Dispatch No. 27

Pomegranates + Dangerous Ideas + The Substack Zone

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Recent stories: The Zeno Paradox | Reading In The Nude

Missed something? Sketchbook | Stories | Dispatches | Series

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Welcome new subscribers!

If you’re new here, welcome! These semi-regular dispatches are like a palate cleanser, an intermezzo, if you will, between larger works.

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Non-Sequiturs

1. Through a doorway - You might have heard a rumbling or two about The Substack Zone. 31 writers, artists and musicians came together to celebrate the 66th anniversary of Rod Serling’s classic The Twilight Zone. The stories are spectacular.

   Erica Drayton
   has compiled a list in a special edition of Top In Fiction. Please check them out.

2. Abandoned - free story ideas left behind in… The Substack Zone

   1. Play Date – The Stanford Prison Experiment meets The Veldt. Parents watch their kids play from a raucous bar through one-way glass. It’s not clear who is in control on either side.

   2. CrumpleZone - Excruciating first date gone wrong. Did you have crash detection installed?

3. Placating Papa

   [listening to The Martian in the car with my 4yo]

   4yo: How do they breathe on Mars?

   Me: They have oxygen tanks.

   4yo: Like SCUBA tanks?

   Me: [surprised, laughing] Yes! I mean, slightly different but that's the right idea.

   4yo:

   Me: Do you know that SCUBA is an acronym?

   4yo: What's an acronym?

   Me: Like ATM, the machine I use at the bank, is an acronym—A for automatic, T for teller... [3 minutes pass as I explain]

   4yo: [sighs loudly] I love you, dad.

   Me: [my heart swelling] oh, I love you t—

   4yo: [Interrupting] I also love [babysitter's name]

   Me:

4. Pomegranates — It strikes me, after hours spent plucking seeds to end up with a handful of sour, crunchy beads, that these fruits might be a cosmic joke. Perhaps it was a pomegranate, not an apple, in the Garden of Good and Evil? Imagine Adam and Eve, frustrated and stained, laboring over its inedible rewards until they admitted defeat and left.

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Dangerous Ideas

I sometimes lie awake at night, thinking about danger. Not the immediate kind—fires, floods, or fists, though those have their place—but the quieter, subtler kind. The danger of an idea.

I’m drawn to the subtle ideas—the invisible gravity in a story—that feel dangerous even to think about. The ones that quietly gnaw at your ankles or wake you in the dead of night, when your brain is busy piecing together the puzzles of the day.

“…that room is dangerous,” her mother had said, sometimes under her breath, sometimes aloud, and it was a sentiment Hanna shared. Dangerous. The walls held his trophies, animals frozen in fierce postures, teeth bared and claws outstretched. But that wasn’t what her mother meant, was it? It was the work being done in the room—the ideas it contained—and the man who gave it all meaning. - from The Zeno Paradox

In The Zeno Paradox, Hanna stands at the edge of her father’s study, thinking about the work being done in that room. It’s the ideas she’s afraid of. The ones stacked and layered inside those walls, growing heavier with each pass of his pen.

Dangerous ideas.

Ideas are living things. They breathe. They move. Like a virus, ideas slip beneath the door, out the window and into the world attaching themselves to someone else. Words you wrote late at night, half-dreaming, take on a life of their own once they're read by someone else.

There's a scene in The Mosquito Coast where Allie Fox tells his son, Charlie:

"That's why it would take courage to go there—not ordinary gumption, but four o'clock-in-the-morning courage. Who's got that?"

It’s such a brief line, but it carries weight. In that moment, Allie isn’t just speaking to Charlie; he’s issuing a challenge, a dare. What lies ahead is unknown. The true danger in Paul Theroux’s prose isn’t the Honduran jungle. It’s the idea itself—the one you know will eventually force Charlie to reckon with that notion. And, in turn, you, the reader.

I think about “four o’clock-in-the-morning courage” often. Do I have it? Would I know it if I did? What if I don’t?

To be clear, dangerous ideas don’t have to be dark. But they do have to provoke us to wonder, even unsettle us a bit.

To illustrate my point: in my story Johatsu, the central idea is the fragility of knowledge—to play a pivotal role in the disappearance of a spouse, to see the fallout, and to decide how, if at all, to act on that information. Perhaps the deeper question isn’t about obvious remorse, but rather: at what cost can equilibrium be regained—if at all?

In another story, The Bear, the cycle of the full moon offers the power of connection between humans and animals. The notion here is that there is magic in everyday life and that creation is a universal trait.

Ideas don’t have to travel alone. Often, the most powerful stories don’t revolve around a single notion. Instead, they layer them, one atop another, twisting through the characters’ world until the ideas become inseparable from the story itself.

The success of a dangerous idea, I believe, isn’t in how far it spreads but in how deeply it burrows. And I’ll bet you that somewhere, deep in your psyche, there’s a file cabinet—a hard drive of these notions you’ve accumulated without even knowing.

• Frankenstein: The reckless pursuit of knowledge without ethics.

• Brave New World: A life without struggle or unhappiness isn’t truly human.

• Contact: Understanding our place in the universe is worth risking everything.

Maybe a few of these show up in your own writing?

These notions, though born within the architecture of the story, don’t remain confined there. They burrow deep, shaping how the audience views humanity, morality, and the limits we’re willing to cross.

Said another way, writers are like farmers, planting ideas rather than battling outward dangers like ER staff on the Fourth of July or wildland firefighters. With our prose, we nurture and cultivate those ideas throughout the story. They may quietly take root in our audience, or they may immediately burst into the daylight in full bloom.

And finally, if you feel like you didn’t stick the landing right away with your readers, remember: stories aren’t static or predictable. The seeds you plant today may take years to blossom, or they might burrow deep and lie dormant, waiting for the right conditions to emerge. But when they do—when that dangerous idea blooms—it can change the landscape forever.

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