Neil Serven

I was sitting in a parking lot in Ipswich, Massachusetts—just a few blocks from the house at 26 East Street where Updike lived when he began Rabbit, Run—late for work because I just had to get to the ending of Rabbit at Rest because I knew what was going to happen.

It was hot in the car.

From his expression and the pitch of his voice, the boy is shouting into a fierce wind blowing from his father’s direction. “Don’t die, Dad, don’t!” he cries, then sits back with that question still on his face, and his dark wet eyes shining like stars of a sort. Harry shouldn’t leave the question dangling like that, the boy depends on him.

“Well, Nelson,” he says, “all I can tell you is, it isn’t so bad.” Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kid looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough.

And then I went to work, and I don’t think I got much done that morning.

John Updike would have turned 81 today.

I didn’t bring a camera or laptop with me to AWP, nor did I have a smartphone or other means for live-blogging or tweeting the event. This was probably a good thing. Enough time is spent consulting maps, keeping track of your wallet (location and contents), and trying to figure out if or why a face looks familiar to worry about keeping score for those at home.

With the threat of snow making for treacherous motor travel through central Massachusetts, we arrived in Boston a day earlier than we had planned, the fine folks at Marriott Copley only more than happy to charge us the extortion rate for the extra night.

I started with the book fair on Thursday. My plan was to seek out those markets where I had published work, or perhaps had work rejected but with whom I had enlightening correspondence, or some other connection, and work from there. Panels would be less of a priority; I had a few circled on my program, but most of them, as usual, were tied to academia or were on some esoteric subject that wasn’t going to do much for me.

My first stop was the Barrelhouse table, where I got to meet both Mike Ingram of the BookFight! podcast and Dave Housley, who will be running the workshop I’m in later this month. I spun the wheel and won myself a copy of Issue 8 to go along with my purchase of Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays from Barrelhouse.

It was great to meet up with folks who had either published me, or had nice things to say about my work that was either rejected or withdrawn, or who simply had let me into their worlds via social media. The fear of not belonging is wiped away when a stranger looks down at your badge and recognizes your name, and even better when they remember something you wrote.

I attended an interesting panel on the novella, featuring five writers who have recently each published one: K.E. Semmel, Owen King, Edan Lepucki, Derek Palacio (pinch-hitting for Daniel Torday), and Andrew Ervin.

As someone who has been trying to place a 9,100-word story that was once, before some merciless editing, a 11,200-word story, I have wondered if a market would ever emerge for stories in that “dead zone” between short stories and novels, taking too much page space in a print journal, not profitable enough for standalone production, and past the attention plateau that seems to plague Internet writing. The consensus seems to be that tablets have helped to bridge the divide—Ploughshares’ new Pshares Solos project is one attempt at this—as well as a recent wave of houses putting out standalone chapbook-size novellas such as Melville House, Nouvella,  Dzanc, MudLuscious, and Coffee House Press.

A sliver of issue still remains: most publishers don’t want to commit to a novella that’s not at least 10,000 words (even Duotrope uses the term “novelette” for works of such length), but I didn’t want to bring this up for fear it would seem a) pedantic and b) like I was just trolling for markets for my story.

Later, I attended a panel that doubled as a reading, featuring the authors of three debut fiction collections: Eugene Cross, Andrew Scott, and Jared Yates Sexton. There was a fun and energetic Q & A session at the end in which the writers discussed the process of going from writing short stories to making the decision to put a collection together, and resisting the temptation to make narrative decisions that would force a unity to the collection (something all three said they tried to avoid), rather than let the stories stand on their individual merits. I picked up Cross’s book from the Dzanc Books table, as well as Sexton’s from Atticus Books, from where I also purchased Jürgen Fauth’s Kino , J. M. Tohine’s The Great Lenore and Steven Gillis’s The Law of Strings.

Snow and slush made the idea of venturing too far off-site unappealing, so I kept my options limited to events within walking distance of the hotel and convention center. Other people seemed to have the same idea. The much-hyped Not Reading @ AWP bash put on by Barrelhouse, Hobart, and PANK on the top floor of Lir was sardine-packed, and it was much more difficult to start conversations when folks had ditched their ID badges. I drank some very good Balvenie scotch and not enough water, as evidenced by my Friday morning hangover.

