The Dead Writers Club

J. Bradley Minnick is a writer, public radio host and producer, and a Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His book, The Bankrupt Circus & Other Misadventures, was published through Silent Clamor Press.

Notecard # 1: 

Welcome Dead Writers Club members one and all. I am ‘so’ (conjunction or intensifier or both) pleased that you’ve all decided to attend this year’s signature Fireside Story Competition.

Notecard # 2:

As you all are well-aware, The Dead Writers Club is an annual event that convenes to provide the spirit of camaraderie replete with breakfast bran muffins, Farkleberry jam, mid-mourn Jell-O , Communion Pop cycles, resurrection chocolate Easter bunnies, and burnt marshmellows over the fire.

Notecard # 3:

 So (conjunction or intensifier or both) again welcome one and all to our annual Fireside Storytelling Competition! I wish all of you wordmongers luck, Hardy prose (sorry Thomas can’t make it this year) and prayers. 

Notecard # 4:

“I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long." Go forth into the woods and good luck and good grammar. 

——

“Who among you will make the fire?” says Henry James.

“Who among you specializes in redundancy?” says Hemingway. 

“I shall retrieve the golden bowl in which after each reading we will fire our words to make them more resilient,” says Henry James.

“Eliott, George, please get the spikes and the tent, and make sure the leaves and sticks are dry,” says Updike. “Remember what happened last year. My fingers still hurt!”

“Stop mansplaining, Updike,” says Elliott. “I’ve heard about enough from you and your forth-dimension sentences.”

“I can’t help that words fall trippingly off my tongue,” Updike says, and sticks out his wide red tongue. 

“I’ll do it ‘cause no one can be counted on to do anything but me,” says Hemingway, upon seeing Conrad resurrect flint from his dirty pants and Hem says: “The tents and the sticks and the leaves are over the river and through the trees.” 

“For once, I want to be the keeper of the flint!” says Faulkner. 

“Don’t let Faulkner near the hooch if he’s going to be building a fire. Apologies to London,” says Hem.

“I hope you do that better than when you read notecards on television,” mocks Carver.

“What’s television? You never explain anything except minimally, Ray,” says London. 

“Look who’s late coming from breakfast muffins,” Virginia Woolf says and points at Fitzgerald, “Fitz, you look dapper, pink and positively Episcopalian.” 

“Hey now, Ginny,” Fitzgerald says. 

“Don’t you dare call me, Ginny.” 

Whitman picks up wet leaves and grumbles, “That accursed autobiographical poetry form, puts a premium on the loose. The impermanent the cheap and the easy.”

Conrad says, “Thanks for that poetic introduction Whit. And Let it be known for now and always, I am the keeper of the flint.”

“Don’t call me Whit.”

Cheever, who hates argumentation, sings a throaty torch song: “I am a writer of experimental fiction/world of apples/world of apples/world of apples/When it fails to be/fails to be fiction/fiction/fiction/Wait! They said we thought you were dead/Still, you’re not too difficult to kiss goodbye.” Cheever wipes away a smile and then wipes it away again and again.

“We thought you got lost in suburbia,” says Updike.

“Look who’s talking!” Cheever says. 

“Fire lit,” Stendhal scoffs, “I’m sick of all this talk-talk. Let’s do something.”

“Thinking IS action,” Sartre says.

E.B. Whites interpolates and quotes: “and begins the spontaneous rule book ritual, I see but one rule—colon—to be clear. If I am not clear all my world crumbles to nothing. Repeat all. You too, Gertrude.”

“Rules are like become like syrup—and syrup,” Gertrude says and looks at Hem.

“Gert is right: she’s always right as right is right; and there is right.”

“Button up you, tender man.” 

Stendahl clutches his beard and continues: “Little hangnails of books in the prison library. Repeat. You going to do any work today, Genet?”

“Only at Christmas,” Genet, like Updike, sticks out his tongue, which he has painted white for this exact moment—this occasion. 

Sartre adds, “Yes, they are ‘without breadth and width and maybe too self-referential to have substance.’”

“I can’t figure you out,” Gertrude says.

“Either can I,” says Carver, “maybe we can get Wright Morris to take a photo.”

“What’s a photo?” says London.

“Rules have no import-and importance,” E.B. quotes. He’s always quoting, “And cameras are reality and story.” 

Updike repeats his old standby, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth. . .” He riddles: “Guess who is earning $80,000 per year and writes terribly wonderful stories?”

Conrad says, “Faulkner dropped the flint on the ground. I am the keeper of the flint. My task is by the power of the written word to make you hear to make you feel it is before all to make you see. Ouch I burned my phalange!” 

Chekhov shows up with his doctor bag, looks as if he wants to grab Conrad by the shorthairs who holds out his hand for Chekhov to examine, remarks rather blandly, “I think descriptions of nature should be always short and always apropos.” 

“Prose is architectures not interior decoration and the baroque is over. Did I say I think I should be the keeper of the flint? In truth I am so famous and good, I should be the keeper of everything that matters, ”Hemingway puts all the sticks in a pile as if building a monument to failure and says in a long and beautifully wrought monologue to Fitz: “Your talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by dust on a butterfly’s wings.” He looks at all who gather round the unlighted fire pointing at him.  “At one time he understood it no more than a Butterfly did, and he did not know when it was bruised or marred. Later he became conscious of the damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the long line of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been of feathers.”

Hem sticks out his tongue and Genet follows suit. He says, “Trees have limbs cars have trunks. Books have spines and leaves have jackets.”

