cheeks
visible
flushed
underthings
skilled
red hair
pronouns
sacrifice
which

She might have been unskilled and had red hair. And had red hair. Her shoulders flushed. The chest between her breasts flushed. She saw some mound rising on the horizon. At first, the mound looked to me smaller than a house--but soon it was many stories. She had a hydraulic wood-splitter she could use to chop her wood. She poured a concrete slab and thumbed quarters into it. Those quarters. She sacrificed her lunch for a better dinner. When she looked to one side, she saw a mound. When she looked to another side, she saw a frame with people hanging inside. The largest frame built and people hanging in it. It was my job to say what the structure was and whether or not the story was cliched. My advise was to do a freewrite. Some research. To surprise. To put dough over your eyes and hope something sets in. For some reason, I put a photo of a horse with a long mane in her mailbox. That morning, I saw her coming out of a house. She stepped on a lawn, and, right away, I wished that lawn were aflame and that she was rolling on it. Later, I went to a Red Sox game. Got inebrio on Alize. The point of it was that I read fifty pages and didn't get to a point or a theme. These pieces of writing are small.

You're to find a fucking topic. Melville found a fucking great topic in the whaling industry. You are to write about a topic because--look at you--you have so much torment and turmoil in your life. Look at all the deep pain in your family. Look at how they hit each other with larger and larger branches for generations. Why is it that all your write is so short? It is because you do not have a topic that's as good as the whaling industry or the killing fields or desertification.