New Storyglossia Blog

This is the old Storyglossia blog. The new storyglossia blog is at http://www.storyglossia.com/blog/, so please update your links and feedreaders. You can expect a lot more content at the new blog, as well as some new voices posting on the site. This blog will remain on the site and you can still access the blog archives from here, but it will no longer be updated.

Don't Fear the New Storyglossia Blog

The Storyglossia blog is about to undergo a major makeover including switching blogging platforms and I have no idea what will break during the process. But have no fear, the blog will soon be back up with even more content. See you on the other side...

Short Story Month - Essay Collection - Dzanc Books

You know how you meant to go back and read all those short story month posts and never did? Well now you can get them all in one book from Dzanc! Just make a (fully tax deductible) donation of $10 or more (yes, do donate more) and this collection is in your hands. From the Dzanc email announcing the offer:

This past May's celebration of the short story produced an extraordinary number of great articles, blog posts and reviews in support of Short Story Month.   We at Dzanc thought what a wonderful resource it would be to compile some of these essays into one publication.   In partnering with Matt Bell of www.mdbell.com, Aaron Burch of Hobart, Steven McDermott of Storyglossia, and our own Dan Wickett at Emerging Writers Network, Dzanc has put together a collection of no less than 160 essays, covering over 320 pages, into one book.  Each essay explores a specific story and/or collection by authors both heralded and overlooked, all deserving of a first - or second, or twelfth - read...
 
Dzanc Books - as part of its mission as a nonprofit 501(c)3 press dedicated to bringing literature and lit programs to a wider audience -  will mail you a copy of these Short Story Month Essays for a minor tax deductible donation.  On top of publishing great works of literary fiction, Dzanc Books provides workshops for students in the public schools free of charge.   Our Dzanc Writers In Residency Programs matches writers with students whose schools do not otherwise provide students the opportunity to explore their own creative voices.  Dzanc covers all expenses for these programs, which run several thousand dollars each.  All monies donated to Dzanc for the purchase of our Short Story Month Essays will go 100% to our charitable programs which Dzanc conducts nationwide.

Full details of how to support Dzanc and receive this excellent collection are right here.

New journal Kill Author

The first issue of the new journal Kill Author is up and if this issue is any indication it's going to be one to put on your regular reading list. This issue includes new fiction from past STORYGLOSSIA contributors: Barry Graham, Brad Green, Corey Mesler, Cortney McLellan, Ethel Rohan, J. A. Tyler, and Kyle Hemmings, plus a bunch of other excellent work.

Monkeybicycle - Jessa Marsh

Over at Monkeybicycle is "What We Can't Do," a powerful new story by Jessa Marsh, who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite new writers. Also check out her stories in decomP and Word Riot. And, something to look forward to, I'm super excited to have a story of hers in the upcoming STORYGLOSSIA 34, which will be out in July.

Issue 36 Theme: Musical Obsession

STORYGLOSSIA 36 (October) will be a themed issue: Musical Obsession

Seeking fiction that reveals musical obsession in any form. Could be about musicians, singers, songwriters, A/R people, roadies, groupies, fans, possessed jukeboxes/iPods, etc.

Fiction only. Maximum length 7500 words. No limits on style. Realism, language driven, or innovative forms are all encouraged equally. Regardless of style or form, editorial preference is for edgy material with emotional consequences (it's about obsession after all).

This theme is well-trod so the challenge—as ever—is to make it new.

Submission deadline for theme issue is September 15th, 2009.

Be sure to check the rest of STORYGLOSSIA's submission guidelines before submitting.

ml press freebie from j.a. tyler

One thing that all the reading I did during short story month made clear is that short fiction is stronger than ever. More vibrant short fiction is being written now than at any time since the invention of the printing press. More risk taking literary journals. More independent small presses. Makes me excited to be a writer and excited to be an editor/publisher. These are great times for short fiction—savor!

Here's an opportunity for a free sample from j. a. tyler, he writes:

charles lennox turned in this fantastically explosive text A FIELD OF COLORS to ml press & we, well, we wanted to share it with everyone.

email me at author@aboutjatyler.com with your mailing address & I will send you a copy of this volume, free.

current subscribers will also receive this free title; in fact, it will be in the mail today, so keep an eye out.

this will continue through the entire month of june, so please link, post, etc. - let's see how many copies of this volume we can get out and into the world.

