storyteller
My dissertation is rigid, POV-wise, and it’s been a while since I’ve worked on a long form first person story. To compensate, these short monologues show up on my blank pages from time to time. Here is my latest one of those.
Also, related: I have never named a child. I have named two dogs, though, after American music icons. We’ve got Woody Guthrie (the bigger one) and Elmore James (the littlest).
My latest flash piece has been published!
I’m noticing a recurring image with my writing: canoes. This is probably because I went on an annual canoe trip every year between ages 5-18. By the end of those years, I was pretty tired of canoes. Luckily I’ve since discovered kayaks, which are much easier to paddle because we don’t have to depend on others.
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As for the story, I’m excited about this one.
You can access it here.
This one, “Next to Godliness” is a flash story that came from a prompt from my Fall 2016 fiction workshop at Georgia State [Write a story that takes a saying literally and use it for the premise of a story].
I think I must have submitted at least 20 stories to this magazine before they finally took one. Writing ain’t nothing if it ain’t persistence.
It’s been a while since I updated this, but I have had a couple of stories published in 2017. One is in a print journal, one is online.
The print story is, “As Though She Could Actually Do Somethin
g,” which appeared in the Potomac Review, just in time for AWP in Washington DC. For a nice surprise, my friend, Kilby Allen, also had a story in there called “Everything Neatly Put Away.”
“As Though She Could Actually Do Something” is based on an experience I had in Thailand when I accompanied some American friends when they took their sons to see a movie at a fancy mall in Bangkok. The majority of the story is fabricated (that’s why it’s billed as fiction), but the strange chaos of doing something that is mostly familiar in a place where everything appears in a new language stayed with me for a long time. It seemed story-worthy to me.
You can read other online, “New Translations,” which appeared in the latest issue of Quarterly West. I wrote that one after accidentally getting sucked into browsing my Twitter feed during writing time, and I stumbled across an article that explained how we might have been reading a Bible verse from Genesis wrong all these years. That concept catapulted into a flash piece. I hope you enjoy it!
Two of my friends who happen to be amazing poets, Caroline Crew and Anne Barngrover, have some killer poems in that killer issue.
up at Corium.
It was inspired by what the comedian Pete Holmes says in this podcast conversation.Â
1. The Indiana Review notified me that they are going to be publishing my story, “Come Go With Me,” after it won runner-up in their 2014 fiction contest. I’ve been following that journal and submitting to them for years, so there’s lots of celebration going on around here about that.
2. My flash story, “The Last Attempt,” appears here in the 30th anniversary issue of Oxford Magazine (Oxmag) with some terrific writers, like David Ebenbach, Bret Anthony Johnston, and Michael Czyzniejewski. Woot. The story is based a little bit on my dog, Woody, so here’s one of my favorite pictures of him for you to enjoy:
“Woodilocks”
Nora Bonner 