After We Were Nothing

I’m excited to say I have a story at The Collagist. It’s called "After We Were Nothing" and I owe plenty of thanks to Matt Bell for giving the story such a perfect home, and for providing some key editorial insights.

A good editor means so much.

I really like this story. Hope you do too.

Of Rainbows and O.J.

Wanted to point to a couple of stories that entered the world in the last week.

"To the End" is over at Used Furniture Review.

"Twenty-Nine Failed Beginnings to 'The Tag Brewster Story'" is over at H_NGM_N.

Thrilled about both of these and I have to personally thank Matthew Dube at H_NGM_N for the time and energy he put into helping me get this story where it needed to be.

It is interesting how these things align. Both of these stories proved super tricky and each took a long time to bring together. "Twenty-Nine Failed Beginnings" definitely holds my personal record for time elapsed between first draft and final publication. "To the End" holds my time-elapsed record for a flash-length story.

Hope you enjoy them.

Of Droughts and Mayors

Got a story up at Hobart called "A Good and Hopeful Man Leading His People Forward. It's here.

I love Hobart. I own a Hobart shot glass and almost every print issue. I don't need to tell you how happy I am to be part of this great publication. But I will.

I'm overjoyed.

"An Incomplete Registry of Deaths: Part One" Up at Corium

Got a new story in the new Corium. Read it here. It’s a series of somewhat interrelated micro fictions. I’m hoping to do more of these but who knows. My projects don’t always hold.

Thanks to the wonderful Lauren Becker for including the story. I haven’t been getting a lot of stuff out there this year, but this one I really liked and am so glad it found such a great home.

Short Getting Shorter

I haven't been writing much flash. I've been enjoying taking a little more time with things, leaving room to extend language. Not that I'm writing epics, mind you.

But I wonder what the popularity of flash is doing to our perceptions of things. And by "our," I mean the world of journals and journal readers. Today, I had a story rejected. The reason given: the story is too long to be so reliant on the poetic over the narrative.

The story is 1,500 words.

I'm pretty sure that's quite short.

I assume the journal had issues beyond the poetic-to-narrative balance (not claiming it's the most brilliant thing I've ever done), but I do find the specific concern over the length strange. It's as if flash has trained us to expect a full story in the tiniest possible spaces. Maybe this story needs to be cut in half. But, eight years ago, I would've never imagined a 1,500 word story referred to as "a story of this length." As if it were something bloated and unwieldy.

So Close and So Far

I love a story I could never write, that I couldn’t even conceive of writing, the diction and the plot and all of it existing somewhere outside of myself and yet – YET – somewhere so close to me that the damn thing makes me feel, makes me read the story again, then again.

That’s “Men Glass” by Sarah Rose Etter in The Collagist this month. Good stuff. Good read.

"The Abomination" at decomP

The February issue of decomP is live and my story "The Abomination" appears within. It's a monster story. It's part of a little project I'm working on about various beasties and such and I couldn't be more pleased to have it in decomP.

Thanks to Jason Jordan for including me!

"The Nameless" at PANK

If this was Novemeber, I could say Happy PANKsgiving and feel mildly clever. But it's December. So maybe: Merry PANKsmas. I'm not sure that's appropriately non-demoninational. It also sounds weird.

In any case, this is all to say that the December PANK is live right here and it contains my story-like thing "The Nameless."

So ends today's self-promotion.

"Leap" at Hayden's Ferry Review

Thanks so much to Beth Staples and the editors at Hayden's Ferry Review for including my story "Leap" in Issue #47. The story is available in the print issue; or you can read it online here.






The opening:

They found my roommate’s body stuffed into a drainage pipe two miles from campus. I saw it on the news before anyone came to my dorm-room door. “Body of Missing Student Believed Found.” He’d been dead for five days. I’d like to claim I was the one who’d reported him missing. But I hadn’t even known he was gone until his girlfriend called the police.

The knocks at my door began a few minutes after the news of his death hit. Light tapping at first. Then people banging, shouting for me to open. I imagined them swarming in the hall. If I’d opened the door, they would’ve eaten me. Skin first and then the red parts. I sat in my desk chair next to the window, the February air coming in cold as I watched my roommate’s fish swim circles in his tank. A key rattled in the lock. Then the door opened, and there was the resident assistant with two cops, clones of each other, formal posture, pug faces. A crowd gathered behind them but didn’t come in. “You the roommate of Baron Butler?” one of the cops asked. The RA told him I was. “That’s David Nikkola,” he said. My name is Davis. But I offered no correction. Or maybe I mumbled one. I don’t know. This was five years ago now.

