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Today's work of the day is the poem, The Point, by C. Dale Young via the fine journal StorySouth.

Young has published four collections of poetry to date (I'm behind on this by one I believe) and has a collection of short stories I'm greatly looking forward to coming from Four Way Books next year. Young is also a doctor and while this doesn't always directly enter his poetry, when it does, it can be very powerful.

His other doctors proclaimed he would die

     within a month. He kept on living for years:

the simple fact is that he was barely thirty

is the opening stanza of sixteen such stanzas which are followed by a single line. Here's where I have to offer my standard poetry apology--I've not studied poetry at all, if this is a particular type of poem or if there's a better way to describe these "sections" I do not know.

While one never knows just how autobiographical a piece is, be it poetry or fiction, I think there's an inherent belief by most readers that there's something within the work that comes direct from the author's life. And when the author has the protagonist in her/her work be very similar to themselves, it makes it that much more difficult for the reader to avoid this.

In which case, I imagine the ideas behind this poem must have flooded out of Young, though also much have been pretty crushing to continue working on and refine until he had it just right. While the patient noted "kept on living for years," I think it's pretty obvious from that opening that things aren't going to continue on that way for long.

And while I think doctors must have some sort of mechanism to get through the lost patients--especially those working mainly with patients that suffer life-threatening diseases--I also think there must be patients that have something about them that make these mechanisms seem very inefficient.

So this is it? You're just going to let me die?

     Mano, you leave me here to die like this?

But here, you see, the tongue is wiser than

a knife, the word selected not just "brother" but

     a word that cut far deeper than English ever could.

The urge to prophecy is deep but not a given.

The italicized section the words of this patient as the doctor has run out of ways to fight his cancer. And these words, this particular word, Mano, has cut the doctor deep. As implied early in the poem, the patient does indeed pass away. Early the morning that this occurs, this conversation returns to the doctor's mind. The patient's sister called later that day to inform that doctor that her brother had passed very early that a.m. This leads to the doctor wondering how he knew and again brought to mind that word Mano.

Whether or not this is a situation Dr. Young has personally gone through, one would assume his years of doctoring, of associating with other doctors, is what has given him the insight to write such a poem, but it's his years of working with words on the page that have allowed him to draw such power into this work. That allowed it to be as concise as it is--that allows the reader to feel the gut punch that the doctor in The Point must feel.

"My Black Valiant" and "Lavender Soap" are two of the ten stories in Irene Zabytko's story collection, When Luba Leaves Home (Algonquin Books, 2003). The collection is a linked one set in 1968 in Chicago's Ukrainian neighborhood on Wheat Street. The collection is about Lubochka Vovkovych and her life as a DP (displaced person), her attempts to become more Americanized, and things that slowed that idea down.

"My Black Valiant," the second story in the collection finds Luba (the shortened version of Lubochka), attending Loop University, the all-commuter school in the area. Luba finds herself spending her first year taking classes, eating meals, and hanging out with, her Ukrainian friends. She's also not finding it satisfying. Going into her second year she begins to call herself Linda. She consider changing her last name to Wolf (apparently Vovk means wolf in English), but unless she officially makes the change the University won't let her register with it. But Linda does take hold. To jump start her Americanization, Luba decides to buy a car, and finds a 1967 Black Plymouth Valiant that is owned by another DP, who because he knows her, sells her the car for only $500. Luba/Linda is amazed by how little interest her parents show in the car, even turning her down for a ride on a weekend, claiming they are tired from working all week, and enjoying what appears to be a game show on television instead. The end of the story however, seems to have an incident's importance escape Luba/Linda. It involves her parents and the car, and brings a touch of humor to the story.

"Lavender Soap" falls about 2/3's of the way through the collection and is interesting as it doesn't focus so much on Luba. She's still involved, narrating the story in fact, but it's more about her good friend's (Natalka) mother, Pani Slava. Pani is a tech in the microbiology lab in a hospital where Luba (the name she seems to be going by here) works as well. Pani works the late shift and sometimes Luba waits around, watching Pani do the same thing night after night (dealing with bacteria and slides) so she can give her the occasional ride home. Pani has gone through a mastectomy not so long ago and rapidly goes back and forth between fairly sweet and cranky. What the reader picks up though is beyond still owning that Black Plymouth Valiant, Luba seems to have let the idea of pushing behind her Ukrainian heritage go, at least a little. She's going by Luba, she's hanging out with Natalka. This story is well worth reading if only for the two pages or so where Pani tells the her daughter and Luba a story about lavender soap from her past.

Zabytko, in these two stories, and I assume the other eight in this collection, does a great job of writing from the outsider's perspective. She shows the line walked between family and pulling away and living your own life. The two stories are excellent and I look forward to the rest of the book.

According to the author bio notes, "Money Maker," published in Other Voices 46, was Wendy Duren's first published story. I can only assume she had many finished stories that just didn't find the right homes before this one because the author of "Money Makers" shows a great confidence in her abilities.

She was going to take the money and buy a house.

This begins the story, and the she in question, Mary Ann, is a stripper. What Duren does is dig deep inside Mary Ann's head and a little less deep into the heads of other strippers from The Club. This seems to be a case of a writer wondering--why, and, how, after considering this particular profession. And while Mary Ann is constantly thinking about this house--about furnishing it, about kitchen details, about pool details, Duren also dips into the heads of others that are looking to make their rent, to pay for what they put up their nose or shoot into their veins (often to forget how they made that money in the first place), and others.

Where that original paragraph begins "She," the majority begin with "We," as if the strippers have a collective means for what they do and how they do it. And then there are very specific "Mary Ann" paragraphs that begin as such. As Duren gets deeper into Mary Ann's story than the others, these sometimes feel the most mulled over, but that's not to say that the group paragraphs, or details about other strippers like Phoebe, or Crystal, weren't very solid--just that the Mary Ann sections weren't missing, or using any extra, words.