A Friday panel on writers who grew up in Massachusetts tried to work in the notion of a “rage”—an unapologetic approach that Massholes demonstrate in their driving habits, and consequently, their writing. I’m not sure the readers on the panel really followed up well on that theme. One panelist had been a student of Anne Sexton the same year the poet committed suicide, and it’s hard to follow up something like that with observations on turnpikes, candlepin bowling, and the list of ways Western Massachusetts differs from Eastern Mass. (as I was tempted to bring up from the audience).

I got bonus whiskey shots from the devils at Hobart and Juked. I ran into Fictionaut friends Meg Tuite and Robert Vaughan at the Tusculum Review/Connotation Press table and tried (unsuccessfully) to help them fix the telescoping handle on their suitcase.

Friday, I attended the AWP Heat reading at Dillon’s Bar, featuring not only the aforementioned Tuite and Vaughan but a diverse group of talents including Ben Tanzer, Alex Pruteanu, and Julia Fierro. Then it was off to the Plough and Stars, over the river in Cambridge, for the Don’t Forget to Eat poetry reading presented by The Baffler and Make: A Chicago Literary Magazine, where we met up with some longtime real-life friends (Eastern AND Western Mass.) to hear our friend Christopher Janke read. Then a fantastic dinner at Russell House Tavern in Harvard Square.

On Saturday we checked out and enjoyed a delicious brunch with our friends A., J., & L. in Medford.

I arrived home safely, and a lot less lighter in the wallet, having secured the following loot (more or less L-R, top-bottom):

• Noö Journal #14 (pronounced “noo”)
• The Great Lenore, J. M. Tohline (Atticus Books)
• Fires of Our Choosing, Eugene Cross (Dzanc Books)
• Kino, Jürgen Fauth (Atticus Books)
• Here Is How It Happens, Spencer Dew (Ampersand Books)
• American Short Fiction #35.3, Spring 2011
• Missouri Review #14.51, Fall 2012
• Lake Effect #17
• Juked #10
• Hobart #13
• Evansville Review #22
• Ampersand Review #2
• Barrelhouse #8
• Fast Machine, Elizabeth Ellen (Short Flight/Long Drive Books)
• Willow Springs #70
• Pank #8
• The Law of Strings, Steven Gillis (Atticus Books)
• An End to All Things, Jared Yates Sexton (Atticus Books)
• Look! Look! Feathers, Mike Young (Word Riot Press)
• Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays From Barrelhouse (Barrelhouse Books)
• Parcel, Spring 2012 (somewhere in there)
• Microtones, Robert Vaughan
• Participants, Andrew Keating (Thumbnail Press; not shown)

And now I am exhausted. In the best way possible.

The short list makes it sound like I didn’t get a lot read this month, but in truth I’m in progress on a few different titles. Plus I’m in the middle of a book purge, which I’ll write about later, and getting ready for AWP. In the meantime:

Birds of a Lesser Paradise, Megan Mayhew Bergman. A lot has been written about this collection already, particularly with regard to the book’s animal themes, which felt to me like not so much a connecting thread as a heavy, taut cord. Bergman is trying to get at something valid: that our animalistic natures enter at odds with, and are sometimes the driving force behind, our moral decisions. And so in Birds we see a lot of ambivalent pregnant women, aging parents losing their faculties, and ailing beloved pets becoming weights around the necks of the people who care for them. What I think gets overshadowed by all this, though, is the quirky honesty of Bergman’s characters, the fact that she lets them run around bruised and fucked up.

I liked “Another Story She Won’t Believe,” about a recovering alcoholic who volunteers at a center for endangered lemurs, and is called in to help with them when the power goes out during an ice storm. She is supposed to look after the lemurs, but instead ignores them in favor of the building containing the aye-aye:

That’s the only place I want to go right now, a familiar place. The pressure is getting to me. I can’t look at the other lemur houses; some of these things are the last of their kind. They break my heart on an ordinary day—but today, when it feels postapocalyptic outside, when I’m here by myself—I know I’ll see them as they really are, alone. Finished. Hepburn in On Golden Pond.

