Stare and Write

a kind of Flickr for nonfiction prose, a site where writers post their people-watching snapshots

[stareandwrite]

She waits with us in Léon, Nicaragua's Oscar Danilo Rosales Arguello teaching hospital, as her mom is screened for precursors to cervical cancer. She is seven. A young American bound for med school teaches her the alphabet. After the lesson,  the little pupil struts through the hot, humid waiting area with her hand on hip,  her black hair swishing against her shoulders,  and her black-brown eyes reflecting the fluorescent glow. Everyone is taken,  delighting in this child's apparent joy -- our smiles and laughter reflected in hers. Then this: Our host tells us our new friend is no stranger to this clinic; she's been treated repeatedly for sexually-transmitted gonorrhea.  We are frantic to help,  but we can do nothing. No authority exists here to step in. Stunned, we soon watch the girl leave,  waving goodbye and looking over her shoulder with her huge smile and white teeth flashing against her brown skin.

- Larry Shushan

Please submit your own true story. 200 words or less. Click here for the rest of the details. Thank you.

[stareandwrite]

These people, only two days ago, had been leading a thousand different lives, in indifference or in antagonism to each other, as alien as enemies across a frontier: now workers and idlers, thieves, beggars, saints, poets, drabs and sharpers, genuine people and showy shams, were all bumping up against each other in an instinctive community of emotion. The "people," luckily, predominated; the faces of workers look best in such a crowd, and there were thousands of them, each illuminated and singled out by its magnesium-flash of passion. I remember especially the steady-browed faces of the women; and also the small but significant fact that every one of them had remembered to bring her dog. The biggest of these amiable companions had to take their chance of seeing what they could through the forest of human legs; but every one that was portable was snugly lodged in the bend of an elbow, and from this safe perch scores and scores of small serious muzzles, blunt or sharp, smooth or woolly, brown or grey or white or black or brindled, looked out on the scene with the quiet awareness of the Paris dog.

- Edith Wharton in Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort, a collection of the novelist's nonfiction dispatches during World War I.

It's quite a book. Mostly forgotten, as far as I can tell. I blogged about it here. Free, legal audiobook here. Free, legal text here.

Please submit your own true story of people-watching. 200 words or less. Click here for the rest of the details. Thank you.

[stareandwrite]

High up a winding mountain road in a coffee-growing town three volcanoes beyond San Salvador, a priest's voice bellows from giant speakers aimed out the front door of the largest church. Nobody pays attention. Too much is going on. Horses wearing canvas diapers pull carriages of families enjoying this steamy Sunday. Amplified singers fight to be heard over each other's overly loud voices and distorted music. A father blows bubbles from a wand for his son. Young lovers eating ice cream cuddle on a bench. This weekly festival attracts people to Juayua from miles around, mostly for the food. Hundreds of plastic-tarp-covered stalls surround the crowded square. A snake handler draws passersby to pose for photos with a huge python draped over their necks. Young girls approach strangers, desperate to sell potted plants and local fruit. Pistachio vendors beg for a sale. Sudden laughter springs from a corner as people revel in the racy lyrics of a singer flirting with a pretty bystander.

- Larry Shushan yesterday in Juayua, El Salvador. He's participating in a Central American medical mission with Prevention International: No Cervical Cancer.

Please submit your own true story of people-watching. 200 words or less. Click here for the rest of the details. Thank you.

[stareandwrite]

Every few weeks, a blacksmith parked his van on the sidewalk outside the stable and set up his forge and tools, and would proceed to shoe horses all day as cabs and cars roared by. He had evidently gotten tired of being asked questions by the people walking by— there are so many questions that come to mind when you happen upon a person shoeing horses on a Manhattan sidewalk, after all—so he wrote out a list of answers to the usual questions ("NO. IT DOES NOT HURT THEM / ONCE EVERY SIX WEEKS / IRON NAILS") and hung it on his truck. If anyone dared to speak to him, he gestured toward the sign and refused to glance up.

- Susan Orlean in Animalish, her recent Kindle Single.

Please submit your own true story of people-watching. 200 words or less. Click here for the rest of the details. Thank you.

[stareandwrite]

My last night in the valley I wander through Camp 4 at dusk. The scent of pine sap and campfires floats in the air, and a couple of stars have just come out. There's laughter, and someone is playing a guitar. At one campsite two young men are methodically laying out gear—ropes and carabiners and milk jugs of water—talking gravely about what they hope will happen on their wall the next morning. At another picnic table three women with bloody knuckles, all in pigtails and wearing headlamps, are crying, hugging each other, having just come off a three-day ascent.