"My Father Believes" at > kill author

Love > kill author and I'm excited to have a little piece in Issue 6.

It's "My Father Believes and it is surrounded by some incredible company. Really. Check out the issue. Good stuff. Thanks to the mysterious editors for letting me be a part of it.

Damn Fine Fiction from Ethel Rohan

Some stories crackle under each sentence, the story emerging not so much in some linear ascension but in some exponential expansion until the whole of it overwhelms. That’s Ethel Rohan’s How to Kill currently over at the Hobart website.

Just take this line: “He pushed away his breakfast plate, the leftovers looking violated.”

Amazing. Read it.

"Cast Out" Now at PANK

The newest issue of PANK is now live and includes "Cast Out" -- a post-apocalyptic short story I wrote while considering ideas for a novel.

Can't say how excited I am to be in PANK. They consistently publish some of my favorite stories. And they manage the rarest of feats -- a consistent aesthetic that isn't beholden to a specific style or genre.

Hope you get a chance to read the whole February issue.

A Story I Keep Remembering...

I didn't write about this story when I first read it. I think it's possible I hadn't yet started this blog. Or I was busy. But I want to mention:

Yearlight Savings Time by Kevin Griffith. Published in the August '09 issue of PANK.

This is fantastical fiction about Americans trying to relive a year exactly as it happened the year before in an attempt to stave off the end of the world. The story centers on one man, the narrator. His personal hopes and failures are perfectly interwoven into the story of a world struggling to relive the past in order to have a future.

It's fantastical fiction at its best because it makes you think AND feel. Given how many stories I read, I think it's a sign of this one's power that it keeps returning to me. So I wanted to mention it.

And encourage you to read it if you haven't.

"Touch Me" Live at JMWW

I love JMWW. Really great quarterly. And I'm so glad to have my story "Touch Me" in the current issue.

Very cool.

Do Not Hit Delete

I used to write a lot of political commentary that appeared on various blogs of various acclaim. I did this for around four years before giving it up so I could focus more time on my fiction. But here’s the thing: if you looked at my opinions circa 2005 and then looked at my opinions circa 2009, you’d find a few inconsistencies. O.k., a lot of inconsistencies. That doesn’t bother me because those inconsistencies are really just a record of my political evolution. I like that I can trace my growth in knowledge and shifts in philosophy. So why do I sometimes feel different about my published fiction? Why do I occasionally want to delete the links to some of my older stories?

Here’s the truth: anytime anyone mentions they liked one of my stories and say they’re going to read all the stories I link to here, I get a palpitation. Seriously. What if they don’t like anything else I’ve written? What if they decide the first story of mine they read is the only worthwhile thing I’ve ever written?

But that’s stupid. And I know it. First of all, I’ve never submitted to a journal I don’t respect. So, if they published a story of mine (even five years ago), I gotta respect their decision. Sure, maybe I don’t write in that style that anymore. Maybe I think I write better now. Maybe a few of my stories now represent everything I’m trying to get away from in my fiction. Maybe, maybe, maybe. What’s the point of fretting? I wrote it. Someone I respect published it. Let it live as a record of my writerly evolution, right?

And that’s why every story I’ve ever published is linked to here. Because, after those palpitations recede, I really do want to keep that record.

A Little Noise for "Quiet"

What I love about reading online fiction is the variety you can find – particularly in the realm of flash (a form that is very suited to the Internet). That’s all just a prelude to the praise I want to throw David Erlewine’s way. Specifically for ”Quiet”, his new story in PANK.

The story is under 250 words and has the weight of a story ten times as long. David does this so well in his writing –condenses the essential flavor of a narrative so that nothing is missed despite the brevity. In “Quiet”, he gives us the entire story of a mother/son relationship. Impressive not just in its ambition but in its effect. Its impact. Its success in causing the reader to pull in a long breath and wait a good moment before being able to move on.

Considering Brian Evenson

Confession: I’d never read a word of Brian Evenson’s until today.

