We are a writing group that started at the University of Chicago with four of us (in the picture above, from left to right, Alfred Klinger, Marcia Zuckerman, Rosina Neginsky, and Mariano Bernardez) and the help of our writing coach, Colleen O'Brien.
For the past four years, we have been working together, sharing, and commenting on our work on our own Blackboard platform.
We started this Blog to show samples of our writing to others interested in joining us.
We commit to collaborate online in four seasons a year -we start our Fall season next September- and write and comment at least 4 postings per season, with a maximum extension of 3,000 words each time. Each one of us comments in general and in particular each other's postings and can add suggestions and edits. Colleen comments and adds edits to all our postings on the same basis.
I'm attaching a short piece here as a sample of how we can post and interact here.
You can take a look at the samples of our work, and if interested in trying one season, contact us at the following email addresses:
The stories are arranged in chronological order of writing.
The first two -Second Thoughts and The Passage- are completed (insofar
they have a plausible “ending”) and the other three -Once Again From the Top,
The Tango Traveler and Salvador- in the middle of the “second act” stage, all
taking an unexpected turn in plot and style.
All five stories involve traveling, foreign (to US readers)
countries and also traveling in time in some way.
Here’s a summary of the basics of each saga (click the title links to read the full story):
Chris, An
American journalist spending a sabbatical in Madrid -where he had an affair
years ago with a woman named Alexandra- meets some old friends (Luis Fernando,
an old ladies man, and Mikel, who lives in Pamplona). He accidentally encounters Sofia, a young Basque woman, in a
library. Sofia reminds him of Alexandra. They spend an evening talking and walking through Madrid, and Chris accompanies her to take her train at Atocha
station. That is when a terrorist attack takes place, and Sofia disappears. Chris tracks her to the Basque country and helps her find a way out of the country for her brother Gabriel. Gabriel, a former member of ETA, must escape from the revenge of the chief terrorist, nicknamed Kubati, to leave their movement. The action unfolds in Pamplona and a nearby old town, over
the Arga River, where Mikel has given Chris a cabin to hide Sofia.
2.The Passage(a "prequel" to The Tango Traveler that can be read independently)
The story starts on a rainy night
in Buenos Aires in 2015. Schlomo, a clockmaker nearing his seventies, is
described in his regular routine playing chess, tending to his clients, and meeting his friends -a
butcher and Max, an old actor-. Schlomo lives in an old building in downtown Buenos Aires in the passage (a closed street)
La Piedad (the Piety),. One night,
he hears a noise and sees lights in a back door that opens to an alley, and when
he opens it, he finds a passaged hallway that takes him to a pension room in 1936.
When he checks his image in a mirror, he
finds out that he’s younger -in his thirties- and has a different name in his jacket. He is now Julian Bisbal -his mother’s family name-. He finds out that his character has changed into his
polar opposite: a violent hit man, billiard player, and tango dancer associated
with a Nazi organization cracking on socialists. Several scenes are describing the way Buenos Aires looked during the thirties.
Schlomo wakes up in his pension
room with blood in his hands and discovers he murdered a Nazi leader.
The story ends in 2015 when Max
comes with a friend to find out what happened to Schlomo and feed the cat. They
find a picture of 1936 with Schlomo, Sarah, and Gabriel in front of the
clockwork store in Colonia.
Amanda Thomas, a young
restaurateur, closes her failing restaurant in Chicago and decides to start
again in Uruguay, where she has a friend. She ends in Jose Ignacio, a small
fishermen village close to Punta del Este, a seaside summer town in Uruguay. She works her
way up, taking care of a small grocery shop, Manolo’s, and living in a small
room on top of the store with the local dogs. She befriends the locals, workmen, and women that live from seasonal jobs in construction and also fishermen who
invite her to work on their ship as a deckhand.
Amanda befriends a retired French
actress, Dominique, whose husband dies of a heart attack suddenly and turns -or
so she thinks- into a falcon that visits her house. Dominique accepts the
invitation of his friend Max (the same Max who’s also friends with Schlomo) to
act on a play in Buenos Aires and recover from her loss. She takes the
challenge and starts giving classes, where he befriends Cecilia, the wife of
Benny, a man, working for the financiers involved in corruption with the
government. Benny knows too much, and he’s killed and thrown to the sea, where
he looks at his own lifeless body float with the current and recapitulates his
life until the fishermen catch their body.
There is a long in-between the chapter titled “Last Days of the Victim,” where the protagonist is a hitman
who kills a DA who investigates the corrupt government and ends turning
against his bosses. But it’s too late for him, and he gets killed and thrown to
the sea in front of Uruguay. The fishermen in the boat where Amanda is working catch
the body.
Amanda meets David, a financier
that recently widowed and retired to Jose Ignacio, and helps him find a house.
David Aisenson is the grandson of Sarah, the young woman that Schlomo saved in
1936.
David tries to start a small
vineyard and gets help from some local friends of Amanda -who’s already
assimilated- who are street smarts: Wilson and his wife and lawyer,
They do all kind of things -from
renting camels to drilling water wells and blasting rocks- “the Uruguayan way.”
-skirting the law and the red tape. We are currently in a chapter titled
“Vitruvian People” where they save David’s new house from a fire when the local
firemen show up without water.
