Sermonsnovel

Last Day in Bogotá

Good-bye to Camila

Photo of Camila Reyes, smiling. She has long, wavy brown hair and brown eyes.
Camila Reyes, founder of Resuena

The picture I had of Camila for our final day together, didn’t really express who she was. So I took something from a webpage describing her what she does. Her current work is with Resuena, an organization “set out on a dream to expand the access to Nonviolent Communication in Colombia so that it becomes part of the day-to-day culture.”

Below is the bad picture I took of Camila at a diner for breakfast. She really wasn’t unhappy at the time. One of the aspects of Colombian cuisine that Michael really appreciated is the soups, and the fact that Colombians eat soup at breakfast and lunch. I remember with fondness Colombian pastries on previous trip. I

t struck me that this simple diner had works of original art all over the walls. I said it seemed like I saw art everywhere I went in Bogota. Camila told me its presence was especially prevalent in her bohemian neighborhood.

A love of beauty and plants also helps describe Camila’s character. She has plants in every room of her apartment except the utility room. I documented them here:

A tiled gallery of various plants in different rooms of an apartment

We decided to go to the Bogota public market and eat all the fruits we hadn’t eaten yet (and we had eaten a lot of different fruits.) The excursion turned into buying fruit that doesn’t need to be turned into juice. Of the fruits you see here, we liked the mangosteen the best (the little brown ones). Since Colombia is full of microclimates, almost anything can be grown. Camila also took us to visit her friend who organizes community-supported agriculture (and allows artists to use her space, because, well, it’s Bogotá).

What else? By the time I got to Bogotá, the bruise I got from my fall in Medellin had grown considerably worse. As it dissipated over time, I realized it had hematoma at the center, which explains why the muscle in my thigh hurt so much when I moved it. I used one of my hiking sticks as a cane for the rest of the trip.

In a moment alone with Camila shortly before we left for the airport, she was discussing her goals for the next few years. She then asked me about my goals. Without thinking, I said, “I’d like to make compassion cool again.” She asked how I planned on accomplishing that, and I said, “Well, maybe that’s what my next novel will be about. Right before we left, she handed me this pin and told me, “This is to remind you that your job now is to make compassion cool again.”

To Kill a Mockingbird–alternate ending

This is the second installment from the novel writing course through Curtis Brown 715VLP6M-OLCreative in London, under the mentorship of author Nikita Lalwani and with fourteen other novel writing peers.  As I said in my previous posting, the bulk of the work is evaluating 3,000 work segments of each other novels, but we also get little voluntary 500 word homework assignments we can submit for peer review as well.  This week, in which we focused on endings, the assignment was to rewrite the ending of a favorite novel.

I am predicating an alternate To Kill a Mockingbird, told from the viewpoint of a black girl who was sent from Chicago with her brother to Maycomb, Alabama, to live with her Aunt Helen and Uncle Tom because the pollution in Chicago is bad for her asthma. While they are there, her Uncle Tom is charged with rape, put on trial, killed…(I didn’t feel I had a handle on Southern Black dialect from the 1930s.):

Miz Richardson wouldn’t let Mama take off work right away to come get Jem and me after what those men did to Uncle Tom, because Miss Susan was getting married. So while we waited, the ladies from the church came over with food for Aunt Helen and our cousins. They cleaned the house, swept the yard, even boiled the water for our baths on Saturday. They combed out our hair into pigtails so tight that I had to work my eyebrows loose. But I didn’t complain, like I would have for Mama or Aunt Helen.

Some colored men from out of town in suits came to talk to Aunt Helen with that white lawyer who defended Uncle Tom. He smiled at Jem and me all sad like and said he had children our age. He even had a boy named Jem. They want Aunt Helen to go to Washington, DC and tell her story to some important people so that white folks in the north will understand what’s happening in the south. But Aunt Helen can’t hardly even talk to her own family, so how’s she going to talk to white folks up north?

Half the people in the neighborhood came into the house when that Atticus lawyer and the men in suits came to see Aunt Helen, and someone must have spread the word, because then the pastor came and half the church. They told us we should shake the hand of that lawyer and that he was a great man.

“If that were true,” he said, “Tom would still be alive.”

Aunt Helen, she just look at him like, so some white man finally said something that make sense.

All of the people, the smiles at the white man, the sad looks at my aunt, they began squeezing the air out of my lungs. I grabbed Jem’s arm.

“I can’t breathe,” I said.

He got me out of the room, and out under the tulip tree; I began wheezing. He ran around the side of the house, brought some mint and crushed it against my nose.

“Hold that breath, and count to five” he said. “Now let it out,” and soon the world was more than just my breath again; I heard locusts and the hum of the sawmill up the road.

A truck drove by the house with two white men in the flatbed. One had a gun. We started to get to our feet to run for the house, but they just laugh and the one without the gun hold his arm up high in the air like his head in a noose and shout, “Next time we’re coming for you, niggers!”

Mama sent us down here from Chicago so we’d get some fresh air, but sometimes the air in a place, even if you can’t see it or smell it, holds more poison than all the smoke and soot put out by the South Works or the Illinois Central line.