It's a story that has been rolling around my head all day after finishing it early this a.m. I'll be honest, it's not a profession I've given a lot of thought to in regards to what is going on in their heads as they prepare to do, or do, the job. But Wendy Duren has done such a good job of getting into those heads, that I know I'll find myself wondering for some time to come.

"Red Eye" comes to the reader via Hobart and Kristen Rouisse. It's a short little story, less than half a page in length, but it packs a mean punch.

Seven paragraphs long, and none of these paragraphs longer than six sentences (and only one that long--the others three sentences or less). The first paragraph begins We're, and then the five middle paragraphs begin with some form of you (you, your, you're). That last paragraph does not begin with a pronoun. Even though the sixth paragraph ends with a bit of a hint, I think the last paragraph is meant to be at least a little surprising to most readers. Upon re-read, it probably shouldn't necessarily have been, but it was.

The story this short, I don't see quoting it much. The thing I like is how Rouisse lets the reader see both (we're) characters, but really only through the eyes of one of them. We're allowed knowledge of the one that we know is sick ("You're mildly attractive for an ill man.") via the other character. We learn of the ill man through her repeating things that he said to her ("You say you wanted to adopt a mutt and name her Margo."), descriptions of his actions ("Your fingers fumble with the seatbelt's metal latch."), and her reactions to him (the aforementioned comment regarding his appearance).

It's an interesting way of telling his story--at least his story during this particular red eye flight. The ending will hit hard.

So, Work of the Day seems a poor term as I tend not to do one per day, and when I do get to these there are frequently multiple posts in a single 24 hour span. That admitted, I'm probably not going to change the name of this type of post any time soon.

I had the good fortune of having the Dzanc Books table slotted next to the Poets & Writers table at the Voices of the Midwest last weekend. P&W was helmed by Melissa Faliveno. Maybe because she's originally from Wisconsin, she seemed like the right choice. In any case, it allowed for a few good conversations and I found out her preferred method of writing is the essay.

Now, I try to notice when new issues of Diagram are published and, when they are, do my best to read the majority of the work in each issue. That said, I don't always see everything they publish. And I somehow missed the essay, Of a Moth, by the very same Melissa Faliveno, from Issue 12.1 (an all-essay special issue). Which brings me to today's post:

GO READ THIS ESSAY NOW. Don't waste time reading what I have to say about it. It's online. It's free. It's well worth your time.

I can see how this work made it into a journal helmed (yes, twice in one post) by Ander Monson. Faliveno's work reminded me of some of Monson's essays, maybe just less the playing with form.

Faliveno starts off with a great opening line: "For some months now, my apartment has been infested." I don't see a way you read that and don't continue on barring maybe having lived in an apartment that had been infested yourself. She quickly allows her readers the news that the infestation was by moths and notes that moths are "Small, crawling, fluttering things, whose full-grown bodies look strikingly like butterflies, and whose larvae look devastatingly like maggots." It's a great line that leads into future aspects of the essay.

She describes the effort of she and her roommates, upon discovering some larvae in their pantry, putting forth a massive cleaning effort and moving anything edible into glass jars, cookie tins and "... the few remaining Tupperware containers whose warped lids still fit snugly." I loved this line as it brings some universality to the situation--who has ever used Tupperware and cleaned and dried it a few times that won't understand the bit about the few that can close properly?

There are many great one topic essays out there. However, I'm always more impressed by those writers that can take a moment, an incident, or situation, and write about it but allow it to bring another aspect or two of life into the picture. "When the moths first arrived, I had been living on my own for a little over a year, after having lived with a partner--by all accounts a man I eventually would have married--for five." This might not just be about moths one thinks. It delves a bit into solitude with lines from the next three or four paragraphs including:

For the first time in years, I knew solitude. And I wanted nothing more.

It seemed those days, by early fall, that we existed only in one another's peripheries, living under the same roof, ostensibly together, but in reality floating in and out of an empty house, utterly alone.

I realized, floating beneath the surface, that after years of being so intimately connected to one other human being, and after having that connection severed, I no longer had the desire to interact with anyone other than myself.

Faliveno does get back to the moths though: "The moths first arrived in late October, in the form of small, whitish worms that had somehow, impossibly, made their blind and crawling way into one of my roommates' unopened bags of Japanese rice noodles." At this point, Faliveno shifts a bit to the scientific--a trait in essays like this that I personally LOVE--noting "The moths that live in my pantry are called Plodia Interpunctella, or, commonly, Indian Meal Moths." More moth details come flowing shortly after this:

On close inspection though, the tiny fluttering things are nothing short of extraordinary. A fully-grown adult meal moth is approximately eight to ten millimeters in length, with a sixteen to twenty millimeter wingspan. Its forewings are sturdy and brilliant in color, speckled with various shades of brown, bronze, and copper, the lower wings are thing, fragile and light, an almost pale yellow in parts and grey in others, with small, dark lines like veins running along their perimeter. When the wings are open, stretched wide, the intricate pattern on each appears to be perfectly symmetrical.

I picked up the body and held it in the light of the window. I studied his body--his angles, his shape, his design.

When a moth is at rest, one cannot actually see its body. One can only see its wings, which come together upon the moth's back and encase its small frame.

These insects, I realized, these pests, were carefully and beautifully built.

The bit before about the butterfly slips back into play at this point: "Moths and butterflies belong to the order Lepidoptera. Moths make up the majority of this order, with around 200,000 different species--about ten times the number of butterfly species--with the thousands more having yet to be named." Butterflies will sneak in again before the end.