- Mark Jenkins in Yosemite National Park for his cover story in the current National Geographic.

[stareandwrite]

The two-room hole. The family trap. Everything there conspired to constrain the weekend visitor. Not even the mother’s hand could smooth away the son’s distress. True, he was no longer expected to sleep in his parents’ bedroom, like his sister, but even on the couch made up for him in the living room he remained a witness to the married life that continued unbroken from Saturday to Sunday, that is, I could hear — or thought I could hear — sounds I had heard, muffled as they were, from childhood on, sounds that had lodged in my mind in the form of a monstrous ritual: the anticipatory whispers, the lip-smacking, the creaking bedsprings, the sighing horsehair mattress, the moaning, the groaning, the entire aural repertory of lovemaking, so potent, especially in the dark. … Yet it is far from certain that the two of them went at it when the son lay awake on the couch within hearing range; in fact, it is more likely they took his presence into account and left each other alone. But the mere expectation of those noises in their more or less unchanging sequence was enough to keep me awake.

- from Günter Grass’s memoir, Peeling the Onion, translated by Michael Henry Heim

Submitted by David Dobbs, author of Reef Madness, which Oliver Sacks called "brilliantly written, sometimes almost unbearably poignant." He writes the Neuron Culture blog for Wired. Twitter here. Tumblr here. Oh, and go read this Atlantic piece he wrote. It's the seed for his next book.

David's contribution is a good reminder that this blog welcomes submissions of your own original people-watching prose as well as favorite published passages from other writers, umlauted or not. As always, 200 words or less. Details here. Thanks.

[stareandwrite]

The bar is much quieter in the afternoon. The lunch crowd that chose iced tea and cola returned to their office cubes an hour ago, and now only the drinkers remain. I was munching on chicken wings, fried whole, from shoulder joint to wing tip.

 She offered it up, amongst routine talking points like favorite neighborhoods, and restaurants, and how long we’ve lived where and such.

 “My husband is dying of leukemia so…” — she hung there for a moment, suspending time while staring deeply into her glass like a crystal ball — “gotta have fun while you still can.” I offered the death of my stepfather as some sort of consolation: that we spoke a similar language, even though I was out front and ahead of my grief, and she was still buried under the thick wool blankets of disbelief. 

“Where you from?” she asked for the second time. And I answered earnestly like I’d never heard the question, but you could see in her face that she discovered her slip, as I mentioned the island again. She’d gotten her check now, and assembled her things before pouring herself off her barstool to support a bloated torso on spindly spider legs.

- a Washington, D.C. scene submitted by the blogger behind bigship.tumblr.com

Big thanks to Big Ship for the submission. Even more than I expected, I love reading these stories people send in. Please submit your own true story of people-watching. 200 words or less. Click here for the rest of the details. Thanks.

[joaocanziani]

I heard a thump and a man took flight at least fifteen feet up in the air. ... Whoever was walking the street turned around and gasped in disbelief, watching the man suspended in the air. ... he had stepped on the street without seeing the car. ... A man coming home from work held the man’s head and told him to keep on breathing. The sleeve of his office shirt was bloodied. Another got off his bike, took off his helmet, and knelt on the other side. ... The man was moaning. His face was bloodied and I thought his skull was cracked. I looked around. A woman was crying, being held by another. A few other men took it upon themselves to redirect oncoming traffic. ... An ambulance came, and then the fire department. The man got strapped to a stretcher and carried away. ... A fireman approached and sprayed the pavement. I saw bits of flesh and the blood disappear. ... I crossed the street and walked 4th Avenue towards Union as a rush of people emerged from the subway station. ... I thought of geology. (Or archaeology?) How rivers and wind and sand would bury the past over thousands of years.

- photographer João Canziani in Brooklyn, abridged from his post "What happened today, April 4th."

[distorte]

I pass a Montessori school on the walk to work. A box-shaped kid is tottering on the footpath after being unloaded by his mam. She’s back in the front seat of the car gathering up bags. The boy props a neon-green book awkwardly across his chest. “Look what I’ve got!” he shouts at a woman who’s gearing up on her scooter. “What’s that?” she says. “Is that a book about a bear?” There’s a five second pause as I approach, and I can see the boy’s face twitch and crease as he parses the unfamiliar sentence. “It’s got loads of bears!” he shouts, triumphantly. “What!?” shouts the woman. “Loads of bears!?” The boy squirms and shows his teeth and glances at the cover, making sure. I feel pretty good about books.

- Pierce in Dublin, Ireland on Is that blogging? Stop That.

