Emerging Writers Network

Local Writers With New Work

A couple of Ann Arbor writers (even though one is at least semi-residing in lovely Champaign-Urbana these days) have new flash fictions in a couple of the finer online short fiction literary journals.  Matt Bell with How They Were Found and Who They Were That Found Them over at Wigleaf and Aaron Burch with How To and How To over at the December elimae, which posted today.

Both are great examples of flash fiction - wander on over and take a read.

Update:  Like having had to go in and update the post below 10 times since originally posting it isn't enough, Matt Bell necessitates me doing the same with this post by having another flash posted today, this one at Night Train.  This one, "This Showroom Filled With Fabulous Prizes," might just be my favorite of the pieces in Matt's soon to be available chapbook, How the Broken Lead the Blind.

And Elizabeth Ellen has a new story, "The Beaten Path", in the new issue of Lamination Colony.

All three of them have pieces in the new handwritten issue of Keyhole, which is hitting some of your mailboxes as we type/read this.

Lastly, Steven Gillis has seen his novel, Temporary People, listed as one of the best eleven books that literary blogger Anne Clark has read this past year (alongside Austen, Wharton, Nabokov, Petterson, Camus, D'Ambrosio and others!).

Work of the Day - September 3, 2008 - "How to Fold Paper Cranes" by Aaron Burch

It's been a long while since I did one of these but I really enjoyed the new Aaron Burch story up at Pequin, "How to Fold Paper Cranes," a title that doesn't hit you until you're in the last paragraph of this flash.

Within this story, Aaron slides in sentences that are teeming with supposed confusion:

"Straight like an accident, on purpose, like he didn’t know where he was going but he couldn’t wait until she’d left."

"The first time he found it—tucked away, near the back of a drawer they rarely used—he’d been looking for the scissors, or some Post-Its, or a battery, or this receipt."

The receipt?  It's for a shirt, one that the protagonist has never seen.  One that has induced this seeming confusion.  Burch captures this fear and worry and yes, confusion within the narrator's mind extremely well.  Take a look.

Work of the Day - November 2, 2007 - On the Edge by Barry Graham

Storyglossia's Steven McDermott has been publishing some of the best stories around this past year and the new issue is live now.  One of the new stories this time around is Barry Graham's On the Edge, and it's a fitting title.  The story opens:

"I can't remember if it was before or after I pissed on the side of the Grand Canyon, but there was a man standing along the road holding a camera and the car in front of me swerved to avoid hitting a skunk and ran over the man taking pictures of the sun setting behind the canyon."  This is about as far from the edge as Barry's unnamed protagonist ever wanders.

Barry is able to run along an edge of his own, the fine-lined edge of the voice of his protagonist/narrator and not having it fall down the side of being over the edge and becoming campy.  Instead it remains a funny, reckless, fast paced and (I suppose pun intended) edgy voice from beginning to end.

Barry puts the poor bastard through the wringer in On the Edge.  He witnesses the aforementioned death, has an encounter with a spicy chicken burrito that leads to a hilarious bathroom scene, has fun in a bar, and the police do eventually get involved as well, not to mention a not so honest prostitute.  What happened in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas for this poor guy, and we have Barry Graham to thank for that.  Go take a peek yourself.

Work of the Day - The Carousel by Cory Garfin

From the Fall 07 ZYZZYVA (and I'm late to it, but Howard Junker's doing some great work with this west coast based journal) comes "The Carousel," Cory Garfin's first published story.

Cory does one of the things I like best (as regulars here might be aware), starting the story off with a sentence that makes me want to read that second sentence:

"My parents install an old-fashioned carousel in their house once I move out."

It seems mom and dad needed something to do with the narrator and his sister (whose room has been converted into a petting zoo) moved out.  They've even brought grandpa and grandma into the operation.  Garfin does a nice job with his narrator's voice - there's a bit of wonderment, but not so much as to put the reader off.  The story's pace also works well - it's not a long story, and to me, just enough happens to keep my interest.  I'll be reading more of ZYZZYVA, and looking for more of Garfin's name in the future.

Work of the Day - August 21, 2007 - So Far from Anything by Benjamin Percy

After the slight gimmickery with the Lombreglia story last month, Esquire goes hog wild this month with Benjamin Percy's new story, "So Far from Anything."