More about the idea of solitude, kind of, though:

Most moths are nocturnal, but those in my house seem, for the most part, to follow a pattern more human. They fly by day and sleep at night; they buzz around my bedroom as long as the lights are on, and fall silent almost as soon as I turn them off. But when I can't sleep at night--as happens often, particularly when I am alone--and I turn on my bedside lamp, the moths wake up with me, and resume their overhead flight for as long as I lie awake in the light.

And what I guess would be the opposite of isolation: "A month or two after the moths first arrived, I started sleeping with someone new." And the two ideas combine a bit--butterflies and lack of isolation--as Faliveno notes that at age 18, upon leaving home, she got a small butterfly tattoo. It's not something she's still fond of, but the new person sleeping in the bed has a tendency to run his fingers along the outline of it "...causing tiny follicles beneath the ink to stand on end, making the wings seem almost to break forth from my skin, I think that maybe the thing I regret no longer exists. That perhaps, instead, there's been a metamorphosis, and the small, winged thing on my hip is no longer a butterfly--that it disappeared for a time into darkness, and emerged again as a moth."

She wraps everything up: "The moths in my house are still around." Faliveno questions whether they'll ever get rid of them. Maybe they'll still be there when she leaves: "Or perhaps they'll stay here in this house and I'll be the one who goes first. Either way, when their constant fluttering about my head has ceased, when the buzz of their flight has gone, I'm sure I'll remember again how much i loved the quiet. But sometimes, mostly on the rare nights when I'm alone, I still hear that old familiar hum of wings beating fast inside the soft yellow lampshade by my bed. On those nights, I'll leave the light on."

I've read this essay about six or seven times in the past week. I enjoy it every time. I discover that I must read it a bit differently each time as one time I might learn a bit more about moths--the next, a bit more about the author's habits. But I simply love the weaving that goes on throughout.

So, it's the fifth of March and it's my first Work of the Day post after going a near criminal 7 for 29 in February. Let's hope this gets the EWN started back up a little more regular again. I should be using the inspiration of reading Michael Czyzniejewski's story366 every day to get my rear moving better.

Prior to this morning, I'd not heard of Ashley Strosnider, nor New South. I think I narrowly avoided 'strike three' by taking the time to read this wonderful micro-prose 5 or 6 times. "A Few Electric Sounds" hits hard and more than once in its short structure. The story opens, seeming as if it's going to be a simple conversation:

They had talked about dying, the ways they’d prefer it to happen. She wanted to go in her sleep, she told him, to drift off skyward on some cinnamon cloud.

The her and his versions drastically different as he'd hoped for a meteorite to crush him, perhaps while he was out fertilizing his lawn. And more time is spent describing how he'd like to go--in a big and instant manner to finish up the first, and largest of the three paragraphs to this fiction.

Then Strosnider begins the second paragraph slowly:

And it had almost been like that, she thought.

I'm sad to note that it took me until my second time through this work to realize this statement noted the passing of the man in the conversation.

The next two sentences however, beautifully written, hammer home that point:

The supernova that sprouted in the front left corner of his brain, a little sunburst hemorrhage. Infinite like so many light-years it takes for a long-dead star to wink out inside the lens of a telescope.

And the story moves from there, quickly to the end, with another line or two like that above that hit the reader like gut punches. Ashley Strosnider's website has links to some more of her work and you can bet I'll be clicking on those links throughout the day.

Sub-titled "Oddball Artists, Twisted Writers, Demented Editors, Office Politics, Hamburgers, and a Dead Stripper, this is the first issue of what is deemed a "mostly true 5-issue series about the whacked-out world of comic books."

Ted McKeever is one of my favorite comic book creators. He has a distinct art style that is not designed to create "pretty" characters. They tend to have odd shaped heads, and squared off teeth with spaces between them. In past works where he's had full creative control (Transit, Eddy Current, Plastic Forks to name some earlier efforts) there was sort of a cross between religious concerns and superhero ideas (with the protagonists often not really having super powers). The characters were people who were at their very closest on the fringes of society.

This time around McKeever is writing about a different type of character on the fringe of society--those in the comic book industry. He describes it as "mostly true" and if that's the case, issue one makes a case that being the writer of a comic book owned by somebody else is at the least a very frustrating position. Poodwaddle, the comic writer in Pencilhead, has a meeting with his editor, a man whose face is about 3/4 mouth--which is fitting as he's mostly there to yell and chew through Poodwaddle's thoughts. Poodwaddle is dropping off the pages for the next issue and on his way out he's given a complimentary copy of the last issue--one that in which he finds the editor has added Batman (the Adam Ward television version) like KAZAMs and POWs designed to suck in the superhero audience--even though the title isn't a superhero title. But that's okay because by the time they figure that out, they'll already have purchased the issue.

There are a couple of other stories lurking at the fringe of this issue--another comic editor trying to bring Poodwaddle over to his company and a strange creature following Poodwaddle around--almost looking like something he'd have created in a past work.

I was excited to see something new with McKeever's name on the cover and the issue didn't disappoint--I'm looking forward to issue #2.

"Sure Footing," by Margaret Malone, comes from her collection People Like You (Atelier 26 Books, 2015). The collection itself is excellent from the half of it that I've had the pleasure of reading so far. Malone has a nice way of writing  stories that may not have that big twist or wallop at the end that has a reader slapping their head and saying Oh! out loud. Instead they tend to bring about memories. They have situations that maybe most of her readers will have found themselves in at one time or another and not always the type of situations they'll fondly remember.

"Sure Footing" has a great opening sentence/paragraph:

Love lasts until the man you love leaves because he wants to drive a truck up and down I-5, hauling for a Central Valley feed company in the blazing hot sun and endless brown miles.

