Some recent reads worth sharing:
Continue reading “Friday Five: on great books, flash fiction, writing advice, late bloomers, and Alice Munro”Category: literary magazines
New work in ‘Club Plum Literary Journal’
A piece I wrote called “The Things My Father Used to Eat” is included in the latest issue of Club Plum Literary Journal. The latest issue went live last Friday. Huzzah!
Image: screenshot of list of contributors to Club Plum Literary Journal, Volume 5, Issue 3
Friday Five: Hippocampus Magazine editor Donna Talarico on creative nonfiction
‘Like fiction, good memoir can also allow people to get lost in another world.’
The literary genre known as creative nonfiction (CNF) has grown in popularity in recent years, and one brilliant and consistent source of great CNF is Hippocampus Magazine. The online literary magazine has been going strong since its debut in 2010.
In today’s Friday Five, Donna Talarico, the magazine’s founder, publisher and managing editor, provides her insights on CNF and the magazine she founded.
Continue reading “Friday Five: Hippocampus Magazine editor Donna Talarico on creative nonfiction”Recently published: ‘Hypnotist’ (short story)
A few months ago, I reviewed several old writings, short stories and essays I’d written in the late 1990s through early 2000s. I set aside several pieces I decided weren’t worthy of further work at this time, and focused on revising or rewriting a few that I thought might find a home in some literary journal. One of them is a 1,500-word short story called “Hypnotist.” I dusted it off, submitted it to five or six journals, and when a brand new student-run journal called Red String contacted me with a request to publish it, I happily and readily agreed. They published the story here a few weeks ago. I’m posting it below as well so that I have it in my archives and to correct the spelling of “Cobain,” which was misspelled in the published version.
Trigger warning: the story is rather dark. Proceed with caution.
Continue reading “Recently published: ‘Hypnotist’ (short story)”Friday Five: literary Easter eggs
Some literary morsels to entertain, inform, and possibly inspire.
On this Good Friday, as we enter Easter weekend, here are five literary morsels — little Easter eggs I recently hunted down to pass along for your reading and listening pleasure. May they provide some amusement, entertainment, and even inspiration.
- 13 Ways of Looking at Socks is one poet’s “meditations on something so deeply mundane that we rarely think about it until we reach into the sock drawer and it’s empty or just sad and disappointing and now you have to do laundry.” The author, Mary Roblyn, wrote it as a riff on Wallace Stevens’ 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. In Roblyn’s case, she accompanies her writing with relevant photos.
- “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” We’ve all heard that old saying, right? Writer B.J. Novak (he of “The Office” fame) takes it literally in this short audio piece, which he and actor Aasif Mandvi read to open a recent episode of the podcast Selected Shorts (highly recommended for fans of short fiction). The story is from Novak’s book of short stories, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories.
- Vermilion Cliffs is a lovely piece of micro fiction by Allison Field Bell, published in Fractured Lit, the online literary journal devoted to flash and micro fiction.
- “Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly/My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,/Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily/Soft-scented in the air for yards around;” — begins Claude McKay’s poem/meditation “The Easter Flower.”
- Here’s the pitch, baseball fans: Some of the greatest books about sports are also about so much more. Just in time for the opening of baseball season, Keith O’Brien, the author of a book about one of the game’s greatest tragic figures, Pete Rose, gives us Greek Tragedy in the Bottom of the Ninth: On Baseball’s High Literary Drama. Play ball!
Photo by Laurentiu Iordache on Unsplash