1. I enjoy listening to stories while I chop veggies for soup and salad. Especially, the following recordings: Tobias Wolf records Denis Johnson’s short story “Emergency” on day 56; Sebastian Berry records “Eveline” by James Joyce on day 74; Flannery O’Connor reads her own story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” in front of a live audience on day 84; and Sophie Kipner reads her short accompanied by drawings in this video clip at Kugelmass.

2. Stories may be read in packages. Oprah featured 8 Micro-fictions by “provocative” writers. Five Chapters serializes a Kristopher Jansma’s short story in parts over 5 days of the week. Spartan published 5 stories under 2,000 words on April 1st. 3 stories were written as responses to photographic images used as writing prompts at Superstition Review. Stories 101 and 102 are paired back-to-back by a common theme: Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” is mentioned in Mima Simic’s “My Girlfriend.”

3. Vermont College of Fine Arts students are represented in Story 63 (Cynthia Newberry Martin), Story 96 (Claire Guyton), Story 104 (Angela K. Small), Story 105 (Kali VanBaale). Ross McMeekin VCFA alum is the editor of Spartan (Stories 91-95). Story 75 is written by one of our beloved teachers, Abby Frucht.

4. Coming of Age themes show up in “Our House is Open,” “Off the Revolution,” “Untitled,” and “Fort Apache.”

5. Story favorites from print found on-line to share: “The Dead,” “Yurt,” “Roman Fever,” “The Drowning.”

6. Stories that match a theme-of-the-day: “A Short Story About Academy Awards,” “Snowed-In,” “Let It Snow,” “A Country Woman.”

7. Two well-established writers (Pamela Painter and Lydia Davis) spin a different kind of tale on the experience of coming in for a shaky airplane landing.

8. Flash pieces read as I further my study on the form: “Snake Eyes,” “Monsters,” “The Common Cuckoo.”

9. “Runner” was the result of a writing prompt using photography. The story is meant to bridge the gap between two unrelated images by showing what happens in between.

10. I find both tension and an odd comfort in stories by women about women (who happen to be mothers of daughters), thanks to Alix Ohlin in “Casino” and Suzanne Jackson Rodgers in “I’ve Looked Everywhere.”

For the rest of April, I will be shining a light on the city of Boston and the writers (and literary magazines) who do their good work in the good city. See you next time.

If you’re just joining in, I review an on-line short story every day of the year in 2013. A few weeks ago, I traveled west to California with my family, a region rich in literary tradition both past and present. Instead of posting a week in review of Bay Area posts, I featured a story each day I was traveling which covered Short Stories 46-53/365.

There were bookstores, too, and bridges and beaches.

Here’s a list of the lit mags I explored and the stories I chose to feature.

Threepenny Review, “Drouth” by Wendell Berry

Threepenny resides in Berkeley, same town where we stayed the first half of the trip. Check out their Reading Room which houses an archive of selected poems, fictions, essays and reviews.

Storytapes features a story swap and the one I stumbled upon was #5, a sharing between Amber Sparks and Sarah Rose Etter who happen to also share a birthday. Both read and write beautifully, magically, heartfully (is that a made-up word?) and Storytapes does a bunch of cool things like swapping, reading, and chatting.

Eleven Eleven, “Down River” by Anna Fonte

This journal comes out of the California College of the Arts MFA Writing Program. This from their website…”The aim of our publication is to provide a forum for risk and experimentation and to serve as an exchange between writers and artists.”

Catamaran Literary Reader features California Regional Themes. Writers and Artists from Everywhere. I chose a series of linked short fictions with a circus theme by Ana Maria Shua translated by Steven J. Stewart. I loved these lines.

You’re always as young as your dreams, as your wishes, as your youngest lover, as your heart. And there will always be a place for us in the circus: it’s only a matter of putting on a little more makeup when the years turn us all into clowns.

Willow Springs takes us a bit up north to Spokane, Washington, but the author of this piece, “Sin-Tra-La” is by California writer Diane Lefer who I had to privilege to know at Vermont College of the Fine Arts. Great writer, excellent person, and Willow Springs is one of my favorite print journals.

Narrative Magazine is well-known, well-funded, and generally an easy go-to for good on-line fiction. Russell Banks (also well-known) has a novel excerpt/short story up in the Winter Issue. “Lost and Found” by Russell Banks

And to close, on my way home, at a layover in the Chicago airport, rain beating on the glass behind my seat, I could not help but think of Stuart Dybek. So I found this, “Voyeur of Rain” and borrowed my daughter’s ear-phones and was read to by the man himself. Sad, dark, lyrical and true. I can’t help but love the way his stories take me to his place, South Side of Chicago. Thanks, Indiana Review!

