APAC 2023

Professional ear texts - apac 2023

In Sunday school, when we held Owen up in the air – especially in the air! – he protested so uniquely. We tortured him, I think, in order to hear his voice; I used to think his voice came from another planet. Now I’m convinced it was a voice not entirely of this world.
‘PUT ME DOWN!’ he would say in a strangled falsetto.
‘CUT IT OUT! I DON”T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. PUT ME DOWN YOU ASSHOLES!.’
But we just passed him around and around. He grew more fatalistic about it, each time.

A measure of Owen’s seriousness was that we could talk about the mothers of all our friends, and Owen could be extremely frank in his appraisal of my mother to me; he could get away with it, because I knew he wasn't joking.
Owen never joked.
‘YOUR MOTHER HAS THE BEST BREASTS OF ALL THE MOTHERS.’ No other friend could have said this to me without starting a fight.
‘You really think so?’ I asked him
‘ABSOLUTELY, THE BEST’ he said.
‘What about Missus Wiggin?’ I asked him.
‘TOO BIG.’ Owen said.
‘Missus Webster?’ I asked.
'TOO LOW," Owen said.
'Missus Merrill?" I asked.
'VERY FUNNY," Owen said.
'Miss Judkins?" I said.
‘VERY FUNNY,’ Owen said.
‘I DON’T KNOW,’ he said. ‘I CAN’T REMEMBER THEM. BUT SHE’S NOT A MOTHER.’
‘Miss Farnum.’ I said.
‘YOU’RE JUST FOOLING AROUND,’ Owen said peevishly.
‘Caroline Perkins!’ I said.
‘MAYBE ONE DAY,’ he said seriously. ‘BUT SHE’S NOT A MOTHER, EITHER.’
‘Irene Babson!’ I said
‘DON’T GIVE ME THE SHIVERS,’ Owen said. ‘YOU’RE MOTHER’S THE ONE,’ he said worshipfully. ‘AND SHE SMELLS BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE, TOO,’ he added.

I agreed with him about this; my mother always smelled wonderful.

Your own mother’s bosom is a strange topic of conversation in which to indulge a friend, but my mother was an acknowledged beauty, and Owen possessed a completely reliable frankness; you could trust him, absolutely. Owen and I had suffered through Religion One together in our ninth-grade year: Pastor Merrill preached his doubt-is-the-essence-of-and-not-the-opposite-of-faith philosophy; Don't ask for proof-that was Mr. Merrill's routine message.
"BUT EVERYONE NEEDS A LITTLE PROOF," said Owen Meany.
"Faith itself is a miracle, Owen," said Pastor Merrill. "The first miracle that I believe in is my own faith itself."
Owen looked doubtful, but he didn't speak. Except for Owen Meany, we were such a negative, anti-everything bunch of morons that we thought Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were more interesting writers than Tolstoy. The class loved Sartre and Camus - the concept of "the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation" was thrilling to us teenagers.

Owen, who'd had his doubts about Pastor Merrill, found himself in the role of the minister's defender. "JUST BECAUSE A BUNCH OF ATHEISTS ARE BETTER WRITERS THAN THE GUYS WHO WROTE THE BIBLE DOESN'T NECESSARILY MAKE THEM RIGHT!" he said crossly. "LOOK AT THOSE WEIRDO TV MIRACLEWORKERS-THEY'RE TRYING TO GET PEOPLE TO BELIEVE IN MAGIC! BUT THE REAL MIRACLES AREN'T ANYTHING YOU CAN SEE-THEY'RE THINGS YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE WITHOUT SEEING. IF SOME PREACHER'S AN ASSHOLE, THAT'S NOT PROOF THAT GOD DOESN'T EXIST!"
"Yes, but let's not say 'asshole' in class, Owen," Pastor Merrill said.

And in our Scripture class, Owen said, "IT'S TRUE THAT THE DISCIPLES ARE STUPID- THEY NEVER UNDERSTAND WHAT JESUS MEANS, THEY'RE A BUNCH OF BUNGLERS, THEY DON'T BELIEVE IN GOD AS MUCH AS THEY WANT TO BELIEVE, AND THEY EVEN BETRAY JESUS. THE POINT IS, GOD DOESN'T LOVE US BECAUSE WE'RE SMART OR BECAUSE WE'RE GOOD.WE'RE STUPID AND WE'RE BAD AND GOD LOVES US ANYWAY-JESUS ALREADY TOLD THE DUMB-SHIT DISCIPLES WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN.'THE SON OF MAN WILL BE DELIVERED INTO THE HANDS OF MEN, AND THEY WILL KILL HIM...'REMEMBER? THAT WAS IN MARK-RIGHT?"
"Yes, but let's not say 'dumb-shit disciples' in class, Owen," Mr. Merrill said

Book Title: A Prayer For Owen Meany

By: John Irving

Problem/Challenge:
“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice”

“His vocal cords had not developed fully, or else his voice had been injured by the rock dust of his family’s business. Maybe he had larynx damage, or a destroyed trachea; maybe he’d been hit in the throat by a chunk of granite. To be heard at all, Owen had to shout through his nose.”