The character’s train of thought references a lot of classic cinema (she wears a trench coat given to her “when I was in what I call my Gene Tierney stage”), suggesting, perhaps, a yearning for a dream world of burnished beauty and safely pre-scripted outcomes.

Bergman’s prose throughout the collection is fluid. This one was a quick read.

Fourteen Hills, Vols 18.2 & 19.1. The cover design of this journal out of San Francisco State University reminds me of the 1986 Topps baseball card, with the title a cutout against a black border stripe at the top. There are solid selections in both issues, but naturally the one that stood out to this league bowler was “A Foursome Bowling”, by Peter Stenson, in Vol. 18.2.

The foursome in “A Foursome Bowling” is a double date between two married couples: serious bowler Jorge and his controlling wife Becca, and alcoholic Sandy and her husband Daniel. Becca and Daniel are both recovering 12-steppers, and in the early throes of an extramarital affair.

Stenson divides the story into three sections, each aligned with a different point in the match: “First Frame,” “Fifth Frame,” and “Tenth Frame.” Each character brings his or her own buried agendas. Jorge wears his own wrist brace and keeps to himself as he concentrates on his game. This bothers Becca, who had embraced the outing as a social occasion, perhaps as a means to cover up any suspicion of misbehavior between her and Daniel. Sandy is an alcoholic who goes through most of a pitcher of beer (though why a pitcher, if two members of the party are in recovery?). As she falls further into the abyss, Sandy forces the rest of the group to scratch and scrape to reestablish their dignity. Daniel tries to elude the humiliation brought on by Sandy’s behavior by convincing himself that he’s in love with Becca. Meanwhile, Jorge is working on a perfect game.

Stenson does a good job of letting underlying resentments find the precise points to reveal themselves. Bowling is a notoriously lonely sport, one that avoids confrontation (even in head-to-head matches, since there is no defensive element), where you stand away from the audience (Sandy acknowledges advice with a bob of her ponytail) and your loudest opponent is your inner demon, and so Stenson lets omniscient narration ratchet up the tension:

Daniel stood and tried to make his last glance meaningful and have it be with Becca and it was, both with her and meaningful, and Daniel felt like the looks they shared—first across the decaying Uptown Alano Club from over the rims of white Styrofoam coffee cups, months later across forkfuls of strawberry and brie salad at the Lexington, her telling him about the miracle of the mundane and letting go and letting God and the joy of living clean and sober, and then just two months ago, the look they shared in Room 107 for the first time, the guilt of breaking vows and taboos and the excitement and the secure knowledge they what they were doing was okay because their partners didn’t understand what it was like to battle a foe more cunning and baffling than cancer—were better than anything, a secret, an understanding.

…

Bowling with some regular old pros, [Becca] said.

Maybe Jorge here, Daniel said. He slapped Jorge on the shoulder. Becca knew this was a mistake, that Jorge hated being touched. She went to squeeze her husband’s hand but was greeted by his bionic arm. Then it was Sandy draining another glass and peering at Becca, saying things about wrist guards and arrows, and Daniel had been right, her drinking was bad. They’d been there…what, twenty minutes, and she was already openly mocking her husband.

No wonder he cheats.

Francona: The Red Sox Years, by Terry Francona with Dan Shaughnessy. What is strange about this tell-all from the former Red Sox manager is that it’s written in the third person. It’s Shaughnessy’s book, not Francona’s, even though the latter gets top billing. Shaughnessy, a longtime columnist for the Boston Globe, has developed a bit of a reputation among savvier members of Red Sox Nation as a gleeful savager who seeks out narratives of sports personalities who, at their peak, could do no wrong in the eyes of the team and its fickle fanbase, only to be ushered out of town in disgrace once the bloom falls off the rose. He frames this one no differently, but with Francona being the protagonist, the writer makes sure he emerges with his dignity intact.