Feeling the same giddy love for art of letter writing made me think about how love can feel a million trillion different ways and the objects of our desire may take a variety of form. So with my story project, which to date had been random in choice, became about love. From February 5-14, I looked for love in all of the short story places.

Here’s where I found it…

Unrequited in “Araby” by James Joyce at Fiction

Haunted in “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” by Robert Olen Butler at Web Del Sol

Made up as you go along in “Morton Bonsey” by Randall Brown at 3:AM Magazine

Any size in “Crushed Ice” by Gary Fincke at SmokeLong Quarterly

Between siblings in “Nobody” by Tom Kealey at Sunday Rumpus Fiction

Longed for in “Flotsam” by Diane Cook at Redivider

Sweet in “Zorba’s” by Mathieu Cailler at Scissors and Spackle

With an unexpected twist in “Scapegoat” by Michelle Coppola from Short Story America on Quiddity

Rendered fragile with time in “Immortalizing John Parker” by Robin Elizabeth Black at Freight Stories

Grown fonder with absence in “Lemons” by Frances Lefkowitz at 100 Word Story

Click any one of these shorts and feel your heart begin to stretch towards something you hadn’t yet found to fall in love with.

Beginning with Robin MacArthur’s beautiful story at Shenandoah, “Wings, 1989″ and ending with a visual narrative brief by Amy Porter in First Inkling, each story this week featured a narrator whose close observation of a mother/grandmother (or both) figure instructed the development of the viewpoint character over time.

In between, we had “Rose” by Dylan Landis at r.kv.r.y; our weekly classic, “Hell-Heaven” by Jhumpa Lahiri at The New Yorker; “Up High in the Air” by Laura van den Berg at Boston Review; and “The Long Beep” by Casey Hannan at Wigleaf.

My own story, “Alchemy” fits in well this week, too, thanks to the supportive editors at Monkeybicycle.

Here are some great opening lines…

From “Wings, 1989″: “That day in July my mom came out of the house, wiped her soapy hands on her thighs, and told me to get my lazy bum up off the grass and go weed the peas.” (MacArthur)

From “Up High in the Air” : “Just after the Fourth of July, my mother called to tell me she thought her hair was on fire.” (van den Berg)

From “Rose”: “Leah’s grandmother washed and dried her dinner plates, stacked them in the oven and set it on broil. She hid her pearls in the toilet tank, where they coiled under a rubber flap and created a perpetual flush.” (Landis)

From “The Long Beep: “My mother’s fingers are scissors. There are lines to cut. My mother doesn’t cut them. She pinches my grandmother’s lips. My grandmother’s eyes stay closed.” (Hannan)

My daughters with me, their mother. I’m pretty sure they’re paying attention.

Dalia’s goal is to save the love letter, which she considers an endangered species.

She began to raise money to rent the space, provide complimentary hot drinks, paper, pens, and stamps, and maybe even to pay some volunteers, through Kickstarter with a goal of $1,200. In no time, she received $4,184, a clear testament to the charm of her vision: to have the community as a group write 1,000 love letters in two weeks.

For two weeks, 47 Flat street will provide shelter from the cold where you can sit down with a hot cup of cocoa and write your heart out. The project will conclude with a special reading of selected letters on or around Valentine’s Day. Don’t worry; directions are provided.

At the end of the first night, 131 letters were written. My daughter, Luci, who wrote a love letter to me, her very grateful Mom, wrote letter number 10. I wrote a love letter to my house later in the evening coming it at number 83. My fiance, Bob, was Mr. 100. He wrote a letter to a pair of birch trees he admires from the living room window each morning as he sips coffee and writes poetry.

There were letters to babies, fathers, mothers, grandmothers, teachers, the graduating class of BUHS 2013, friends, lovers, houses, trees, and the first letter, written by Dalia herself, is a love letter to the town of Brattleboro.

As Dalia said in her Kickstarter video, “Brattleboro had some really some hard times in recent years. We had a hurricane, and a major flood, and some violent deaths, and a major fire. I want this as an opportunity for us to come together…. Being a place that values art and the written word and just being a small town that knows how to take care of each other.”

I was most struck at how one person with heart and vision transformed a empty storefront, splashing a dismal dingy space with color and light and filling it with warmth and creativity.

Go, Dalia!

Brattleboro, this is who we are!

Ours was one of the last families in our little foothill town elementary school to purchase a home computer earlier in this century. It wasn’t until my MFA program, three years ago, that I swapped out pencil and pad for laptop to draft stories and poems. If you ever visit the place where I live and write, you’d see that there are hours of my writing/reading day where electricity eludes me.Yet, slowly, and with a certain amount of internal angst, I’ve come to love the world of electronic ink, how stories from all over the world can be conjured by a click.

So, when I’m all plugged in and charged up, I am digging what I read, the literary current, if you will. And I still yearn for the printed page, the paper in my hands. I straddle both worlds. So do many of the literary magazines I admire, so why angst about it? Why not save the unease for my characters?

