Tag: Creative Colloquy

• October 20, 2022

  New Short Story: “Reviews of Sanctuary Creek Honey Farm”

  

  This Labor Day weekend, my family took a road trip through North Cascades National Park. Along the way, we stopped in the small town of Winthrop, WA, to grab a snack and stretch our legs after a long drive. Things went downhill almost as soon as we got out of the car.

  Winthrop, it turned out, was under siege by bees. Bees were everywhere, dive-bombing us when we tried to enjoy an iced chai at an outdoor cafe, popping up unexpectedly from under the boards of the wood-plank sidewalks, and swarming us when we dared to stop in a creekside park for lunch. In the end, we gave up, packed up, and drove an hour farther into the mountains to eat in peace.

  Our experience wasn’t all that unusual, but it left me wondering what would happen if a town really did get taken over by bees. How would the residents react? How would tourists rate their visit if they were constantly under threat of being stung by oversized and increasingly organized honeybees?

  I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. So, I started writing. The end result was a weird, experimental little story in the form of a series of online reviews — to say anymore would be spoiling it.

  I’m pleased that the editors of Creative Colloquy enjoyed it enough to publish it on their site. You can read “Reviews of Sanctuary Creek Honey Farm” now:

  READ “REVIEWS OF SANCTUARY CREEK HONEY FARM”

  If you like the story, let me know by leaving a comment below. If you’re a writer in the South Sound with a story or poem that’s ready for publication, check out Creative Colloquy. They’re always looking for local scribes to feature. Thanks for reading!

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer, podcaster, filmmaker, and photographer in Tacoma, WA. You can find his words in Creative Colloquy, Grit City Magazine, and All Worlds Wayfarer. While you’re here, read more of his travel writing, sign up for his monthly newsletter, and follow him on Twitter.

  P.S. If you’re reading this before October 30, 2022, there’s still time to help my audio drama The Adventures of Captain Radio win an Audio Verse Award! Learn more here.
• July 12, 2022

  Audio Drama, Sherlock Holmes, and Public Domain in My Interview With Grit City Podcast

  

  A few weeks ago, I got to sit down with the friendly folks at the Grit City Podcast to chat about my work as a writer, podcast creator, and filmmaker. We talk about my podcast “The Adventures of Captain Radio,” my involvement as a member of the Creative Colloquy board and as a contributor to Grit City Magazine, and Tacoma’s amazing arts community. See the post below from Obscure Studios to listen to the episode. Thanks to Scott, Justin, and Jeff for having me on the show!

  This week, you can catch Obscure Studios president Jonny Eberle on The Grit City Podcast! The Grit City Podcast has a simple premise—in every episode, the hosts sit down with Tacoma-based creatives and entrepreneurs over a couple of drinks to learn more about them and their projects. In this episode, Jonny joins the crew for […]

  Obscure Studios Talks Audio Drama on the Grit City Podcast — Obscure Studios

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer and podcaster in Tacoma, WA. His work has appeared in Creative Colloquy, Grit City Magazine, and All Worlds Wayfarer. You can follow him on Twitter, join his mailing list, and listen to his audio drama, The Adventures of Captain Radio, wherever you enjoy podcasts.
• February 28, 2022

  New Short Story: Victorious

  

  I’m pleased to share that I have a new short story published this month on Creative Colloquy’s website. It’s a piece of flash fiction written in response to artist Steve LaBerge’s installation “Touching Down in Tacoma,” which was a part of the Tacoma Light Trail, an exhibition of light art in downtown Tacoma. For a few weeks this winter, LaBerge transformed the lobby of the historic Pantages Theatre into an alien landscape with a lone illuminated figure sitting beside a suit of some kind and a board of multicolored squares. Also included was an ethereal song provided by the Puget Sound Revels.

  Looking at LaBerge’s piece, I was struck by the whimsy and the melancholy in the scene. With that in mind, I set out to write a short story incorporating the various elements of the installation and trying to imagine who the lone figure was and what they were doing there in this bizarre, otherworldly place. The resulting story is “Victorious,” about the last survivor of a devastating future war in the final moments of a world about to end. It appears in this month’s fiction and poetry published by Creative Colloquy, alongside a poem by Erik Carlsen.

