My new short story, “The Open Air,” appears in the July issue of Numéro Cinq. About the strange world of office work, it incorporates thoughts and things I’ve experienced over the past couple decades working in offices and corporate highrise towers in different cities across America. Office environments are some of the oddest places I’ve ever been in. How these so-called corporate cultures develop and how people survive in them is fascinating, something I’m sure I’ll end up writing more about later on.
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Kingdom of Reversal
My 200-word piece, “Kingdom of Reversal,” appears in the current issue of The Bohemyth.
It’s about the last deer my father shot before he died in 2012 after many years with cancer. It’s also a small attempt to hint at an enormity of things. What a family goes through during a loved one’s treatment, the motions of anger and solace that form grief. I took the picture of him, above, a few years before the last deer, on a cold morning in Michigan.
The June 2015 issue of The Bohemyth brings together texts and visual art by artists from around the world. And the journal’s archives showcase a fantastic mix of traditional and experimental work. I’m grateful to the editors for including my piece, especially to Michael Naghten Shanks.
Rodoreda
Last week I finished reading Mercè Rodoreda’s novel La plaça del diamant and I’m pretty much over the moon about it. She’s quickly jumped up to my list of all-time favorite writers, up there with the likes of Tove Jansson. I may end up writing at length about Rodoreda later this year but that’s an iffy proposition, for various reasons, when I really enjoy an author’s work. For now I’m just in all kinds of crazy love with her work and letting it sink into what I’ve read, appreciating what she represents artistically and historically.
The novel was translated by David H. Rosenthal in 1981 and published by Graywolf under the title, “The Time of the Doves.” A new translation by Peter Bush called “In Diamond Square” was published in 2013 in the UK from Virago. I highly recommend Rodoreda’s selected stories, published by Open Letter in 2011, in superb translation by Martha Tennent. The stories got me hooked on Rodoreda. I held off reading the novel for weeks after I finished the stories. I was afraid the novel wouldn’t be as good. It was. I’m going to start it again this week.
Here’s a quote I liked from near the end of the novel, about the subject of time.
And I got a strong feeling of the passage of time. Not the time of clouds and sun and rain and the moving stars that adorn the night, not spring when its time comes or fall, not the time that makes leaves bud on branches and then tears them off or folds and unfolds and colors the flowers, but the time inside me, the time you can’t see but it molds us. The time that rolls on and on in people’s hearts and makes them roll along with it and gradually changes us inside and out and makes us what we’ll be on our dying day.
New work in progress
I’ve been having fun working on something new, a series of these things that started out as erasures.
For bookstore lovers: A Thousand Lives
Bookstores sustain me–it’s an obvious statement to look at it, but perfectly true. When I first moved to Philly back in 2008 I didn’t feel comfortable until I learned where the bookstores were, first those in my neighborhood, and later on all the other ones around the city. (There are so many good ones and I’m devoted to so many I won’t name a whole bunch because it’ll turn into a silly game of favorites!) I even organized and led an independent bookstore crawl about five years ago. It was so much fun and I hope to do another one some day.
For me these are places where special things will always happen, where I’ll return over and over again, often to get away from things I think I need to avoid for a while, and of course I get to meet folks there and chat and learn about great books or just random things I’ve never heard of.
So being a bookstore sort of person it was inevitable that I’d eventually write at least one short story about them and try to get at what they mean to me, or a version of me. Recently, Jared Daniel Fagen, founder of Black Sun Lit, was kind enough to publish my flash fiction, “A Thousand Lives,” about bookstores, desire, and in a way, eternity. (A certain West Philly bookstore plays an anonymous role in it.)
Black Sun Lit has an impressive archive of online work to explore, and the first issue of their print journal, “Vestiges,” is forthcoming.
Thanks for taking a minute to check out the story. It’s fiction, but entirely true in many ways, too, of course.
‘Ray Apada’ now online
I’m pleased to say that my short story, “Killing Off Ray Apada,” is now available online. It first appeared in print last year in the first issue of gorse, a literary journal based in Dublin.
The story is about friendship, college, art, and regret. Many thanks to gorse editor-in-chief Susan Tomaselli for publishing it online.
If you enjoy experimental writing and haven’t checked out gorse, it’s high time you did. They assemble incredible poems, stories, interviews, and essays for each issue. You can pre-order issue no. 3 now and copies of no. 2 are still available.
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We’ve published work from 93 countries and 65 languages. Our archives include original work by incredible writers, and many Nobel Prize-winners, such as Anne Carson, Can Xue, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, J.M. Coetzee, Lydia Davis, David Mitchell, and many many more. But we need your help! We’ve crossed the $22,000 mark but only have until MIDNIGHT TONIGHT to reach $25,000.
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truce 