& if you like it, then think about a six-month subscription: $36 = 18 more volumes + our first novel(la) WE TAKE ME APART by molly gaudry.

And you have been reading mud luscious, haven't you? The April issue has work from Peter Berghoef, Sean Ruane, Jennifer Pieroni, Sara Reihani, P. H. Madore, C. L. Bledsoe, Nathaniel Tower, Molly Gaudry, Ryan W. Bradley, Ravi Mangla, Shome Dasgupta, Sean Lovelace, David Erlewine, Zachary C. Bush, Barry Graham, Lydia Copeland, Conor Robin Madigan, Liz Hall, and Peter Schwartz.

Short Story Month - Larry Brown - Facing the Music

Thought I'd end SSM with Facing the Music by Larry Brown because the stories in the collection are a mixture of experimentalism, and traditional stories with down-n-out Carver characters. In the traditional stories Brown does a couple of things really well. He captures character voice; you can hear these characters talking as they narrate. The other thing is he gets his characters to the point where they know they are screwing up, puts them right at the point where all they have to do is stop, even has them express it, but they continue on. He does this a few times, really captures the descent into self-destructive behavior. “Kubuki Rides (This is it)” nails the alcoholic at that irrational rationalizing stage. Although the last paragraph seemed off-key, “Night Life” is a relentless tale of a self-destructive bar pick-up. “Facing the Music” is a great story about a husband and wife dealing with her mastectomy. The cool thing is that her mastectomy is never mentioned, not even alluded to in fact, we know she’s had one by everything else that is revealed—just beautifully done. “Old Frank and Jesus” is a pretty good story about a guy about to commit suicide and it seems a quite realistic rendering of the state of mind of a guy who feels the weight of the final straw. The nice thing is, and this contrasts well with the other stories, is that the guy is not self-destructive, or even self-pitying. Of the three experimental stories, “Leaving Town” works best. The experiment here is to have alternating first person narrators. The shattering of the pickle jar display is neat symbolic trick at the end. “Boy and Dog” is more like a poem, each line is five words, but it is not “poetic,” gets its power instead from its flat narrative. “Julie: A Memory” didn’t work for me as well as the others. At the end I had a sense of what happened, but the experimental technique was too distracting. It’s a single paragraph that goes on for 15 pages. There are several narrators—couldn’t figure out how many—describing the events by alternating sentences. Some of the narrators seem to be telling the story in the opposite order as the other narrators. Interesting idea, but distracting and somewhat confusing, or maybe I just wasn't in the mood to work that hard.

Short Story Month - Donna D. Vitucci - Night Train

Sensual and moody, hot and moon-ey, with rich character infected language, and a propulsive desire-driven structure is "Leo Moon" by Donna D. Vitucci from Night Train Magazine. Right off in the first several sentences we are within the moment and within the character:

Driveway grit, itchy like everything, stuck to Lori's bare thighs, where she sat cross-legged in very short shorts, ready to assist Cliff. In the way a surgeon demanded of his nurse, "Scalpel!" she would hand him what he asked for. She liked imagining herself doing that. She didn't care how they spent Friday night as long as they spent it together, and he'd be so ever-lovin' grateful his girlfriend cared about cars.

And then it's game on in this great little paragraph. I love the way the tools are used to convey how she wanted her kiss to make him feel.

They passed the smoke back and forth without speaking and, when she and Cliff kissed, she tasted what she imagined as diesel mixed with weed in the back of his throat. She hoped to rattle him as much as his garage torque and his air gun, to compete, but he pulled himself up by the fender and said "Hold the thought."

When Cliff doesn't give her the attention she craves, Lori wanders over to a neighbor:

He'd mowed crazy around chairs scattered in party leftover. Older than Lori, he floated to her in cut-offs, in combat boots, and bare-chested. His face was a smudge in the dark. She couldn't look beyond his thick neck begging for her hands there.

Oh, these men and their machines. She enjoys a ride on his lawnmower before returning to man one:

Wakefulness and headache glued her newly into Cliff's arms, the Malibu's sun-bleached upholstery itching her bare back, grass clippings in the sweat between her toes. He didn't ask where she'd been, just brought her close and loved her up. Could a girl garner too much loving? She decided, no.

