Saturday, October 26, 2013

The One and Several Oren Pierce


    The self-inventing writer slash hair cutter slash jeweler slash "osteoempathetic"    healer Oren Pierce  lives less than a mile  down  through the woods from here, in a rented, concrete silo that someone once almost finished converting to comfortable living quarters.
     He calls it "Cayuga Tower" because it's very near the lake, but it's  in a  barnyard  long ago abandoned, even by the barn, and so over-grown  with Buckthorn, Juniper, and Pear that he can't see the  lake for the trees; he can't even see the sky from his Cayuga tower.
 Wiring runs in and out of the windows, and twists up the  silo along with Woodbine and Poison Ivy vines thick as your wrist.  I don't know of any plumbing.  A depression in the yard  with cattails growing at the bottom is either a failed dug-pond or a sump hole.  Or both.
  It's cold comfort there in the tower, so when we go away,  Oren happily comes up here  to look after our  place and stay  in the back-yard  trailer with a sky-viewing cupola and the comfy  bed downstairs that converts to a bath tub.  He says he writes well there. Maybe in the bathtub.
   
  Lately Oren has been publishing stories about   a pale-faced, sort-of bear whose father (according to her Black Bear Mother's early  stories) is a Polar Bear;  although Mother Bear later  confesses that  Nowella's father was a White Man.  Owen Pierce's  stories keep reminding us of this naked  fact.  But oftn in the stories, what we have here seems to be nothing more than a trunk full of stuffed animals … and the scale of these creatures shifts unsettlingly, at least for simple understanding.  Clearly not stories for children, unless they are haunted children.
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