Moorepark Memoir

[emo_snal]

   So the Geelong* Writing Club puts out an annual anthology and recently put the call out for next edition, and the theme this time is... the hardest theme of all ...open topic. ::cue picture of Edvard Munch's the Scream:: *Geelong being my nearest large town. Submissions may be poetry, flash fiction, short story, and memoir. The flash fiction

Comments

[lookfar]

I think you do need to fix the tenses but I can't see why this feel difficult to you. Can't you make it all present tense? Other than that, I found it fascinating. Please add this one thing: when you come out in the morning covered with honey, what does that feel like? Is it gross to get in your car? Are your clothes all painfully sticking to you? Do you shower right away? Do you leave honey on your car seat?

This was the one part that left me really curious.

[emo_snal]

Oh good questions about how it actually feels to be covered with honey. Its gross and I end up treating honey like a gross nuisance and sometimes forget its delicious and edible! When I come home covered in honey I typically take all my clothes off right in the doorway so I don't track it around, and then I jump right in the shower! I'll see about maybe adding something about that its a good point.

The original was all in present tense and I much prefer to write that way, but I just feel like they might already be scowling at me over trying to pass off events from 2012 as a memoir alongside their 70s reminiscentses of childhood games so I'm hoping past tense makes it a little easier to swallow :-[] :-[]

[ravena_kade]

Yes, I wondered about the honey too.

[meisje_viktoria]

I am sure this has been told to you already, so if it has please ignore this. It's just that Rozalski artword was the inspiration for a pretty good board game called Scythe. I love his stuff.

[wpadmirer]

First of all - I love the memoir piece. I read it like a reader, not an editor, so I don't have comments about tense or such. (I'd have to read it again for that, so let me know if you want it.)

I love the detail of it. Trevor's bare feet, the sight of the moon shining so brightly you think it like 100 year before, the cane fields before and after. I can picture it.

I especially love the banging on the door and barefoot Trevor going off about the smoke detector.

I got swept up in it, lost in this strange place with these new experiences and feelings. Dead fish around the beehive trailers! Water marks up to the wheels, and your habit of putting hives on the highest ground saving them - even if inadvertently.

I like it a lot.

[aerodrome1]

I really like the Pointedly Unrelated Picture.

[cactus_rs]

The sun, quite impertinently, refused to set over the ocean as I had grown up accepting as the only proper solar behavior. Instead it would hide its colorful daily finale behind the tangled branches of mangroves and eucalypts

[cactus_rs]

Moving on:

My boss, the farm owner, if I may be so bold as to conjure an Australian legend, reminded me of Steve Irwin -- he had the same short boxy stature, the same exuberance, except in this case rather than for animals and conservation his enthusiasm was entirely directed toward profitably growing vegetables, and everything he'd say was peppered with the most shockingly profane analogies. I'd give you an example dear reader but you'd be unable to sleep for the next three days trying to work out if it were anatomically possible. Despite being one of the largest vegetable growers in the Bundaberg area, I have never seen him wear shoes. I generally got along with him fine, but he had this unnerving propensity to appear like an unholy genie the moment anything went wrong despite his properties being spread over thirty kilometers. Someone rear ends my work ute? Oh there's Trevor coming around the corner. Ute gets stuck in the mud in a paddock, oh look Trevor is just coming along.Current construction suggests (or can suggest; it does

[cactus_rs]

Every evening I would walk out to where I could see what used to be the surrounding cane fields and road to Bundaberg, now a vast inland sea, to confirm I was still on an island and wouldn't have to get up for work in the morning. As it happens, when the waters finally fell it fell all at once overnight and I was caught off-guard at 6am with someone pounding on my door, I jumped out of bed to answer it and there was Trevor, shoe-less as always, and barely had he expressed that the waters had receded than his eye hit upon the smoke alarm hanging open and he immediately launched in on a truly remarkable feat of extemporaneous composition with an extremely creative story about how without my smoke alarm working my house was going to catch fire, and burn down, and I would die, and the fire brigade would arrive but they wouldn't care, and neither would he, and then they'd be burying my body, because there weren't batteries in my smoke alarm. I can't even begin to do this fascinating spontaneous piece of speculative fiction justice, I

[cactus_rs]

After this interlude it was right back to sixty hour weeks in the “bee mines.” Even in summer, sometimes the sun was already setting by the time I'd be headed home. Around 5pm, already the forests were bathed in a warm golden light slanting in from the side. The sun sets over the sea of sugarcane as a giant orangish-red fireball. If I was running the honey extracting machinery I wouldn't emerge from the corrugated metal extracting shed until after 11pm, whereupon I would come into the fresh night air covered from head to foot in honey, to find the world illuminated by the moon as if by a floodlight. Just the cane fields and the metal shed under the moon and stars, I'd contemplate it could be a hundred years earlier and it would look the same.The repetition of "[introductory clause], already ____________" in the second and third sentences jumped out at me, but it's up to you if you want to change it-or maybe the parallelism/repetition is what you were going for. I'd also take the first half of the last sentence and add it to the end