So at this point you're thinking break-up story. But it's not really. It's more of a wrong relationship story as the narrator begins to wonder, and really pretty quickly, whether or not she really was in love. The coffee she makes sort of hammers it home as she loves that first sip, yet when he made it the coffee was watery and nowhere near the same. Sunrise lighting is noticed and windows cracked even though it's cold out.

The story however also delves into the ideas of loneliness and the familiar. A couple of seasons into the future, her hair longer, new life patterns developed and he calls, a very short warning as he's at the local gas station. He shows up and:

He's gained weight. His tee-shirt is tight across his middle and his blue jeans are soiled, stains and creases cover his lap. He's starting to grow a beard or hasn't shaved. You can't tell which.

Malone's writing is like this throughout--pretty spare and quick to her points. A couple of bits that I loved:

"His hands fumble at his sides, then he pushes them into his front pockets, then moves them to the back, like the awkward appendages are brand new."

and after realizing that he had washed his hands and nails at the gas station before coming over:

"That single kindness is a crowbar swing at the clamped shut heart you've come to love keeping to yourself."

I don't think I've seen a reference to the clumsiness of what to do with one's hands put so well before.

As noted, the story's ending doesn't punch you in the gut, it doesn't stun you into a big yelp out loud. Instead, like many of Malone's efforts, it will probably make you think of something from your own past, or maybe that of one of your friends or family. And even if it's not a fond memory, the way she got you to think about it was definitely enjoyable. Look for this collection!

Here we are on February 14, Valentine's Day, and there's only been four Work of the Day posts so I'm a tad behind. With nothing to do today beyond mass, watching three Premier League matches, one college women's basketball game and soon an NHL game of the week, I've been able to fit in some reading so maybe I'll get a little closer to a one per day average by the end of the night.

Last week, I became aware of a four year old posting of a poem on Rattle by Matthew Olzmann. The fact that the title, Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem was intriguing would probably have been reason enough to click on the link. The fact that I LOVE Matthew's work was the real reason I bounced over though.

I've now read the poem five to ten times since mid-week and have to say it hits me at the end every time. The poem begins:

Here's what I've got, the reasons why our marriage

might work.

and then a litany of reasons some forth--I won't get the line breaks right, but here are a couple of my favorites:

Because you yell at your keys when you lose them, and laugh, loudly, at your own jokes.

...and write in the margins about all the people you're mad at and my name almost never appears there.

But it's the last one that hammers home the poem, that makes me think, "Awwwww," every time I read the poem, no matter how many times it's been that I've read it that day.

Now I believe that in general titles mean something. And I have to admit to having been thrown by the title the first time I read this poem, looking at these "reasons" as a commercial, trying to imagine them as film, and they weren't fitting in with my own thoughts of Mountain Dew commercials. It actually took me until the end of the poem for it to him me how the title fit, and wow does it. Olzmann does a fantastic job of writing things, in this case reasons, that feel both very specific to him, and this case a relationship, while also yielding a feeling that these reasons would fit in most relationships. It's something I've felt while reading the bulk of his poetry--all of it enjoyed greatly. His full collection, Mezzanines, is available from Alice James Books and elsewhere.

Litro: Stories Transport You is a site that is new to me. I've read a couple of the works there now and think that maybe a touch more editing could be employed (some spelling issues, or homonym issues, for one thing---and tense changes that shouldn't be there slipping in) but I've liked the works that I've read so far. One of which is Julia LaSalle's "Aerial Acrobatics."

An early line, "He was standing under the “34^th Annual Model Airplane Contest” banner...", brought this reader to life as it let me know that LaSalle was taking meto a place I'd not been before--neither in real life, nor in my readings. The story also brought shipyard welding into play--another aspect of life I've never encountered physically or in my readings.

In both instances, LaSalle got just deep enough into the subject for me to feel like I understood what was going on, but not so much that I felt like I was being lectured on the topic. There's a nice little thread throughout the story about the narrator's heart running alongside her narrative, and I found myself really liking the ending:  "She watched Mustafa work until she trusted him, watched him until she became a spark herself, flying through the air, first rising then falling, and finally sputtering as her spark-self bounced once on the rubber mat by Mustafa’s foot and extinguished." I'll definitely be looking for more of Julia LaSalle's work in the future and remembering to visit Litro as well.

I think it's much easier to talk about poems from this second collection by Vievee Francis, Horses in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), by talking about the book as a whole. The poems interact with each other, memories mixing with the present, horses running throughout, a girl coming of age. However I think the opening poem in the first section shows some of what she does very well:

AMARILLO

           Texas Panhandle, 1971

Inland, where no seagulls circled,

     no sea, but storms of dust and dust,

heartland: mouthless heart of thistles,

     and waves of sun, and salt, and fish,

shimmering in their cans of oil,

     as every surface boiled to rust.

This opening stanza does a nice job of showing just how well Francis evokes a sense of the place--the Texas Panhandle jumps out at me while reading her lines (and briefly cause laughter as I think of seagulls circling mall or grocery store parking lots when they're not full of cars, nowhere near large bodies of water).

Francis continues with images such as "Scruffs of scarecrows lined the fence posts, // coyotes with their lolling miens, // their smiles now fixed as any man's."  This is an image that pops up more than once in the collection--coyote heads atop fence posts, scarecrow-like to warn live coyotes--stay away.

It's a fantastic entry into her collection, and as good as this poem is, in my opinion it is only enhanced by continuing on and finishing up the poems behind it.

The work this time around is an essay, Would Dying Alone Really Be So Terrible, from Samantha Irby's collection, Meaty (Curbside Splendor, 2013).  Man, 2013--that means I've had this collection for over 2 years now. In that time it has rarely not been somewhere in one of my main reading piles. It's not a collection I'd suggest one sit down with and three or four hours later put it down. It is one however that I highly recommend.

