent. At the same time, the four men turned once again and glared at him. The one furthest on the left folded up his paper and left two grimy pound coins on top of it, got up, and walked out with his coat, hat, and umbrella.

“Why do you want me to change it?” she asked.

“I just. . . I’d rather listen to music.” Another man got up and left, leaving two more pounds atop his folded, wrinkled paper.

“You don’t want to hear the news?”

“No. I can only handle so much of it.”

When he said this, the last two men stood up and left in the same fashion as the others. The woman paused, then walked toward the radio at the other end of the bar, collecting the pounds two by two as she went. As she turned the dial, static flooded the pub, slowly giving way to more news, more static, and finally an old recording of the London Symphony Orchestra performing Edward Elgar’s cello concerto. It was somewhere in the second movement. Simon closed his eyes and finished the beer in three gulps.

“One more, please?”

“Very well, then.” As she poured him another pint, he squinted in the dark, gray light at the scar beneath her eye. “What?” she asked.

“You’re from Russia, are you?”

“Yes, I came from Russia. Why?”

“Just curious.” Simon took a sip. “Before or after? If you don’t mind, that is.”

She folded her arms.

“I was a soldier, just like you,” she said. “I was in the Red Army. I came here while it was ending.”

The music thrummed against the rain, which grew louder as it shifted direction and pummeled the windows and the door. Taking another sip, Simon paused, closed his eyes again, and listened to the orchestra interrupted by brief pauses of rusty static.

“You are very different,” the barkeep noted. Simon opened his eyes.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You won’t listen to anything about the war or read anything about the war, but you feel free talking about it. Why is that? If you don’t mind, that is.”

“Oh. I don’t know. I can’t help it, sometimes.” He gulped half the beer. “Do you ever talk about it? I imagine the Red Army is much more interesting than just an old British infantry division.”

“Before the war, do you know what I used to do? I was a musician. A clarinetist.”

“You were?”

“Yes. I played all over the country. Then they came and told me I had to fight to save the motherland. So I went and fought. I was in Leningrad for some time.”

“Well, I’m glad you got out of there. I could never play. I was a terrible musician. I still love to listen, though.” He drained the last of the beer and stood up. “Thank you for listening. It’s getting late, though. I need to be off.”

“I’m closing up soon, anyway.”

As he stood up, he dumped a pile of pound coins around the empty glass like presents beneath a tree. He reached for his cane; she collected the coins and picked up the glass. The concerto continued to rise and fall, to lean forward and pull back like dancers. She pulled off her dusty white apron as he slid into his nearly dried coat and hat. Looking around, he turned on the axis of his cane.

“My umbrella is gone. I. . . did one of them take it? I don’t suppose you have a spare?”

“I only have mine.”

“Oh. Thanks anyway.”

“Wait a moment.”

Putting on her own coat and hat, the barkeep stepped out and tossed her own black umbrella to him while she turned stools up onto the smooth wooden top of the bar. She switched the lights off and finally did the same to the radio. Together, they stepped outside; he opened the umbrella while she turned around and locked the door, before they walked up the street. She took the umbrella as Simon limped forward, frowning as she opened the umbrella and swung it above their heads.

“Did you ever play Tchaikovsky?” he asked.

“Oh, yes.” They walked slowly and Simon’s cane clicked against the hard cobblestone with every other step. “I haven’t thought of music since the bombing.”

“Tell me about Tchaikovsky. About music before the war. If you don’t mind, that is.”

Around them, rings of rain slid off the umbrella as they passed empty pubs and shops together.

-JK