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Adrian Khactu
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Excerpt
From the opening of my short story "A Moth's Desire":
Johan skips among the tombstones, but Gertrude is too tired to chase in her starched black dress. She watches instead: the loose crowd of mourners flocking each side of the country road, the priest's thurible swooping on a clanking iron chain, the ash and smoke spewing from its perfect half-circle. Father, blank-eyed and stiffly smiling, is watching as well. The small litter of branches, his gamboling son, his black-dressed daughter, his second wife's burial. Harp and reeds. Evening crickets in harmony.
"Come along," Gertrude snaps at her younger brother. She worries about meals and markets and washing to finish. Their stepmother is gone now; Gertrude must attend to the household.
Or, from a section of my novel about an alternate history Marvin Gaye:
You might think this his hardest song to record. Just ten days at Hitsville for the whole album, and Jamerson already stretched flat on the floor in drunken glee, picking C major chords on the electric bass cradled between his legs and swaddled in spit rags. Far from the gilded and prettified "Stubborn Kind of Fellow," far from the smooth-skinned brother with the nice wave to his hair and the dapper suits. No more masking his apostolic blues with cooing falsetto.
And how it all opens: two Detroit Lions lifting on reefer and giggling at the bottom-heavy bongos. "Solid." "What's up." Eli Fontaine noodling a silver alto saxophone, slipping up and down the register, his reed not yet wet before he's dismissed by this skinny Nat King Cole wannabe hippie. "You goof exquisitely. Thank you." And the hook never repeats, the sax vanishing and ephemeral as Tuesday's sunset over the Seine, as volatile as Martha Reeve's career. As immortal as sin.
Bio
Adrian Khactu is a doctoral student in literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and he holds shiny, though not entirely profitable, creative writing degrees from Stanford and Temple Universities. For one brief, shining summer in 2002, Adrian also wrote with some great friends at Clarion West. His work has won the Richard Moyer Prize in Fiction, the Academy of American Poets' William Carlos Williams Prize, the Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest, and the Ezra Pound Prize in Literary Translation, as well as fellowships from Iowa Writers' Summer Workshop, Kundiman, and Vermont Studio Center. He remains, however, unpublished.
Publications
No pubs! Well, a few pubs, but nothing that's been in a magazine with a circulation above, oh, say 50 people. But that's gonna change this summer!
Writing Description
I write what the kids today call slipstream. Or is it still magic realism? Interstitial? Mundane SF? New wave fabulist? New weird? I adore the work of J.G. Ballard, Octavia E. Butler, Angela Carter, Ted Chiang, Robert Coover, John Crowley, Samuel R. Delany, Karen Joy Fowler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, Ian MacLeod, China Miéville, and George Saunders (to name just a few), and those are the literary gods I aim at when I write. I also don't believe in literary/genre/mainstream divides: a good story is a good story is a good story.
Goals
I am a complete newbie at the Write-a-thon. I also am good at promising more than I can deliver. Having said that, I will attempt to (drum roll) wait for it (/drum roll) write one brand-spanking-new story each week and, since my bête noire is the submission process, polish and send out for publication an old trunk story of mine each week. That's six new stories AND six newly polished stories (and hopefully my first publication credit is in there somewhere). I'm also taking this challenge very seriously: I've cleared my calendar of most major distractions (including work and most of school), I'm staying with a friend in the proverbial Midwestern cabin in the woods, and I'm subsisting on a diet of granola and rabbit food (my friend is vegan, unfortunately--I might also accept sponsorships in the form of cheeseburgers).
About five years ago, when I was living and working in Viet Nam, I applied to Clarion West knowing that I probably wouldn't be able to afford to attend. Then, through the serendipitous grace of the Susan C. Petrey Fund and an unknown donor, I was able to live and thrive and be considered as a writer for the first time in my life. While still a grad student, I can't exactly contribute as much financially as I would hope, but I'd still like to do anything I can to pay it forward. Therefore, I'm asking everyone to contribute whatever you'd like per story drafted or submitted. I'm aiming for about six new stories drafted and six old stories submitted in total. I'll post snippets of my work up here throughout the summer, but, of course, anyone who contributes will be able to read the pieces in their entirety. Also, if anyone sponsors (read: dares) me a healthy amount to finish the first draft of my novel, I'd gladly work towards that goal as well! And, if and when that first novel gets published, I'll thank you profusely in my acknowledgments!!!