Irby's writing is both funny and a bit angry all rolled together and takes on topics rarely seen in essay, or even fictional, form. From the middle of this particular essay:

I don't know, man. I'm just not big on spending every waking minute with someone you show your privates to. People are boring. I'm fucking boring. My funny runs out, my cute runs out, my smart sometimes hiccups, my sexy wakes up with uncontrollable diarrhea. I have a fucking attitude.

This really is pretty typical of her writing. There's self-deprecation, dark humor, quick wit. Nothing to not like. You can really open this collection up to any page and get a quick paragraph or two that will brighten your day, make you think a bit, and think that you'd like to hang our with Samantha Irby, watch some television maybe, have some snacks. Just be ready to get up at the end of an hour or two as she's not up for the company staying too long.

The Cortland Review brings a new short story, "G.O.D. Live in Concert", from Robert Kerbeck. It's another author I've not had the pleasure of reading before whose first effort I now have is one that I enjoyed. I'll be sure to keep an eye out for future work from him.

Taking his thirteen-year-old son to see G.O.D. hadn't been Tom's idea. His soon-to-be ex had roped him into it. Natalia said she wanted him to stay connected to Peter, despite their acrimonious divorce, complete with dueling restraining orders. A series of texts and two loud phone calls (she hung up on him once) were required to synchronize a neutral pickup spot, and then drop-off and pickup times spread far enough apart to ensure there weren't any violations.

opens the story and it's a nice, straightforward entry--Kerbeck gives the reader what is needed to get into the story. The next paragraph opens:

Tracey had made it too, herding a gaggle of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls. Her daughter, Daisy, kept inviting more friends to see the boy band, and Tracey kept saying yes. The girls, all four of them, were a welcome distraction of unbundled energy and fresh-smelling hair. They reminded her of the first days of summer, carefree and almost, but not yet, hot. The audience was made up of similar-aged girls accompanied by their mothers. There were only a handful of boys and no men, except for one.

Which brings into play a woman to sit in front of Tom and set up a bit more about the concert itself. What happens from there is Kerbeck allowing the reader into both Tom and Tracey's heads as they notice each other, wonder about each other, consider their own situations while judging the other, range from attempted flirting right on up to actual flirting. Oh yes, there's also a monstrous amount of female rear-end being flashed in Tom's face as Tracey's new skinny jeans don't seem to quite hold up at the hipline.

I thought for about 95% or more of this story that Kerbeck simply nailed things. Great internal thoughts, just enough for the reader to know where things were going and guess how they might end up, etc.

There are great thoughts expressed--Tracey noticing Tom's leathery skin and wondering about his inability to use sunscreen; Tracey's internal complaints about the youth of today's poor manners; Tom's awareness of the young girls interest in his son, but not of Tracey's interest in him.

There were a couple of times I thought he added a bit more than was necessary--"(and into bed)" for instance--sort of nudging the reader after they've laughed and asking if they know what he's saying? But again, that happened maybe one or two times and it's something that I'm probably an overly picky reader for. I much prefer to concentrate on the rest of the story where again, I think Kerbeck really hit strong. I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for more of his work.

The Masters Review, a Platform for Emerging Writers. Seems like something the Emerging Writers Network should have known about prior to January 22, 2016 doesn't it? Well, we didn't. Stumbled upon it when either Jeff or Ann VanderMeer linked to this:

FALL FICTION WINNER! We’re so pleased to introduce “Animalizing” by Marisela Navarro, the third place winner in our Fall Fiction Contest judged by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. In “Animalizing,” our narrator starts walking a friend’s dog and suspects it sees something dark inside her. As she works with the sea urchins in her lab and develops a bond with the dog, she begins to think differently about the creatures in her care. A sea urchin embryo is a beautiful sight….

I clicked on the link and read the story. And then I cut and pasted it to a Word doc so I could print it out and read it again later on Friday night. And again yesterday. And once more this morning. I am still not completely sure what the freak is going on but I really like the writing, some of the offbeat lines that seem to come out of nowhere but fit very well. Interesting observations.

"Our friendship was very much like coming upon a puddle."

Describing a park area that was closed off once you were inside: "There was a sense someone could emerge from anywhere within the 360 degree angle, that they were on their way, and there was nothing you could do about it."

Describing the process to collect sea urchin embryos: "...by spinning the seawater in a centrifuge we cranked by hand. This was always the most fun part of the process. To me it seemed like I was taking these babies on a carnival ride."

"It is foolish to assume a certain thing could never happen."

There's also an interesting bit that describes how we sometimes converse with each other--the narrator telling a story that begins with a dog ringing his doorbell and going from the point he opens the door to the dog on the porch and beyond. At the end he asks his friend if he really believed that a dog had rung his doorbell and he replied that he didn't, but just assumed somebody else had left the dog there and rang the doorbell. How often do we gloss over a crazy detail so that the rest of a story we're being told makes some sense? We rationalize out the offbeat detail in order to be able to accept the rest that seemed believable, even though that original detail would, in or mind, make none of the story even possible in the first place. Could this be what Navarro is really trying to get across and throwing out some of those crazy, offbeat, details throughout just to prove her point? It's a story that is well worth your time to read.

Sarah Layden's story, "13 Things Your Mail Carrier Won't Tell You" appeared today in Booth. It's laid out exactly as the title suggests--13 numbered things from one's mail carrier. And while the 13 items may appear to be random, I believe they tell a story--the story of the mail carrier. The first section is:

It’s not about the dogs, but control. That you should learn to tame the untamed. That to let your pit bull ride shotgun is one step removed from handing over the keys. Barking, fine. That can be controlled. As can you.

