I think you can read any line from piece by Diane Williams and use it as a starting point for something—poem, essay, fiction, hybrid, Girl Scout cookie slogan, empowerment-feminism speech delivered in a garden of heirloom roses…. But I also think studying her lines is instructive. So I did.
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Example 1: “He had dragged me along to this refined filth of a hotel, which aroused my truest false feelings.”
This line from “Speech” does the magic thing twice! Williams lays opposites side by side in a description, so the “refined filth” makes the hotel feel even filthier, like the afterbirth of a Stanislaw Lem story on the linoleum. And then “my truest false feelings” make the feelings feel even faker. When coupling opposites, it appears that the subject sinks beneath the lowest common denominator.
Example 2: “…the redness and the whiteness of a fine radish.”
This brief image appears in “Gods of the Earth At Home,” where it sticks to the mind and shimmers. Williams does this suffixing often, adding a -ness to an adjective to make it a noun, to wrap the object in a condition or quality rather than a simple description. So the red and white radish becomes redness itself, whiteness itself, two separate, divided conditions. Notice how red and white evokes the colors of objects while the redness and the whiteness evokes their condition, their aura. Hence luminosity, shimmering.
Example 3: “I say yes yes. I say my excitement is so great, so huge.”
Again, from “Gods of the Earth At Home,” Williams reveals how a series of enthusiastic superlatives actually makes the enthusiasm, itself, incredible, and suspect.
Example 4: “I am the dark one, the short one, the thick one, the coarse one, who is so unsatisfied with all of my suggestions.”
This is the second paragraph in “Desperately Trying to Lie Down.” I love how one can watch the narrative voice distance itself from the intimacy of the “I” as if by striptease; each additional qualification tells us less and less about the speaker. And each “one” moves us further away from the single person we are trying to understand. What if taking off all our clothes made us invisible rather than naked? Is nakedness and earnesty, itself, a facet of invisibility? Sometimes Williams seems to suggest this in “I” statements.
Example 5: “Rather, it is from the blather, rather I am made. I parade around plenty, which means I do have the globular breasts. Yet, I am watched.”
The final two paragraphs of “Her Hair Is Red”—and so many Williams’ in these sentences. I will focus on the use of rhyme to bind lines and create motion forward through sonic effects rather than plot. Rather/blather rhymes, and then repeats. Then made/parade link arms across the punctuation mark. Notice how the “t” sounds accumulate and only really prick up their eats in the last sentence, where the rather/blather/plenty/breasts rub against the “Yet”. I kept hearing the “Yet” as “Yes”—and I suspect the purpose of this short story lies in the unlatched friction between Yet/Yes right there. Yet, I suspect because I am suspicious. And wow.
Example 6: “There is a slim chance that anything is unable to be unmoved.”
The last line of “Actual People Whose Behavior I Was Able to Observe,” a destabilization accomplished by attaching the prefix -un to two verbs, and then using one to define the other. Williams could have written this as: Everything can be moved a little, but that’s not quite what she means. What she means is that negation is related to motion, and the prefixes render the sentence prismatic, the promise that “There is” complicated by the double -un.
Just because bars are fascinating. And prompts are bars, re-visioned. So do whatever with the iron below. I just used to it to free-write.
Prompt 1: “How about the deity responsible for me?—why should it not move me through the realm, escort me to the other side of the predicament?” (from “Upright Pearl”)
Prompt 2: “Get myself endeared I should, endorsed with a day in mind. This day in Wednesday.” (from “Madder Lake”)
Prompt 3: “An entire formula for feeling good….”
She was jealous of people with sea green or lavender scooters who had grown up in small towns with singular traffic lights. The arrogance of rural intimacy was the highest emotional connection she imagined when trimming her hair with nail clippers over the expired Confederate gravestones.
Where had the nail clippers come from, anyway?
It was Long Rod who urged the clandestine. He had family in Uruguay he couldn’t talk about at all. Or under any condition. But no children. “I love knives too much to be a father,” he had announced. They met at a sword conference by mistakes.
Both had similar, variant deficits in their peripheral attention spans, which caused them to see sword when what happened was a Swordfish Convention. Neither had ever fished. Failure felt like bondage when he touched her arm with his mind and she used the word swords and love in the same unbuckled sentence.
“Believe in the extended metaphor of us,” he had whispered the following morning in the hallway of her apartment near the poster of the Dalai Lama she’d inherited from a professor, disgraced. Sacked, shamed, and gone—all his stuff left to scald the walls of his large university office.
“I have come to collect his spiritual influence,” she told the secretary who shrugged. Just take it. Take it all. Like a 90’s indie record song lyric.
She dreamt taxis had wings hidden beneath their yellow hoods.
But they did not develop eyes and entire formula of flight was useless.
“Believe in the extension rod,” the professor once said while holding white chalk. She lost the nail clippers after pitching a multi-modal review essay to an editor she knew from grad school. But he was married and not interested.
You think it’s easy to be noisy and quiet, but the pillow in the taxi’s backseat was put there on purpose. Someone made plans.