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Essay: The Archetype of the Whore

The Archetype of the Whore

Queen Sheba journeyed to Judah bearing gifts and tribute to pay homage to King Solomon, and returned home bearing his child Menelek, who became the first king of the great Ethiopian dynasty.

Mary Magdalene carried Jesus’ child even as she watched her lover crucified for aspiring to the throne of David. Magdalene fled to Egypt with her daughter Sara disguised as a servant girl, but Peter shoved them off in a rudderless boat without oars, and they landed in the French Riviera where Sara’s descendants became the Merovingian line of kings.

Sarah could not give Abraham a child, so she gave to Abraham her slave, Hagar, who bore him Ishmael. Then God blessed Sarah, and to Abraham, Sarah bore Isaac.

It is a perilous thing being born to Abraham. Now Ishmael must not be allowed to inherit Abraham’s birthright, so Abraham banished Hagar and Ishmael to starve to death in the desert, Isaac being the one destined to be the ancestor of Jesus once he survives almost being sacrificed on his father’s altar. Continue reading →

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New Story: Shear Coincidence

Shear Coincidence

 

A Zen monk was bicycling through a residential neighborhood in East Vancouver, Washington. He was pedaling along a random side street, miles from home, as a consequence of meandering around checking out garage sales, when by chance he came upon a man pinned underneath his lawn tractor beside the curb in front of his home. The monk took in the scene and asked himself, “Is this really happening?” He raced up to the man and set his bicycle down.

“Are you all right?” he asked the man, a typically but not grossly overweight Caucasian man in his fifties or sixties, evidently the homeowner. The tractor was on its side, half off the curb; the man was lying on his side with his legs underneath the steering wheel. He was struggling with the tractor, but in his position, could not budge the tractor or slide out from under the steering column.

John Deere lawn tractor“I just need to lift this off me,” he replied. The monk lifted the tractor by the steering wheel and with some effort wrested it off the man’s legs.

“Are you okay?” the monk asked again, concerned the man’s legs might have gotten crushed or something.

“Yes, I’m fine,” the man said, “can you help me up?” The man extended his hand and the monk helped him to his feet. It took somewhat more effort than lifting the tractor, actually, but between the two of them, they managed it. “Thank you very much,” said the man. Continue reading →

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Excerpt: You Can Talk!

You Can Talk!

from The Golden Books
Copyright © 2012 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.

Now which way did she tell me to turn?…   Everything had been so surreal, Gus realized he wasn’t quite sure exactly what Gaia had said. Then his eyes fell upon a sign across the road. It looked like this:
To The Library
“Curiouser and curiouser…” Gus grinned, amused at his literary allusion. Then, addressing himself to no-one in particular, “Well, whaddya say, shall we go to the… library?” Continue reading →

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SunWinks! June 29, 2014: Aboard the H.M.S. Metaphor

SunWinks! June 29, 2014: Aboard the H.M.S. Metaphor

Dear SunWinkers!

Where are all the haikais? I expected to be inundated with poo-kus. Well, there are no deadlines at SunWinks! Get them in when you can—it’s never too late.

Important note: if SunWinks! and Writing Essential Group are to survive and thrive, it is imperative that you do your part by sharing these columns with your communities on WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Google+, whatever. We can’t build a community without your help.

On to today’s topic: Metaphor. That stampeding of hooves you hear is the self-described “non-poets” running as fast as they can in the other direction. I get the same reaction every time I mention that word: “I just don’t understand poetry.”

The inescapable fact is that you pretty much cannot write a poem without using metaphor in some form or fashion. But here’s the thing: you also pretty much can’t talk without metaphor. Metaphor is one of the building blocks of language. Teachers and public speakers know the value of metaphor. Our speech is chock full of metaphor whether we’re aware of it or not. “Stampeding of hooves” above is a metaphor—so is “running as fast as they can etc.”. Metaphors are the stock in trade, the coin of currency (there are two more metaphors!), of any writer who strives to be more colorful than dishwater (that’s a simile).

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Memoir: The Pacemaker

The Pacemaker

Ten years ago, Dad couldn’t get himself out of bed. Mom called the ambulance. One week and a quarter of a million dollars later, Dad had two bovine heart valves and a pacemaker courtesy of world-famous heart surgeon Albert Starr. Dad was not grateful. He continued to abuse my mother, push her around, lean on her, and make horrible jokes like “I’m a walking cadaver.” Five years later, Mom was thrown to the floor on a train and broke her hip and was taken to the hospital in Centralia, a hundred and some miles north. Dad never visited Mom in the hospital up in Centralia once. Any of us kids would have taken him from door to door. When she was transferred back to town to a convalescent center, where she stayed for two months, Dad visited one time. When she finally got home, Dad went right back to making her wait on him, even as she was trying to rehab from her hip replacement.

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Story: The Honey Badger

The Honey Badger

from The Golden Books
Copyright © 2012 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.

Then Gus noticed something right behind Tucker. “Don’t move!” he whispered

Tucker heard the maraca sound. “It’s a rattlesnake, isn’t it?”

“Oh my God, Tucker, what do we do? I’ll get a stick.”

“Don’t you move either. Either one of us moves, I’m dead.”

“Okay.”

A minute went by. Then two. It seems like hours. Then Gus noticed Tucker had moved imperceptibly. “You’re moving,” he whispered.

“Shh.” Tucker was moving so slowly, Gus couldn’t even see him moving. It was like watching grass grow. He could only tell Tucker was moving when he realized he was in a different position from a minute before. Slowly, infinitesimally, Tucker was turning to face the snake. Gus had never seen anything like it.

Then Tucker made his fatal mistake. His tail twitched. That was enough. The rattlesnake struck.

Kree-k-k-k-kree! Continue reading →

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The Mars Escort Service

The Mars Escort Service

It was inevitable. During the California Gold Rush, for example, cottage industries sprang up around the prospectors and speculators like dandelions: assayers, innkeepers, merchants, farriers…and whorehouses. Where the women came from and why, well, the answer to that is probably as old and mysterious as the profession itself. Whatever their motives, the lure of riches, the dream of meeting Prince Charming, the pioneering spirit, the ladies of the evening are there. No matter how remote or adventurous the enterprise, be it the California Gold Rush, the Alaska Oil Boom, Los Alamos or North Hollywood, the women always seem to come from somewhere.

The year was 2112. I’d been on Mars for 10 years. You know those science fiction stories in which the expeditions are co-ed, with a sustainable breeding cohort being sent to populate a distant planet? Still the stuff of science fiction. Space exploration is still a man’s world. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. Sending a school teacher into earth orbit is one thing, but that’s a parlor trick compared to establishing an outpost on Mars.

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SunWinks! May 18, 2014

SunWinks! May 18, 2014

It’s impossible to overstate the inspiration Gather has been to my writing. The kind comments, the eager responses, the enthusiasm for writing in general, makes me want to write more and more, and better and better. When Gather crashed, so did I. I didn’t have another writer community and haven’t found one. And the writing just stopped happening.

I wrote this in July, in one of my last columns for Gather. The following month, I buried my father after a long decline. A couple months later, my mother broke her shoulder. Since hanging out my shingle as a freelance writer, I’ve participated in a variety of projects, a lot of them involving churning out scads of Internet content. So without an active community, an actual audience waiting for it on a regular basis, you can see it was all too easy for SunWinks! to go by the boards.

Then Greg Schiller launched the Writing Essential Group the other day, and already, many old friends are coming together. I jumped at the chance to participate, and here I am, amusingly, a “Sunday Editor” again. And SunWinks! looks poised to emerge from its medically induced coma.

Now there’s an odd image.

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