Category: Writing

Blindness and Disability, Samples, Writing

Instrument Analysis – Truth, Lies and the Wicked Witch 2

Chrys Buckley

To start this piece from the beginning, click here.

jazzy-cello-susanne-clarkAnd at first, I tried to be good. All my dittos from class were filled out and filed neatly in my folders. I swept the floor even though I couldn’t see the dirt, going around the kitchen systematically until a dark pile formed in the epicenter. I scrubbed the bathroom sink and only complained silently to my favorite doll Jenny and my Care Bears in my room. I went to the Centerstream after school program with my seven-year-old brother Randy and didn’t cause any trouble.

One day early in the school year, my music class had a test. It wasn’t a real test, our teacher assured us. She just wanted to see what we already knew coming in. Up front she had about twenty-five big glossy photos of instruments lined up side by side, all seated in that little tray that’s supposed to hold chalk and erasers, and leaning back against the blackboard. The teacher told us to get out a piece of paper and number it one to twenty-six. Next to each number, we were supposed to write the name of the instrument in the matching picture.

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Blindness and Disability, Samples, Writing

The “Truth” About Me – Truth, Lies and the Wicked Witch 1

Chrys Buckley

tlww1imagesI was excited for fourth grade. I had been assigned the teacher I wanted, Mrs. Domaracki. I had new school clothes. I had all my school supplies in order—folders for math and reading and science and social studies and spelling. Some had covers with graded coloring going from almost white on top to a deep fuchsia pink on the bottom. Others were black with hot pink and yellow squiggles scattered about. They were all packed in my backpack, ready for the new school year. There was only one thing left to do.

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Music, Samples, Writing

Total Eclipse: A Memoir Chapter

Chrys Buckley

This piece directly follows Warding Off Eclipses with Sex and Music, which chronicles what I thought of as my alt rock music heyday at fourteen.

totaleclipseimagesI was seventeen. Everything had changed. Love Phones went off the air. A country station bought X107. Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys took over all the other radio stations. Even Randyand the neighbors weren’t into music anymore, like music has a switch for some that can be shut off. I wondered if my switch—that feeling I got from music that was like a direct line to the moon and my deeper self—was one of those circular switches for dining room lights, slowly being dimmed.

It was the night of the Battle of the Bands in my high school gym, the one school event that made me feel like I wasn’t an alien. I needed this evening so badly to help crank my light back up.

Continue reading “Total Eclipse: A Memoir Chapter” →

Writing

My Essay “Seeing and Not Seeing” Won Third Place!

Chrys Buckley

wwlogo-200Holy crap!!!

This spring I submitted several pieces of writing to a handful of contests and had almost forgotten about it. But last night I got an email that my essay “Seeing and Not Seeing” won third place in the Willamette Writers Kay Snow Writing Contest for non-fiction!

You can read a description of the essay at the Personal Essay and Memoir page.

I’ve also posted a few excerpts, Reading Eyes and Faces, Albino and My Face, which are part of the longer essay which you can read anytime.

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Metaphysics, Samples, Writing

A Somewhat Double Life – Dark As Roses 3

Chrys Buckley

dar3imagesTo start this short story from the beginning, click here.

I take the box of this week’s letters and hold it close to me so that Kevin can’t hug me. With a quick wave I leave the office and head for my car across the parking lot. I throw the box in the trunk and close it tight. I get in the car and speed off to meet my two best friends for lunch. I like them because they’re never bursting with color, but dim like me.

When I arrive at the cafeteria on the ground level of our dorm building, Jade and Andrea are already waiting. “Hey, we were about to go inside without you,” Andrea says.

I catch up with them. “Sorry. Crowley let us out late again. Always seems to do that on Mondays. Then I had to run to the paper office to hand in my movie review.” They nod knowingly as we fill our plates with food.

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Writing

Revisiting the Past

Chrys Buckley

So, before I started this blog, before Foraging into the Blogosphere with WordPress, I had an old blogspot blog. It lapsed for a few years before the start of this one. So, why not merge the two? I’m going to try to import the old posts into this site. We’ll see how it works.

It actually worked a lot easier than I ever would’ve thought. So some old posts have already gone up and there will be lots more to come. I’m psyched to be able to have it all in one place!

