Writing By Writers...

In the spirit of generating new work Writing By Writers held our 12th annual Short Short Writing Contest to win free tuition to the 2025 WxW Generative Workshops. The rules were simple. The piece could be fiction, non fiction, memoir or poetry but it must include a texture related to a tree, a kind of rock or category of rocks (ie geology), a sound a bird makes, a snack you can buy at 7-11, and a reason for hope.

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Winners: Shawna Bethell, Megan Campbell, Allison Field Bell, Kathryn Ganfield, Ford Hinojosa, Tia Jensen, Kathryn Kukula, Claudia Presto, Robin Puro, Randall Van Nostrand, Julie Vogel, Sarah Wheeler

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Finalists: Patricia Bailey, Eva Churchill, Alexandra Dane, Janet Huntington, MaryKae Marinac, Jane Jackman Morales, Solaris Santaella, Christine Stepherson, Lisle Thielbar, Julianne Warren

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Cranes of the Platte River Vallley by Shawna Bethell

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It’s cold. A sharp prairie wind rushes hard through pre-dawn black, navigates ridged striations of cottonwood limbs, and sweeps across the sand-braided Platte River of Nebraska, where huddled and shivering we sit in a blind, waiting for dawn. 

 

Instead, we’re gifted a slender orange crescent rising above the opposite bank. You lean into me, shoulder to shoulder, and I feel, what exactly? The past two years have been numbed by caregiving and grief. There has been no space for connection. But now, I feel. In that pre-dawn shadow, I recognize it. You are kindred.

 

Out on the river, a rose-gold glimmer from the east, and with light comes sound. Grey feathers blush pink, and what begins as a craggy murmur gradually erupts into a cacophony of trumpet calls as thousands of sandhill cranes wake for the day. You turn to your camera, while I stuff my half-eaten granola bar into my pack and reach for mine. This is why we’re here, a photography workshop. But really, I came for you. For your knowledge of these birds, whose ancestors have found this river for two million years, a sojourn on their spring flight north. 

 

Last night you explained how they survived the plow that took their prairie, the growth of towns and industry, the irrigation that siphons more water each year. They adapted. They’ve endured. Wings stretched wide, they still bow and dance, and as I watch there’s a familiar welling in my chest. But no longer from grief, only joy.

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Notes Instead by Megan Campbell

 

I decide to write a letter to my friend Tom. It begins with my thoughts about his eating Twin Snakes for dinner the last time I saw him downtown, and leads gently towards my mounting concern for the subsequent white russians. I had gone down to the bar for dinner, and he bellied up next to me as I was eating a salad. He asked me if I ever wished for stuff. I start the letter over and over because I know within all the rings of my treed soul that concern is the wrong approach. As futile as trying to rub the rough bark of his forehead smooth with my thumb. Then I think about his teeth. I write, your teeth are the color of caution, Tom, and they are crumbling like the cliff out at agate beach. Dropping out of this wolf’s mouth of a place. No, too far. He would just tell me he hates poetry, so I cross that out too. I move back and forth. Into the light and out of the light, dragging the flowers to different places around the room before I return. I think I hear a voice out there saying you can’t save him. But it’s a golden-crowned sparrow. Those four notes carving a space for themselves in the mixed up air, like they are the only thing that belongs there. They sound and sound and then come all the way down. Like rest. I record the notes, send them instead.

 

SCREECH by Allison Field Bell

 

She’s forty. Not maternal. Never has been. Gritty, intense. “A handful.” This is what men say. They say, “Whoa.” They say, “Hold up.” She laughs. She screeches. Like really screeches. A sound that’s both guttural and shrill. This morning, at breakfast, a friend gifts her a rose quartz. “For your heart,” the friend says. But her heart is fine. Her heart is fueled by sweet tarts. Chalky, sour, nostalgic. Blue 2 Lake. Red number whatever. She has them always in a pocket. Later, she’ll carry the quartz too. Simultaneously smooth and jagged. A translucent pink. She hates the color pink. Not out of principle but also out of principle. To the friend, she says, “Thank you.” The friend nods, and she nods back. She orders them coffee. She has no need for quartz. She has a cat: short-haired, gray. Cat, childless. She’s one of those. Out every weekend knocking doors. She makes signs for protests: Fuck all Kings. She likes the word fuck. Not that interested in fucking though. She is and she isn’t. The friend says, “How’s your dating life?” Well. She laughs. She screeches. Her dating life is: bar, drink, screech, home. “Fucked,” she says to the friend. The friend is also forty, also alone. Alone and not alone. They have the cat, the rose quartz, the sweet tarts. They sip coffee. They laugh. They screech. They hold onto each other across the table, rose quartz between them collecting all the light it can. A warm pink glow.  