Often he is referred simply as: The Voice.

Book Title: Walking Gentry Home

A Memoir of My Foremothers in

Verse

By: Alora Young

Problem/Challenge:

Poetry and Verse

Poetic Form and Structure

A Lot See But a Few Know. Halls, TN. Always.
It's a funny thing being born.
Someone
carried us for about nine months
and that one person
will always know
where we came from.
Them.
But that's where things start to get complicated;
it gets blurry as we get less concentrated;
we zoom out on the camera of history
and like the smallest part of cells
the microscopic organelles
once you zoom far enough
they just disappear.
But they're still here,
we're still here.
My story goes back centuries
but I see so few generations
my culture is calamity
and far away nations
my blood bleeds into endless cotton fields
of empty stalks on family trees.
My ancestry was lost
in chains and boats across the seas
Am I aristocracy?
Do I belong to a great nation?
What if my Black Girl Magic
is just cultural appropriation?
My genes are on a selfish streak
and decided to abstain
from sharing what runs in my veins
with my desperate brain.
I never know if my identity
is more than just a guise
all I have to go off
is a fro and slanted eyes.
My recipe remains a mystery
and as I grow and die
I crave any bit of history that takes the question
out of I.
I want the glittery grains of broken past
that cut me deep like broken glass
to hold tightly in my hand
but the powerful don't care
for it's their world that we must understand.
We are all dying and degrading
every second till we're dead
from the moment we're born

----

to exist in our heads.
Like history melting into the ground that we tread
the only stories that survive are the ones we've all read
but the only ones I want to hear are the ones we left unsaid.
1765 the start of a revolution
Phillis Wheatley slung syllables
and sent her slavers absolution.
But she fades to the grind of time
to the Bible of brilliant Black women
with its withering spine.
We neglect to remember an astonishing mind
because her symphonic synapses
sulked beyond sepia skin.
Who am I but a fiber in the hive mind of history?
Praying for a fighting chance
to outwit the sophistry
that the victors imbued
every textbook with.
I wish to untwist the thread
every fact from myth
but no matter how hard I try
my textbooks lack melanin.
If not a slave then a felon and
I can't find my future
if I don't know my past.
I am a Black woman
as the standardized test said
but who knows if my genes
bleed black, white, or red.
I talk about melanin
but I haven't much to spare;
the only strand that ties me to my people
lies in the coils of my hair.
How do I identify when my blood is an enigma?
My pigment is more akin to unbleached paper.
I cried the day my white best friend
came home from vacation
and she was darker than me.
That year I swore
every Halloween
to go as a strong Black woman from history.
And I did
from C. I. to Colvin
through my mismatched shades
I was truly emboldened
and unafraid
cause we all remember Rosa
but we forget Claudette
and I wanted to make a change.
In the corner of my mind
I felt if others remembered

---

God would tell me who I was in exchange.
I know more about the world
than what's beneath my own skin
It's easier to look out
than comprehend what's within.

Book Title: The Gone Away World

By: Nick Harkaway

Problem/Challenge:

Humour in narrative
Narrator Comparison!!!

Sally rides next to Gonzo and mostly she scans the area with a pair of big spyglasses and draws Annabel’s attention to little heat pockets which might need to be rapidly sprayed with fifty-cal shells whose velocity and spin is so incredible that a near miss will kill you as
surely as a hit.

For “little heat pockets” read “people,” although actually most of them so far have been weary, nervous sheep. A war zone is a bad place to be a sheep. It’s not a good place to be anything, but sheep generally are a bit stupid and devoid of tactical acumen and individual reasoning, and they approach problem-solving in a trial-and-error kind of a way. Sheep wander, and wandering is not a survival trait where there are landmines. After the first member of a flock is blown up, the rest of the sheep automatically scatter in order to confuse the predator, and this, naturally, takes more than one of them onto yet another mine and there’s another woolly BOOMsplatterpitterslee-eutch, which is the noise of an average-sized sheep being propelled into the air by an anti-personnel mine and partially dispersed, the largest single piece falling to Earth as a semi-liquidised blob. This sound or its concomitant reality upsets the remaining sheep even more, and not until quite a few of them have been showered over the neighbourhood do they get the notion that the only safe course is the reverse course. By this time, alas, they have forgotten where that is, and the whole thing begins again. BOOM. The first corollary of this is that sheep are a nightmare if you’re trying to construct a perimeter defence, because they can end up cutting a path right through it and leaving themselves in pieces as markers show- ing the cleared route to all comers. For this reason, many military offi-cers now order a mass execution of unsecured sheep when fortifying a position, incidentally incurring the deep displeasure of local shepherds and creating yet another group of grumpy, armed persons who will shoot at anything in a uniform. Knowing this, George Copsen has taken a pro-sheep position, in the vague hope that Baptiste Vasille or Ruth Kemner will begin the ovicide (which may or may not be the offi- cial word for a killing of sheep) and suffer the consequences. So far, it hasn’t happened, and a kind of steely cold war of livestock has devel- oped in which we drive sheep towards the other forces in the hope of triggering a slaughter, and they drive them at us with very much the same in mind. An unofficial book is being made on which area com- mander will snap first, and the betting heavily favours Ruth Kemner, who is apparently something of a scary lady.

