I completed the first draft of a story called “Millie Floating” in the fall of 2004. In those days, my goal was to edit a project until I had a final draft, at which time I could send it out to publications until someone accepted it. That was naive and wrong.
Fast forward nearly two decades. “Millie Floating,” a weird little story about a guy who wonders if his wife has murdered the family dog, was published in the Toho Literary print collection, The Best Short Stories of Philadelphia 2021. It would never have been published if I’d stuck with that final draft theory.
I just learned that the folks at Adelaide Literary Magazine published my story “Like They’re Waiting” at their site back in January. It’s a very short piece of flash fiction, but one of my favorite projects from the past few years even though it’s a bit confrontational for the reader. I came to it partially inspired by real life events. Also, perhaps, I was a bit touched in the head by all the time we all spent in that first two years living on Planet Covid.
Besides having a comprehensive online publishing presence, Adelaide Literary Magazine is a print-based operation publishing a monthly journal of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, book reviews, and interviews. They also run a small press imprint called Adelaide Books that is more prolific than any other micro-type operation I’ve encountered.
I was so happy to see my story, “Animals with Nowhere to Go”, published this month (January) at Jerry Jazz Musician. I wrote “Animals” specifically to enter the Jerry Jazz 55th short fiction contest last fall. Even though it only wound up short-listed (go to “Chromesthesia “ here to read the wonderful winning story by Shannan Brady) it is an honor to see my work alongside so many other great creative people’s.
I discovered Jerry Jazz about fifteen years ago while researching material for my novel Notes on the Golden Country (still a few years to go before it’s out). At the time, I was writing a rather freeform essay on the effect that Ralph Ellison’s work had on American literature. You can read that brief essay here. JJM is a wonderful repository for all things Ralph Waldo Ellison. I’d found my people.
I am a writer who has a tendency to connect his fiction and essays to musical questions and mysteries. I often go find the Jerry Jazz Musician website whenever I’m feeling beat up and ragged out from projects I’m working on. It’s a great source of inspiration for jazz culture lovers on all sorts of levels with poetry, essays, fiction, photos, videos, and book reviews on everyone from John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk to James Baldwin and jazz chronicler Gary Giddins.
My new story “MANY WAYS TO FIND OUT” was featured at the BULL magazine website earlier this week. Bull specializes in quality fiction (and some essays) directed in varying ways at the complexity and dynamics of masculinity here in 2017.
There’s a theory out there that men don’t like to read “serious fiction.” I think a lot of men just don’t like to read crappy stories that have little to do with them. I might be wrong. Who knows?
We had a huge cold front come in right around 9:00 last night. The temperature dropped fast from 52-degrees Fahrenheit to 20-degrees Fahrenheit, and by our 10:30 bedtime the wind was blowing hard. Our bedroom wall is northwest facing and somewhat unprotected, with no wind-block trees or shrubs or walls. The property backs onto a college campus with a good five acre field that lets the wind streak across unobstructed whenever weather spins out of the northwest. Our bedroom wall gets pummeled by roaring air, our windows rattle and shake like something is trying to get in.
So I awoke at 12:30 to howling gusts that had to be hitting 50-60 mph. I could not sleep for nearly an hour until Marla woke up too and began immediately to chat with me about the howling wind-toads. She could have been a scientist so matter-of-fact is she about the things she brings up out of sleep.
I said, “Wind toes?” She said, “No. Toads.”
I said, “Really? Toads flying on the wind?” She said, “Nope. Just wind-toads…half wind, half toad.”
I asked if that meant we would have toast in the morning.
She said “Nope. Toads! We’re going to have toads for breakfast but we’re going to have to get the wind part out of them first.” I pointed out it might be easier to get the toads to jump off the wind.
We left it at that and snuggled in the dark with the wind howling like wild toads deep in a forest. But as I drifted into sleep, knowing how much I loved her, I wondered if wind-toads even knew that human beings existed. Maybe they were just doing what they’re supposed to do and would feel bad if they understood that they were scaring a couple of middle aged people out of sleep on a lonely late winter Wednesday night.
I’ve spent the spring adapting stories I began writing almost a decade ago into a novel. The stories all had to do somehow with a character I called Julia Davenport. It’s been quite an interesting task converting short stories into long prose. Six tales were completed by 2005, and another four or five fitful starts came after that. I figured I could finish these starts over the spring and then turn it all into a book that would effectively amount to a series of vignettes about life here in the early part of this new century.
Julia was the connecting piece through all of the stories I wrote. However, each piece was composed in a different voice with a somewhat unique narrator and a weird perspective on life and love. In many ways, although I wasn’t overtly aware of it at the time, this approach to creating fiction is now a common methodology for contemporary storytellers.
Point of view is a key element in all storytelling. The standard way of doing things is Continue reading →
With two weeks to go before our national election, I have had posted the following election short story…but it’s gone now. When a story implodes it’s an ugly site. You should have seen it.
32 years ago we had an election that changed the course of history. Us young libertines of the time were none too happy. What actually transpired that night in my little world, so many years ago, was a rather debauched episode that ended with a number of us taking our household TV outside and someone slamming it down in the middle of the street. Prior to that seen in the street, I recall Chuck Bell climbing on top of the TV as it muttered away in our living room. Chuck pontificated quite eloquently for a broken and sad 21-year-old on the wreckless nature of the American public while in a catcher’s squat and wearing a luxurious nightgown.
The title piece in my nine story collection is offered below for your reading pleasure. The book will be released on November 16th. It will be available in both digital and paperback formats. As always, this post will self-destruct in a few days, so either read it now or download it (and please don’t let me know if you do the latter).
Implosions of America: a tiny excerpt
Tucker was still out getting supplies for our billboard work when Janie Hawthorn came up with the idea of a TV demolition event. “We publicly unveil a group of TVs,” she said, “all stacked into a pyramid, then smash them to pieces.”
Angeline Worley, a quiet, studious girl who worked in the library, piped up and said: “Yeah, we could have them all powered up and tuned to individual channels.” I’d been attracted to her since moving into the house. Angeline had a confidence about her that I only partially understood in women back then.
You can read the rest when the book comes out on November 16.
Photo: Warren Harold – http://www.thatwasmyfoot.com/
There are fabulous, creative artists everywhere in this country. I am so grateful to photographer extraordinaire Warren Harold for use of two of his images of a building implosion for both the cover of my new collection of stories and promotional highlighting of articles for my book. Yes, that’s his photo of the West Pavilion Professional Building at the Houston Medical Center in my latest post, “Everyone Gets a Scarlet Letter.”
Check out Warren’s work at his website, http://thatwasmyfoot.my-expressions.com. He has a discerning eye for the bizarre and interesting. And seems equally at home with people, portraits, and inanimate objects. What I see in Warren’s work is passion for the magic that images elicit in us in the day-to-day. That magic is so odd. Were we to Continue reading →
Photo: Warren Harold – http://www.thatwasmyfoot.com/
We’ve been through more than a decade of struggle now, haven’t we? There’s that economy thing that’s been eating at all of us this past three years. But there’s also the insanity of extremist violence and murderous intent directed randomly at those of us who are innocent.
All of this seems to have at least temporarily altered the core sense that most of us have of what counts in life. What seems to have happened is not that we’ve changed our values or our definition of the meaning of life, so much as we’ve forgotten the importance of those issues and their bedrock necessity.
This stuff ain’t going away. It’s no ones fault. Economic and social chaos have always been with us. These days, though, this chaos is amplified because of the reach of media, the density of world population, and the fact that peace and happiness in Continue reading →