 

Benchwarmer by Kathryn Ganfield

 

Spring of 7th grade, somehow I made the softball team. No experience past preschool T-ball and scared of grounders that popped up my outstretched glove.

 

Coach stuck me in right field where I couldn’t hurt our chances. 

 

My teammates Robin and Jozie said their parents couldn’t pick them up after practice. Could they come back to my house every day? 

 

Were they using me? Didn’t care, if it showed they liked me even a little. 

 

We walked two miles to my house, stopping at Super America for Coke slushies that sizzled my tongue. Starting the next slurp before the pain of the last ever ebbed, in agony and ecstasy. 

 

Under my maple tree, we stretched our 7th-grade legs, still dusted with the infield’s yellow gravel. The maple leaves were big as softball gloves and just as leathery. I ripped them along their veins and listened to the cooler girls who knew how to call boys, and kiss them too.

 

Robin’s laugh was the most decisive I’ve ever heard. Hers was the harsh, rich guffaw of a crow, like she’s surprised someone like you could humor someone like her.

 

How I wanted to make Robin laugh, how I wished to be cool, how I hoped to hit a hit that no one could catch. The promise of a 7th-grade girl, over-sugared and unsure. Hanging by her hands from the lowest maple branch. Swinging like a bat that had not yet hit a ball. 

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Why Don't You? by Tia Jensen

 

Why don’t you write about fishing?

Why don’t you have a favorite band?

You saved a fish abandoned in papercup next to a dumpster. Kept a tank full of frogs in your dorm. You’d hand out amphibians from your pockets to keep boys at bay. 

When did you first know you wanted to write?

When prompted, “Write the lifecycle of a frog” 

Expected: egg, tadpole, frog.  

You wrote how it felt to sprout legs and leave water. 

 

Your music: sight read, played fast, close to the beginning. Nothing too understood. Clock it. Drum it out—Metamorphic. 

Fur Elise learned from TV Commercial selling tape-recorder. A boy at the piano played through, hit record, knuckled a football— jumped out of the window. Ah ha, this moment—furrows whittled deep-just another bagatelle. Music=escape. 

But fish?

You wrote a wedding vow based on a fly-tie knot. The art of entrapment. Ocular rings marked years in fish, you don’t remember jig patterns, nor dance. 

 You can’t arrive at the end without beginning.

You tell stories better than you write. Work is what’s available to you. 

“Then write about work.”

 When Fisherpoets gather; you cry. A life on water, under the Milky Way; you dream of fish. 

 

Your first salmon canned. 

Now, you cast, catch, learn to fillet. Feast.

You asked a bestselling author if he ever noodled.

You asked how to write.  

Catch. Hold something shimmering in your hand. “Isn’t it stunning?” 

Stick and stay—wait for it. Now, you are here…Sing. 

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Defying Gravity by Claudia Presto

 

Everything goes into his mouth. Well not everything, thank DOG, he draws the line at the ragged rocks roaming the beach. But the stick, trapped in teeth, three times his length, with warped wet bark stringing over his face as he races down the sand teeters dangerously near his eyes. He drops that to investigate and chew on the orange flapping paper which I grab out of this mouth as he dashes back to me – Cheetos. 

And then he catches a glimmer of movement on the sandbar. 

He freezes. Sandpipers. And with their next synchronized session of chirps and chattering, he demands and they obey. Swooping and gliding as one entity just out of his rough-hewn running reach. The whoosh of wings, teasing him as they figure-eight over the sands and he is all locomotion steam and pulsing power as froth from the waves spews from Scottish Deerhound paws and he becomes a black dot on the horizon.

