This little story saw print publication in “Ballyhoo Stories,” a now defunct little lit mag of the early aughts. (Remember lit mags? Yeah, me neither …) I actually did a live reading…
Author: Michael Hartford
Quick notes on “Bank Holiday”
I wrote this story in 2005 or 2006, and had it accepted and published at Lily Lit Review in April 2006 — another of the slew of little lit zines of the…
Bank Holiday
This story appeared in Lily Lit Review in April 2006. There’s a tradition of bankers, doctors, and insurance executives being secret poets (think T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Lowell, respectively)…
Among the Moabites
This is kind of a nasty little story. It floated around in the slush pile of several literary and horror publications who rejected it as just a bit too dark before it…
Dyspepsia at 400 feet
Born in Casper, Wyoming, in 1922, Laurie Anders was a singer and actress in the early years of television, gaining some fame on the “The Ken Murray Show,” where she sang “I…
After Ice Cream
This little story was, I think, my first publication of the 21st century, appearing Eyeshot in 2004. Do you remember Eyeshot, webzines, and the Internet when it was weird and fun and…
Excavating the Submission History of a Story
In preparing a bunch of old stories for publication here, on Substack, and on Medium, I discovered that WritersDB, the website that I used to track my story submissions back in the…
Follow me here, on Substack, or on Medium for a free story a week into April and beyond
I spent a good chunk of the day going through my archives of published and nearly-published stories from the last (mumble mumble) years, and have a story a week queued up on…
Famine
I’m digging into my scattered archives and polishing up some old stories, some previously published and some not. I don’t actually recall if this one was ever published; I loaded it to…
“Learning to Talk” by Hilary Mantel
Not having read Mantel’s memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost,” I was a little befuddled by some of these stories – they return again and again to similar settings and situations but with…