Tag: Moonchild

Samples, Writing

Writers at Sunset on the Eve of College

Chrys Buckley

marylandsunsetindexWe go back to the outdoor school for dinner, then they drive us all to the beach for the evening. I hang out on a towel on the sand and watch a fiery, cloud-filled sunset with Jen and Christina, two writers who live in a dorm by the Lit House. The Lit House is a special building on campus for all the English majors to have meetings, workshops and readings. Most of our Sophie Kerr weekend events took place there.

“Are either of you taking the freshman creative writing class?” I ask.

“I am,“ says Christina. She has long straight dark blond hair, and wears a beanie. She’s small, one of those small people like my mother who carries a big voice.

“Cool,” I say, flexing my toes and watching a cloud fill with red like a pen burst inside it. “Me too.”

Continue reading “Writers at Sunset on the Eve of College” →

Writing

After the Ecstasy of the Writers Conference Comes the Difficulty of Doing the Work

Chrys Buckley

angry-writerOn Sunday, I came home from the AWP Writers Conference, full of inspiration and ideas and lots and lots of insights on how to fix my old memoir manuscript, Moonchild, which has languished, untouched, for about six years.

I wanted to get right to work, and I knew part of the job would be to integrate the oldest version I had with the most recent. The oldest had all the raw material that I mostly wrote by hand from 2003 to 2005. I transcribed in onto the computer and when that task was daunting, hired someone to help with the transcription. The newest version, from sometime in 2008 had been through years of editing and was more polished and tightly written. I printed out the first chapter of each and started to read.

I got about three pages into one version, if that, and I realized, holy shit, this is going to be a nightmare to deal with. No wonder I haven’t looked at this mess in six years!

Continue reading “After the Ecstasy of the Writers Conference Comes the Difficulty of Doing the Work” →

Writing

A Lollapalooza for Writers – What I Learned at AWP in Seattle

Chrys Buckley

seattleawpimagesI just got home from AWP in Seattle. For those who haven’t heard of it, AWP is this massively huge swarm of writers that descends on a different city each year. This year, AWP took over the Washington State Convention Center, an Annex and the Seattle Sheraton. Someone told me that the total number of people registered was 14,000. Unless you count music festivals like Lollapalooza and Coachella, I’ve never been around that many people in such a concentrated space.

There are oodles of writing-related panels. In fact, for every time slot, there are, oh, I don’t know, twenty or more different offerings. And then there are outside events, readings, contest winner announcements, drinking with some vague literary theme in mind, and then more panels. There’s also a bookfair, which is huge. This one was split into two separate rooms, that’s how huge it was. Booths everywhere. Books everywhere. Writers milling around booths and looking at books everywhere.

I was a total AWP virgin, open to all kinds of impression and experience.

So, here are some things I learned over the last three days:

Continue reading “A Lollapalooza for Writers – What I Learned at AWP in Seattle” →

Samples, Writing

Eleven is When We Waved Goodbye

Chrys Buckley

dark_stormy_nightI was eleven. I loved things that not everybody loved, like thunderstorms and rainy days, winter, outer space, darkness and the feeling of mystery. I thought about things I read, either for school or for fun, and pondered them long after I’d finished the book. I thought over events in my life the same way. I looked for meanings, for connections, reasons, patterns, philosophies. I had a lot of thoughts and a lot of feelings and I was always exploring them, taking them deeper, writing them down. On Saturday mornings I woke up early and sat in bed writing stories. I was just starting to figure out who I was. I felt vivid, like a full moon in a sky full of identical stars.

Continue reading “Eleven is When We Waved Goodbye” →

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” →

Blindness and Disability, Music, Samples, Writing

Warding Off Eclipses with Sex and Music: A Memoir Chapter

Chrys Buckley
My Binder Cover
My Binder Cover

I was fourteen. I was an alternative rock goddess. I’d found Nirvana. I was in love with a dead man.

I sat with my brother Randy, my neighbors and my friend Lissa from blind camp in the very back of the backyard on pink plastic chairs. “So, which would you rather do?” said Ryan from across the street, turning to me. We were playing Questions. “Have sex with Kurt Cobain for one hour, Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam for ten hours, or the guy from Silverchair for twenty hours?”

I was a loyal girl. “Kurt,” I answered without a thought. “Okay, Lissa. If you were going out with a guy and he wanted to 69, would you do it?”

Continue Reading–>

~~~

Hahaha, so, it only continues from there. This chapter was published in Shark Reef a few years ago and so is also available through the Published page on the site, but I know sometimes those things can be hard to find so I thought I’d bring it out for this week’s writing sample. Fair warning: it’s not a particularly easy read. Still though, I once was reading a passage from this piece at an Open Mic type deal and was laughing so hard I was crying and could barely read and almost peed my pants.

As always, for more writing samples, you can always check out the Samples page. There’s also a section for Published and Early Work (most of this latter section is downright mortifying, but you know, oh well).

~Chrys

Blindness and Disability, Samples, Writing

Constant Eclipse: A Memoir Chapter

Chrys Buckley

chrys_boweryclub1bI was scared that Mom or Dad would kill me in my sleep. Dad was an FBI agent and he had a gun that he sometimes kept in the house. I thought even he was afraid of Mom, who screamed all the time, got hysterically mad and spanked me when I was little. It was her I listened for as I laid in bed in my thin yellow nightgown, reading Nancy Drew by the light of my night-light, while I tried not to think about getting murdered.

My parents’ bedroom door opened and I heard Mom’s sharp footsteps in the hallway. They sounded mad. I waited curled on my side with the book under the covers and screamed No, Mom, No! inside my head. If either of them came for me tonight, I’d jump out the window. I didn’t care that my room was upstairs. I’d jump anyway, land mangled on the driveway and run across our yard as fast as I could. I’d pound on our next-door neighbor’s door. If she answered, I’d tell her my parents were chasing me and beg her to protect me. If she didn’t believe me, I’d run faster and pound harder at the next house and go through the neighborhood with wild desperation until I found someone who would keep me safe. It might not last. My parents might follow me, shoot into the distance or use the authorities to take me back, but that was like the second story window and the driveway; if I wanted to survive, I’d have to think about it later.

The bathroom door opened and Mom went in. I kept freezing. She finally stalked back to her room and I breathed. The quiet lasted a few full chapters.

I got up and went to my window. It faced the driveway and our front yard with its giant tree. The moon was out, maybe full, I couldn’t tell. It was big and white and round and it cast shadows through the branches onto the grass. I had a huge feeling of dark and mysterious magic in my chest. If I could touch it, it would be like touching my soul. It would make me huge too, and magic. I stood watching the moon, the tree, and the shadows until I was finally tired.

Continue Reading–>

