Emerging Writers Network

SSME - Patricia Engel's Story to be Published in Collection

Very cool news over at The Roving Editor this morning - that is that Patricia Engel, whose story "Dia" we took a look at here at the EWN during Short Story Month, has just signed a two book deal with Grove/Atlantic and first up will be a story collection (one can only assume "Dia" will be included as it is a great story) due out a little over a year from now in the Fall 2010!

Congratulations to Engel.  This seems overly well deserved and two more books to immediately put on my "Can't wait for" list.

And a reminder for you readers that had a difficult time keeping up with the flurry of posts during Short Story Month, consider making a Dzanc donation to receive the full collection of Short Story Month Essays from here, Matt Bell, Steven McDermott's Storyglossia, and Aaron Burch's Hobart!

News from Dzanc, and Benjamin Percy

The following comes from Dzanc Books - a great looking anthology and a show of support from Benjamin Percy - an EWN favorite for years now.


This past May's celebration of the short story produced an extraordinary number of great articles, blog posts and reviews in support of Short Story Month.   We at Dzanc thought what a wonderful resource it would be to compile some of these essays into one publication.   In partnering with Matt Bell of www.mdbell.com, Aaron Burch of Hobart, Steven McDermott of Storyglossia, and our own Dan Wickett at Emerging Writers Network, Dzanc has put together a collection of no less than 160 essays, covering over 320 pages, into one book.  Each essay explores a specific story and/or collection by authors both heralded and overlooked, all deserving of a first - or second, or twelfth - read.

As we are all readers and lovers of great writing, the chance to have a compilation of essays that champion some of the great stories and story collections of our time, provides an invaluable tool to turn to when  wondering what to read next.   Dzanc Books - as part of its mission as a nonprofit 501(c)3 press dedicated to bringing literature and lit programs to a wider audience -  will mail you a copy of these Short Story Month Essays for a minor tax deductible donation.  On top of publishing great works of literary fiction, Dzanc Books provides workshops for students in the public schools free of charge.   Our Dzanc Writers In Residency Programs matches writers with students whose schools do not otherwise provide students the opportunity to explore their own creative voices.  Dzanc covers all expenses for these programs, which run several thousand dollars each.  All monies donated to Dzanc for the purchase of our Short Story Month Essays will go 100% to our charitable programs which Dzanc conducts nationwide.   A ten dollar donation will cover our costs (printing and shipping) on our SSME and, understanding these harsh economic times, we wont appeal to you for anything beyond which you can afford.  We believe these essays provide insights and recommendation for books and authors which can be turned to again and again.  Dan and I thank you in advance.  To get your own copy, please visit our support page at http://www.dzancbooks.org/support and make a tax deductible donation of ten dollars or more.  Please email Dan at info@dzancbooks.org if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Steve Gillis
Dan Wickett
Dzanc Books
www.dzancbooks.org

A Note From Ben Percy

If you fell from the sky and landed on any street corner in this country, you would not know where you were, lost in the concrete maze of Taco Johns, Burger Kings, Best Buys, K-Marts, Wal-Marts. Sometimes I feel similarly adrift and headachey when wandering a chain bookstore, where the same two dozen authors stare out at me from slick dust jackets, where short story collections are difficult if not impossible to find, where novels are weighed down with codes and techno-jargon and brand-name clothes and throbbing euphemisms, where literature sometimes feels as substantial as a Big Mac and fries.

Which is why Dzanc comes as a welcome shot of adrenaline to the heart. It is a publishing venture that transcends the bottom-line, that trumpets what the big houses have crassly elbowed aside, that reminds us reading is more than entertainment, that books are more than commodities. Their standard is bad-ass literary excellence, no matter if it can't be tidily packaged or pitched by some agent at a cocktail party where everybody wears black and none of the cheese is yellow. If you look at their line-up of emerging and established rock stars -Yannick Murphy, Terese Svoboda , Kyle Minor, Roy Kesey, Laura van den Berg, and Michael Czyzniejewski, to name a few-it's quite clear that Dzanc is a force.

But they're also visionary-with their Best of the Web anthologies-and goodhearted-with their affordable online workshops, their writer-in-residence program, and their prize for literary excellence and community service-not to mention many-tentacled-with their imprints (OV Books, Black Lawrence Press, Monkeybicycle), their new online magazine The Collagist, and of course the Emerging Writers' Network (where the magic began).

Folks, we're talking about a homegrown wonder, something to applaud, a bit of a miracle. I'm not at all surprised, but I'm heartened, that Publishers Weekly called Dzanc the future of publishing; the industry should be so lucky. Join me in supporting them. Or else.

