December 2010
26 posts
1 tag
703
I didn’t feel home until I was on the northbound San Joaquin Valley train, sitting in the calm of blue seats, breathing in the smell of smoke trapped in the fibers of a junkie passenger’s Betty Boop bag, listening to the fizz of her newly opened Pepsi can as it poured into a plastic cup the four-year-old across from us later knocked over, spilling ice across the tabletop as I wrote.
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Rumbling tracks
by Tyler King
This stationary train car remains,
filled only with the memory of its cargo
and dead grass the wind blows around.
People come to it now,
to spray or etch their names
into the roll-call of generations,
or to tenderly touch its rusty sides
and listen to the echoes of the rumbling tracks
and the hum of history.
Tyler King is currently working toward his B.A. in English at...
1 tag
“You couldn’t make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other...”
– Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Passport, by Deb Olin Unferth →
It was robbed from her hotel room along with everything else. Or not the hotel room, but her person on the train. Or not the train, but the locked box or the bag. Or it happened in the hallway, or on the stairs. Or she never received it in the first place and had to call after it like a lost dog. Or she got one but good only for a year, renewable each November for the next ten. Or she sat in...
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Whistles in the Distance →
Sill looking for imaginative Christmas presents? Washington Post children’s book reviewer Abby McGanney Nolan recommends Rosemary Wells’ “On the Blue Comet” and Gordon Titcomb’s “The Last Train,” two new books that prove trains are for kids:
They’re big, they’re fast, they whistle loudly. So you wouldn’t think trains needed a public relations campaign...
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“As the express train passes the local
It moves by just like a paper boat...”
– Nada Surf, “Paper Boats”
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“Got a choke chain, made out of Night Train, to keep your memory down.”
– Elliott Smith, “See You Later”
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BusWrite, or The Inevitable Return
I write a lot about trains, but I like buses, too, especially ones that go on through the night, like the one I’ll board in a few more hours, the one that will take me back to the city where TrainWrite began: New York, NY. At the time, writing the subway made it seem more familiar, made it feel more like home, which I’d hoped it would become.
I’ve missed those tunnels, their...
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They used to call it Love.
Today at Without Constraint, past contributor Steve Marin compares love to walking through train cars, “looking for a seat by itself, or a seat near someone, passing the same things, same mistakes, same patterns.” Enjoy the grit and rhythm of “What They Used to Call It…”
She sat in the middle, twiddling, tombing, exhuming, eradicating black strings and strands, wires...
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This Just In
from Mallory Moore
Woman sitting next to me on the train at 8:45am: *Taps me on shoulder* “Excuse me. Your bag is touching my arm.” Yes, and we are basically sitting on top of each other, and the nice gentleman standing in front of me has his crotch in my face. Oh, but I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to let my BAG touch your ARM. Seriously, people?
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Love and Loathing
TrainWrite has been blessed this holiday season with a slew of talent, from rock stars like Best American Essays notable Joe Bonomo, six-time Pushcart Prize nominee Steven Church, and Flatmancrooked Fiction Prize Finalist Danny Goodman to up-and-comers like Fumbling Forward’s Jenna Mantis and Mr. Lighter’s Dominic Laituri. If you like what you read here, please recommend TrainWrite for the...
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The Following Is In B&W
by Joe Bonomo
Tracks that end in a field confound me. Tracks that sink into paved roads confound me. We’d drive from Maryland to Ohio to visit my grandparents every August. They lived in Coldwater in a small white house, in front of the New Idea Farm Equipment factory along which train tracks ran like girders. Every day when the trains would come through town we’d burst out of the kitchen and...
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An excerpt from the short story, "Forest Hills"
Read this gem by Danny Goodman over the weekend, and while you’re at it, head on over to fwriction and wish him a happy birthday. He’s older than he’d wish to be.
The tennis club was too far for Hank to walk, but the subway was close. He needed to visit the stadium one last time, take in all he could. His memory lacked its former sharpness. Somehow going there, though, being in...
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Want to know where I am?
Let Wufniks tell you.
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Chuck Klosterman & Jonathan Franzen ride the Acela
I meet Franzen in the Philadelphia train station; we will ride the Acela to Washington, D.C. During our two hours together, the one time he shows a spike of emotion is when he correctly predicts where the café car will stop on the train platform. “My father was a railroad man,” he says as the doors slide open.
We sit in business-class. Franzen takes the window seat. He answers ...
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Mark of the Hobo
by Steven Church
In the summer mountains of Colorado, where we yearly escaped from the flat lives in our Kansas home, we placed pennies on the tracks and waited for the train to flatten them into copper smears. Dad told stories of trains derailed by sagebrush and cattle, elk and cowboy train robbers. I knelt in the black cinders and pressed my hand to the sun-warmed rail, feeling for the coming...
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The Hush and the Hum
by Jenna Mantis
It’s officially the start of the Holiday season. The air in South Station is thick with anticipation, the urgent need to be out of Boston and en route to the destination: loved ones.
South Station is alive, an organism humming, the heart of which is the arrival and departure board. Crowds of traveler’s stand, heads tilted back, waiting, waiting, waiting, until there is movement,...
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The Paths We Choose
My imagination never stops when I jog along this section of track, envisioning various travelers, spanning decades, making their way to a new destination.
by Melissa Crytzer Fry
That propensity to find a story in everything is probably why I’m a writer.
Even though hubby and I live in the desert “boonies,” I continue to be amazed at the amount of foot traffic along the remote,...
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“Honestly, I wish I weren’t so moved by this Puritan quandary. I wish I did...”
– Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates
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Things I'm thankful for this Tumblr Tuesday: The...
Three things:
1) Being without Tumblr for a full 24 hours has helped me realize just how much conducting TrainWrite means to me. Believe it or not, writing for and maintaining this blog is perhaps the thing I’m most proud of in both my personal and professional life. So if you like what I do here, please recommend it.
2) The great people at Wufniks Magazine were so kind as to publish a KES...
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“Even if I get a teaching job, I’ll probably live in New Jersey. Or share a...”
– Rachel
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Homeless
by Kate Mayhew
CONDUCTOR NOTE: Though the following submission is not explicitly about trains, it struck a chord with me, given its reflection on movement and the writer’s search for somewhere to permanently station herself. Enjoy Kate Mayhew’s “Homeless.” -KES
I’m not so sure it’s an unadulterated love of dirty water that’s kept me here, so much as it’s just the plain fact that Boston’s the...
1 tag
Mediums
To my right sat a young man in red flannel, a busted old trumpet case between his knees, and in front of him sat a young man with fine hair tucked below a grey knit beanie, a portfolio the color of sunburned canvas on his lap, a bag of photographs, a stack of hand-printed captions. And in the far corner of the train car sat a chubby little boy, his glasses slipping down the charcoal slope of his...