Saturday, March 22, 2025
Time: 10:27 AM
Song: Father of Mine
Artist: Everclear
Mode of Consumption: Listening to MP3s on the way to Rock Island
Link to Song: https://open.spotify.com/track/2hx4ptqsE8dboLH3NCLmaN?si=5839a126f7664ead
Daddy issues.
There’s a trove of songs, stories, plays, movies, and more dealing with Daddy issues.
In my little way, I added to that thread with my story “Hands” that won the 2025 Fiction portion of the Iron Contest held by the Midwest Writing Center based in the Quad Cities.
The Iron Contest is a 24-hour contest where you are provided with a prompt and then have to generate either a fiction story, a nonfiction essay, or a poem. There are winners named in each genre.
This year’s contest began at 5 p.m. Friday, February 28, 2025, and concluded at 5 p.m. on March 1st.
I doubled-booked my Saturday that weekend, so I churned my piece in about 3 ½ hours on Friday. It was like being a sports reporter again, cramming words on the page as deadline loomed. I remember being tired when I started and exhausted when I finished. Jodi gave it a read that night, and I woke up Saturday morning, gave one more edit before hitting send and heading to Wisconsin for the rest of the day.
The prompt was a quote from James Baldwin: “The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of very few people.”
I remember writing some anecdotes from my own life and considered developing a nonfiction piece. After about 45 minutes, I couldn’t see the connecting tissue as a nonfiction piece.
So, I began to fictionalize it. I punched up the voice of the narrator, in the back my head it sounded a little like the voiceover in one of those old gangster movies. After finishing, I realized it might have derived a bit from “The Catcher and Rye,” which I was reading at the moment. I altered events, and created a family. A mechanic father. A homemaker. A smart older brother with a mean streak. Add a dash of conflict, and you have a fiction short story.
The purpose was to show how individual lives are held together by the expectations of those around them. And, in this case, there were some Daddy issues.
Today was the awards ceremony where I along with other writers read their pieces. I hope to be able to share the video of that soon.
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