Is one story by DDV enough? No. You can start with "Where the Spirit Leads" from STORYGLOSSIA issue 24.

Short Story Month -Roxane Gay - Word Riot

Roxane Gay's story "Bone Density" from the April 2009 issue of Word Riot is the kind of story that it is easy to become immersed in as the narrator begins describing in beautifully specific detail the nuances of her relationships with her husband and with her lover and the different needs each fulfills for her. One neat move that pulled me deeper into the story is when the clichéd situation is acknowledged:

Our relationship is like this—a terrible cliché. He is that professor who has torrid but discreet (or are they discrete?) affairs with research assistants and students and strangers he meets in hotel bars. He knows I know. I know he knows I know. It's an interesting equation. But we pretend that we're both faithful and true. The lie suits us and I refuse to play the part of the dissatisfied, jealous wife. I'm not dissatisfied. I know who I married. And I have secrets of my own. There's a poet, Bennett, who lives in a cabin on the other side of town. He has no telephone, lives nearly off the grid. He is completely different from David—dark, unhappy, brooding. He is enamored with the idea of himself as a tortured poet in search of his own Walden Pond. Bennett's self-involvement turns me on.

This may seem counterintuitive, but I think it is always a good strategy to come right out and acknowledge the surface weakness, that you are heading into well-trodden territory. For one thing, readers are going to think it anyway. When the writer puts it out there, says, yes I know this is not a new theme, she's throwing down, saying that she is going to show you something new, and she does. Not that the relationships necessarily break the mold, it's the writing about those relationships that is not clichéd; it is detailed, specific, nuanced, and voiced in a way that makes you forget that these relationships are a "terrible cliché," because when they are rendered with this much particularity they are unique.

Short Story Month -Kim Parko - DOGZPLOT

One of the pleasures of reading flash fiction is that the form accommodates so many different styles. What I enjoyed the most about Kim Parko's thirty-one flashes in her chapbook The Rest of The World Seems Unlikely is the sense of fun in the pieces. Most of them have surrealistic elements reminiscent of pre-world war II french poetry—Max Jacobs is first to mind—that seems fresh now. Here's a sample from "Hand:"

After sunset, Marla went out to the barn and unburied her hand. Her hand had been severed from her many years ago, but still she kept it warm under the hay. Her hand had grown a little mouth with baby teeth. She fed it leftovers for dinner.

In all of Parko's pieces the language flows naturally from sentence to sentence even when the succession of images move away from each other. The pieces cohere and dissemble at the same time, which builds anticipation and yields surprise. Here's "Mouth" from DOGZPLOT flash fiction.

Kim Parko's chapbook of flash fiction The Rest of The World Seems Unlikely is available from the DOGZPLOT Achilles Chapbook Series for $5. Treat yourself and support an independent press at the same time!

Short Story Month -T.J. Forrester - Harpur Palate

T. J. Forrester's "The Revolving Door," which appeared in the Winter 2006/2007 print issue of Harpur Palate and is now available online as a PDF, is the kind of story one expects to find in the Best American Short Stories or the O'Henry anthologies. It takes on the biggest of all themes: Death. Not only is the narrator, Chad Quail, dying in hospice, but he's also guilt ridden because he's potentially infected as many as 90 women. As the story progresses and the patients he shares hospice with keep dying he systematically writes letters to his former lovers. I won't give this story away because if you haven't read it yet you deserve the pleasure of the ending. This is the classic well-made story. Strong voice, concrete details, emotional arc, structured to rise and fall, rise and fall, with subject matter that is both uncomfortable and satisfying. Just the kind of story one expects to find in those award anthologies and deserving of more than the Pushcart nomination it received from Harpur Palate. T.J. just landed a book deal (congratulations!) so here's hoping the collection scores big.

Be sure to check out his also Pushcart nominated "To the Bone" in STORYGLOSSIA issue 29.

Short Story Month - Jessa Marsh - decomP

The June issue of decomP is up and I just loved the gritty, dark, and brutally honest "My Motel Week" by Jessa Marsh.