DeQuincey confesses that he would rather be paid by the stick and gives notice of his disapproval. “Already… what by. . .what by…the eye is troubled.” 

“Impassioned prose—Tom embodies,” Virginia Woolfe cries.

“DeQuincey decries simple dashes,” quotes E.B.

“It’s like middle-school recess every day after lunch with Sir Thomas Brown, eternally looking for his head,” Fitz quips.

A disembodied voice yells: “Playstered and whited Sepulchers were anciently affected in cadaverous and corruptive Burials.”

“TV sets have rabbit ears. Doorbells and calculators and elevators have buttons. Shoes have toes heals and tongues,” Gert says.

“What’ s an elevator?” asks London. 

“I keep it under control so as not to have to cut out crap and rewrite.”  Hemingway implores Conrad to strike the flint and fire the leaves!

Before dinner, we all watch tv on our cell phones with the sound off and make up the words the characters on screen are saying.  “Look, the words match the cartoon character’s mouths exactly,” Cheever says.

“No they don’t, you dingle,” says Virginia Woolf. “You are all high!”

“High on life and absinthe,” says Hemingway, “I am King of the written world.” 

“You all know I’m open-minded,” says Sir Thomas Brown, “but that King is most definitely not a humane Anglican!”

“Right-on! I’m the grandson of a Presbyterian minister; yet I choose divine comfort, not Catholicism, Dude,” says Updike, reasonably.

“Misplaced in circumstance, there is something in it of devotion,” Brown replies.

“So is sex,” says Updike. “Pass me another brownie, Sir Thomas.”

William Faulkner says, “People think I’m a liar. It’s because I tell them I flew around in broken planes.” 

“There are days he tells you his name is Bill,” Hemingway says, “which would not be a lie, and other days he lets you think silence is his natural state, which would be a lie indeed.”

Raymond Carver crushes up his meds in Hi-C as an after-dinner drink and says, “I will not succumb to peer-pressure and drink it.”

“After dinner Scrabble?” Fitzgerald says.

“Fitz spells worse than I!” Hemingway taunts and he and Fitz pretend a late-night fist fight over the spelling of the word “calendar.”  

“What’s Scrabble?” says London.

“What would Nick Adams do?” Fitz taunts and throws a mock punch at Hemingway. “Would he screw up his eyes and cry himself to sleep, or would he huddle next to a mortar shell, his rump high in the air?”

“Gatsby only sold seven copies and two of those to your friends and one to Zelda and one to what was her name—Sheila?” Hemingway retorts.    

“Target practice for you, fat butt!” Fitz must have the last word and tallies up 11 points.

“Barnacles, declarant, renal lance-laden crane!” Hemingway taunts, “Come on, Fitz, that’s nine letters, nine letters, five, five, five, and six! I could do this all night but only for tender. Put your money where your mouth used to be.”

“That is so crude,” Updike says, “Let me write that down.” 

“Yet for eight letters ‘calendar’ my bestest bet,” Fitz says. Then Fitz turns to all, “If you think this is a story then just wait twenty years and maybe while strolling along the beach, you’ll all have something—you’re definitely not beautiful and you’re all damned!”

“Please, please,  please be quiet,” Carver says.

After Scrabble. Donald Barthelme says, “Isn’t this supposed to be fireside story time? I’ve been sitting here watching the fire, watching Fitz and Hemingway pretend to fight, waiting for one good one! I am an ICE-MAN,” and Don works up a short-short about the discovery of a frozen man, who speaks in a long extinct and heretofore unknown language. He even sketches fictional archeological artifacts: cave drawings for decoding, pictures of spears for protection against critics who he thinks are “dicks”: he holds a handful of bristly hair in his fist and says, “I think, I plucked that from Stendahl’s beard this afternoon, which he deposits into the story he now says is tangled.” 

“Help me unravel it,” Cheever says, “You know I am an experimental writer. Have you read The World of Apples?” 

The Dead Writer’s Club watches as Barthelme applies a glue stick and pastes the pages he has written onto his clean plate: “Look, it’s not supposed to make immediate sense, but even you can guess at the imperceptible uneven lines in the same way a copy machine set on highest resolution cannot disguise a grand experiment too far gone.”

“What’s a copy machine?” says London. 

DeQuincey, listening-in says, “The object of that work was to reveal something of the grandeur which belongs potentially to human dreams.”

Later Kathy Acker appears naked in our dreams, lying outside a church courtyard in Mexico. She says to the nuns, “Oh the breeze feels soooo good on my . . . .”

Notecard # 5: And, I sincerely want to thank all this year’s attendees at our annual Dead Writer’s Club Signature Fireside Story Competition and particularly this year’s winner Donald Barthelme, whose story “The Frozen Man,” excited us all while we gathered round the camp fire.

Notecard # 6: We send good well wishes to Ernest Hemingway, whose writing fingers were unfortunately burned during the making of the fire. And, a warm welcome to the new keeper of the flint, Jack London, who will say, “It’s about time.”

Notecard # 7: We would like to especially thank Thomas Dequincy for helping me to write these closing notes, who says and I quoth: “But my way of writing is rather to think aloud and flow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.”    

Notecard # 8: And with that, I lay the proverbial and symbolic fountain pen down on the podium, present the flint to Mr. Jack London; “but, of course, it isn’t really Good-bye, because the Forest will always be there and. . .and anybody who is Friendly with Bears can find it.”