I’d, of course, heard plenty about him. Most of the lit blogs I read speak of the man in breaths of pipapitating awe (yeah, I made that word up). I kept meaning to order one of his books. Still meaning too. But when I discovered via HTMLGiant that a story of his entitled “Windeye” was up at PEN America, I figured I’d better go see what all the pipapitation is about.

I was surprised. I have no idea if this one, brief story is representative of the Evenson style, but I really didn’t expect such clarity of prose and tightness of narrative. Frankly, I expected the story to be “difficult” – the kind of story that takes multiple reads to suss out an ounce of coherence. I don’t know why I expected this. Perhaps because there’s been a trend within certain quarters of the short fiction world (including the quarters where Evenson is praised) towards a kind of linguistical and structural experimentation that forgoes a strong narrative in favor of artistic impressionism. While I often find those kind of stories brilliant in their own right, I don’t often enjoy them as “stories” in any traditional sense.

I enjoyed “Windeye” as a story. I wanted to know what was going to happen next. And what did happen next repeatedly surprised me in the way a very good story can. But, what truly impressed me was how much depth Evenson manages to create in such a small, strange space. There’s a haunting quality to “Windeye” that is very rare in fiction this short. I could tell even after the first reading that the story was going to rattle around inside me and resurface in the months and years to come.

So, yeah, if this is what Evenson is all about, I get it now. No more procrastinating on reading more of his stuff. Orders will be placed very soon.

The Invasion of the Realists!!

Via Matt Bell, I came across this article from Context that claims neorealism has a stranglehold on major American literary journals and that experimentation, while often given lip-service, is fundamentally discouraged.

The author, Daniel Green, does note that things might be better on the web, so I won’t call him to task for missing such places of invention like Diagram or 5_trope or many of the other online journals publishing stories with voices a good deal outside traditional realism. I’ll even give him a pass for overlooking Unsaid and Monkeybicycle et. al. because his focus is so specifically on journals like Ploughshares and Gettysburg Review and others known for having stories regularly selected in the prominent yearly anthologies.

Given Green’s narrow focus, the question isn’t whether or not he’s right (he is right that those journals prefer realism and anthologies/awards like Pushcart fill their pages with predominantly traditional stories – although not always). The real question is: does it matter? While journals such as Paris Review may help a writer land an agent, how influential and representative are they really? Most successful writers I know don’t pick their style based on what’s winning awards. They come to their style based on their own peculiarities. And that style is often hard to categorize with easy labels like realism or experimentalism.

If realist-leaning prose is popular with many journal editors, I suppose that’s because realist writers have something vital to say about our current world. And if less realist writing is bubbling up from the Internet and newer journals, maybe that’s because, in our incredibly confusing world, those styles have something vital to say too.

I know I’m being all accepting here. But, generally, I reject the assumption that literature is stagnant if it’s not being wildly inventive. A good story is a good story. Maybe I’m missing the point. But despite the fact that none of us can make a living writing short fiction, it seems to me there are more venues available for publication than ever before. That should mean more opportunity for all kinds of fiction to find its audience.

Force Me Down

A moment of complete honesty. I read a lot of online fiction (that’s not the revealing part). I’d say I stop reading 75-85% of the stories and never come back to them (sad but true). It’s not that they’re poorly written or that I’m such a busy, busy man that I can’t be bothered to keep reading. It’s just that – I get bored rather easily.

And then I think – shit, how many people never make it to the end of my stories? And that makes me think – shit, better write better. Sometimes, I actually do. Or think I do. And then I stumble across a story that forces me to read it in full in one sitting. Holds me down and forces. And I think – yeah, that’s how it’s done.

Roxane Gay has one of those stories up at JMWW. "His Name Is". Love it. And not just because it takes place in Las Vegas and I’m a sucker for Vegas. It’s got force. And it’s got lines like: “He scurries away, his short legs trying to keep pace with his optimism.”

Nice.

What's in a Translation?

Here’s a thought a writer friend and I had today when we both agreed we preferred Chekhov’s short stories to Joyce’s. Does Chekhov benefit from having modern translations while we still read Joyce in the original? Would Dubliners be more engaging if a translator whisked away the cobwebs?

Hard to know. But we agreed that antiquated language is not a sure-kill. After all, that Shakespeare guy is still pretty engaging. You know, if you like love, murder and betrayal.

King Lear, man. That’s all I’m saying.