This week, characters in the 7 of my 365 short story line-up are all about discontent.

Beginning with Mary Stein’s beautiful story “Vestigial Features,” about a woman’s quiet quest to feel herself fully-formed, and ending with A.K. Benninghofen’s “Torque” about the underlying tensions of mild-manner domesticity, each of the protagonists persist, torn in some way by the human condition. True of all good fiction, no? But something about the inner struggle, the doing it alone even when among others seem to ring true in the fictions that chose me this week.

In “People With Holes” by Heather Fowler, literally, people with holes seek connection with like-beings who also have holes. In “Jesus Doesn’t Love You and Neither Do I” the same author finds the metaphor for how we are alone with our holes even when among a townspeople. David Houseley’s character in “Toyota” stands alone by a window, looking out, coveting his neighbor’s latest acquisition while calling out to his disconnected wife to stand witness beside him.

How about this? “Some people can have arguments and discussions on the bus. They talk about money and shoes and bosses and medication and who has screwed whom and who is more righteous and when will they learn.”  Ever think about how public display of personal content is another form of loneliness seeking connection? Andrea Dulanto’s story “Winter Clothes” explores the mind of a woman ready to risk privacy in a public arena.

Finally, in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” the town character demonstrates an over-arching collective discontent, demonstrating the ache within a people, and the blind following of a community tradition.

On that note, I can’t quite say, “Happy Reading!” but I can say hope the sun comes back to Vermont soon.

You can read my thoughts on print lit mags here.

So, in deference to the form, I’ll keep this post brief.

What I gleaned from Robert Vaughan’s interview about flash is this…

Beadelaire: Father of Flash?

1.) Origins: turn of the century, Baudalaire

2.) Word Count: some say 1,000 words or less, some say 14o characters (micro-flash)

3.) “Glimpse into a world or a fraction of a story that is as  finished as a story.”

4.) A growing category

5.) Every single word has weight.

6. ) “The piece has a line or a phrase that stands the piece on its head.”

7.) Connection to poetry, almost a cross-over

8.) “It’s of a moment. It comes through you.”

This week’s flash fiction featured “What Fills a Balloon” by Ross McMeekin who edits an on-line flash journal called Spartan, “Delta Thirty-Five” by Pam Houston, who can be seen reading from her “genre-bending” book Contents May Have Shifted* on Vimeo, “Winter” by Aimee Bender, “The Dauphin” by Marc Sheehan (winner of NPR’s Three-minute Fiction) and may be heard as a podcast, and coming in as the longest piece this week, at approximately 1,800 words was Amber Sparks, “Study for the New Fictional Science.”

Lake Effect: Friday Flash Fiction

And, of course you may hear half a dozen super short pieces by Robert Vaughan in the interview at Lake Effect.

My own thoughts on flash may be read here.

Thanks for peeking in.

* Pam’s book is marketed as a novel. Each chapters could stand alone as a short story. They’re very short. They fit in here.

What I’m really enjoying about the challenge is that I stumble upon new (and old) on-line journals I haven’t checked out, which then leads me to art I haven’t seen, poetry I haven’t read, editor statements that encourage me.

Fiction is not dead or even dying and good shorts are available with a click and a scroll, or maybe you have to try out two or three before you read the one you want to share, for some reason, any: the prose, the content, the place, some fabulous twist, something dark on a rainy day, a good friend wrote it. This week, I rejected a few stories, as in, I read them but then didn’t post them in my group.

I heard a line in a movie this past week…

“You think its cool to hate things. And its not. Its boring. Talk about what you love, keep quiet about what you don’t”. —Zibby- Liberal Arts

There’s enough negativity out there already, and besides, it wasn’t that the stories I didn’t post weren’t good, I just didn’t love them.

When I scanned the batch of stories I was compelled to review, a common theme I found among them was family: sisters in “Two Sisters” by Helen Rubenstein, father and daughter in “Sleeping Out” by Cassie Gonzales, a young boy and his father, in “My Father at the Mountainside” by Jacob White, a grown son and his parents in “The Red Room” by Paul Bowles, and a woman and her monkey in “My Monkey and Me” by Laura Burnes, again, sister and sister in “Firebug” by Katie Cortese–oh, the complications between sisters– and finally husband and wife in “Leftovers” by Nickolas Butler.

Once again, I was drawn to a different story each day, randomly, and as a group they held a common thread.

Here’s a saying: “There are only two things you can count on: death and taxes.”

But perhaps in fiction the two things you can count on are: death and family. Not in the sense that characters can always count on family, but that people can count on reading a pile of stories and run into family drama in more, rather than less, stories from the pile. We often write fiction about what we face in our lives. In life, we face our families, even if they aren’t near or even on the planet.

