I've been submitting to Indiana Review for about a million years now. Lots of nice feedback along the way, and a couple of close calls in their contests, but no paydirt until now: it's a great pleasure for me to be able to say that "Body Asking Shadow" is out in their latest issue, Volume 20, Number 1. Much good company too: Denise Duhamel and Stuart Dybek and Dustin Long and Lucia Perillo for starters.
"Body Asking Shadow" is one of the few stories I've set in China so far. I'm pretty sure more will come later, after we've left. That's usually how it goes.
And, to save you a little googling, the title is from Gary Snyder's amazing translation of Han Shan's Cold Mountain sequence:
"A hill of pines hums in the wind. And now I've lost the shortcut home, Body asking shadow, how do you keep up?"
August 5, 2007, 4:10 p.m.Categories: China, Poetry, Short Stories
It took me a long time to get this story right, but I finally did, and it found a home: it's now out in the Summer 2007 issue of a British litmag called The Reader. It's a great little magazine--they list blurbs from Seamus Heaney and Doris Lessing and Harold Bloom on the back cover--and it's part of an entire... huge... thing at the University of Liverpool. Literary events, outreach, education--they've got it all.
I'm not sure where the center of this story came from, but I remember Walker Percy saying that chickens have no myths, which got me thinking about possible sets of circumstances in which a person might also by mythless, and what the consequences might be.
August 1, 2007, 4:05 p.m.Category: Short Stories
The Spring/Summer '07 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review is out, and it's got a story of mine in it called "Falling Through," which is shacking up with work by Michael Downs and Jack Driscoll, among others. "Falling Through" is tied to a story I had in Harpur Palate last year; whether those ties thicken into ropes or cables of some sort is, at this point, anyone's guess.
July 2, 2007, 10:28 p.m.Category: Short Stories
The New England Review has been one of my favorite litmags ever since the day back in 1998 when in their pages I discovered a fantastic, moving, very funny story by Nicola Mason called "The Lizard Man of Lee County." At that point I hadn't published a single story, and was starting to wonder if the fact that I couldn't land any of the stories that I'd meant to be both funny and moving meant that such stories couldn't be landed. Turns out, they can: mine just weren't funny and/or moving and/or good enough, and Mason was the proof. Which meant that it was okay for me to keep trying.
And to keep submitting stories to The New England Review, of course. For years it was a series of kind but firm rejections from rock-star editor Jodee Stanley, who's now holding the fiction reins at Ninth Letter (for which she has taken a story or too.) Then Stephen Donadio and Carolyn Kuebler took over at NER. They took a story back in 2005, and, I'm pleased to report, have now taken another: "[Exeunt." is now out and about in Volume 28, Number 1, along with other fiction by Stephen Dixon and Steve Almond, poetry by Brian Swann and Elizabeth Haukaas, and a right fair mix of artwork, literary criticism, nonfiction on film and place and literary lives, plus a bit of Virgil. Who doesn't love themself a bit of Virgil?
April 5, 2007, 1:21 p.m.Categories: Litmags, Short Stories
The New Orleans Review, like most everything else in New Orleans, got crushed by Katrina, and the editor, Christopher Chambers, slogged manuscripts from city to city to keep the magazine alive until there was a home to return to. I'd been submitting to them fairly regularly for years before that, got some nibbles but no solid bites. Now the trains are all back on the tracks, and I'm proud to say that a story of mine called "How Things End" is out in Volume 32, Number Two, along with fiction by Dylan Landis and Mario Benedetti, poetry by Michelle Glazer and Bruce Bond, and a moving photographic essay by Jennifer Shaw.
Most of "How Things End" was once part of the first book I published, the novella Nothing in the World. As I've mentioned here and there in interviews, that novella was once a novel, and before that it was a short story. The original short story failed because it was too fragmented, incoherent, even for me. The novel failed because only one of the two story lines was really exploring what most interested me. But when I cut out the other line, there were still sections of it that seemed worthy to me, and that had a sense of continuity amongst them since they were already part of a single narrative. It was a great pleasure for me to have found in the ruins something that could work, albeit in a different form. Oddly (or perhaps not), "How Things End" contains (more coherently, now) three of the four main scenes from the old, abandoned story that started everything off.
April 2, 2007, 10:45 a.m.Categories: Litmags, Photography, Short Stories
And so it's for real: I just got an email from Steven King.
He signs 'Steve.'
That pleases me no end.
And once again, monster credit where due: "Wait" first appeared in The Kenyon Review back in Fall of 2006. David Lynn and Meg Galipault did great work on it, and I am ever so much obliged.
February 21, 2007, 11:28 a.m.Category: Short Stories
So you know how you wait years for something, and it never happens, so you quit waiting, quit hoping, because waiting and hoping is stupid when there's so much work to do? So you just do the work? And then years later the thing happens?
I just found out that Steven King has picked a story of mine for this year's BASS.
The story's called "Wait."
Perfect.
February 20, 2007, 11:11 a.m.Category: Short Stories
Ninth Letter became one of my favorite magazines the very day of its birth back in 2004. They're one of a couple of new magazines that are way out on the edge in terms of design, and the aesthetic results are consistently extraordinary. They're also one of only a few magazines that truly means it when they say that their tastes are formally eclectic: you'll find hardcore realism sitting snug in the love seat with razor-edge experiments. I immediately started submitting to them, was lucky to hit with "Fontanel" in Volume 1, Number 4, and now have a new piece called "Nipparpoq" out in the latest issue: Volume 3, Number 2. Not just me there, either: Rachel Cantor, Oscar Hijuelos, Joe Meno and the sublime (and often very funny) Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti landed fiction, Michael Martone and David Evanier have nonfiction, and Louise Erdrich, Candace Black and Chris Dombrowski have poetry, all just for you.
January 25, 2007, 12:14 p.m.Categories: Art, Litmags, Short Stories
