New Millennium Writings, Issue 12

Issue 12 -- 2002

Contents - Departments

Ken Kesey… Further Along
And Still Testing the Reality of It, 65
'Ken Kesey dead? Who they tryin' to kid? That can't be Kesey they wheeled away from Sacred Heart in Eugene, OR, Nov. 10, like hauling off the corpse of some lobotomized savior in a movie about lunatics. Kesey was much bigger than that…'

Poetry Suite, 153-188, Recent Poems by…
Anthony Seidman, Paul Guest, Karen Head, Rush Rankin, Ben Passikoff, R.B. Morris, Antler, Renée Ruderman, Xin Qiji translated by Mike Farman, Kristen Tracy, Marilyn Kallet, Ryan G. Van Cleave, Deanna Kern Ludwin, Terence McGuire, Ben Norwood, Laura Still, Walt McDonald, Cristine Boyka Kluge, Virgil Suárez, John Randolph Carter, Margaret J. Hoehn, Dennis Saleh, Shoshauna Shy and William Derge
First Verse by Therese Stegman, Doug LaVerne, Everette Bach, Joe Quinn, and Nancy Callahan

Writing 101, Ways to Make a Character Come Alive, by Don Williams, 208
Few aspects of writing are judged more stringently than the development of characters whose thoughts, words and deeds propel your story forward. Here are tips for rendering a character extra vividly…

Funnier Than Fiction - Humor
Death Of A Romance Novel by Michael Zukowski, 194
'Were they laughing at him? Or maybe they were just jealous? He felt as if he were bing used, like an old tire, like a little bunny rabbit, like a bunch of other things that didn't make sense.
By damn, he was not someone to kick around. He would show them. It was not that easy to kick a bunny rabbit. If you'd ever had knee surgery, forget it…'

Light Verse by Judy DiGregorio, Deanna Kern Ludwin, David Catron, and Nelson Adrian Blish, 202-205

An Actual Cover Letter by Patricia Ansley 206

Notes on Contributers and Acknowledgments, 190-193

Cover Art,
"Aquarius"
by Ken Kesey & Family

Cover Design
by Rhonda Swicegood
of Hart Graphics

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Contents - Special Section
New Millennium Awards XII & XIII

Read the Winners,
Special Section - 6 to 64
Honorable Mentions, 6 - 7
New Contest Guidelines, 64

1st Place, Fiction, NMW 13
Kiyash Monsef,
Lobsters In A Tank, 8
'Those nights are never easy… but at the end, when you've closed your last check, and you go home and fold all that money you made away into a corner and lie down with your girlfriend and close your eyes, your nerves are still jangling….'

1st Place, Fiction, NMW 12 (tie)
Sari Rose,
The Daughter of Retail, 16
'Retail works like this: Someone walks in the door and she's yours. you may not fall in love but you have to put her body before yours. You must see whatever it is she wants to show you; smell her smell; satisfy her. You must sell yourself as a suitor before you sell the suit….'

1st Place, Fiction, NMW 12 (tie)
Toby Heaton,
Southern Revival, 27
'Rose never got her lipstick on quite right. She ran it off above the corners of her mouth, as if the face in the mirror was a carefree twenty-year old girl instead of a woman struggling to stay upright under the weight of some heavy object…'

1st Place, Nonfiction, NMW 12
Trent Moorman,
Tilos, 39
'I went to Greece to run the course of the original marathon… I had become a zombie in the coffin-sized cubicle where I worked. It was all nine-to-five, small talk, quotas, computer screen cathodes, customer service, carpal tunnel, coffee stains and flourescent lights….'

1st Place, Nonfiction, NMW 13
Laura S. Distelheim,
Requiem For A Dreamer, 48
'Later, when I heard what had happened, I imagined him standing there in th ekitchen in those final moments of believing… untying his apron and placing it on his hook, adn I imagined him pausing to glance out the window onto the intersection, silvered with snow, and the lavender twilight, just descending…'

1st Place, Poetry, NMW 12
Eduardo C. Corral,
For A Boy In A Bus Depot, 61
'Moonlight topples
from the star-cabled night
like the handkerchief
in the breast pocket of a Frenchman
reclining in a chair, his shoes
being polished by a boy….'

1st Place, Poetry, NMW 13
Jeff Walt,
Why I Work, 62
'Every day I tie on an apron, wrap the long,
white staps around my waist twice
to hold me there, tether me to eight hours
or more of pouring coffee. I sing the common,
everyday music of an urban café: "Iced grande
fat-free latte!" for seven dollars an hour…'

Featured Writers

Elizabeth Crowell, 82
The Killing Jar
'A gray, mottled butterfly lay on its back inside the jar.
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins," I said aloud.
It was awful of me to have said it and the wife sighed as if she'd heard it a thousand times. I'm sure she had. Mr. Nabakov didn't seem to hear at all….'

Michael Hyde, 92
What Is Now Proved Was Once Only Imagined
'She looked up and squinted, startled by the man in the open doorway of the garden shed. He was neither youn nor old. Scars stretched across his forehead. They were trenched deep in his brow. His eyes looked gouged out and burned. His mouth was a mistake…'

Bernard Otterman, 106
The Golem of Auschwitz
'It was this artistic ability to unite flesh with flesh that persuaded me to tell him my very unusual dream. I dreamed tall the sick people in the bay left their bunks and gathered around the wooden table on which I performed minor operations. "Make us a golem," they begged me….'

Sean Aden Lovelace, 118
Sprawling
'I'm in a sagging little town outside Birmingham, Alabama, attempting to sell energy supplements to a disinterested convenience store manager, when my nine year old son calls on the cell phone and says his mother, my wife, won't leave the backyard hammock. In fact, hasn't left it for three days….'

Ina Clair Gabler, 132
A Vast Number of Breakfasts
'That made 12,045 breakfasts. She harbored the secret knowledge, then and now; held the vast number, a concrete thing, in her heart, imbued with enormous, speechless meaning like an everyday image in a dream that could shake her soul…'

Oran Ryan, 136
At Two Degrees Below Zero
'It is a cold four a.m.. Todd is sitting up in bed. She is there. He can feel her there though she isn't. He feels what he felt when she was there. This envents her presence. She is there, as when she lay there beside him--every night for thirty years--and she would sleep but he couldn't….'

Al Sim, 139
Nick the Greek
'On Christmas Eve of his junior year, Nick the Greek decided to commit suicide. He had his reasons. His mother had died over the summer and his father had become a haunted shuffling shell. Then Nick found his pretty little blond girlfriend in his roommate's big muscular arms. His black mood was not improved by the bad acid he swallowed…'

Joel E. Turner, 144
Holly Boy
'"A plague on you and all the girls of Gladwynne! What fright is this, what mischief, what failure, that you'll have non of me? What harm could it be for a fine-browed maiden to meet me in this thick dark wood?"
"And if I give myself up to you in this thicket, would you abandon me to woo another?"….'

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Last updated June 8, 2002