Of course, I thought, a mail carrier would certainly be commenting upon dogs right off the bat. And that end, "As can you," seemed almost ominous.

It's followed by suggestions to invite the mail carrier into your home, but then a warning that the one time the carrier has been invited still cannot be spoken of even 20 years later. There's commentary on junk mail, and what goes on inside our homes, and tattoos, and the lack of books being delivered compared to days past (obviously not my mail carrier sharing these 13 things).

Again, I think Layden has actually done an interesting job listing these ideas out as separate "things" but doing so in a way that has created a fully realized person in the mail carrier. We know the thoughts rolling around in their head, what they think about our houses, our landscapes, our animals, their boots, their thoughts on the lonely, and more. A very well done story.

Starting off 50 with a nice quiet very early a.m. reading of a short story by Darrin Doyle, an author whose work I've enjoyed before. Passages North has published The Lumping as an extra story and their own Jason Teal notes "Darrin Doyle’s “The Lumping” is a cautionary allegory that thrillingly brandishes the first-person plural to dramatize a public assembly" and that is a great short description.

"The Lumping" begins:

By lumping, he said, we will become. Not by lumping on occasion, only when it is convenient, but with discipline and devotion, passionate at all times, with disregard for lesser obligations (clearly implying that every earthly obligation fell into this category). If everyone lumped three times a day, he stammered and sweated, ours would be a world of transcendence and joy. To lump is to live; to live, lump.

What is lumping the reader wonders, and that is where part of Doyle's genius with this work shines through--it's never really determined (or I'm just one lousy reader--thoroughly possible). It seemingly can be whatever the reader opts to believe.

Doyle's usage of that first-person plural--that public assembly--creates a form of authority to what is being stated from the stage before them as the communal belief they develop help push forward the idea in the reader's mind that what is being said is accurate.

Perhaps, we thought, this was the true meaning of lumping: to finally lay bare our most private selves, to unite through the world of the hidden, the inner place where heretofore none could live but the architects themselves. A playground where lumps could frolic: no names, no identities, no bodily trappings.

It's an interesting technique and one that seems very fitted to a short story of this length.

New work by Elizabeth Ellen? Yes, please. Somebody was kind enough to post a link to her new story, "Straight," at The Fanzine earlier today and I couldn't click on that link fast enough. Ellen's never been shy of writing stories that some would consider edgy. This one starts:

After that I go straight. Or after that I make an attempt at going straight. I try to take photographs of other things. I take photographs of myself. I try to figure out ways of making myself appear interesting as a solo act. I don’t incorporate Adam into my art. There is still Eli, occasionally Eli’s female friends, Coco and Alondra, but the boys are gone. All the boys are now gone, sent out to various ‘alternative’ high schools and juvenile detention centers in the Midwest and, in Saul’s case, a boarding school somewhere on the east coast. I study Darius’s face in the photographs from a year, two years ago. I remember how it could go hard or soft, the carved scars on his cheek, self-inflicted scars on his arms, how he lay his head on my arm in the movie theater, cuddled up to Eli on the couch in the basement. “Damn right I was scared,” he used to say. It was the ending to a story he told about when he was a young boy, hiding behind his father’s legs in the presence of strangers. His father, he said, had been shot four times. But he wasn’t dead; he had survived. Darius and Eli tried to set us up once, before Adam came back. I found Darius’s father good looking, affable, strong, but I couldn’t imagine not looking over my shoulder in his presence. I couldn’t imagine not feeling as though Darius were always watching, listening through walls.

I think there's enough in the opening paragraph to let the reader know to expect the story to head toward the edge, but doesn't jump right into it or hit the reader over the head. Later on some of the implications above are elaborated upon--at times even very bluntly in a way that a critic might suggest that lines (which I don't wish to type as they'd be spoilers) this direct are unnecessary--that Ellen has already given the reader enough information. However, I believe they perfectly fit the narrator and how she would be telling the story. Everything about her has me believing she'd take her time opening up but once she did she'd be as direct as Ellen writes her.

It's not the most comfortable person or story to read--but comfort is hardly what I expect or look for when I see Elizabeth Ellen's name at the top of a page.

I'm a big fan of stories that move forward in small sections--Ander Monson's Big 32 comes to mind as an old example many reading this post will have read. Electric Lit has recently published a story that immediately reminded me of how much I enjoy these types, Jeb Bush is Sinking by Jeff VanderMeer.

Each section of VanderMeer's story begins with "Jeb at..." and a percentage, beginning at 6% and dropping all the way down to -6%. It begins:

Jeb at 6% feels as if he is walking inside an old-time diving suit, but kicks up sand across the bottom of the sea. Knows he is fated to rise like mercury, expelled into the sky through the emulsion of his own silver birthing.

I believe my favorite section is:

Jeb below 3% begins to haunt himself, walks ethereal through a wall. He cannot tell what he’s done/not done. Stops in the middle of tasks believing he has completed them.

VanderMeer keeps things interesting by changing styles from section to section--"Jeb at 4%" begins with a long list of things Jeb is, while "Jeb at -1%" is full of violence. Utilizing a real person in a real situation could lead to all sorts of difficulties--trying too hard to really nail the individual's personality and character; trying to hard to predict specifics; or missing the mark to a point where readers wonder exactly why you used that particular name/situation. I think VanderMeer hits everything just right in this short story. Bits of Jeb appear, bits of George W., some seeming absurdities (or are they?), and a lot of fantastic images. Follow that link above for a great read.

One of my favorite publishers, The Cupboard, recently released The Coupon Thief by Lily Hoang. If I understand the project correctly, she took donations from forty different authors and created micro-fictions around these donations. The donations, again, if I understand, were sentences, or sentence fragments--something that would spur Hoang to an idea that would lead to a complete micro-fiction. The works are not considered collaborations, though she does attribute the donations to the author in question for each piece.