Anna rolls onto those thick hips, looks right at me, right into the blacks of my eyes. I am taking her in, surveying her landscape, the porcelain skin, the freckles dotting her breasts in circles around pale pink nipples, when she says, “Just like you, babe. He was an old pervert just like you. Except of course you have two legs, so you have no excuses. Two legs, two arms, two eyes. You had a chance to be normal and you fucked it up.”
   “I’m not a fuck-up,” I say. As soon as the words hit the air I realize how meek they sound, like the protesting of a kid who knows he’s been caught in the act of writing on his bedroom walls.
   “In what world are you not a fuck-up? Do people with their shit together bail on their entire lives like you did, mid-business trip nonetheless. I mean, wasn’t that important? And you just gave up on it to fuck around with me. Not that I’ve minded. Much. You’ve had your fun moments.”

Let me just confess right now to both editor and writer envy. I wish I'd been the one to publish this story and also to have written that exchange. Look at how that one word sentence at the end just kills. "Much." Need I say that this story does not end in a happy place, that there won't be many more fun moments. But don't let that scare you away because you'll miss out on a gem of story that puts you in another's shoes. Although essentially a slice-of-life story focusing on a turning point moment, it also pushes outward, showing more of Anna via her actions, and more of the narrator as he relates this present to the parts of his life that have come undone. If you still like gritty realism, this is a story for you.

Short Story Month - Blake Butler - Abjective

Abjective is a new journal that in its prose selections is emphasizing language over the tenets of traditional realism. This type of fiction is most enjoyable if you are able to set aside what Barthes referred to as your readerly expectations—the need for fiction to maintain the status quo of traditional style and content—and embrace more writerly texts, those texts where language, form, and content are presented in a manner meant to destabilize a reader's expectations. Witness on pg. 56 by Blake Butler is an example of such a text. Here's how it begins:

In the room I watched them muddle, their limbs and lungs a splintered sprawl, the moisture beading on the flood doors where in their sleep the room would fill with mush: another rash condition of containment enforced and overseen in lifelong plan. I could not bring myself sometimes to see the seam set in the child's forehead open up . . .

With this type of writing, nothing is given, you must be prepared to participate in the text, to interpret, to supplement, yes, to write it as you read.

Short Story Month - Brian Evenson - Unsaid

"Storybarkers: A Report From The Field" by Brian Evenson from Issue 2 of Unsaid is a clever mashup of a technical report and a polemic against certain Midwestern writing workshops. A machine that peels bark from trees as part of a lumber mill operation is transformed into a machine that removes style from stories in Midwestern story mill workshops.

Barkers now used in the Midwestern fiction workshops operate according to three radically different principles. In one type, style is “barked” by the friction of the words tumbling against one another; in a second type, it is beaten off the story by hammers and flails; and in the third type, it is cut off or peeled free by rotating knives. In all three, style will be more easily removed if it has been given several weeks to harden and dry.

Evenson then goes on to describe three different types of machines, skillfully transforming the technical writing so that the writing workshops get the skewer:

The lathe-type peeler automatically centers the ends of the story on a powerdriven chuck or dog. The story is then mechanically turned slowly against faster-turning cutter heads mounted athwart a motor-driven shaft. A selfcontained motor of 17 h.p. is used for power. When turned, these stories are perfectly cylindrical and have no taper. Four men operating this machine can produce from 120 to 200 workshop-ready sentences per hour.

This is classic satire in the Swift tradition, where the absurdity of a practice—in this case the stripping of individual style that takes place in writing workshops—is highlighted when it is dropped into another context where heightened efficiency of an analogous practice is desired. Humor is always an effective weapon.

Also hard not to love Evenson's conclusion:

We cannot conclude this report without a brief personal note on the dangers of story barkers. In our travels through Iowa we saw ample evidence of injuries as a result of incorrect or careless deployment of barkers . . . not to mention the thousands and thousands of mutilated and now useless stories. It is perhaps for this reason that many workshops still rely heavily on hand-peeling or have rejected the workshop process altogether, opting instead for each author to peel his own work in private.

Short Story Month - Lisa Lim - Guernica

"The 24-Hour Date" by Lisa Lim in Guernica is the kind of piece I'm seeing appear more and more often. It uses an explicit and highly visible structural device: "the date" is broken up into 24 sections, one for each hour. The text—the description of each hour—is an almost desperate attempt to not make meaning in a conventional way. Most of these fictions appear to be written by writers based in New York City. Mmmm. ??? Just a coincidence, surely.

