I Now Write Short Stories, and How I Reflect On It

by Dmitri Akers

Last year, I hit a milestone. I published my second short story ever. My first short story about my ancestral lands appeared in Penumbra. The second appeared in an anthology from IFWG, entitled Spawn II: More Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies. This second short story, "Punch in Hell," explored puppetry and cosmic horror and pregnancy. (In that order). The dark, universal experiences of pessimism were explored through bloodshed and suffering, found only in birth (rather than death). Not only did I want to explore the theme of antinatalism — but I wanted to link this to human bodies, extended bodies (puppets), as well as birth/labour, child rearing, and pregnancy.

The third appeared, this year, in Skull & Laurel. It is called "Meander" and follows the meandering path of a labyrinth in a special issue about the Greek myth of the Minotaur. Another is forthcoming.

Short stories are a hard art-form to learn. Some view the writing (and rewriting, and mothballing, and editing, and discarding) of short stories as a rite de passage. My genre of choice has been horror stories. How could I not? We all know, across cultures, that horror is pervasive. There are cautionary tales, songs for the dead, and mythology. But they came to fruition with the advent of printings presses with ghost stories, monster stories, haunted house stories, serial killer stories, murder mystery stories, and more and more stories...

I began reading supernatural horror in high-school with H.P. Lovecraft. His poetry and general style were of great interest to me. They impressed me so much that I once wished to be a science journalist, as he was once a science journalist in the amateur presses. But my first writing appeared in the form of "poetry"... At first, I wrote embarrassing vers libre and doggerel. These appeared in La Piccioletta Barca, an online literary journal (ran by students) set in Britain and Greece, when I was the age of 22.

After some reflection, and several jobs and failed projects, I decided my poetry was deficient in quality. I dropped my dramatic mask; I decided to hone my skills and build my repertoire; I studied, as all would-be poets should, formal modes. Since I am a monoglot, I studied English iambic pentameter and other rhythmic structures. I broadened my shallow readings from Ezra Pound and Shakespeare and Homer, to deeper waters: Tennyson, Browning, Christina Rossetti, Spenser, Chaucer, Dickinson, Francis Cary's translation of Dante, Longfellow....

My forays into poorly rhymed and timed poetry may have come from a botched study of Ezra Pound. For less than a year, I studied Ezra Pound's Cantos at the University of Adelaide. A so-called "modernist" poet, Ezra Pound mainly began his long, rocky career from travel writing, love poetry, fledgling manifestos and magazines, and then his (however incoherent) attempts at epic poetry. Ezra Pound also translated a great deal of eastern works, particularly Noh plays. If you did not know, Noh plays contain ghosts and hauntings, usually in a domestic setting. An angry, revenant ex-spouse (abused women, in particular), often curses a disgraced samurai warrior.

For those who do not know the giant of a personality that Ezra Pound was, his name is synonymous with the wide proliferation of Odyssey paperbacks in the modern period. Penguin Random House published E.V. Rieu's prose rendition for the masses; this was the first translation that I ever read. I was 14.

Ezra Pound's poetry is hard to learn. Sometimes, his process of reading and writing (somewhat iconoclastic, somewhat maverick) has spawned many poor copycats. I was one of them. His mark is still great on me, even greater than H.P. Lovecraft. He showed me how a poet's career can begin.

Pound's first poem was printed in a newspaper as a wee boy. But his career began when he left the University campus. Despite being well-off and well-connected, his real key to success lay in his talents as a people person. He boosted the status of his contemporaries (Hemingway, Eliot, Joyce, H.D., and more), researching widely and deeply (however haphazardly), and by creating educational programs for would-be poets and critics — using his (somewhat questionable) knowledge of ancient, medieval, and renaissance poetry as examples to crib.

But what I learned most from Pound was to always learn and innovate, in myriads of ways that others do not consider. Even if the art-form of short stories are an arduous rite of passage, they are linked, in some fashion, to the stringing together of a line of poetry.

I write short stories as a way to make poetry alive once more. Contemporary poetry, it seems, is a dying husk from a once fertile chrysalis. The butterflies of poetry have migrated to other fields, into new seasons and bright, new climates.