Background: Today I received a text message from UTD telling me severe storms were battling their way through south Dallas Country. For one second, I thanked my lucky stars that I’d left Texas and avoided this mess, but in the next, fear began sucking at me, wheedling at me, worrying through me as I thought about my friends, my loved ones, all the beautiful people I cherish and trust and miss back home. Granted, I didn’t have to worry about my own, Lucas’s, or our cats’ safety, but there are so many others I love and hate to worry about in a swirl of devastation like that.

And then I also remembered: two days ago, I wrote a piece about a coming tornado, touching down and wreaking havoc on the Great Plains. I’ve pasted it below. I had placed it on my FB page, but hidden it the same day because it seemed over-dramatic, and now, it seems real, too real. So here it is:

Fragment, a storm

There’s a wall of black moving in, a storm. The clouds roll down until they touch the rippling fields, the bowed trees, the sagging ply-wood houses. Nothing can escape this.

Nothing can stop the inevitable wreckage to follow, the flapping curtains that breathed lilac and honey, now soggy and buried in a swirl of burnt, creosote-soaked two-by-fours. Shreds of pink insulation float like cotton candy in the air, buoyed on by the wafting stench of sewage, unburied and unmoored and seeking its own shelter, always.

The last offering soaked into the earth, the rain and the lightning and thunder skitter down, precursors to the party, the whirl of world in the clouds, the breaking sweat that finally pours into a funnel, finally pours into our reckoning.

The plains and the petrichor and the last ones left to witness how the wind does move, how it takes everything up for itself, sweeping and sweeping and sweeping until all we have left–all we ever have left–is gone. Is clean.

(1 April 2012)

My story, “A Lesson in Metempsychosis,” is up at Extract(s) today! This was the very first piece I wrote at Clarion West, so if you want to know what I was thinking about that first morning we had a story due (back in good ol’ 2010), please take a journey through my mental landscape. Usually, after every story I write I carry around a feeling of shame. I always violate some boundary or hurt something in a story that makes me feel people should keep a wide berth. So maybe that explains the story. Who knows. Was the me in the past talking to the me in the future? Maybe it’s just a story. Let’s go with that. I mean, come on. A story with giant, soul-swapping crows? What more could you want? Also, it’s like 800 words, so it’s like twice as long as this meandering blog post about it.

Hello, dear friends and random readers (and tweens looking for anything Saddle Club related. Sorry to disappoint you. I really wish I had some horses around that could also sing pony songs with me). My Seattle writers group has a really cool blawg and today I posted like a crazy storm of fire and ice. Check it out, if you dare: Horrific Miscue. They’re all pretty and nice and they smell good, and they write beautiful words too. I don’t think many of them bite. Except for me. And if you’ve gotten this far, then you should already know that.

My story, “Double Dutch,” is up at Scapezine as of this moment! The amazing Galen Dara illustrated it like she knew my own mind. I wrote this story during Week 3 at Clarion West in 2010. So happy it has a home now. And it’s a beautiful home. I don’t think I can go to sleep now–and I apologize in advance if you read it and find you don’t want to eat eggs in the morning.

A few days ago I received an email telling me I’d been accepted into an excellent looking workshop/retreat, led by primo-supremo writer Dan Chaon. I’m floating a little right now, especially because this workshop takes place in Fairyland, aka the English Countryside. You can visit the website here: Word Theatre Writers’ Workshop & Retreat.

For a week in July I get to speed off to other climes for what I hope will be a rejuvenating writing experience. You can bet I’m over the moon about this one.

In other news, I had a phone interview on that same day for a dream job (aside from being a writer, this is perhaps one of the only other things I can imagine doing for the rest of my life). I don’t know how it went exactly–I lean between it went well and I destroyed my chances by babbling about it being a ‘dream job’ at the end. Sheesh. In any case, if I somehow am able to wow the forces that be and I actually get the job, it will be life changing. That’s about all I can say about it right now without freaking myself out again.

In less than three weeks now, we’re packing our bags and will be driving to Seattle. Most people reading this blog will know we decided to move, but just in case you didn’t, come Feb. 1, this girl will have evacuated the concrete land that is Dallas for a greener (literally) world. I really can’t wait. We’re leaving almost all our possessions behind and are starting over. A good friend of ours is renting us the bottom floor of her house. We’re ready to begin again, in the right place for both of us.

I’m also working on a story right now that must be finished before I go. I’d started it several weeks back, but now more than ever I have an impetus to finish it. On New Year’s Eve, a young woman who was very dear to several of my friends was murdered near her home in Austin. I didn’t really know her, but I knew who she was, and to know that violence is so close, so easy to ignore but always trembling beneath the surface, keeps working at me. So I’m writing this story, knowing she was murdered, trying to pull shards out of death and put them into some meaningful order. Very rarely can anything come of a death like this but pain and grief. I’m not sure what I expect to find in this story that says differently. The story is only trying to offer companionship to the ones who lose their lives, to ones who don’t get to speak back, who don’t get to smile or laugh and share with us again. Even if the words are only a whisper, I hope they can channel a reprieve from the chaos this loss brings.