Happy weekend, readers, and happy Labor Day weekend to my fellow U.S. Americans. I hope you’re all able to get some down time this weekend, unless you, like me, are taking part in Jami Attenberg’s Mini 1000 writing exercise this weekend, in which case, I hope your labors are fruitful.
If you’re in need of some fresh reading material to wind down your summer and move into fall, here are five goodies I’ve selected just for you:
1 – Before your summer dissipates into the ether like the final wisps of the night’s last cigarette, read this hauntingly beautiful poem, “Lit Cigarette Summer,” by Sage Ravenwood. This poem was featured in issue 1.2 of the literary magazine Scavengers, a publication of Querencia Press. Follow Sage Ravenwood on X/Twitter at @SageRavenwood.
2 – I remember the long summer nights of my childhood chasing lightning bugs and capturing them in Mason jars. Maybe you do, too. Tom McAllister does, and he captures that experience brilliantly in his recent creative nonfiction piece, “When We Used to Glow.” It’s one of many pieces worth reading in the latest issue of Hippocampus Magazine, which publishes only creative nonfiction. (Bonus read: Check out this Q&A with Hippocampus founder and publisher Donna Talarico.)
3 – Perhaps you remember dissecting frogs in your high school biology class? As kids everywhere head off to school this fall, many of them will likely perform the same ritual. In “Dissection,” Rebecca Tiger riffs on that high school rite of passage and other lessons about life, death, and family. This flash fiction story is published in the latest issue of Trampset. Follow Rebecca on X/Twitter at @rtigernyc.
4 – If you’re looking for something to help you as a writer, or to help you feel a little less guilty about all those hours you spent playing Ragnarok Online when you could have been writing, check out “Getting Into Character: How Early 2000s Online Roleplaying Helped My Writing Evolve,” by Melissa McDaniel in Write or Die. Thanks to gaming, “I learned how describing the setting could change the mood of a scene, and how a fleeting memory could bring something new to light. And for the first time, I studied the magic of words: how to make a sentence sing, how to bring a moment to life in a paragraph.” Follow Melissa on X/Twitter at @melissamcd29.
5 – Let’s end on a humorous note. While I was working on a recent post about writing with humor, I was in the depths of a very funny collection of short stories by B.J. Novak (he of The Office fame) called One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories. One of my many favorites from that now-decade-old book, and one that is miraculously available online — on the Wall Street Journal website, of all places — is “The Something by John Grisham.”
Have a good weekend.
AI-generated image.
Andy writes! 