Page 29 - A footer reads:

"When it is dark, when you are alone and driving through northern Wisconsin - so" --->

Page 32 - A footer reads:

"far from anything - and when your eyelids feel as though heavy weights hang from them" --->

and the story continues, throughout the entire magazine, one line at a time.  The idea is that this is just a page turner, you'll continue.  Personally, I'm going to state a preference for stories being all together, in continuous pages.  I'm not even big on reading 90% of the story with the final few paragraphs at the end of the magazine.

That said, I turned those pages, from 29 through 244.  Percy's protagonist is forced to consider his own level of morality while the reader is considering their dedication to the reading of the story. 

My favorite page?  88:

"comes to a rocking halt.  'Jesus,' you say into the rapidly deflating air bag, 'Christ.'" --->

Work of the Day - August 20, 2007 - Winter Memories of the Summer Bear by Kimberly Willardson

"Winter Memories of the Summer Bear" by Kimberly Willardson is the winner of the American Short Fiction 2007 Short Story Contest, as judged by Dan Chaon.

Written in 19 vignettes, ranging from four short sentences to nearly two full pages, with headers such as JULY 5, SHE'S BACK, and THEN, LATE AUGUST CAME, Willardson's bear story captures a woman in mid-life crisis, and her slightly unique method of dealing with it - taking on ownership of a retired circus bear.

"MIDSUMMER

Sammi Taylor bought a bear.  Most women Sammi knew, near her certain age, want  Manolo Blahnik shoes, boob jobs, emerald earbobs, Botox, secret lovers, brand-spanking-new SUV's, knee lifts, or remodeled granite kitchens with Viking stoves.  But Sammi bought a brown bear."

Willardson does a really nice job of capturing Sammi's crisis, her exuberance with the bear, and moves the story forward to a rather surprising, but very fitting, ending.

Work of the Day - August 19, 2007 - Goat's Feet by Stanley Gazemba

"Goat's Feet" by Stanley Gazemba was published in Crossing Borders issue 12.  It begins:

"Akinyi finished an entry she was filing in her computer and shut down the machine. She leaned back in her comfortable leather chair and gave a yawn. Through the netting in the window the palm fronds swayed lightly in the cool evening breeze blowing from the direction of the ocean. The palms were tall and slender against the darkening backdrop. Their shaggy crowns reaching upwards whipped left and right in the breeze like long brooms sweeping the dusty sky. She rose and walked out of her tiny office into the corridor. Only one light at the last room to the right, the security office, was still on. The rest of the block was deserted."

And with this last line, Gazemba sets up his story - Akinyi becomes quite nervous about the time, and the fact that she's alone.  The rest of the story follows Akinyi's plight as she tries to get home, and Gazemba does a great job of getting the reader inside her head, as most of the story is told from that very place - after she finally catches a bus, her thoughts spin:

"Akinyi was vaguely troubled. She realised what it was bothering her when next the driver changed gears. It was the odd scraping of his feet on the bare floor every time he released the pedals.

A dim interior light hang from a wire on the roof. In the dim light spilling into the front cabin the driver's legs tapered downwards into the darkness, the bony sharply-angled knees poking through the thin fabric of his trousers. Either her eyes were playing tricks with her or she was giving in to her earlier paranoia. For where the man's shoe-clad feet should have been she thought she saw a set of hooves, more like a goat's, peeking out through the flared trouser hems. And they were pumping the pedals with the ease of normal human feet that had been long at the job."

The reader is treated from there to Akinyi's continued descent into panic driven, albeit mis-directed (or was it?  Gazembo does a truly nice job in writing the story so that the reader must decide), fear.

Work of the Day - August 18, 2007 - Goodbye My Loveds by Laura van den Berg

Another story pulled from the Summer 2007 issue of American Short Fiction.  It's a piece by Laura van den Berg, who we've praised here before, though there's a nice contrast as this piece is a much longer one.

The story begins:

"My brother enters my room at dawn.  He wants to show me the hole outside our building.  I get out of bed and he drags me through the blue-black light of our basement apartment.  He's twelve, although most people think he's younger.  I don't tell him I was already awake, lying on my back and gazing at the ceiling, trying hard to return to sleep until my alarm sounded, trying hard to be normal."

