Embers – by K.B. CARLE

So happy to announce that my flash fiction piece, “Embers” was published today on Sick Lit Magazine!

SICK LIT MAGAZINE

Embers

I watch the embers, sore after being thrown to the ground. Watch the crimson sparks skip off the ashen wood as your heavy body presses against mine. Watch as your hand slips under my dress, claws at my legs, rips away my underwear. Hot tears blur my vision as you grunt, enter me, choke me. Your big hand strikes my face as I watch the embers dim. You pull my hair, forcing me to watch you, thick vein pulsing in your forehead, sweat dripping onto my dry lips, black hair on your chest, creeping under your arms.

Every time it hurts but every time I find something new to watch; cobwebs on the ceiling, a mouse hiding under the couch, your friend with the lazy eye looking back at me.

I want to watch as my fingers wrap around your neck, slap you when you cry, slam your head…

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Challenging the Whiteness of MFA Programs: A Year in Confrontations at UW

“All the things Díaz describes, the lack of a supportive environment for students of color, the workshop as a space which reproduces “the dominant culture’s blind spots and assumptions about race and racism,” the tendency for people to erase matters of race (as if it’s passé at this point) in order to highlight matters of class, minority students retreating into their solitary “bolt holes”—even though these all might exist in, ultimately, unique cultural dynamics from program to program, I’d like to testify for UW and say that they exist here as well.”

via Challenging the Whiteness of MFA Programs: A Year in Confrontations at UW — The MFA Years

First Rule of Novel Writing: Don’t Write a Novel

“Creative writing doesn’t want to be worked at, just as cakes don’t want you opening the oven door on them all the time, or animals don’t want you harassing them into submission, or children don’t want you to force feed them the rules for growth. You can bake a cake or tame an animal or raise a child under these circumstances, but it will emerge tragically deflated, a poor approximation of what it might have been.”

(Z)oning Out

“A writer is working when he/she’s staring out of the window.”

(X)enophobia: Why Do We Fear Writing What’s Foreign?

How do we as writer’s incorporate something foreign into our work? Write from the point of view of a different race? Portray a scene that we have never experienced? Describe the layout of a city, state or country we have never been to? Some of this can be achieved through research, the first draft of a story being a draft or placeholder until we have enough money to travel to that state. I know one day I want to travel to what remains of Topaz, the Japanese internment camp in Utah or to China to see a Chinese opera.

But what about the things we cannot change? I’m an African American woman who could bleach my skin but would still identify as black. So how do I go about writing White, Asian, Latino or Biracial characters?

(Y)ou: The Writer

I am a writer.

It took me years to admit this to myself partly because I am afraid of what being a writer entails. A lot of people don’t want to be writers under the assumption that it means a life of poverty. But the idea of being a part of a career where you are constantly alone with only a notebook, pencil, pen, erasure and computer? Sounds perfect to me!

I am an introvert. I am a nerd. I am African American. I am a writer.

(U)mmmm………

I get a lot of questions.

Sometimes dealing with my height, race and age. Others focusing on what I plan to do with my life, job, do you want kids and what genre do you write in? All these questions are overwhelming, especially when there is a deluge of them. My mind starts swimming, my eyes bouncing from one person to the next. Or, I tune out the one person sitting across the table from me, trying to pry into my life so much so that their words just fade into the background.

I’m normally snapped out of my alternate reality when their hand slams against the table and they ask “Are you listening?”

Um….no.

(R)evisions and (R)ewrites

If someone were to ask me my favorite stage of the writing process, it would definitely be the creation stage. I love the feeling of my pencil gliding across the page, my ideas just appearing before me. Typing it all up on the computer, checking the page count, seeing my characters come to life and my settings fall into place. Then, listening to the printer spit out those pages and holding this draft in my hands, smelling the hot ink fill the air (which is probably not good for my health).

Then…I’m forced to hand it over to someone else who does not bask in the gentle glow of a new story. Instead, they make suggestions, destroying every page with a comment, insertion of a comma, period or quotation and crossing out entire sentences because they just don’t belong. The proofreader, editor, friend or in my case my mother, then hands the story back to you and I enter my writing equivalent of limbo: revising and rewriting.