Sacred Tales and the Creation of Fiction.

Most mornings I tune it out. The noise
the conversation of the day babbling loudly all around me,
Noise. None of it aimed at me. But there, so there.
It would be easy to listen. Nothing is secret here.
Voices loudly proclaim the latest success, conquest,
broken heart, offence or game of golf.
There is history told here, and lurid tales.
Stories of newborn calves and the death of a dog.
Movies could be made of a morning here.
A sitcom or tragedy, depending on the morning.

I am a collector of tales. And a spinner of them as well.
I used to cringe in embarrassment as my father held court
from his recliner, a born rancounteur. And here I am,
nearly seventy, inflicted with the same trait.
And yet, not these. And not the ones told to me
in the quiet sanctuaries. Or on the street corners
bustling with traffic and drug deals.

These are sacred tales. Never mind the profligate way
they are spewed in the noise of the diner, spat out
on street corners – they are soul stories. Never mind
the source or the profainess. Never mind the mess,
they are sacred.

They burble up of course. I press them in the mash,
Apply time and heat and a thousand other stories
and new ones emerge. All true. All fiction. Unrecognizable.
But this is what allows me to write fiction.
I cannot write the stuff worth a damn. I seem to lack
imagination when it comes to stories. But real things, Ah!
Those are the stories when I become my father,
the born storyteller. Homer by the fire.
the wandering baladeer in the castle.
drawing on the sour mash of life, rendered
into a strange new truth. Yours and not yours.

About this poem

I learned a new word yesterday “autofiction”. It is fiction that is written so close to the truth that it becomes autobiographical. Evidently it’s a thing right now among young adult fan fiction readers and writers.

I do something like that in my own fiction. I don’t write reality worth a damn. And so the word got me thinking and as I entered the white noise of the last diner standing, it got me writing .

The photograph is of a diner in Bennington, Vermont, the Blue Benn diner.

Tom