In today’s post, I’m continuing with the mix of reading and music, this time featuring my short story “Fly Away Home,” first published last year in The Bookends Review. This piece also won an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train‘s Short Story Award for New Writers competition.

I chose this particular story in response to the events in Charlottesville this past Saturday. No response feels adequate in the face of such difficult times in our country, when hatred and division so often seem to have the upper hand. I wish words could do more. Like so many of us, I wish I felt sure that beauty, and art, and creative expression, can be valuable tools in our times. Words and music are my tools, though, so I’ll use them as well as I can.

“Fly Away Home” is one of my music-inspired stories, written after listening to works by legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. He is, of course, the “Bird” referenced in the story. If you’re familiar with his life and work, I apologize for over-simplifying his family relationships; I wanted to highlight his relationship with his stepdaughter Kim, and also to focus on his experiences as a black musician facing the racial prejudice of the 1950s.

Writing a piece like this, which is mostly done through Kim’s point of view but also partially through Parker’s own, brings up the challenge of telling a story that belongs to a person of an entirely different background and set of circumstances than mine. Cultural appropriation is a sensitive issue and a tough one to tangle with. In this piece, I can rightfully claim connection with Kim, a young white girl. Readers might wonder, though, how I feel comfortable writing through Bird’s eyes. This question has come up in some of my other stories, too, when I’m using the viewpoints of characters whose experiences I’ve never had myself.

I feel strongly that writing, storytelling, creating fiction, exists at least in part to build bridges. When I work, I don’t only want to tell stories based on my own experiences or the experiences of people like me. I want to reach across those borders. I think we as writers can also grow as people when we do this. In these times especially, I think that kind of growth is necessary for all of us.

I don’t claim to know what Parker thought and felt. I think, though, that we can all, on some level, relate to loneliness, isolation, and frustration with life’s challenges, sometimes such drastic frustration and isolation that we look for any escape valve we can find. In the end, each person in the world has his or her own story. We can either accept the differences between us as barriers, until we each sit alone in a box, or we can try to reach across and see through someone else’s eyes.

In this week’s video, I’ve paired with “Fly Away Home” with the second movement of Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 14 no. 1. This is a new piece for me, and I’m loving the learning process. I’ve done a strange thing musically, here, by splitting the piece up into three parts. From a musician’s standpoint, it feels weird, but those sections seemed to complement the writing, so I went with it.

As always, thanks so much for visiting the blog. Be sure to check back again in two weeks, for the next words-and-music feature.