There are enough moments of candor, involving not just the players and management but lesser-known personalities behind the scenes, to keep the reader compelled, and the insinuations—primarily, that ownership got away from its own successful philosophy in favor of pursuing household-name players to keep casual fans interested—jibe with what fans have seen on the field at Fenway for the last three seasons. If fewer fans indeed turn out at Fenway this year, as we have been warned, they will at least be armed with a keener understanding of how the team got to where it is.

For a while there it seemed like the future of American Short Fiction was in doubt, as nothing had been heard from the magazine in the social media sphere since August. Now it is back with new editors and a new web site:

As we take up the reins of American Short Fiction in 2013, we find ourselves repeatedly touched and honored: not only by the journal’s impressive history—its record of stories anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best American Non-Required Reading, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and the Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses—but by the amount of respect, warmth, and goodwill awaiting the magazine upon its return, which speak volumes for the talents of our predecessors.

They’ll even be at AWP, so you can welcome them back in person.

Submissions that were pending before the hiatus will still be read, according to a thread on the magazine’s Facebook page.

Yesterday I took the plunge, threw down $175 that I didn’t really have, and signed up for the 8-week Online Fiction Workshop run by Dave Housley of Barrelhouse.

Consider this my attempt to bridge the gap between my not pursuing an MFA (since I have no desire to teach) and my itch to inject my game with the twin doses of seriousness and perspective that comes with having your work torn apart by other (perhaps more established) merciless (perhaps even spiteful) writers who know they are doing.

Barrelhouse is a fun journal run by cool, down-to-earth people (or so they seem)—in addition to Housley, the masthead includes Mike Ingram and Tom McAllister, known for their always-entertaining Book Fight!/Writers Ask podcasts. I can’t wait to get started.

What I really want is a dip but I’m trying to quit. Turns out girls aren’t into guys with flakes of chaw in their teeth. So I gave the rest of my chaw to Donleavy two weeks ago, and he’s still working through the tin, because Donleavy’s a fucking fraud, he only dips when people can see him dipping, just to get them to tell him how disgusting he is. That part of the act gets old pretty quick.

Very excited to have a new story, “Where the Sun Don’t Shine,” up at Atticus Review this week, alongside poetry by Matthew Hamilton and a novel excerpt by Rachel Adams. Many thanks to the editors—Jamie Iredell, Katrina Gray, and Joseph Gross—for making this happen.

Happy to have a new story, “Our Place,” featured in Durable Goods #80, a delightful foldable microzine, which arrived in the mail this weekend. Alongside poetry by Lori Desrosiers (Western Mass. represent!) and awesome cover art by Andrew Post. Thanks to editor Aleathia Drehmer for letting me be a part.

Triburbia, Karl Taro Greenfeld. A splendid, fun read to start off the year, about interconnected families living in gentrified Tribeca. The story “Fun Won,” which I read in Harper’s and wrote about here, makes up most of one chapter, and is the reason I wanted to dive right into this one after I received it as a Christmas gift.

A group of fathers meets up for breakfast each morning after dropping their kids off at the same school. Each chapter is a self-contained story centered around a different character (not just the fathers), and the web of relationships becomes more apparent after each one. My sloppy cast of characters:

Mark, sound engineer, married to Brooke, father to Cooper & Penny, affair with babysitter Sadie;

Brooke, married to Mark, mother to Cooper & Penny, at one time worked with Marni;

Brick, sculptor, married to Ava, affair with Beatrice;

Beatrice, married to Giancarlo, affair with Brick

Sumner, film producer

Giancarlo, restauranteur, married to Beatrice, fucks Shannon on his yacht;

Marni, magazine editor, married to Rick, at one time worked with Brooke;

Rick, memorist, guilty of Frey-like fabrications, married to Marni;

Barnaby, gimp photographer, works with Cooper, father of Miro, brother to Shannon;

Levi-Levy, playwright, married to Charlaine;

Cooper, daughter  to Mark & Brooke, child model, crush on Miro;

Miro, son of Barnaby, object of affection of Cooper;

Unnamed avant-garde puppeteer, married to Caroline, father of Sadie;

Shannon, sister to Barnaby, fucks Giancarlo on his yacht;

Rankin, mobster, owns & manages property, married to Sydney, father of Amber & Jeremy;

Sadie, daughter of the puppeteer, babysitter to Cooper & Penny;

Amber, daughter of Rankin, bullied in school by Cooper.

