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Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Contest
The official notice is up on the Burnside Review website, so I can spread the word far and wide myself: my sequence of linked prose poems/flash fictions, “Detours,” was chosen by Blake Butler as winner of the 2011 Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Contest. I’ve been detouring with these words for a good while; winning the contest is…
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Conversation Starter
Waiting through one of my children’s lessons this week, I had my ear talked off by a not-quite-acquaintance who was also waiting on a child. It was one of those small increments of time I had planned to spend reading, or maybe refining my to-do list, as if arranging my set of not-yet-accomplished tasks in…
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Imaginary Weather (running and writing)
I have gone back to a draft of a story that takes place on a hot day. A really hot day. Today is not a hot day, not where I live, and it is taking a strenuous effort to muscle my imagination anywhere near air shimmering over asphalt, t-shirts sweaty around necklines, glare that makes…
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Sounds of Water
When it rains here in our favorite deluge style, the gutters on the front of my house sound as if they might soon tear away from the roof, though I choose to believe that’s just the sound of water cascading over the edge. My own little waterfall–no need to leave home. The back gutters are…
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Bridges real, imagined, or ruined.
Parque Provincial Aconcagua Plaza España, Mendoza We rode the overnight bus back to Rosario from Mendoza last night, luxuriating in coche came comfort–except that my legs are a little short to take full advantage of the footrest. Dozing off, I composed a brilliant blog post in my head. What follows may or may not resemble…
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In search of lost pictures
A mysterious tech glitch having eaten a quantity of pictures off my memory card, I have tried to reconstruct what it was I saw, what I thought I wanted to remember. Snapping quick photos as a memory aid, it’s easy not to look carefully enough; many of the plants are lost to me now, vague…
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Travel guides new and old
I love reading travel guides. I’ve bought several in preparation for my upcoming trip to Argentina, and I’ve pretty well cleaned out the public library’s shelf. (Good news for those planning their own trips: I leave at the end of the month, and all books will be returned.) The university library has just one book…
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Found time (found poems, found stories)
If I’m careful on my class prep/writing days, I can just fit in a run between the time when I get too stiff to sit at the computer any longer and the time I need to pick my son up from school. (If I’m overwhelmed or disorganized, I end up working up to the last…
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Underlining: an irresistibly unreliable narrator talks about art
The Topless Tower, Silvina Ocampo’s long story/novella, translated by James Womack (London: Hesperus Worldwide, 2010) is the tale of 9-year-old Leandro’s unexpected entrapment and eventual redemption. Leandro mixes first and third person, sometimes inside his story, sometimes beside it, almost always inside the tower that he both suffers and creates. It’s a story about writing…