The Menu: a diary of days

We tell our story as a series of tables set in front of us. From one table setting to another we accumulate knowledge, relationships, mistakes. But we eat because we are hungry. The table set before us doesn’t always match our hunger. Every holiday table contains the fault lines of the appetites that drive families, couples, and their ghosts. The poems in The Menu evoke the driven progress of a life. We are creatures of appetite and fear. The debris trail we leave trying to satisfy our hunger is unpredictable, complicated. This tale divides into six sections: It Starts, He, She, She Meets He, You’re It Asshole, and Startled. Scenes of need and desire form a landscape of despair and joy – the sensuality of connection that animates a life. Words trace a diary of days: images and feeling smudged, marked and torn as it opens to our intimacy. Both rhapsodic and blunt, lyrical and sharp we are revealed gaping at beauty, how we swagger and yell, stagger over the line lifted up or cast down – a progress of falling. What we eat, what we will taste, consume, or be consumed by is known and unknown. The Menu defies the belief that your story fits in your pocket. If we are lucky it tears a hole and we fall – again.

Jim Linnell is a writer, teacher, and arts administrator. He received his graduate training at UC Berkeley (Ph.D. Directing). He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Theatre & Dance at the University of New Mexico. His dramatic work has been performed in Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. In 2000 he established the MFA degree in Dramatic Writing at UNM and the annual Words Afire Festival of new plays. One theme of The Menu is about falling, as in old Adam, as a necessary part of life. We fall into and out of jobs, connections, understandings, happiness, moral clarity and make it our story. In December 2011 this theme became a literal event when he suffered an incomplete spinal cord injury from a fall. His journey from quadriplegic to ambulating on crutches in eighteen months is the focus of his current writing project. Other published work: Walking on Fire: The Shaping Force of Emotion in Writing Drama. Southern Illinois University Press, 2011.