 

Sincerely,

Benjamin Percy

Short Story Month - Finale

As Typepad announces I've crossed over into June, even though I thought I had over an hour ago, it becomes apparent that Short Story Month has ended.  There were a few days of slacking during the month that led to a few days of mongo posting, including Sunday, May 31, in attempts to get caught up.

We did end up doing 31 posts for stories from online journals, and 31 posts for stories from print journals, and 31 posts for stories from short story collections.  There were also posts for 18 of the stories in the anthology, Visiting Hours (Press 53, 2008) {apologies to Ron Rash, Bill Roorbach, Michael Milliken, and Roberta Israeloff for running out of time before posting about your VH stories}.

I lost track of some nice guest posts from people like David Galef and Kyle Minor and I'm sure others, but was able to post 33 guest posts, recommending well over 40 books or stories, as well as 4 Short Story Mix Tapes.  I started blogging about publishers doing what they can to elevate the short story but got bogged down after the first one.  There were another 14 announcement posts, covering either other sites participating in Short Story Month, or story collection announcements.  Lastly, I dredged up 15 old EWN reviews from 2000 through 2004 and called them retro reviews - story collections that are still deserving of wider recognition.

All in all, 178 posts over the 31 days, and the excitement of watching others like Matt Bell, Hobart, StoryGLOSSIA, Ninth Letter, American Short Fiction and, sorry to the others but if you scroll backwards you'll find even more links to others that also played along.

Based on the coverage from places like Poets & Writers, Readerville, The Story Prize blog and elsewhere, and the much larger regular readership I experienced the past month, I believe we can safely say there is an audience for short fiction out there.

Short Story Month - Visiting Hours - If You Should Die Before I Wake by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

This one's a bit of a cheat as it's an excerpt from a currently unpublished novel by Baratz-Logsted, but as the excerpt is self-contained, and under a dozen pages, it was included in Visiting Hours (Press 53, 2008).

Broken into sections, the story from a mother's point of view as her daughter, whom she refers to as The Kid, is dying and currently weighs less than she did when she was 10.

In the morning she's calm again.
     "Could you read to me for a while?" she asks with a smile.
     "Sure," I say, thinkin' of where she is on the List. "What do you want to hear?  F. Scott Fitzgerald?  E.M.  Forster?"
     "No," she says.  "I want to hear Trixie Belden."
     I grab my coat and say, "That might take a little bit of work.  Can you wait here til I come back?" and she looks at me and smiles weakly and says, "Sure.  I can wait.  Of course I'll be here when you get back.  Where else am I going to go?" and I see how weak she is, how goddamned small, and I think, You might not be here when I get back, and I realize that I'd better hurry.

The duo has this kind of back and forth throughout which I enjoyed.  I also loved the fact that with the burden of this literary list the daughter wants to take on, her thoughts go to Trixie Belden and what was assumedly the 'literature' that first got her intersted in reading.

Short Story Month - Visiting Hours - The Dead Woman from the Newspaper by Patry Francis

Patry Francis' story, "The Dead Woman from the Newspaper," was probably the only story that upon receiving it I realized I had read it before - in The Ontario Review where it was originally published. 

The story of Johnny Sheehan and his wife, Alice, grabbed me with the opening scene - Alice reading the newspaper to Johnny on the bus (in the past he'd given up private transportation as immoral, and also had glaucoma and couldn't read for himself) and read about a woman found in the trunk of a car, dead.  He wondered aloud about the smell, which brought forth a comment from a man not wanting to hear about rotting corpses so soon after breakfast, which brought another woman into the conversation, stating that we all were interested in murder and that sort of thing.  I believe another three or four bus riders got involved in the conversation before it was over and, again, that scene did it for me. I had to include it in Visiting Hours (Press 53, 2008).

Short Story Month - Visiting Hours - One Moment: 1330 South McLeod

I started to read Kaytie M. Lee's story, "One Moment:  1330 South McLeod," and after reading:

Steven sat in the back seat of a police cruiser, the first time he'd ever seen the view from behind scratched Plexiglas.  He wasn't paying much attention to it except to notice that Midge's blood had dripped onto the dingy, white vinyl seat.  He held Midge's head in his lap, his shaking hands cupping her jaw.  One brown eye gazed intently on him, pupils fully dilated, rims of white where the eyelids pulled back in shock.  He massaged her velvet jowls with his thumbs.  Her pink tongue lolled from her gaping mouth;  blood flecked her canines.

that this was finally a story with an animal patient, or at least I was pretty sure it was.  Then I read:

For whatever reason -- denial, possibly, or simple medical ignorance -- the fact that his dapple-brown greyhound's blood oozed from a gash in her side and onto the police car's upholstery bothered him more than the caved-in appearance of her ribs and the peculiar angle her pelvis jutted out.

