Other writing
This is a link to the short piece, “The Power of Listening to What Your Practice Demands,” posted January 6, 2017, @ the Brevity Blog: https://brevity.wordpress.com/?s=%22the+power+of+listening%22
This is a link to another short piece, “Still Listening to What My Practice Demands: A Follow-up,” posted December 27, 2017, @ the Brevity Blog almost a year later: https://brevity.wordpress.com/?s=%22still+listening%22
Here is a link to the short piece “When Saying ‘No’ to a Student Might Be Saying ‘Yes’ to Learning,” published March 17, 2017, in The Teaching Professor:
This photo above was a prompt at https://creativewritingcenter.com/ in December 2018.
The manager of the site wrote, “I chose Beth Franz's short fiction to feature this month because it is descriptive, suspenseful, and forces us to confront our notion of what a predator is.”
Here is the 480-word story in its entirety:
“Wolves Mate for Life”
The freshly fallen snow created the perfect carpet for the kind of morning walk she liked best. Fresh, clean, silent snow. The kind of snow that called her to be attentive, watchful, wary, but not fearful. It was too still for the predator she was most watchful for to be able to catch her unaware.
There was something vaguely familiar to her about this morning. The kind of morning that she had not felt for a long time. The kind of morning that enabled her to be one with her surroundings. The kind of morning she had not been able to find her way into for too long now.
What was it that felt so familiar? For one who lived only in the present, she had no strategy to call on that would enable her to travel back through time to identify the source of the familiarity that the morning crispness triggered within her. Yet something called her back. Back to a time when . . . . What?
A presence of some kind. A familiar presence that somehow made her feel safe. A presence that somehow made her feel whole again. What was that presence that she felt this morning?
A sound.
She crouched.
Frozen into stillness herself, she became even more sensitive to the stillness all around her. It triggered a feeling of profound emptiness. A feeling that she knew made her vulnerable. A feeling she dare not give into here in the open field, where she could easily be spotted by the predator she had learned to be so wary of.
She waited.
Not another sound.
Not a movement.
And still she waited.
Slowly she turned her head in the direction of the sound.
Attentive.
Wary.
Watchful.
She sensed him now. It was the predator. The one who had killed her companion, last snow season. The presence of the predator recalled the source of the feeling of familiarity that had offered her such comfort just a moment ago.
The scene flashed before her. It was happening again.
Her companion, out in front, the sharp sound and a smell she had never encountered before, his body airborne in a way that made him look like some kind of huge furry bird taking flight. Then he dropped to the ground.
Her feet carried her away from the danger before she could even register a decision: to stay with him, to run away. She ran and ran and ran. She was still running.
When she finally stopped and realized how far her feet had carried her, she dropped to the ground. It was not exhaustion. Now that she had recalled what happened last snow season, grief took her down.
Again.
Waves of the emotion that made her feel so vulnerable washed over her.
Always.
Those waves caught her unaware and brought her down, again and again.