And I know I am missing a few. The book is constructed in the same novel-in-stories style that defined Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (of which the electric prose of “Fun Won” reminded me); the picture gets sketched in from different camera angles, one chapter at a time, to portray a three-dimensional urban neighborhood once friendly to families and creative professionals with sub-moderate to above-average incomes who are soon to be priced out by wealthier types who merely want to pay for the bohemian allure.

My favorite chapter, I think, was the one that centered on child model Cooper; although written in the third person (Greenfeld switches among tenses and points of view depending on the chapter), it weaves the class insensitivity of a child made too often the center of attention, and prompted too frequently to behave as an adult (and hence, rush to have a boyfriend), with genuine prepubescent yearning impulse and confusion:

Ah, an older boy. His appearance in the loft, blond-haired, sleepy-eyed, in button-up blue shirt, slim-cut selvage denim, and Converse sneakers, seemed to Cooper a manifestation. Had he been here all along?

“Miro—Cooper goes to school with you,” Miro was told by the photographer.

Cooper looked at the photographer, with his crazy gyrating limp, his somewhat effeminate manner; he didn’t seem to her like other dads, but she guessed he was Miro’s dad.

Miro nodded, uninterested.

Cooper gazed at him hoping he would recognize her: surely even the fifth-grade boys must have noticed her. Miro, though, merely flopped on another of the many sofas in the room and started doing something on his phone. But when they were finished with her test shots, Miro asked her if she wanted to draw, and Cooper loved drawing. She looked at Sadie, who looked at the photographer, who shrugged and said sure, though he wondered if it might be weird for Cooper to see the other girls coming in for their go-sees. Sadie assured him that Cooper wasn’t the type to be bothered by that.

Other Kinds, Dylan Nice. From SF/LD, the book imprint of Hobart, comes this exquisite collection of stories the size of a prayer booklet, which makes it the perfect book for carrying in your pocket and getting caught reading on public transportation. The nine stories are grouped in threes and all have sensitive, keenly observant male protagonists whose active social spheres contrast with their inner aloneness. The plots are minimalist, almost mumblecore-like, but the narratives are not.

Nice keeps his sentences simple and short, then works up to the occasional outpour of folded-over layers with two or three ands. The effect is one of poignant ruefulness:

A year passed. Friends moved. His rent went up and the university would still not surrender its degree. He withdrew from school owing to debt and took up with a nice girl who enjoyed her work. They lived together in a well-insulated apartment for young professionals.  (“A Short Essay About the War”)

That night there was a girl I was in love with. I wore a nice sweater and smoked in the car driving to her house. I had made a CD and labeled it Tonight and played it, thinking there were chord progressions that sounded like whatever it was I was pursuing. (“Thin Enough to Break”)

John Updike Review, 2011. When the John Updike Society launched in 2009, I immediately signed up and sent the required dues, even though I didn’t have much to contribute on an intellectual level other than my deep fondness for Updike’s books, at that. I was simply happy it existed. After the folding of The Centaurian, the helpful site run by James Yerkes, in 2009, there hadn’t been a sole reliable place on the Internet to turn to for information on my favorite author. For my contribution I received a lapel pin (with a drawing of Updike’s face) and a subscription to the John Updike Review, an annual peer-reviewed critical journal edited by James Schiff and published by the University of Cincinnati.

The first issue of JUR does a good job of covering varying aspects of Updike’s work—not necessarily an easy task given the man’s range of interests and sheer voluminous output. (A read through his collections Hugging the Shore or Due Considerations would lead one to think that Updike never turned down an assignment no matter how far afield.) The selections are also very readable, not weighted down by academic jargon or theory. The authors’ joy in reading Updike comes through with the questions they ask to understand his work better.

