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stories
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02.16.12Showing2011 was my year of finding homes for difficult stories. "Showing" didn't get rejected by as many journals as did Open Every Womb and Summer Rotation, but it still took a few years to find its perfect home. That home, it turns out, was with The Packinghouse Review. You can get a copy of volume 2, #2 here. This story grew out of two places and some drawings. The first place was the Godschalx Gallery at St. Norbert College, a small space in one of the campus buildings that shows both student and professional works. The second was the Riverview Café, a ...
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12.28.11Award nominations for 2011I'm hugely honored that my publishers have nominated two of my works for annual awards this year. Dad's Eye View, my book about great kids' activities in the Twin Cities from Minnesota Historical Society Press, has been nominated for the Minnesota Book Awards. Sponsored by the The Friends of the St. Paul Public Library, the Minnesota Book Awards showcases books by Minnesota authors and Minnesota presses; in the past, the finalists have included writers like Anton Treuer, Kevin Kling, Kate DiCamillo, Eleanor Arnason, and Bill Holm--a pretty great group. This year's finalists will be announced January 29th. And in a surprising bit ...
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09.27.11Summer RotationIt's the season for my more difficult stories to find homes! In July, Open Every Womb landed at Atticus Review; next month, a story that made about eight outings over as many years (some publishers respond very slowly ...) will come out; and last weekend, Summer Rotation went up at NONTRUE. This story went out twelve times over eight years before finding its place, but I believe that eventually every story finds its place. "Summer Rotation" takes place in the context of the "Army brat" world. I've only found a few examples of military dependents in fiction: The Way the Crow ...
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07.19.11Open Every WombI'm very excited that my story "Open Every Womb" has finally found a home; it appears in this week's story collection online from the Atticus Review. I wrote this story in 2004, and it went out to 24 periodicals before Atticus picked it up. I'm a firm believer that every story has a home; finding that home is one of the toughest parts of the writing game. Until now, Among the Moabites has been the hardest to place, and it only had to go through nine submissions to land at Cherry Bleeds and, a year later, at Pseudopod. In some ways "Open ...
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06.16.10For Bloomsday: “Summer Reading”In honor of Bloomsday, I'm resurrecting a story of mine that plays around with Faulkner, Hemingway, Kerouac, and Joyce: Summer Reading, originally published in the now-defunct Somewhat.org in 2005: The summer everyone read Faulkner, I read Hemingway. Out of spite. It's a slight piece, but kind of fun, and I think within the spirit of Leopold Bloom's peripatetic journey.
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05.28.10Fare thee well, PindeldybozThe news arrived in my inbox this morning that Pindeldyboz, one of the pioneers of on-line fiction publishing, is shutting down after a 10 year run. Executive editor Whitney Pastorek explains: 10 years is a good solid run -- centuries in internet time -- and I could not be prouder of what we've accomplished. I know that I would literally not have my current job were it not for Pboz; I would not have many of my current friends. I also know there are lots of younger journals out there tearing it up, carrying the torch of online fiction into ...
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12.01.09#freeeday offerings: two story collectionsToday only, get Pieces and Fifteen Other Stories as a free PDF download, plus the three-story collection Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny. Click the cover image to download. Pieces and fifteen other storiesThe sixteen stories in this collection explore the ways we build our sense of self out of our relationships to memory, history, and the people around us. They recognize our frailties, and are generous with our dreams. From estate sales to birthday parties, from skyscrapers' roofs to cubicle farms, the characters in these stories grapple with the disappointments and exultations of the modern world. Ontogeny Recapitulates PhylogenyThree tales that are neither fish ...
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09.30.09Pieces for the Left HandTiny Upstate townUndergoes many changesNonetheless endures."Brevity," from Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert LennonThe 100 anecdotes collected in Pieces for the Left Hand are loosely held together by a setting (a small upstate New York town and its environs) and a narrative consciousness (an unemployed man who muses on these tales as he takes a daily walk). All are very brief--none more than three pages--and most have a gnomic or aphoristic quality. They touch on themes of mistaken identity, the pitfalls of memory, and unanticipated consequences, often refusing to come to a clear resolution. In many ways, ...
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09.18.09Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book StoreImagine the volume of a normal store turned on its side: It was absurdly narrow and dizzyingly tall. And the shelves went all the way up—five stories of books. The whole place was dim and dusty; you couldn’t even really see the ceiling. Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store, available free to read at the previous link or free to listen to on Escape Pod, is a delightful story about mystery, immortality, and the fate of the book in the digital age. Set in the midst of our current recession, it straddles the worlds of a fanciful antiquarian bookshop ...
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09.05.09Troll’s Eye ViewAnd what, one might wonder, was the slight, pernicious habit that blemished my otherwise purely beneficent character? To be brief, I kill and eat human babies. 'Skin by Michael Cadnum, from Troll's Eye View Troll's Eye View is a collection of stories revisiting well-known fairy tales--Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, Molly and the Giants--often from the villain's point of view. It's a mixed bag of stories: some are slightly skewed re-tellings, some are realistic stories informed by the themes and structures of fairy tales, and some are new tales that add meat to the well-gnawed bones. Some of the stories work well, ...
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