storyteller
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.
I’m excited to have my lyric essay, “Variables” included on Cahoodaloodaling’s list of nominations for the Best Small Fictions anthology. Many thanks to Raquel Thorne and the journal’s team for letting me be a part of such a cool issue.
The journal’s latest issue, Joysticks, is also fun and full of punchy pieces. Special bonus–the theme is joy!
Carolina Quartly has published my story, “Ready for Glory,” on their website this week. This is the first I’ve published from an ongoing project I’ve been working on as part of my Ph.D, which is to “adapt” (I put quotes because I’m still trying to figure out what that means) the stories in James Joyce’s DUBLINERS to stories about present day Detroit.
It’s exciting to have “Ready for Glory” out first, because it is based on the first story in Dubliners, “The Sisters.” Take a look if you wanna.
The second story, based on “The Encounter” has also already found a home. News about that is coming soon.
The first few were easiest because they are about childhood, something I love to write about, and because they are in first person. As the project progresses, it gets trickier, but I’m also embarking on the challenges that have drawn me to the project in the first place: to learn how Joyce uses point of view. With every story, I’ve been enjoying finding parallels with early 20th century Dublin and early 21st century Detroit. There are more than I’d imagined.
The last story from my MA thesis (2010) from Miami of Ohio has found a home! It’s based loosely on some experiences I had playing in a cover band on Khao San Road in Bangkok.
You can read “Miss Thailand Country Band” in the latest issue of UNT’s American Literary Review, which also features work by their contest winners and a pretty awesome photo gallery. My friend Raina has a n essay in there too. Check it out.
While you’re at it, enjoy this photo of me singing in a Thai cover band:
My creepy story, "Trespassers," is now live on the Sequestrum website. It won runner up in their New Writers contest.
It's about Detroit in the wintertime, so a good one to read while you're sweating in August, especially sweating in Atlanta August, like I have been.
Enjoy.
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.
I’m honored that “Theresa Scott” was published today as one of the first two stories ever to appear in Sinking City, a sharp new online magazine put together by the MFA students at the University of Miami.
Twitter alerted me that this site has featured my story today. Apparently it’s part of a series called “Deal Me IN,” during which the author takes on a 52 short story reading challenge. I have been wanting to do some sort of reading challenge involving journals, but this one is a neat idea: he lines up 52 stories to read the following year, assigns each a card, and then draws his next selections from a deck. I really appreciate how this author is promoting work that appears in journals because, you know, it gets published but we have our doubts about how many people will actually read our stories.
You can read what the author wrote about my story, here.
up at Corium.
It was inspired by what the comedian Pete Holmes says in this podcast conversation.
Nora Bonner 