  Before reading the story, I invite you to look at “Touching Down in Tacoma” and listen to the music. Then, head over to Creative Colloquy to read the story. I hope you enjoy it!

  view “touching down in tacoma”

  read “victorious’ by jonny eberle

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer and aspiring podcaster in Tacoma, WA. His fiction has been featured in Creative Colloquy, Grit City Magazine, and All Worlds Wayfarer, and his debut audio drama, The Adventures of Captain Radio. Follow him on Twitter or join his mailing list for more news, writing, and musings.
• October 1, 2020

  Publishing News: Two Stories for a World on Fire

  

  Writing is a strange craft. You spend months or years with an idea rolling around in the dark recesses of your mind, weeks or months or years coaxing that idea out of the shadows, and months more chipping away at the rough edges before its time to shop a story around to find it a home. And then, out of nowhere, the pieces fall into place in the bizarre ways.

  In September, I found out that two of my short stories were going to be published. One was a story that I’d been editing and submitting to various journals for almost three years. The other was an idea I had four or five years ago that crystallized in mid-summer and came pouring out onto the page over the course of a week. Despite their vastly different origins, they both revolve around a similar image: fire.

  I love fire. My mom taught me how to build a fire when I was eight or nine years old on one of our camping trips to Zion National Park. To this day, I’m mesmerized by flickering of firelight and in awe of its power to create and destroy. Fire can forge, it can cleanse, it can make way for new life to take hold. Fire can also consume and kill. For me, fire is a metaphor for humanity. We, too, are capable of great beauty and equally terrible destruction.

  Perhaps it’s no surprise that this idea should work its way into my short fiction. In “Firemaker,” fire is a symbol of humanity’s potential, as a time traveler discovers when he travels to a village on the verge of being wiped out at the dawn of the last Ice Age. “Pyrocene” embodies the other side of the coin as a character tries to save a house from burning down in a setting that could be the present day or the very near future.

  I never thought of these stories as having anything to do with each other, but rereading them, the parallels are obvious. They are intertwined, each commenting on the other. I love being surprised by fiction — sometimes I even surprise myself with hidden themes I didn’t consciously incorporate. In a year when the world feels like it’s on fire (racial injustice, the presidential election, and the actual fires raging across much of the American West for a start), it’s fitting that these two stories will be published together in 2020.

  “Pyrocene” will be published in Creative Colloquy’s seventh annual anthology, due out later this year. You can hear me read it at the Creative Colloquy Crawl on Saturday, October 3 at 2pm Pacific time (RSVP here to receive the Zoom link). “Firemaker” will be published in All World’s Wayfarer Issue VII, which will be available on Monday, December 21. You can preorder it for your Kindle at allworldswayfarer.com. The issue will also be free to read on their website until March 20, 2021.

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer in Tacoma, WA. His writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Creative Colloquy, All Worlds Wayfarer and Grit City Magazine. Follow him on Twitter and subscribe to the mailing list today for exclusive content delivered to your inbox once a month.
• September 24, 2020

  Join Me for a Virtual Literary Pub Crawl

  

  Every year, Creative Colloquy hosts a literary pub crawl in downtown Tacoma. In 2020, due to the pandemic, CC is bringing the stories to you. This year’s Creative Colloquy Crawl will be 100% online, all-ages and spread over a whole weekend of literary awesomeness, kicking off with a virtual happy hour on Friday, October 2. You can join in from anywhere to listen to stories by women of color, hear some new urban legends or tune in for our first-ever story time for kids.
  
  If you’re interested in hearing me perform, you’re in luck. My short story “Pyrocene” was selected for inclusion in Creative Colloquy’s seventh annual print anthology. Volume 7 will be available to purchase later this year, but I’ll be reading it during the Volume Seven Sneaky Peeks event on Saturday, October 3 at 2pm Pacific alongside other authors whose work will be featured in the anthology.
  
  Each event is free to attend, but you do need to register in advance to get access to the Zoom link. Learn more about the weekend’s shenanigans and RSVP below:

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2

  7pm | Virtual Kickoff Happy Hour

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3

  11am | Perhaps It Takes Courage to Raise Children
  2pm | Volume Seven Sneaky Peeks
  7pm | Listen Up! Stories from Tacoma’s Women of Color Collective and Beyond

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4

  11am | Yarning a Tale for the Youngsters
  2pm | Write253 Presents
  7pm | From Bigfoot to Honest Politicians: Modern Urban Legends

  The Crawl is one of my favorite events of the year and while I will miss the excitement of the in-person events (and frantically running between venues to catch my favorite writers and musicians), but I also think this will be the best Crawl yet. If you couldn’t attend before because you don’t live nearby or because you can’t make it out to a bar on a weeknight or because members of your entourage are under the legal drinking age, I hope you’ll be able to make it to one or more of the virtual readings. Mark your calendar for October 2-4 — and I hope to see you there!