~Chrys

Blindness and Disability, Music, Samples, Writing

Music Takes Me Back – Camp Marcella 1993

Chrys Buckley

campmarcellarechallindexOn the Sunday that marked the midway point of the camp session, the routine changed. We got to sleep in an extra hour, and after breakfast, we had Sunday Morning Program. Phil opened the program with a new song, a slower song than the whale song or “Great Balls of Fire” or the aorta song.

“Welcome to my morning
Welcome to my day
I’m the one responsible
I made it just this way
I made myself some pictures
To see what they might bring
I think I made it perfectly
I wouldn’t change a thing
La-la-la, La-la-la-la-la-la…”

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Samples, Science, Writing

Know Your Enemy – MMM: In the Trenches of Organic Chemistry 1

Chrys Buckley

ecology background: chemical formulas         “We’re not literally going to die,” I reminded Natalie as I gathered up my things to leave her apartment and walk back across the street to mine. “I mean, no one’s going to shoot us or anything. The worst that will happen is that we fail–”

“I kinda feel like I might actually fail,” Natalie said, sort of laughing the way people laugh when they’re trying not to cry. I knew that laugh so well by now, had laughed it myself so many times.

I grabbed my huge eight-pound book with the fluorescent green cover and shoved it into my backpack. “Me too,” I admitted. I looked around her living room, to all of our practice tests and answer keys scattered over her couch, chair and coffee table; the erasers bloody with pencil shavings, my pink and purple mechanical pencils and Natalie’s straight-up golden #2s; our notecards in several haphazard piles; our identical molecular models of cyclohexane with their carbons and hydrogens in the most stable chair conformations. Natalie sat on her couch, pulling a plush brown blanket around her shoulders. Her apartment looked like a warzone. “That practice test was brutal,” I said. “I’m the one who couldn’t even finish it.” I had given up early into the second practice test, as per usual, feeling I just didn’t know enough to go forward, every question making me feel more like a failure than the last.

Continue reading “Know Your Enemy – MMM: In the Trenches of Organic Chemistry 1” →

Samples, Writing

Food Bank

Chrys Buckley

foodbankindexFinally our names are called, one by one, and we get our bags. I peer into mine. “Ice cream, no way!” I never dreamed they’d give us dessert.

When we unpack back at home, I see that’s mostly what they give us. There’s cake and bags full of Christmas cookies. I open it and pop one red-and-green sprinkled cookie in my mouth. “Kinda stale,” I say, “but better than nothing.”

There are chicken poppers, catfish sticks and cans upon cans. At the bottom of all of our bags are onions and potatoes. “Not bad,” I remark as we fold our bags up and close the cabinets. Sadly, this is the most food I’ve had on hand since my grocery shopping spree when I first moved to Seattle, more than two months ago.

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Writing

Memoir in Review: Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy

Chrys Buckley

Since memoir and personal essay are some of my favorite genres to write and read and contemplate reading and writing, I thought I’d start putting up some reviews of different memoirs, and use that as a way to dig into discussing different aspects of writing. I can almost guarantee there’ll also be some fiction reviews at some point. As I said from my very first post, whether a post on here is about blindness or Breaking Bad or organic chemistry or a book review, I always want the underlying focus to be on storytelling.

citationWinners04_lucyGrealyBefore reading Autobiography of a Face, I’d only read one thing by Lucy Grealy. It was “The Country of Childhood” from her As Seen on TV essay collection, and it was about her experience becoming an American citizen (she was originally from Ireland). I was hungry for more of her work, and then once I found out a little bit about her story, I picked up her memoir. I was definitely looking for a personal connection because though my story is different from Lucy’s, I knew that getting inside the skin of someone else who’d grown up being very physically different was going to make me feel less alone. But I didn’t actually read the book until it was assigned for a class this past April.

Autobiography of a Face tells the story of Lucy’s struggles with her face. She got Ewing’s sarcoma in her jaw as a child and spent lots and lots of time in the hospital. It’s a window into another world, the friendships and hierarchies of hospital patients. There is even a chapter where she and a hospital friend sort of con a hospital volunteer into taking them to see the animal lab and get somewhat traumatized by seeing the vivisected and caged animals.

Lucy details the excruciating pain of chemotherapy while also conveying her childhood ignorance about the seriousness of what was going on. For most of the early stages (maybe even years) of her disease and treatment, she has an almost blase attitude toward it all, takes things in stride, doesn’t really understand the significance of what’s going on even though adults try to hint at it. She has to have a major surgery to remove the cancer in her jaw, and then spends years and years, operation after operation, trying to reconstruct her face.

Continue reading “Memoir in Review: Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy” →