Anyway, "The 24-Hour Date" is fresh, disturbing, entertaining, annoying, funny, and very very dark and cynical, even as it tries to affect disaffection. It's just play, right? Just dress-up. I'm not fooled. Immense pain is what's dressed-up. Excessive care taken to mean so little yet reveal so much. Or not, maybe it is just a game. After all, she promises hickies on the second date.

Short Story Month - Sean Lovelace - Hobart

Sean Lovelace's "How I Run" from the current issue of Hobart (web) is a sad, heartbreaking story just the way I like them—but then I've always been a sucker for stories whose character's lives are unraveling. I know some prefer to see characters change (meaning, for the better), seek that moment, or at least a hint, of redemption (please, give me something to cling to), and I'm not opposed to that leg up, just don't think it is necessary for a story to satisfy. I'm quite content to take the emotional pummeling and leave it at that. Aren't we most real when we are on the edge of disintegration? When our carefully—or not so—constructed lives and facades are revealed as inadequate, in need of renovation?

Such is the emotinal locale of the narrator in "How I Run." She has recently divorced or separated from her husband. She has a daughter she didn't want: "Another baby, or divorce. I need this." was the ultimatum her husband gave. Now he's gone. The baby, April, remains:

Her favorite thing is to stand. She gazes all around, this new perspective. If she can stand, just stand there swaying, legs quivering, her tiny hand grasping a coffee table's edge, she's content.

There's a boy, too:

Daniel likes to crawl into the recliner, crouch there under the folds of his blanket, his head swiveling, watching. He studies the room; flinches as the central air kicks on. "What are you doing?" I ask him one evening. He gives me a look for disrupting his vigil, his silent alertness. He hisses, "I'm a deer. They're hunting me."

And a dog:

The dog has wrapped her leash around the base of the birdfeeder pole. The more she struggles, the tighter the knot. She's strangling herself.

I love how those descriptions reveal so much about her life. Our narrator, a runner, hits bottom following an injury to her achilles tendon:

Medications, physical therapy, heel lifts, new shoes—nothing helped. For months, trapped in the cage of my hobbled body, softening with self pity, insomnia. Losing the angles of my body, the honed edges. An injury is a betrayal to a runner. A cold, stinging fog.

The language in this story is completely character infected—the words feel hers—and the story unfolds within those words rather than from an arc (plot) prescribed by an author bent on telling a story. This is what character-based fiction is all about. The character (with apologies to Gass) inhabits the page/screen and story emerges in the most magical way: via intuition. Or for you left-brainers—inductively—from clues.

Short Story Month - Jo Page - Our Stories

Here's another traditionally styled story, also with a neat reversal at the end: AAA by Jo Page from Our Stories. I'll leave the ending for you to appreciate on your own this time and will just highlight one moment of maximum tension and menace. The setup begins with the first sentence: "Jane's car had stalled out at the crest of a blind curve on a winding, wooded road thirty miles from the retreat center." Of course, she has no cell reception. She waits. A pick-up truck approaches. We've seen this movie: DON'T GET IN THE TRUCK. She does. Small talk as they wind down back roads to his house. Wine? No. Yes. Then this:

And then he said, “You know, you’re pretty,” and her stomach lurched.
    “Ah, look, thanks, that’s nice of you to say,” she said, “But please, I’d really like to go back to my car and wait for the AAA guy.”
    “I know,” he said, “But there’s time.”
    Time for what? she thought. Then she stopped herself from thinking. The silence between them lengthened. Finally, Tom said, “Why don’t you take off your tee-shirt?”
    “What?” Jane waited for him to tell her it was a joke—though some kind of a sick one. She set the wine on the coffee table.
    “Why don’t you just take off your tee-shirt?”
    “No. No, thanks. I don’t think so,” she heard herself say politely, as if turning down a piece of pie.
    “Come on, don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m telling you. Why don’t you take off your shirt?”
    “I really don’t want to,” she said, feeling lightheaded and dizzy. She got to her feet. Why had she let this happen? Why had she gotten into his truck?
    “Hey, hey. Don’t worry. Calm down. I just want to make you feel good. Take off your shirt.”
    His voice was gentle, but this time it was more command than question.
    “No, I want to go. Really. Just take me back.”
    “I’ll take you back. AAA won’t be there for an hour. Take your shirt off.”
    “No!” she said.
    “I won’t hurt you.”