[stareandwrite]

It was funny watching people on the opposite platform. I expected more to be reading or texting on their phones. But, for the majority of the 40 or so, all were staring across at us. Bored, drunk maybe, waiting for the train to take them home. Some with headphones, but a lot without. Looking, like me, up and down the platform for something interesting to watch. A girl in bright yellow pants reached down and surreptitiously scratched her crotch. A tall, rail thin man in a necktie and suit jacket shifted his weight and slowly inched his way up to the grooved caution edge of the platform. He raised himself on his tip toes and swayed back and forth. I watched as he closed his eyes, almost imperceptibly raised his arms out from his body for balance and shuffled his left foot over the edge and out into open air.

- Emily C. in Washington D.C.

I have no reason to believe that it's anything other than a coincidence that this is the second consecutive submission to include the word "crotch."

You can make it a trifecta or break this unwholesome trend by submitting here. Thanks.

[stareandwrite]

I took the radio call on Washtenaw in Humboldt Park around 7pm. No sign of life for a few minutes, but then a kid with neck tattoos and a hoodie ambled up and motioned that the rest of them would be right out. Two guys and two girls; the first guy sat up front with me. “Is this one of those freaky cabs?” a voice from the back called out. Like Cash Cab? I wonder. “No, man, Taxicab Confessions, where they tell all the fucked-up shit they did, yo.” Got something to share? I ask...This leads to a graphic discussion of all the positions that they’d do it in in the cab. I tell them it happens. The one in the front wonders if he could get his crotch up to the partition where his girl could have at it. They whoop it up when I tell them that there would be extra charges for that. “By the way, yo, we’re gonna kill you,” he announces, dead-eyed, and tells his buddy in the back to give him his knife. “Just playin’!” he cracks up. ... They get out at the Diversey Rock-n-Bowl.

- Dmitry Samarov in Chicago

Samarov has written Hack (Stories From a Chicago Cab), which The University of Chicago Press will publish in October. John Hodgman blurbed the book. John Hodgman! He wrote that Samarov is "as skilled a navigator of the forgotten American city as you’ll find, and his writing is funny, grim, humane, and welcome.”

This people-watching scene comes from a longer blog post called "Black Friday." You should go read it here, especially since I cut a sentence to keep the post under the strict, arbitrary 200-word limit.

Unless I've wildly misunderstood, Samarov himself submitted this to "Stare and Write." I'm so grateful.

You, too, should submit a true people-watching story. Do it here. Thank you.

[nogreatillusion]

On the train, a man sits next to me, in one of the three-seat sections. He should have sat on the other end. That’s the unspoken rule: if there’s room, you always leave a seat between you and the other person. I think about asking him to move. Or standing. Neither option seems reasonable. Now I’m the crazy one. Sometimes I really think I will go crazy if one more stranger gets too close to me. That’s the New York mentality taking over - a sort of defensive cringe that develops after too many months of crowded spaces. Sometimes I can scarcely stand the smell of other humans. All the short, leering men start to look the same. All the terrible, inattentive mothers, shoving strollers in front of them like shields, strapped in children twisting and crying in the seat, blur together into one ugly pool of too-tight jeans and tacky purses, and heaving sighs.

- Caroline in New York City on her blog No Great Illusion, which seems to take both its title and subtitle from my favorite Jenny Lewis song.

Tell your true story of people-watching on "Stare and Write." Just 200 words. Please submit here.

[stareandwrite]

I see flesh — bare flesh, 200 yards on, as my dog and I run along the winter beach. So much skin makes no sense for 45 degrees Fahrenheit. But there she is. The path will bring us closer and closer until we run right by her. Each stride delivers news: she might be topless; she's definitely topless; she's improbably trapezoidal in the torso; she's a he; he's so thoroughly un-androgynous that only prehistoric, hardwired, propagate-the-species optimism can account for my initial impulse to assign gender to a speck. The guy is with a second guy, also undressed for July. As my dog and I pass, I miss all details of the men. I do a quadruple take on a ruby hookah in the sand between them. When men and hookah are a couple dozen steps behind me, the Rushdie audiobook in my headphones says "few boatmen or traders invited him to share a hookah." Come on, I think. It's time to double back. I see upcountry choo-choo puffs rise from the hookah. I see the summer-ready men. Ham-handed reality commandeers the audiobook, making it say "the defining images of the coming of spring."

- me on Friday in Seattle

The Rushdie novel mentioned in the post is Midnight's Children. The quoted passages, which happened to come out of my headphones exactly as described above, are from pages 9 and 10, respectively, of the 2006 Random House Trade Paperbacks edition that I searched online to get the wording right.

