It shouldn’t come as a surprise by now that I dig Steve Almond…hard. theNewerYork #0 tipped me off to this small experimental book he did called, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey. The video is of him reading from said book back in December of ’09.

This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey:  read through in one direction to find tiny little short stories of a page each. Flip the book over and find mini essays on the psychology and practice of writing. I’ve given you my favorites from each below.

Communio Sannctorum

When the avalanche came the fuselage filled with snow, like a drowning throat. There were twenty four people inside, dazed survivors of a plane crash high in the Andes. They were boys mostly, rugby players buoyant with the wants of youth. They had soft girlfriends and old cars they shined by hand. They hung cigarettes from their lips and blew smoke at the sun. At night, their mothers still stole into their rooms to watch them sleep. Some weeks ago, they had begun to eat the flesh of their dead comrades.

And now this: the soft slam of snow erasing them. For a few moments there was absolute silence. A few began to moan. It was easier when they stopped struggling. One said later he could see a crown of light bending towards him. Another said he felt, at the exact moment of surrender, a tranquility so profound it would haunt him for the rest of his life. A third – the one who came closest to dying – saw hundreds of images from his childhood. He inspected them with great patience, like photographs, falling backward in time until he was just a baby on a white rug and his mother was walking towards him.

The boys were devout Catholics. They had been forced to gaze upon their redeemer as a man nailed to wood, His arms flung out for a bloody hug. Now they knew the truth. It was better than any vision. This is why, when they felt hands clutching at them, they fought to remain still. They were spirits roused from the tomb of paradise. They smelled the stinking pleas of their bodies. Bullies hovered over them with the wild eyes of saints, pounding at their hearts, saving them.

***

Character in a Hole

But perhaps you are one of those aspiring writers who wishes to write about The Alienated, that exalted breed who are so deeply and mysteriously wounded that they are no longer able to feel much of anything and must therefore stumble through their given plot points, secretly hoping they are being filmed for a music video.

The Alienated are all the same. They’re always trapped in dead-end marriages and jobs and they have no friends or family to comfort or confront them. Sometimes they are given lavish homes, as if to mock the poverty of their internal lives. But mostly they dwell in holes. I can see them down there, sipping at their misery cocktails, wallowing poetically. Characters in holes don’t hope or struggle or mourn. They put nothing at risk.

But wait a second, you’re saying, perhaps defensively, isn’t the inability to connect emotionally a central crisis of human consciousness? Didn’t Hemmingway write about this shit all the time?

To which I would respond yes and yes. But Hemmingway had the good sense to place his alienated heroes in the midst of tumult, and furthermore to intrude upon their sense of alienation. He made them want things: heroism, the devotion of unreliable women, large symbolic fish.

This is by way of observing that alienation is not a natural human resting state; it’s a response to thwarted desire. Your duty as a writer is not to erect lovely monuments to these the lesser defense mechanisms but, on the contrary, to dismantle them and thereby expose the unbearable feelings they conceal. For additional details, please see Remains of the Day, The Good Soldier, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, and so on.