As I re-read it while typing, I'm reminded of an aspect of van den Berg's writing I'm frequently impressed with - she brings things up, things the reader needs to know, in fact oftentimes the true crux of what drives her stories forward, in a casual manner.  She gets to them when needed.  She's not in a rush to blurt it out in the reader's face.  She doesn't start the story with a statement from the narrator about how her life isn't normal, or about how she can't sleep and is lying in bed just waiting for her alarm clock to ring.  She gets to it after a few other details, bits of information that are also necessary to the story, even if that striving for normalcy is the main issue she's writing about.

I don't find this to be a common ability in younger writers, and is a reason I continue to look for literary journals that include the name Laura van den Berg in their table of contents.

Work of the Day - August 17, 2007 - The Turnaround is at Hand by Ralph Lombreglia

I went looking for the September Esquire believing I'd find a new story by Benjamin Percy.  It was not to be (apparently his story will be in the next issue, due out in a week or so), but my disappointment was short-lived - the September issue has a new story, "The Turnaround is at Hand", by Ralph Lombreglia!!!

There is a little header on the title page:  Four reasons to read this story, and reason 3 is "It's the first new story in five years by Ralph Lombreglia, a funny, remarkable fiction writer who teaches at MIT."  That alone is more than just reason to read the story, it's enough reason to shell out the $4 and pick up the copy of Esquire.

Reason 2 is "You'll never guess how it ends."  Whoever put this list together was right - the whole last section was a surprise to me.  I'll leave it to you to find out reasons 1 and 4, but give you a brief taste of Lombreglia's writing:

     "The train began to taxi again, gliding out over the water.  Across the river, the spectacular slab of green glass called the Hancock Building carried the painterly reflection of its predecessor, the old Hancock, just the way it did in postcards.  It was a lovely city for a crushing reversal of fortune.  Half asleep, Hook closed his eyes for takeoff, though he was standing upright holding a pole.  Thinking he was flying, he panicked for a second when the train tipped downward, not upward, and plunged underground.

     He hadn't been on an airplane in more than a week -- the longest stretch on the ground he could remember.  He lived on airplanes.  He lived by airplanes.  His son had grown up calling him Airplane Man.  Commercial pilots didn't log the miles Hook flew every year.  True, the FAA wouldn't let them, on grounds of reckless endangerment.  But now the judge presiding over Hook's divorce had forbidden him to board any airplanes or otherwise leave town while his wife's attorneys examined his books and taxes, trying to find the assets she was convinced he was hiding.  It was the only time Hook could recall wishing his wife was right.  Alas, he was not hiding anything -- or at least, not any money."

Work of the Day - August 16, 2007 - Winter Life by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell has a new short story in the most recent Alaska Quarterly Review (Vol. 24 No. 3-4), and it's a good example of putting together a solid first paragraph, in regards to the rest of your story:

"Trisha and Harold were more-or-less happily married four years, despite Trisha's late night drinking and her bouts of weeping, which had gotten more frequent since the war in Iraq, where her brother was now in his third tour of duty.  one late evening when it was too cold to snow, when Harold was already stretched out in bed reading, Trisha leaned against the bedroom doorframe to keep her balance and said, "I think I'll call Stuart."  Usually Harold would have said, "That sounds like a bad idea, Trish," but this evening he had been quieter than usual and now he just shook his head and went back to reading.  Trisha felt the floor creak beneath her all along the hallway and into the kitchen.  The wood of these old floors expanded in summer, shrank in winter."

I refer to it in reference to the rest of the story because every little detail she slipped into this paragraph, this opener, is utilized later within the story.  The fact that Trisha drinks has an effect on the story.  Calling an individual named Stuart certainly does.  The brother in Iraq does.  Even the expanding in summer, shrinking in winter can be seen in only a slightly different way, within the bulk of the story itself.

Reading the story the first time, it was nice, as a reader, to have at least a bit of knowledge any time the story drifted off towards a different focal point.  Reading it for the second time, I was struck by just how subtly she weaved facts into that first paragraph that really did matter later through the story.