[stareandwrite]

No one looks up from their hands, phones, papers. Yau Ma Tei and the crush grows tighter. Women with lollypops reading “stop” try half-heartedly to stop more than a few entering the train, but stiffen amid the futility, arm and sign raised before the door. People press in around and the doors close to the familiar refrain, “ please stand back from the closing door” spoken in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. Now the train gathers speed again, people swaying with the carriage rhythm, no longer space to hold on, propped by other bodies. No one looks, no one catches anyone’s eye. The discomfort of proximity precludes any further connection; the space too close for contact. Jordan, and no one exits, more join the fray. Can this press be any tighter we all wonder but don’t complain? It’s just before nine and the worst of the rush. A girl next to me, bundled against the Hong Kong cold, types into her smart phone, expressionless. It’s too early for emotion, there’s no mental space for emotion. The man next to me coughs, whether in need or to create any distance around him. To the best of their abilities, people turn away...

- Lisa Genasci in Hong Kong

Many thanks to Lisa. Her dispatch from the crush of Hong Kong's morning commute is the first-ever submission of original work to this blog. I'm delighted and look forward to more from her and the rest of you. It's just 200 words. Actually, 199 in Lisa's case. Please submit here. Thank you.

[stareandwrite]

Without any disrespect to the Egyptian people (and the very real revolution they are attempting to throw), the square is slowly starting to feel more and more like a festival – especially now that the ‘pro-mubarak’ protestors have all but dispersed. There is an emerging tourism economy in the square – flags, face masks painted the color of the Egyptian flag, blankets, baked sweet potatoes, cigarettes, bottled water, coke, candy bars – all of these are now available for sale through table shops that are popping up all over. Each day brings more children and families, I swear I’ve seen couples on dates, the mood is becoming lighter and lighter (though I’m sure this will all change when the Army decides it’s time to move in – which is what I predict will eventually happen).

- photojournalist Andrew Burton in Cairo on his blog.

He wrote that four days ago. Today is a huge day in Egypt. So we may learn the real-world meaning of his prediction that "this will all change when the Army decides it’s time to move in."

[meaghano]

I go down into the subway and there is a man playing a fiddle and singing, Sitting at the Dock of the Bay, and I see two big fat white men with out of date frames on their glasses and the kind of fleece pullovers one can only get for free at a conference. I wonder why they are standing so near this guy, almost rudely, as if they feel like he is in the only place on the platform that they want to stand in and want to punish him for it. Then the fiddler guy clears the bend of the second first and so launches into the chorus and right as I pass the two out of shape uncles echo what he sings, loudly and with grandeur. They are standing so near him so that they can sing harmony without anyone so much as posing for a picture. I catch the eye of a girl who is much prettier than me and we laugh together and shake our heads as I float, really float, past them.

- Meaghan O'Connell in New York City on her blog Life is hard. Here is someone.

Is all of the punctuation perfect? Should that song title maybe have an "on the" instead of an "at the"? Meaghan would sweat those details if she were going to take her blog post and put it in a book. Maybe I would sweat them here if, while looking back through every post I've ever "Liked" on Tumblr, the words above hadn't given me an instant affirmative jolt of Yes! I want Stare and Write to be about this exact way of looking out into the world and noticing other human beings for long enough to be surprised by them.

[stareandwrite]

There were the obvious, and obliging, exhibitionists—the spangle-clad drag queens, the tattooed gym rats with their oiled chests, the Russian beanpoles in their dental-floss bikinis and stacked heels, trailing stout, balding father figures in their wake. The usual addled tourist families came streaming by, loaded down with Aldo and Sephora shopping bags. I decided to settle in. Next came an Orthodox couple—he in a black frock coat and beaver fur hat, she in a glossy wig, neither of them, amazingly enough, sweating in the bright heat. Then a stooped man in a shirt and tie, carrying a thick book, “The Psychology of Shame.” Three pretty young women who were, all three of them, talking on their cell phones—I hope not to each other. A dreadlocked street person, pushing a groaning shopping cart. People speaking Italian, French, Spanish; arguing, laughing, sulking. I could have easily stayed all day.

- Susan Orlean on people-watching in Miami Beach last weekend

Susan's words inspired me to start this "Stare and Write" Tumblr just a few minutes ago. (Note: If this blog never amounts to anything more than this one post, it will seem silly to have written anything about what inspired it. I'm OK with that. But I'd be more OK with you submitting something great to get things rolling.)