Charlotte Readers Podcast: Paul Kurzeja

Author Paul Kurzeja is a corporate lawyer who has been writing fiction and poetry on the side and getting his work published over the last five years with good success. He’s won several awards while working at his real job and while studying to receive his MA degree in Creative Writing from UNC-Charlotte, including the school’s James McGavran award for Beach Subsidy, one of the pieces he reads on the show.

It deals with the irony of a government project that benefits property owners who normally disdain what they otherwise would call taxpayer funded handouts.

In this episode, Paul also reads a gripping short story about a man struggling with addiction, a poem about a historic statute that divides people, and a flash fiction piece that juxtaposes the lives of a father and son when they are at the same stage in life, but years apart, with a message about the unspoken sacrifices parents make before their children are born. And finally, he brings some humor to the show, with his poem about the love app known as Tinder.

The Readings – in order:

Desiree

In this short story, a man struggling with alcoholism faces demons in the form of a woman who may or may not be real.

“I wake up face down tangled in sheets, my head and one arm hanging from the bed. My hand, asleep and numb, somehow holds an empty scotch glass. I do not look around, but can feel she is gone.”

[The rest of the story is on the show]

Sonnet to Tinder

In this poem, the love app known as Tinder is under the microscope, and we learn that swiping for love can be elusive.

“Oh, failing app of Aphrodite’s curse.
Its name will tease with hopes and dreams of fire,
but leave me only in smoke and tears.
Alone in dark and cold at night again.”

[The rest of the poem is on the show]

Excerpt from Beach Subsidy – a story about place

In this essay, the author takes us to Holden Beach, with its “faded Trump signs on the sandy lawns and the bumper stickers on oversized Ford and Chevy pickups declaring ‘I Own a Gun and I Vote’ and ‘Conservatism! Because not everyone can be a freeloader’ and ‘Global Warming is Global Fraud.’”

“The deafening roar of diesel engine pumps mingle with the wet crash of tons of seawater, sand and sediment pouring from a four-foot-wide flexible pipe.”

The author wonders how this ideology balances “with the heavily government subsidized and environmentally dependent place” they live, because the subsidies are large, the most obvious being beach reclamation.

[More of the excerpt is on the show]

Babel’s Soldier

In this poem, both sides stand in the shadow of a statue and shout

“My family, My past, My future.”

“The silent soldier stands in the hot sun
For one-hundred years a Tower of Babel.
Dividing all.
On pedestal above the crowds,
bronze countenance unmoved.
Glowing in strife.
Below two crowds shouting in rage,
at him, at each other.”

[The rest of the poem is on the show]

Juxtapose

In this flash fiction piece, the son doesn’t understand the father, because he doesn’t know that when his father was nineteen, his father faced an entirely different and uncertain future.

“I’m nineteen, I cringe as my father tells my friends a joke about a bar and a nun. He opens a beer while giving a wide-eyed, extravagant grin that is more suggestive of discovering gold than cheap beer. My friends hide their guffaws during this embellished behavior. I console myself with the knowledge that tomorrow I leave for college.

“He’s nineteen, he hacks and saws at a Banyan tree with his bladed combat knife. The main field is dug out by back hoes, but the edges, too rocky for heavy equipment, are cleared by hand. Two-hundred Army Air Core beat away at the Philippine jungle, hands bleeding and arms aching, to create an airbase in the short hours before a counterattack.”

[The rest of the story is on the show]