4.The Tango Traveler(a "sequel" to The Passage that also reads independently)
Max is still intrigued by the
disappearance of his friend Shlomo, and he misses him. He writes a play
imagining that Shlomo has traveled in time and calls a group of actors -a a couple of actresses, Mabel and Olga, and a couple of actors, Antonio and
Helmut read the play and traveled with him to Colonia to learn more about the
real Shlomo. The actors like the idea, and the group travels to Colonia, ready
to follow in the footsteps of Schlomo the next day.
When Max -who’s ninety- goes to
sleep in his hotel room, he’s awakened by music and looks towards the door of
the adjacent room y, noticing light. When he opens the door to ask Olga and
Mabel turns down the music. He finds Shlomo waiting for him, sitting in front
of a chessboard.
He asks Schlomo if he -Max- is
dead, but Shlomo doesn’t know. He points out to an old black and white TV set
and asks Max to turn it on to find out. When Max does it, he finds that each
channel shows one of the hotel rooms, including Mabel and Olga making love. He turns off the TV set, embarrassed, and they start bantering.
Max wakes up in his room wondering if it all was a dream.
The story starts when the new owner of a ranch in the Parana
Delta, close to Buenos Aires, finds the carcass of a Cebu prize deer half-eaten in the river shore by what seems to be a huge crocodile.
He orders his butler, Salvador, a
half-Guarani Indian islander, to get the croc with foul language and bad
manners. Salvador checks the scene and goes to a local river store -The
Carpincho- to get the equipment. He arrives in his small motor canoe and meets his adoptive son Kicho, who’s deaf and arrives with his cat on his canoe
and other locals -the Professor and Clarita, the islands’ vet, plus a couple of
islanders that work on the river yards and chores. The Professor reminisces the
old days when writers used to come to the river and tells stories about famous
writers -men and women- who he knew in the house of Salvador’s old boss, the
late Englishman Mister Glenn.
Salvador leaves with Kicho, and they go upriver into the wild
zone, arriving at an old abandoned Lutheran chapel. Kicho stays there,
improvising a campsite under a mangrove tree across the river in front of the
chapel while Salvador goes to set traps for the croc and get something to eat.
Kicho sees a Zodiac boat arriving with strange men and bags
and hides until the men leave the chapel. He finds sacks with
money under the altar. At that point, he’s discovered by one of the men and runs, but they shot him and leave him for dead, floating next to some reeds.
Salvador comes back and finds Kicho still alive. He takes him
to Clarita’s vet hospital, where he helps her extract the bullet and save his life.
Kicho must remain with Clara, but Salvador still has to get the croc for his boss and
leaves.
He checks the traps and finds a dead croc. This one's body shows cuts like those on the Cebu steer.
The caiman's hide is ruined for his boss and Salvador
decides to continue further into the wild zone to get the one that did all the
carnage.
He reaches a distant, wild area that used to belong to his Guarani tribe with the last lights of the
day. The fog covers the river and small islands with trees. He hangs his
hammock under one of the trees and falls asleep until he hears a voice asking
him to leave.
He wakes up and sees a large Anaconda—the snake starts talking to him.
STORIES’ MAP
Uruguay-Buenos Aires
Pasaje la Piedad -Buenos Aires (The Passage)
Parana River Delta (Salvador)
Jose Ignacio - Fishermen Village - Uruguay (Once Again From the Top)
These two stories are part of the Once Again, From the Top novella-saga-short stories' collection- (I still don't know which way it will go), but since they are the latest I wrote (2020) and they start new situations and characters, I decided to add them here as -for now- independent ones.
The Howling starts with the Covid pandemic in Buenos Aires, leaving many Argentinians stranded in Uruguay, Jose Ignacio, to be precise. The main character is a young woman, Lola, whom I deliberately introduce in a way that is meant to excite the sexist bias: she's good-looking, blond, wears a skimpy string bikini, and is involved in a relationship with a powerful man from Buenos Aires. As the story progresses, we discover Lola's point of view: she's a political science graduate fighting her growing satisfaction with all those stereotypes that helped her land a plum job as a powerful politician/ business head. She got that job hoping to work on policies, but she discovers it's a dead end as the boss' lover.
We leave Lola in full soul searching, which I'll hope to come back to next once I see which way to turn: either keeping her story separate from the next or linking it into Up in the Woods.
Up in the Woods takes place also in Jose Ignacio -all the characters of the series are starting over "Once Again from the Top"- and takes an older man -close to his seventies- building by himself a treehouse in a section of the woods away enough from the beach and the town as not to see other people around.
This story has only one person in it -more extreme even than Salvador, where there are other characters- and his thoughts and impressions as he builds the treehouse and both models and is modeled by the woods. I leave the man with (still) no name when he sees something that might be a turning point. I chose a cougar first but still didn't decide if it will be an animal or a person and if I will go that fast to that encounter with a second character, or I will keep going with the man and his thoughts as he builds the treehouse and examines how he got there and where he is trying to go and what is trying to find and finding in the woods.
I like better the second option, I can always introduce the other character later.
To this point, I was able to keep the writing minimal, within the 1500 words ballpark each (1339 for The Howling, 1584 for Up in the Woods)
Both stories come from my recent experience in spending a month by myself and cutting wood in the woods.