Pitch Madness

indexTwo weeks ago, I participated in author Brenda Drake’s “Pitch Madness” contest, in which you have 35 words to “pitch” your novel followed by the first 250 words of the novel. Mine was eliminated before it reached the literary agent round. I’ll include it below. I think the first 250 words could have lead the early readers to believe that it’s a religious novel, as opposed to a novel with some religious characters in it, but it still seems like a strong opening to me.

Anyway, this week Drake sponsored #Pitmad, in which authors could pitch their novels within the constraints of a Twitter post—140 characters, which had to include the hashtag #pitmad, and the genre. You weren’t allowed to post more than once an hour and if an agent favorited your tweet, you sent him/her your submission.

Here were mine, which did not attract any agents:

#pitmad Dissident recounts struggle w/wife to bring down fascist U.S. regime, how his infidelities devastated her Dystopian/literary

#pitmad Islam Goldberg-Jones recounts how he cheated on wife as they brought down fascist US regime. Dystopian Literary

But then I discovered #FAKEpitmad, which had offerings such as

Britney visits an exotic foreign country and finds non-Americans have better things to do than facilitate her self-discovery. #fakepitmad

Really Average Girl attracts Really Hot Guy with murky past who wants her for no reason we can understand. #FakePitMad

For some reason, over the course of four hours, fake pitches kept popping out of my head. Given that I am leaving the country at the end of the month and am REALLY pressed for time, I consoled myself by thinking they really did only take seconds to produce. So here they are, from most to least recent.

His coal black eyes looked down at her from the dune. She would follow his path now. THE WAY OF THE GERBIL #fakepitmad

When Nazi cult resurfaces in Indianapolis, Chief Detective Lisette McCoy thinks “Stupid History Channel” #FakePitMad

“We will never get past the race issue,” said the hare to the tortoise as they stared into their whiskeys. #fakepitmad
I confess I plagiarized this one from a framed cartoon in my office.

When evil Christian Romance antagonist folds ingénues into his arms he actually turns them two-dimensional #fakepitmad

Buffy Slayeresque heroine attracted to Westboro Baptist fanatic picketing her church. Hilarity ensues. #NA #fakepitmad

Migraineurs discovered to have epic powers to heal planet. Will they choose to live w/projectile vomiting? #Fakepitmad

Very pragmatic woman with spastic bosom must deal with people under assumption she is always overwrought #fakepitmad

Slave laborer in oil fields eventually discovers he is mining sebum from blackheads of giant human’s nose #fakepitmad This got me an “ewww from a fellow participant.

Susan, polydactylic cellist from Labrador, must enter the ring with Yo Yo Ma. Only one will leave alive. #Fakepitmad

Jane Austen, sent forward in time, gets job working for Amnesty International; Told her reports too wordy #Fakepitmad

Modern retelling of Book of Judges with gender roles reversed. Whose cutting up the concubines now, guys? #fakepitmad

An exiled elf returns to compete for the hand of her love with a troll offering 8265 REALL FOLLOWERS!! #Fakepitmad This pitch relates to the fact that the #pitmad feed was beset by spammers after awhile promising thousands of followers for twitter accounts. I sort of assume that authors I haven’t heard of who have like, 20,000 followers have bought them from these people.

One piece of encouragement I took away from the lack of response to my pitches were some agents’ responses to the pitch madness contests:

Sarah LaPolla ‏@sarahlapolla 12 Sep
I don’t mind things like #pitmad. They can be fun & force you to conceptualize your novel. But a full query + sample pages is always better.

• Jim McCarthy ‏@JimMcCarthy528 12 Sep
I’m always looking for new clients, but I need more than a sentence to gauge interest. Content over concept, people. #pitmad
• Kate McKean ‏@kate_mckean 12 Sep
@JimMcCarthy528 This is exactly why I don’t think these are very helpful events for writers.
12 Sep
@kate_mckean I saw someone tweet that she was giving up on writing today to focus on it and thought BAD CHOICE! BAD CHOICE! #pitmad


My pitch for the original Pitch Madness:

Kathleen Kern
The Price We Paid: My Life with Hoshea Weber and the UPS Underground
Genre: Dystopian Literary
Word Count: 103,000

Political dissident Islam Goldberg-Jones recounts in prison memoir how his infidelities devastated his wife, the iconic activist Shea Weber, as they participated in the struggle to bring down the fascist (U.S.) Christian Republic regime 2065-2086.

I came to God late in life. It was not because I feared hell or longed for heaven. When you finish reading this account, you will understand why I have some anxiety about reunions with the people I’ve loved after I die. Ironically, it was the Christian Republic that in the end made me a believer, when it put me in solitary confinement. By the second year, my sanity had eroded to the point where I thought if I were talking to something besides myself, it meant that I was less crazy. So I began praying, and after about a week of rambling on to some invisible deity (saying essentially the same things I rambled on to myself about), I finally felt a presence in my cell. But it wasn’t God; it was Shea, praying for me, and then her parents, and then all the Wayvers on the outside who had the mistaken belief I was a hero. Sometimes I could almost make out the words, but mostly, I felt those prayers in my chest, breaking the iron bands of fear and depression that made breathing difficult. It would be a while after that before God and I spoke, and I believe that I was ungracious enough to tell him/her that I was much more impressed by feeling the connection to people praying for me than I was with direct contact to the Divine.

Yes, I was angry. Apparently, God decided to work with it.