I watch for him to lift off as my heart bursts with his. Like Pegasus of old. No longer earthbound, but on wings of whirls and swirls and want and need. Going so fast that time falls away and he is a particle of sand, a dash of wind, a crash of wave. Defying gravity.

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Adrift in Hokkaido by Robin Puro

 

“Everyone was right. 7-eleven is 100% better here,” I say.

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We’d spread our snacks onto the thin sheets of white birch I’d peeled off the tree. The papery bark lay adrift on the snow, little ships carrying onigiri salmon rice balls and fish-shaped azuki buns. I’ve stuffed my thermos of hot green tea into the corner like a lighthouse.

We squat on our skis because if we remove them here, we would sink. Each winter, meter after meter of snow arrives, sailing in on the frigid Siberian winds like a tsunami of crystals. The drifts here are bottomless, just like grief.

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“Do you ever talk to Clara?” I ask. 

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“Sometimes,” he says. “I carry this obsidian river stone in my pocket. When I really need her, I hold the rock and start talking.”

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“Does she respond?” I ask.

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“She does. Always when I most need it and least expect it. Do you talk to your dad?”

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“I’ve decided he’s an owl,” I say, popping the last of the mochi into my mouth, “I recently dreamt I was staring at an owl through a window, but then the window shattered.”

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“What do you make of that?” he asks.

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“I guess things aren’t always as they appear to be. Nothing’s permanent,” I say.

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It’s bitter cold; we cannot linger in this groundless place for too long. We shuffle our skis forward again, into the silence between the trees. Then, from somewhere deep in the forest, I hear it: Hoo-hoo.

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Giant by Randall Van Nostrand

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Giant dangled his legs over the rim of the granite quarry, speed-eating Oreos. How long before anyone came looking for him? “Probably never.” His laugh, more of a bark, echoed. What kind of lonely idiot talked to himself? Jamming another Oreo into his mouth he leaned over the edge. It would be easy for a kid, even a big kid like him, to disappear. He threw a rock, listening for it to hit the water. Overhead, crows circled and cawed, daring him to do it. 

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Giant finished the Oreos and started on the pork rinds. A whine made him turn. A skinny brown dog—stuck-out ribs, hunched shoulders, flattened ears—watched him chew. 

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“Hi,” Giant said. 

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The dog dipped her wrinkled forehead. 

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He tossed her a pork rind. She lurched forward, snatched it, and skittered back. He tossed another closer and kept going until the bag was empty. 

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She stared, hopeful for more. 

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“Sorry,” Giant said, showing his empty hands. She licked them clean, her tongue soft and thorough. He stroked her throat and the back of her neck. They watched the sun slip behind the mountain and the crows leave. 

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When the air turned cold, Giant pushed himself to his feet. The dog danced away. He stood motionless, waiting for her to get used to the size of him standing. He’d wait all night if he had to. Finally, she stepped closer, tail wagging slowly.

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“People call me Giant but my real name is Justin,” he said. “What’s yours?” 

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The Jacaranda And The Pigeon by Sarah Wheeler

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I’m on my way to the library this morning when I’m pulled off course by a Jacaranda that wants

to be witnessed. Today, it says, there will be a holy jubilee of 10,000 lilac-blue silk chiffon petals

dancing in the breeze that cannot be missed. So I enter the tree’s sanctuary. Kneel to the

ground, a carpet of purple. Look up.

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A congregation of pigeons is crowding in around me, no doubt hoping to collect a few crumbs

from the stale muffin in my hand. When a chunk of it falls, a wild commotion ensues and I look

down at the chaotic swarm. That is when I see you. Standing curiously still amongst your fellow

pigeons. When they fall back, I toss a crumb your way. You do not so much as even flutter.

I move a bit closer to see your head is covered in large pumice-like growths—one protruding

from where an eye should be. It oozes like sap from a tree. Unsure of whether the socket is

empty, I lower myself to the ground so I am level with you. I peer deep into the crater and see

the small, orange glint of an eye looking back at me.

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So you are in there.

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Whatever this plague is, it has sealed you inside. Like a rusted tin man. How can I help? What

can I do?

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You stare at me, unblinking.

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Holding your gaze, I take a seat beside you in the graveyard of fallen purple trumpets.