Seattle 92, or The Sprinter Tries a 5k

I've started writing short stories. I haven't written any since high school, but a few months ago, I tried to write a poem that turned into a short story by accident, and decided to keep working on it. I find prose kind of scary, for some reason. Maybe it's because I'm not an endurance person. I mean, I compete in poetry slams that only allow me three minutes on stage. When I did sports as a kid, I played softball, which stops and starts every five minutes. I'm a sprinter. The first time I had to write a ten page paper in college, I froze around page eight. (On the other hand, I once had a professor demand a three-page paper, and threatened to fail anyone who went over the limit. Some of my classmates had panic attacks. I had a picnic.)

So, this fiction thing is weird, despite the fact that I love reading short stories. (I don't do it nearly often enough.) It occurs to me that I don't have to learn how to write short stories the same way I learned how to write poetry (by writing and writing and stubbornly refusing to learn any of the basics of craft until I'd been writing seriously for six years). Maybe I should do some research on how to write prose, figure out how it works.

I'm still doing the 365 poems project, because, hey, I'm not a quitter. But maybe this short story bit will go somewhere. Here's an excerpt from the draft I'm working on now:

Jenny Silverman stood on the back porch of the student co-op kitchen, crying onion tears into a bar mop. She scooped up some snow from the railing and pressed it against each eye, shuddering as the beginning winds of a Nor’easter snaked through her jeans and the long johns underneath. She was so not cut out for this – for Vermont, or a northeast winter, or cooking. She hated the constant process of layering and unlayering her clothes as she walked from one blistering steam-heated building to another. She most hated her roommate’s cheerfulness. Nora seemed not only not to mind the cold and dark, but to actually revel in it.

At the first sign of flurries in November, Nora had gleefully begun knitting Jenny a full winter set – hat, mittens and scarf. Nora was a champion knitter, and was famous for once having excused herself from class to get more yarn in the middle of a lecture.

“No offense or anything,” Nora had said, taking measurements of Jenny’s head as she tried to focus on Principles of Macroeconomics, “but I’m just going to assume that you didn’t bring any useful winter stuff from Los Angeles.” She finished the hat in two days, and despite her resentment at being treated like an ignorant warm-weather wuss, Jenny wore it every day. Nora had thoughtfully made ear flaps, and left ample room for what she affectionately called Jenny’s Jewfro.