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer, photographer, filmmaker in Tacoma, WA. His writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Creative Colloquy and Grit City Magazine. Follow him on Twitter and subscribe to the mailing list today for exclusive content delivered to your inbox once a month.
• July 20, 2020

  New Short Story: Bad Air and Bitter Herbs

  

  It all started when I fell down a rabbit hole of links learning about the history of the plague in Europe. It was a dark impulse in the middle of a modern-day pandemic, but I became fascinated by the plague doctor costume, a head-to-toe covering designed to protect the physician from infected patients. Through my research, I learned that the costume itself may not have been widely used, but those who adopted it reflected a new wave of understanding infectious disease in the West — the personal protective equipment of the day.

  The mask, while turning the wearer into an ominous looking bird, was meant to filter out contaminated air (“miasma”) with strong-smelling herbs and spices. The gloves and robes prevented the doctor from physically touching their patients and the staff may have allowed them to give direction from a safe distance.

  Over the years, as our understanding of disease prevention and treatment evolved, so did the protective garb employed by doctors and nurses to mitigate infection. Gradually, the plague doctor uniform disappeared…

  …but what if it didn’t? That was the starting point for the short story that been published this month by Creative Colloquy. In this story, I update the plague doctor for today’s COVID-19 pandemic. Now, I know we’re all awash in coronavirus anxiety, so I promise this will be my only pandemic-themed fiction for a while. But, I hope you enjoy my twist.

  READ “BAD AIR AND BITTER HERBS” BY JONNY EBERLE

  Please let me know what you think in the comments, thanks for reading, and please wear a mask and wash your hands. Thanks!

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle lives in Tacoma, WA with his wife, three typewriters, and a puppy. His fiction has been featured or is forthcoming in Creative Colloquy and Grit City Magazine. Follow him on Twitter and subscribe to the monthly newsletter for exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox.
• October 1, 2017

  Lies, Damn Lies and Fiction

  

  Two years ago, I read a short story I had written called “The Cannibals of Kitsap.” The story follows a boy who develops an eating disorder after his father loses his job. After the reading, a woman walked up to ask me how the story ended. “Did your father find another job after that,” she asked. I was thrown off. She thought the plot was autobiographical, that this had actually happened to me. I had to admit that everything was fabricated, based on an idea I’d had rather than reality.

  As writers, one of the first pieces of advice many of us receives is to “write what you know.” Some people take that advice literally and only write about their own experience. Many readers have caught on and expect that the all fiction is thinly veiled personal recollection. That may work for some writers, but my life isn’t all that interesting. Fiction should be grounded in reality, but I don’t like limiting myself to my own life. My imagination is not that small, nor are those of most writers I know.

  This week, I’ll be playing with the idea of truth and lies in fiction as part of the third annual Creative Colloquy Crawl. I’ll be hosting a reading at on Tuesday, October 3 at 8pm at Doyle’s Public House called “Lies, Damn Lies and Fiction.” Local writers Jenni Prange Boran, Sam Snoek-Brown and Jonah Barrett will share stories and then we’ll have a Q&A style discussion about what in their work is based on true events and what is made-up. The Creative Colloquy Crawl is a literary pub crawl in downtown Tacoma that brings together lovers of the written word together for an evening of great storytelling. I hope to see you there!

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker in Tacoma, WA. His fiction has appeared in Creative Colloquy.

  Follow him on Twitter or subscribe to the monthly email newsletter to receive exclusive content.
• September 23, 2017

  New Short Story: “How to Steal Copper Wire”

  

  

  A few years ago, a news article caught my attention. An epidemic was sweeping the nation — copper wire theft. People were stealing wire from streetlights and utilities and many of them were getting killed by electrocution in the process. I remember thinking it was a strange kind of crime. Not long after, I saw another article. Copper thieves were popping up in Tacoma and were ripping wire from streetlights all over the city, causing 56 outages and raking in a few thousand dollars. The problem was so widespread, that the city was undertaking a huge effort to replace the copper in its streetlights with less valuable aluminum. There was a story there, so I wrote it down in my notebook.

  

  Four years later, as I thought about writing a crime story from a criminal’s perspective, I remembered this curious bit of news. And I thought it might be interesting to frame it as a second-person how-to article, like one of the millions of lists all over the Internet, but a guide for criminals just starting out. “How to Steal Copper Wire” was born.