Now I was absolutely sure and very excited.  I was hoping for at least one veterinary story.  Though, the seemingly normal, yet odd, human reaction of being more upset about an injured dog than many of the dying people from the other stories kicked in while reading Lee's effort.  While the dog is certainly the patient here, so is the relationship between Steven and his wife, Rebecca, and the story does an excellent job of letting that take center stage.

Short Story Month - Visiting Hours - The Kiss-Me-Quick by Rochelle Distelheim

I visited my friend and we talked about shoes instead of about dying.  I wanted to talk about dying, but she's the one who's dying and she wanted to talk about shoes.  We looked at the three shoe boxes lined up on the carpet next to the couch where she was.  The boxes were open and I saw the tips of three new pairs of shoes.

This is the opening to Rochelle Distelheim's "The Kiss-Me-Quick," a not quite 3 pages long short story originally published in North American Review.  It caught my attention right away as the visiting hours again weren't saddled with being in a hospital, but also because it captured a certain aspect of visiting hours - the people that don't want to talk about the inevitable, even though it seems to be the point of visiting hours some times (not always, this seemed to capture the escapism portion where the visitors do what they can to take the inevitable off of the patient's mind).

Short Story Month - Visiting Hours - The Well-Head by Gabriel Welsch

When I received "The Well-Head" from Gabriel Welsch I was a bit surprised.  To that time I had only known his poetry, and to be honest, not even a ton of that.  And the story plays a little loose with the visiting hours ideas, having at the crux a disabled woman that rides a scooter around her home and especially her garden, and her gardener, that ends up doubling as a caretaker.

This story is more about relationships than it is about visiting hours, and this includes the relationship between the woman, Emeline, and her gardener, Casey, as well as those between each of these women, and Emeline's son (who pays Casey), Paul.  It's a different type of triangle relationship than usual as neither woman seems overly excited to ever hear from Paul.  Welsch captures their scenarios and the feelings each character has perfectly, allowing the reader right into their world as if he/she were the one riding that scooter through the garden.

Short Story Month - Visiting Hours - My Father's Heart by David Abrams

David Abrams' story, "My Father's Heart," was a great one to me for inclusion as it was a story in which the person visiting, the son of the patient, was actually rooting for death.  He'd hated the man his father was, hated how he treated his mother, and was happy to see him there, hoping his father would be afraid of him for once.

When I walk into that hospital room I'm entering a sliver of time when (at last) my father is as weak and powerless as he was fifty-six years earlier cradled in his own father's arms.  I take pleasure in the fact that my father's heart has knocked him flat on his back like a newborn.  I'm also delighted to see he's been rendered speechless.

The combination of this factor, a unique one among stories submitted to me, and David's great writing, made this one a no-brainer for inclusion in Visiting Hours (Press 53, 2008).

Short Story Month - The Goat Variations by Jeff VanderMeer

From the anthology Other Earths (DAW Books, 2009), 11 original stories about the different paths our world might take if certain events never occurred, comes Jeff VanderMeer's "The Goat Variations."  It begins:

It would have been hot and humid in September in that city, and the Secret Service would have gone in first, before him, to scan for hostile minds, even though it was just a middle school in a county he'd won in the elections, far away from the fighting.  He would have emerged from the third black armored vehicle, blinking and looking bewildered as he got his bearings in the sudden sunlight.  His aide and the personal bodyguards, who had grown up protecting him, would have surrounded him by his first step onto the asphalt of the driveway.  They would have entered the school through the front, stopping under the sign for photos and a few words with the principal, the television cameras recording it all from a safe distance.
     He would already be thinking past the event, to the next, and how to prop up sagging public approval ratings, due both to the conflict and his recent "indecision," which he knew was more analogous to "sickness."  He would be thinking about, or around, the secret cavern beneath the Pentagon and the pale, almost grublike face fo the adept in his tank.  He would already be thinking about the machine.

I suppose I should have caught it at this point - any mention of September and "that city" in a book about how the world might have ended up if certain events hadn't occurred should naturally have perked my thoughts toward 9/11.  VanderMeer doesn't take much longer in nailing that idea home for the reader and with this story, creates a fascinating and very unique take on the 9/11 story.  These two paragraphs foreshadow the story very nicely.  It's just one more in what is becoming a long line of work by VanderMeer that is really enjoyable and well done - what more can you ask for?