2011-2012 Winter Short Story Festival 29:70

Zora Neale Hurston—novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist—was known during the Harlem Renaissance for her wit, irreverence, and folk writing style. She won second prize in the 1925 literary contest of the Urban League’s journal, Opportunity, for her short story “Spunk,” which also appeared in The New Negro.

Zora Neale Hurston tells it straight as she saw it in Spunk her first published short story.  Hurston was a master as mixing folklore, true-life, and mid-Florida scenery into one mean picture.  Did she write of the American experience, or the AfraAmerican Experience?  I believe she writes of people neither white nor black, of a certain place and time, and that she goes beyond the limitations of classification. Enjoy the story for the story that is told, and find the connections where you may.

“Ain’t cher? Well, night befo‘ las’ was the fust night Spunk an‘ Lena moved together an’ jus‘ as they was goin’ to bed, a big black bob-cat, black all over, you hear me, black, walked round and round that house and howled like forty, an‘ when Spunk got his gun an’ went to the winder to shoot it he says it stood right still an‘ looked him in the eye, an’ howled right at him. The thing got Spunk so nervoused up he couldn’t shoot. But Spunk says twan’t no bob-cat nohow. He says it was Joe done sneaked back from Hell! ”

2011-2012 Winter Short Story Festival 28:70

Tennyson: The Lotus Eaters

The Lotus Eaters came and beckoned the sailors far from home, to a land of golden rays and pleasant weather all year long.   A place far from home.  A place we used to know.   One gets the sense of wanting this year to be better than the rest, time will tell if the year will blossom into a swell; new-year is like a cloud on the horizon full of weather that will either destroy the crops or make them prosper.

A land where all things always
seemed the same!
And round about the keel with faces
pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy
Lotus eaters came.

  
Okay, sorry for having two from Tennyson, but these poems must be dusted off and read again... I believe you will find them to be full of joyful moments.   I downloaded these poems from the Gutenberg Project under the title Six Centuries of English Poetry with commentary by James Baldwin. A short story must have the five elements of storytelling in order to be considered.  The elements are: 

1. A story has a beginning middle and an end. 
2. It has to have a sense of place.  
3. It has characters/actors.
4. It has to have an internal or external conflict.  
5. The conflict has to be resolved.

Tennyson was excellent at telling stories through the structure of poetry.    

2011-2012 Winter Story Festival 27:70

Alfred Tennyson tells of a heroic heroine and Sir Lancelot's quest in this telling epic poem titled the Lady of Shalott. I love the setting that was created by this poets feel for England; you can feel the warm ground mixing with the cold morning sky.

(Part Four) In the Sotrmy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The brodad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
Over Toward Camelot;
Downs she came and found a boat
Beneath a Willow left afloat,
And round about the prow she wrote,
The Lady of Shalott.
...
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shalott.