It makes for a fairly quick and interesting read--seeing how different donations might have led Hoang into different modes of storytelling--from quick one or two line pieces that almost seem to be there to create an image for the reader, or to highlight a verbal twist, on up to what seem long (though they still are about a paragraph in length) that develop a little more.

In wanting to include an example, but not wanting to put Hoang's entire story on my site, I looked for the sentence that drew my attention to it each time I read this work (I read the full collection a few times yesterday--just got caught up in basketball and football and let the Work of the Day slide to the next day-sorry).

In the sizzling daylight, we quarry out dirt and sand, travelling lower into the crust, down towards all that magma, and when we see that resplendent devil, we say, It's getting hot.

It's a sentence that propels the story a bit as prior to this there was more talk of parents, along with the devil, and from here forward the story just focuses on the devil. It's the segue sentence to push Hoang's work toward its conclusion. It's the type of sentence, winding all over the place, that really only works in this type, a longer paragraph, of micro-fiction, as opposed to some of the 1-3 sentence pieces in this collection.

It's an interesting story, and collection, and I think Hoang has done a fantastic job of incorporating whatever was donated to her into works of her own that are so fully her own that if one were to try to guess the donation over and over throughout the collection, any that they got right would simply be guesses.

This story was published earlier today via The Collagist. To be honest, I'd never heard of Erinrose Mager, let alone read her work before--something I will try to continue rectifying in the future. A shorter story (two pages if printed out), it reads like my favorite type of shorter story--that is, one that every time I read it I begin to think about it differently.

I call up my mother before dinner. I ask her, "What about cinnamon toast? I remember this breakfast distinctly."

I look through the window above the sink at the cat splayed out in the yard near the driveway. He's been chasing something in the grass all afternoon. The cat is fifteen years old and very daring, and I check on him sometimes. I run the green beans under the tap and pour them into the pan with the garlic.

"Of course not," my mother says. "I fed you steel cut oatmeal and salads. Salads and oatmeal and ice water for your circulation. You ate your breakfast and read chapter books under the covers before school. You loved reading. I soaked the oats at night and stirred in honey early in the mornings."

A mother and daughter on the phone, the daughter trying to recall what she'd eaten as a child, the mother tossing out things the daughter not only doesn't remember, but finds there's no way it would have happened that way. Later the daughter notes:

No, no, no. I do however recall the cinnamon toast. She kept a cinnamon-sugar shaker in the cupboard. She buttered the bread to the edges. The shaker had a girl's face on the top. The holes of the shaker were the girl's freckles. I do not dream these kinds of details. I do not have the mind to imagine a past.

I love that last little bit--is it really true that she doesn't have the mind to imagine this stuff? Or maybe she has the mind to imagine a scenario that she does NOT have the mind to imagine it? Is she reliable or not? Actually re-reading the story for about the fifth or sixth time today, I'm not even sure I'm supposed to be reading the story the way I have been--I think the conversation may really be one with more concern behind it--a daughter, not so close, worrying about her mother for more serious reasons. Again, I love the fact that the more I read this, the more that slowly opens itself up to me--I find it an aspect of very short stories that I enjoy a lot--that re-reading them over and over isn't something that can't be done.

The folks at Engine Books did a really good thing making sure that Patricia Henley's short story collection, Other Heartbreaks, got published. Jumping in and out of this collection I've really enjoyed, and tried to savor a bit, each story I've began. "Kaput" is a story somewhere near the middle of the collection. Like most of Henley's work found in between these covers, she does a masterful job giving her readers a couple of women whose lives have interacted. And as is also the case in many of these stories, in less than 20 pages Henley gives us the background of their relationship, the current status, shows some of their loves, their losses, their achievements.

Meekly, I said, "We've been building a bridge, right?" We had talked every three months for the last fifteen years.

"Sure."

"I thought--when I saw you--that the last little bit of the bridge would click into place." I had to catch my breath, as if I said too much. "But there's still a gap."

This is a 58 year old woman, unemployed as the college she worked at closed up shop the previous year, talking to Kim, her much more successful friend, who has flown her to Mexico for a visit. Kim is also the woman  who was with Alex, the narrator's ex-husband, after the break-up (actually seems to have been at least part of the cause for the break-up), long enough to have had two sons with him. The two women have remained friends (Alex is now no longer with either of them).

Henley does a nice job of giving the background of the relationships without going into so much detail that the story lengthens unnecessarily. She gives her readers insight into the minds of both women, allowing for an understanding of why might continue to put up with the other. There are other characters--Willow, the narrator's adult-aged daughter, and various names of people that the narrator and Alex community farmed with back in the day. The inclusion of the farmers, in particular, allows Henley to go back and forth in time, to help her develop the narrator for the reader, and allow her readers to understand the level of loss that she's felt.

Henley's stories are really very layered. They should not be plowed through--they should be read slowly and allow for the details to be absorbed and thought about. "Kaput" is a great read with a wallop to the side of the head at the end (sorry, no spoiler here), and it fits right in with the other stories I've read so far in the collection. Looking forward to the rest.

So, if there's a writer I've mentioned here at the EWN more than any other, it's most likely Percival Everett as I believe I've written full reviews of 18 of his now 23 works of fiction, and 3 of his 4 poetry collections. So it should be no surprise that I've chosen one of the stories from his latest (Graywolf Press, September 2015) short story collection, Half an Inch of Water, to take a peek at.

In the story "Stonefly," a girl named Rachel drowns in the river. Her brother, Daniel, is 8 at the time. That and more background is given to the reader in the first paragraph. Then the story bumps forward six years and begins to really concentrate on Daniel. His parents naturally worry about him and have him seeing a therapist. A sample from one of their conversations:

"Any thoughts about your sister?" She cleared her throat. "Might as well get right to it, right?"