Yeah, you'll probably want to see where the story goes from there.

Short Story Month - Ravi Mangla - Storyglossia

Thought I'd break ranks with some of my recent posts and point you to a straight forward bit of realism: Ravi Mangla's "Reunion" from the current issue of STORYGLOSSIA. I'm going to discuss the ending, which will ruin the story for you if you haven't read it, so take five minutes—it's under a thousand words—and read.

This is one of those stories that when it came in as a submission and I saw the title my immediate reaction was no, I don't want to read about any reunions. And then the first sentence: "It was a male equivalent of a baby shower . . . " Okay, you have no idea the massive resistance I was building up to this story in the first fifteen seconds.

Now that you've read the story, see that textbook foreshadowing in the second paragraph?

I'll never forget that day before winter break senior year when he drank his weight in wine coolers and beer, fell asleep in a mound of snow, and woke up with frostbite. They severed off the three middle toes on his right foot at the Student Health Center. Over the next semester, he trained himself to open beer bottles with his two-toed foot. It became the source of bar bets, the parlor trick of all parlor tricks.

First time through the story that description was an amusing anecdote, a bit of color that kept me reading, but it's also absolutely necessary for the ending to work.

What I love about the ending is the way it reverses my expectations of where the story was going. As you were reading didn't you see the fight coming? And then, bam, they're off their bar stools and within head-butting range:

I couldn't believe it. It all made sense now. He'd invited me to keep some competitive streak burning. What was he trying to prove? I should have had the strength to let it go, been the bigger man, but I couldn't. I got off my stool; he got off his. We stood nose-to-nose. I felt the hot alcohol on his breath. He didn't blink or shift his focus; his eyes were red and glowing.

We wait for the inevitable first blow, for the story to wrap up with a winner and a loser. We just don't know yet who it's going to be.

Instead, Mangla treats us to the "cool wisp of air rising from the neck" of a beer bottle as the "parlor trick" from the second paragraph returns, "perfected" now, to captivate everyone and defuse the situation:

We huddled around him, a few stray diners squeezed in between us. An older woman recorded the feat on her cell phone. Two of Hal's coworkers bought another four beers each. They were making a bet on how many bottles he could open in a row. "Keep 'em coming. I can go all day," Sully said. Waiters and waitresses stopped and watched, set down their serving trays. The bartender smiled, shook his head, and with a damp rag wiped the bar clean.

Just a wonderful example of a surprising, but right ending—the kind of ending realism lives for. No character epiphany here, just the sense that yes, if a bar fight could be averted, it might happen as Mangla envisions.

I crave the edgy, the shock of the new, as much as anyone, but surely there's still space in our literature for the shock of the familiar, for life as we experience it.

Short Story Month - Max Apple - The Oranging of America

Okay fans of George Saunders, if you haven't read The Oranging of America by Max Apple you need to scrounge up a copy. First published in 1976, the ten stories in this collection will also find readers among those who enjoy the early stories of T. C. Boyle (which were published ten years after Oranging). Saunders really has nothing on the early Max Apple, so Saunders fans should definitely seek out this hard to find (and possibly out-of-print) collection. Just for flavor, here's the first paragraph of "Inside Norman Mailer:"

So what if I could kick the shit out of Truman Capote, and who really cares that once in a Newark bar, unknown to each other, I sprained the wrist of E. L. Doctorow in a harmless arm wrestle. For years I've kicked around in out-of-the-way places, sparred for a few bucks or just for kicks with the likes of Scrap Iron Johnson, Phil Rahv, Kenny Burke, and Chico Vejar. But, you know, I'm getting older too. When I feel the quick arthritic pains fly through my knuckles, I ask myself, Where are your poems and novels? Where are your long-limbed girls with cunts like tangerines? Yes, I've had a few successes. There are towns in America where people recognize me on the street and ask what I'm up to these days. "I'm thirty-three," I tell them, "in the top of my form. I'm up to the best. I'm up to Norman Mailer."