And what was the opening line in Anna Karenina again?

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

And one last thing… a happy picture of the most recent addition to my family.

One of the group members, a writing friend, asked how I choose the stories for a post. She queried, “Do you play butterfly and just land on one and then the next?”

My reply: “I have no system. There is no shortage of great shorts on-line. Usually one thing leads me to another, so, yes…the butterfly game, only it’s winter in Vermont so I think more about chickadees at the feeder.”

Fairly random. Which is why I was surprised that 3 of the 7 stories this week featured a dead dog. There’s irony in this. You see, every day for the past eighteen days, I have completed one small act of grieving for the death of my own dog, Finn. His nose prints smudge our glass and I can’t bear to wash them. I can still smell his scent on his collar which I have taken out and put away again at least five times, thinking I was done, or that the scent would be gone. When I do this, his name tag jingles, causing the cat to caterwaul at the door. Perhaps she just misses summer. Snow piles her hidey-hole under the porch. But I think not. Okay. Enough.

From a fabulous interview by Joel Lovell (deputy editor at The Times Magazine) with George Saunders: “ ‘If death is in the room, it’s pretty interesting,’ Saunders said, meaning that any story circling around the idea of death is going to be charged.”

Besides the dead dogs, stories I read this week featured a dying husband (“Dogfights”), a dying father (“Last Dog”), a dead child (“The Red Bow”), the death of innocence, (“Our Education” and “Cartwheel”, a dead horse, and a mother’s grave (“DYSPNEA”).

Then there was Ben Tanzer’s flash piece “Younger” which seemed to cling to life, (and didn’t they all), but without the mention of death, and yet, you felt in the clinging the preciousness of life in juxtaposition. Sort of, death off the page.

“…the little one though, he’s like a donut, a grimy, oozy, sticky, crying powdered donut that you just want to stroke and smell, and curl-up with at every moment possible.”

Then I thought about my own stories. Let’s see. Three published (I’m new to this). In them: a dead sister and a dying wife, a dead mother, the loss of a child.

Again, Saunders…

“But I would also say that I’m interested in getting myself to believe that it’s going to happen to me. I’m interested in it, because if you’re not, you’re nuts. It’s really de facto what we’re here to find out about. I hate the thought of messing around and then being like, ‘Oh, I’ve got pancreatic cancer.’ It’s terrifying. It’s terrifying to even think of. But to me, it’s what you should be thinking about all the time. As a fiction writer, the trick is how to be thinking about it in a way that makes it substantial. You want it to matter when you do induce it.”

I realized he was not alone. Many stories I read have to do with death, or at the very least, any number of smaller losses, perhaps, our way of practicing for death.

It’s winter in Vermont, we are surrounded by death. Even death is surrounded by death. I have friends that read the obits before the comics. Our parents seem to lose a friend a week. Our friends are losing their parents. The holidays are rife with metaphors: the darkest night, a dying light, a savior born.

So why, in 6 out of the 7 randomly chosen stories, wouldn’t a writer feature death?

“You want it to matter when you induce it.”

A question: Did they do it well?

Feel free to weigh in sign up, join in, share a thought…

365 Short Stories in 2013

A couple of weeks before the holidays I was having tea at a friend’s house. She served lemon and lavender and mint tea in an heirloom cup and we sat on her couch in the afternoon light.We talked of daughters and births and becoming grandmothers. We basked in our good fortune. As I stepped into the blank winter air, I wondered what my life would have been like if my daughter had not made it to womanhood and to a time where she herself would become a mother. And I cried. Not because an imagined peril, the what-if, had brought me real sadness, but because it hit me that she would become a mother and have what I have had with her, but with someone else. I felt a loss in that.

I write fiction to play with the nuances of human psyche through characters. So here’s what mingled in my writer brain: tea, bone china, daughter, loss, and I sat down to create.

“Bone China” is the first and only piece of flash fiction I ever wrote. A friend once challenged me to try and write a story under 2,000 words and I knew one day I would. When I approached this story on the afternoon of that day, I didn’t know it would be the story that met the dare. Everything I wanted to say flew from my fingers and in fifteen minutes, it was done. A few tweaks the next day, and off it went.

From “Bone China”…

“He led her to the living room. The furniture quivered at the sight of her, or so she imagined. The leather was skin, the velour a caress. Her mind was slipping into old ways, how she used to love this room after lunch, with him, before work, the children in school, and she steadied herself with the piano. He took her arm.”

Thanks to Ross McMeekin, flash-fiction writer extraordinaire and editor of Spartan, an up-and-coming lit journal that features brief works of prose, for giving my inaugural “flash” a home.

If you like what you read at Spartan, join my Facebook Group, 365 Short Stories in 2013, where you can get a quick review and link to an on-line short every day of the year.