~~~

Yeah, it’s just a little dark, I know. This is what I was invited to read at “The Best Memoirists Pageant Ever” at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC in 2007.  So the picture is from that event. Fun times.

Fun fact: I was kinda freaking about reading this piece out loud and so a good friend had me read parts to her beforehand, and from the first sentence we were laughing our asses off. It’s not really funny, it just somehow struck us that way. Sometimes all you can do is laugh. And that’s okay.

Check out the Samples Page, as well as Published and Early Work, to read more of my writing!

~Chrys

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Music, Samples, Writing

She’s a Girl Rising From a Shell: A Memoir Chapter

Chrys Buckley

So today, I’m giving you a full chapter from my memoir Moonchild. Now, this is actually up on this site but almost no one has found it, so I’m just pulling it out of hiding. Link is at the bottom of the post.

Another interesting tidbit: Seven years ago, I did a full-length spoken word performance show thingy-dingy and this was the first piece I read at the show. The other day, while on a rampage looking for the earliest version of my manuscript, I came across the recordings from that show. So I am toying with the idea of putting the audio up with the chapter. I don’t know. It has people’s real names. And whenever I hear my recorded voice, I sound like a twelve-year-old with a cold. But I’ll let you decide, should I include audio or no?

All the chapter titles from this book are lyrics from songs. This one comes from the song “Ribbons Undone” by Tori Amos, on her 2005 CD, The Beekeeper. I wrote this piece during that spring, with that album infusing into every corner of my life. At the time, I was about to leave Camp Orkila, where I had lived and worked for more than two years, and my brother was about to graduate college and my sister was about to graduate high school. The theme of graduation kept playing through my mind and it just felt like I was coming to the end of a journey that had started when I first left for college, which is what this chapter is about.

It was one of those things where you look back at the beginning of something and ask yourself, if you had ANY clue where it all would lead, would you do it over again? I was looking back at a time of innocence, of blissfully not knowing what that journey would entail, so this song, where Tori looks at her young daughter starting out on life journeys, just completely resonated with me at the time I was writing and the time I was writing about. It’s a really sweet song and if I’m feeling especially sentimental, it will totally make me cry. I’m a sap like that.

Another cool tidbit: About a year after I wrote the piece, I woke up one morning, way too early, to the sound of my ringing phone. Who the f was calling me at 6 in the morning? It was Tori Amos’ dad, calling from Maryland (where this story mostly takes place) to give me permission to use the lyrics. He also told me I should change the name of my book (which I did, back then it was called Learning to Swim, which is now a tattoo rather than a book title). Anyway, I always thought that was kinda cool.

BUT ENOUGH OF THIS BLATHERING. Here it is:

She’s A Girl Rising From a Shell

I decided to go with the audio addition, so here it is:

Now I’m going to go back to editing this same book manuscript, and listening to Rihanna. For real yo. Cannot even believe I’m fessing up to that but yeah, I kinda can’t get enough of a certain song. Have a good weekend everyone!

~Chrys

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Writing

Floored by Rejections (in a Good Writerly Way)

Chrys Buckley

pnwarejectionsindex

Here’s another old post from my old blog. Still importing, and lots more posts from the vault still to come.

I take it as a distinctly good sign that the rejections I receive as a writer are getting more and more flattering. It’s just got to be good.

A few months ago I entered three things into the Pacific Northwest Writers Association (PNWA) contest. I didn’t place in any of the three categories, but did receive two critiques on each piece, which offered some suggestions and things to think about, as well as some positive feedback.

Continue reading “Floored by Rejections (in a Good Writerly Way)” →

Writing

"Ribbons Undone" – Tori Amos (Chapter One Title Explained)

Chrys Buckley

ribbonsundoneimagesI’ll just preface this by saying that there are two sections of my book. The first is called Eclipses, with four chapters about childhood and adolescence before I left for college. These are not named after songs. The next section, Waxing Crescent, is the main body of the book, and I still think of the first chapter in this section as chapter 1. This section (the bulk of the book) is where lyric-as-title comes into play.

In this post I decided to go through my chapters that are named after song lyrics and say why I picked the lyric with the chapter, because I picked them all for such varied reasons.

Chapter One is titled “She’s A Girl Rising From A Shell” from the song “Ribbons Undone” by Tori Amos.

Some songs I picked because that’s what I was listening to at the time I’m writing about. This was not the case this time. I titled this chapter about leaving for college with a line from a song that I didn’t hear until six years after the fact.

Continue reading “"Ribbons Undone" – Tori Amos (Chapter One Title Explained)” →