The second corollary, which is more interesting in an academic sense, but utterly irrelevant in the real world, is that sheep surviving for a prolonged period in a heavily mined area will gradually evolve, and left long enough would develop into more intelligent, combat- hardened sheep, possibly with sonar for probing the earth in front of them, extremely long legs for stepping over suspect objects and large flat feet to distribute pressure evenly and avoid activating the fuse. A warsheep would be a cross between a dolphin and a small, limber elephant.

The sheep currently surrounding us have not yet had time to evolve physically, and in the meantime have evolved behaviours and coping strategies instead. They follow humans quite precisely, walk slowly and the flock unit has been replaced by a loose-knit affiliation of individual sheep carefully watching each other for signs of suddenly flying into the air and getting spread all over the place. Some have started walking in single file. Loud bangs no longer scare them, or possibly they have gone deaf, and there is a sharp, alert feeling about them which suggests they know exactly where they have just stepped and can retreat along their own hoofprints quite readily. The march of progress has reached even unto the sheep of Addeh Katir.

Book Title: The Blind Light

By: Stuart Evers

Context: The family have been rehearsing for the moment the ‘bomb’ drops. Rehearsals

over...they now await the real thing

Problem/Challenge:

Poetry/Epistrophe

Passion and Emotion in Narrative

The family hold each other. The four of them. They hold each other and remain embraced; arms around arms, their heads bowed, locked temple to temple. No matter the rehearsal, opening night always a leap. Metaphor redundant, comparisons blithe. No words for it. No way to pinion it, no linguistic trap a suitable snare. It is the totality that evades us. The exuberance of the whole. Every possible emotion, every single reaction, experienced at its most heightened, at its most intense. Terror, yes; but more than that; grief, yes, but more than that; anger, yes, but more than that; thrill, yes, but more than that; pity, yes but more than that. On and on. Every last emotion dialled up, jacked up, blended and pulsed, no drug invented or imagined as powerful. An implosion of emotion so savage, so various and so concentrated, the body is placed under the most extreme of pressures, every part of the human ecosystem straining under its weight. It is the hit that every addict craves; somewhere between the delivery of a healthy child and a stillbirth; between surviving a knife attack and stabbing someone dead; between whole body orgasm and the first signs of cardiac arrest. It is all of human history and human experience in one ten-second fury.

The People Who Live In My Beard by Luke Kondor

I can’t be too sure, but I’m beginning to suspect that there are people living in my beard. They moved in a while ago, setting up camp in the woods at the end of my chin.

They’re not normal sized people though. They’re tiny ones, with heads the size of peanuts, limbs like matchsticks, and sesame seed eyes. Sometimes when I’m watching TV, I can see them in my peripheral vision, but as soon as I look down, they’re gone. I keep trying anyway. I used to think it was all in my head, but then I started to find evidence: tiny clothes, leftover food, and small shelters weaved together with the shorter hairs. Initially I was creeped out, but I’m starting to like them. How many people can say they’ve got their own little community contained within their beard?

If I pretend to be asleep I can hear them talking. I can’t make out what their saying though, their voices are so small and gentle, like whispers that tickle the tiny bones hidden within your ears. Sometimes it tickles so much I can’t contain the giggles. As soon as I let it out though, they go quiet. They’re a secretive bunch. I’ve tried talking to them but they never talk back.

They’ve been with me for almost a year now, they moved in when she moved out, and for that I’m grateful.

A Mother's Letter By Luke Kondor

Hello son,
I know it has been a long time. I barely remember what you look like. I’m
only e-mailing because my maternal instincts have kicked in again. I doubt
they’ll stay long, but you never know — unwelcome guests always stay the
longest. How long has it been? Two years? Three? Did you carry on seeing that girl of yours? Are you married yet?

I believe that the last time I saw you, you were doing your studies. Did anything ever come of that? Are you successful now?

I do apologise for all of the questions, but I am curious. There is a bond between us, unfortunately. It’s like an invisible leash that ties us down. You’ll understand one day, when you have your own children. Which reminds me, do you have any yet? If not, why? You are fertile aren’t you?