Ways to End the World

This post is about why you should e-mail J. A. Tyler and request a free chapbook, which he will then send you, for free. It’s hard for me to construct an argument when the burden of proof is so low (this is the least effort one has to commit for one of the cooler free things I have ever received) but we all have our crosses to bear. This is the first page of “A Field of Colors”:

Saturday afternoon & I am at my field, a field of colors. I tell the girls OKAY, & they sprint down the slope. The ribbons tied to their hair wave back to me & say HELLO, or GOODBYE. They are my girls for the week & they spread the field, collecting rainbow shards off the ground into baskets normally reserved for easter egg hunts. My youngest finds a rainbow stick & sucks on it like a candy cane & says to me later in the truck that rainbows taste just like pancake syrup & can she have some more before bed.

I tell her YES. YOU CAN.

There are seven more pages with varying amounts of text on them. It’s a floating kind of story, mostly in images. It’s not something I would write, but it is something I would read, and did. It feels good to read it. Like the best short-shorts (or whatever we are calling this length now, in the increasingly Linnaean taxonomy of short prose) it exists in a place of deep ambiguity, offering not a moral or an argument but a number of feelings that do not justify themselves or coexist in kindness. It jostles with itself, which is impressive when you consider how few words there are here. It ends in a strange, sort of frightening, sort of beautiful place. I think it is about trying to own people, and the landscapes we use to seduce, but it’s also about other things. I like it.

If you are a writer you should copy the first page, as I did: just type it up on your computer and then close the word processor, or maybe look at it and think for a while. Maybe the best use of the Mud Luscious mini-chapbook series for writers is this precise exercise. You can copy the pages you like and see how it feels to write the sentences they wrote, and thus become aware of sentences you didn’t know it could feel so good to write, and the choices writers can make that maybe you aren’t making. I am anti-ampersand all the way but now I have written a paragraph full of them and it didn’t feel so bad. And there were other things, little things, that were a pleasure to notice in retyping the page. Sometimes I feel my brain becoming old and carbon, I feel it hardening into what it will be until I die, and I feel the six sentences I love becoming my only sentences. Charles Lennox can help you fight that off. A lot of people can. I like that, and I am grateful for it.

This is his website. And remember, if you want the story, all you have to do is ask.