"I guess."

"You guess you've been thinking about her or you guess we should get right to it?"

"You're the one who put the question badly."

gives an idea pretty quickly as to Daniel's personality and thought process. And Everett has such precision with his language, I'd not be surprised to find out that the question the therapist asked might have been typed out accidentally, leading to Daniel's smart alecky reply. Daniel actually turns the tables on the therapist two or three more times during their session and a later meeting. The story turns a bit into a finding oneself story as Daniel does begin to focus a bit on his feelings about his sister, about how his parents hover over him (their only other child after Rachel's death). It uses elements from activities Everett has been known to both enjoy, and write about--the outdoors, horses and riding, fly fishing--and an abnormally large trout surfacing and shining near the area Rachel drowned to help propel Daniel forward.

As is typical with an Everett fiction, there's no hammering over the reader's head with a message or idea. Instead it's the combination of events, the writing, and the language that grab one's interest and keeps it. The ideas to mull over and consider for the next couple of days before moving on to the next story in the collection. About halfway through this most recent collection and placing it on one of my Everett shelves will be a pleasure.

"Once you counted eleven hundred days, you lot the desire to count." This opens the short story, "Journey's End," from Amelia Gray's short story collection, Gutshot (FSG, 2015). It's followed by:

"You threw out your notebooks, which freed up some space for fuel. Those days we were looking either for fuel or for places to store it."

A trio of lines that implies some sort of post-apocalyptic setting maybe? A shorter short story--only four paragraphs long--"Journey's End" still hits hard with some fantastic sentences:

"I began to fantasize what might happen if we discovered glowing cubes and cracked them open to find blistering stuff of the universe within."

"I found a cooler of urine buoying rotten cans, their metal bowed out, contents sunk in a haze at the bottom."

"We marveled; they had freed delicate glass from metal and filled each bulb, soldered to reattach, and affixed in place."

"You remembered your father obtaining a wood-boring drill-bit set; after he died, you found that every book in his house had been ventilated and the trees out back as well."

"I hooked up the generator and didn't immediately die."

"I wanted to break the screen and employ the services of its glass on my face but you warned me to be careful after all we had been through."

and ends with a killer: "You were thoughtful like that."

Me typing that could possibly ruin the story for you, but I don't think so. Every time I re-read an Amelia Gray story I catch little things I had missed on the previous reading. This one, which I've enjoyed four times in the past few days, is no different. The Los Angeles Review of Books has a conversation between two more of my favorite authors: Robert Lopez and Peter Markus. In it, they mention another friend, Andrew Richmond, saying "people doing people things" frequently. And that is what happens in Gray's stories, no matter how surreal the setting might be--people doing people things in as interesting a way as possible.

It's pretty amazing to me how long Dogzplot Flash Fiction has been around, consistently publishing great flash stories. I don't remember to check out every online journal as often as I used to, but this site is one I tend to remember to find my way to. A recent short by Joanna Arnow, titled, "A Legacy" caught my eye. It begins:

"They said to write whatever came to mind, but all I can think about is peanut butter."

What is never really established is who THEY are. Over the remaining 120 or so words, "peanut butter" is mentioned nine more times. It's an interesting use of repetition, one that I don't see that often in such a short story. It helps Arnow create a nice rhythm to the story if one were to read it aloud. It keeps the story very focused, which while you'd think it being such a short flash that it would almost have to remain focused, but it's not been that uncommon for me to read a flash that wanders and could have been tighter. Of course, Arnow also uses the word "orgasm" three times through the last half of the flash, which also makes the repetition of "peanut butter" seem that much more necessary.

So, hours after writing about what books I look forward to reading that will be published this year, I jump back to a short story collection that won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction back in 1984, Why Men Are Afraid of Women--only 32 years ago. If there is a series I try to make sure I pick up every year, it's the Flannary O'Connor Award for Short Fiction titles. I've probably owned this collection for half a dozen years and today is the first time I've cracked the covers open.

I opted for the story "A Hunk of Burning Love" because it was originally published in The Missouri Review, a journal I've enjoyed in the past. It begins:

Gene is already there when I come through the door of the New Deal Cafe and Bar.

Nothing overly special. Concise and in the not too distant future of the story, Camoin allows the reader the knowledge that the narrator is Larry, a male co-worker of Gene's. Also that Larry is sleeping with the waitress at the New Deal, Rita. While the title of the collection notes how men are afraid of women, and dipping into a few more of the stories this evening, it is a common topic, "A Hunk of Burning Love" looks a little closer at how relationships between men can veer hard toward awkward.

Gene and Larry do outdoor work--on the particular day in question they are putting up fencing on a pasture. The conversation in the diner is a little odd; then the conversation while Gene drives Larry to the property they'll work on gets a little more stilted as Gene accuses Law-rence (as he calls him) of not understanding Elvis because he's from Chicago--among other things; and during the day while they work it all but disappears as they work mainly in silence. A key bit of information about Rita comes about and I think from that point forward Camoin has the reader feeling just as awkward listening in on their conversation as they seem to be themselves, which makes for a great read.

Besides creating some great characters, Camoin writes deceptively simple prose--in that it's not simple at all, but very accessible and clean. He's got some great descriptions:

...the sky is like a TV screen when the station is off the air, a blank waiting to be filled in.

And not long after that:

...the sky is like a page from a book that hasn't been written.

He looks at relationships, at working men, at small daily events that we all recognize but don't frequently see in stories. This story and the others I've had the chance to read so far are excellent. And in good news, the University of Georgia Press has republished this collection in paperback and as an eBook as of late 2013 and it's widely available again.