  Now, despite the title, I’m not actually going to tell you how to commit this crime. That would be wrong and probably get me into trouble. I’m also not going to spoil it by telling you what it’s actually about. For that, you’ll just have to check it out for yourself:

  Read “How to Steal Copper Wire”

  Let me know what you think!

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer, photographer, and fictional criminal mastermind in Tacoma, WA. His fiction has appeared in Creative Colloquy.

  Follow him on Twitter or subscribe to the monthly email newsletter to receive exclusive content.
• September 16, 2017

  Wiseguys with Fedoras in the Shadows: Why I Love Telling Noir Stories

  

  I’ve always loved a good crime drama. When I was in high school, I was obsessed with the film noir classics — Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, D.O.A., Dark Passage. There is something about the tense atmosphere and moral ambiguity of the genre that fascinates me. A sense of doom permeated those films, especially the ones made during the years of the Hays Code, when the studios would not allow depictions of murderers and thieves getting away with their crimes. You knew that eventually, the protagonist was going to run out of time and be caught or killed, but didn’t know when or how they would meet their end.

  I was so enamored with the genre that being an aspiring filmmaker, I set out to make a film noir of my own during my freshman year of college. I never quite managed to finish the script (sadly, I can’t even remember what the story was supposed to be about), but I was in love with playing with the tropes of film noir; the black-and-white aesthetic, the shadows, the moral ambiguity, the fedoras. Obscure Studios wound up only making a 52-second trailer for The Third Degree. It’s amateurish and embarrassing to the point of physically causing me pain to rewatch, but it also captures some of the dark mood, gritty style, over-the-top drinking, and corny dialogue of my favorite crime thrillers of the 1940s. Maybe someday, I’ll come back to it and give it a face-lift.

  It’s been a while since I’ve ventured into the seedy underbelly of the city in my storytelling and as summer gives way to fall, my thoughts have turned to heists, foul play, and the desperate acts of self preservation that push a person to commit crime.

  Apparently, I’m not the only one who starts thinking about whodunits when September rolls around. This month’s Creative Colloquy is themed around crime fiction, so if you’re in the mood for mystery, you can come hear me read my latest short story at our next gathering. In “How to Steal Copper Wire,” I put a modern twist on classic noir staples and do a little digging into what motivates people to turn to illegal acts.

  If you’re in Tacoma, you should stop by to hear it. The reading is at Black Kettle Bites and Brew this Monday, September 18 at 7pm. I’ll be spinning my yarn alongside awesome local writers Jack Cameron, Leah Mueller, and James A. Gilletti. Hope to see you there for a night of murder, mayhem, and intrigue.

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer, photographer, filmmaker (though mostly of poorly lit trailers for unmade movies) in the City of Destiny.

  Follow him on Twitter or subscribe to the monthly email newsletter to receive exclusive content.
• May 15, 2017

  Writing About the Great War

  

  One hundred years ago today, millions of men in Europe were fighting and dying in trenches in a war that not only unleashed the terror of modern warfare on the world, but set the stage for nearly every conflict that would follow in the 20th century. I’m referring, of course, to the Great War, which today we know as World War I.

  My fascination with WWI began in high school in a military history class, where we would reenact famous battles. It was in a shallow trench next to the football field, armed with a Super Soaker as water balloon mortars fell around me that I first gained an appreciation for what those who lived through the real thing must have faced.

  Then, last year, I picked up a book called To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild. In Hochschild’s careful unwrapping of the war and its complexity, I started to understand the messiness of the war and its similarity to today’s global and regional conflicts. This was the war that introduced the tank and the airplane to the arsenal of death, but it also heralded the first time women entered the workforce en mass, the collapse of two major world powers, and the rise of socialism and communism in Europe. Above all, the stories of human suffering and human triumph were deeply affecting and fired my imagination (I was also inspired by my friend, Keene Short’s blog, which frequently focuses on the events of WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution). I was scarcely a chapter into Hochschild’s book when I knew I was reading the source material for a new story.

  Tonight, I’ll be reading that story, which I’ve titled The Night Watch, at Creative Colloquy. This is my first serious dive into historical fiction, which is hard to do period, let alone in short story form. But I hope I’ve captured some of the nuance of the men and women who lived through the Great War. I hope to see you there.

  Creative Colloquy at 7pm
  B Sharp Coffee House
  706 Opera Alley
  Tacoma, WA 98402

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer and history junkie in Tacoma, WA. You can find more of his wit and writing  on Twitter or subscribe to the email newsletter to receive exclusive content and zero spam.