Since this is the first issue, there are a lot of Why-are-we-here moments to get out of the way, including “John Updike’s Sense of Wonder,” Ann Beattie’s keynote address delivered at the First Biennial John Updike Society Conference (in Reading, PA), as well as J. D. McClatchy’s tribute for the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a eulogy from Updike’s son David.

I enjoyed “Updike and Kerouac: Rabbit on the Road,” by Donald J. Grenier, which reminds us that Rabbit, Run was conceived by Updike in part as a response to On the Road (published the same year that Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System was put into effect), asking the question of what happens to the people left behind when a young man puts wandering urges before his responsibilities. I also enjoyed “’The Bright Island of Make-Believe’: Updike’s Misgivings About the Movies,” by Peter J. Bailey, an argument that sources Updike’s fiction and criticism with equal weight to portray a writer’s suspicions of the Hollywood machine.

One of my someday projects is to attempt a wholesale annotation of the Rabbit novels, starting with Updike’s use of alliteration in the first line of Rabbit, Run that is meant to echo the bouncing of a basketball, as well as Janice’s sweet tooth (she puts sugar in her old-fashioneds) in contrast to her husband’s taste for salt.

The Way the World Works, Nicholson Baker. Baker’s second essay collection lacks the unity and serendipity of his first, The Size of Thoughts, but is still an enjoyable read. In fact, Baker’s essays are on the whole probably better than his fiction; for one thing, they do away with the mere shadow of a thoughtful protagonist on which to hook narrative, and rely instead on an already-established, complete, and fully reliable one: the author himself.

The book is divided into sections: Life, Reading, Libraries & Newspapers, Technology, and War, and a final essay, entitled “Mowing,” included at the end “because it didn’t seem quite right to end the book with an impressionistic article on my unsuccessful efforts to master a series of violent video games.” In Technology, one sees the sentiments of this man who once wrote a paean to the card catalog, and who spent his life savings to rescue an archive of newspapers, begin to evolve. He is unhappy with the functions of the Amazon Kindle 2, with its “greenish, sickly gray” screen and inability to mark text, but he thinks Wikipedia is “just an incredible thing” and mourns the death of Steve Jobs, “our techno-impresario and digital dream granter.” (I gotta ask: so what does he think of the Kindle Fire? Has he tried to use an e-reader in the presence of any direct light?)

The ‘War’ section includes three essays that feel like they were written in order to justify, or at least accompany, Human Smoke, Baker’s line-by-line retelling of the facts leading up the U.S.’s decision to enter World War II. A short essay near the front of the book, “Why I Like the Telephone,” may have been my favorite, not least for what it achieves in showing off Baker’s ability to bring forth the wonderment in how we visually and aurally receive things, like dial tones.

Big Fiction # 3, Fall/Winter 2012. As its name implies, this journal out of Seattle focuses on longer works of fiction, which as a submitting writer I have found to be a thin market, in that window of length beyond the threshold of Internet readability, but hard to get published in print, where space is at a premium and journals are understandably reluctant to devote so much of an issue to a single author.

Even better, the volume is published in exquisite hand-designed letterpress. Three stories make up the issue. A lot of attention will probably be paid to the longest of the three, Mylene Dressler’s novella “The Wedding of Anna F.,” as it concerns an elderly character who believes herself to have “recovered” the life of Anne Frank. Elderly characters don’t get a lot of love in fiction for a number of reasons, not least of which that they are hard to write about reliably, since the authors writing about them often haven’t reached the age of the character. How do you convincingly place yourself if the shoes of someone who’s at an age you haven’t lived at yet?

And the ones we do see get played off much younger, dynamic counterparts: I think of the Lee Krasner-modeled Hope Chafetz in Updike’s Seek My Face and Leonard Schiller in Brian Morton’s Starting Out in the Evening, both the subjects of ambitious students eager to pin down the elders’ lives and work for some boxed-off, line-item accomplishment. The common practice is to portray older folks as limited, doddering, reminiscent, and not so eager to advance the conversation. Outside of a few small moments, Dressler mostly avoids this technique, and the use of flashbacks help to break up the long conversation.

Dressler’s story should not overshadow the two smaller ones leading up to it: Eric Neuenfeldt’s “Telegraph Pine” and Molly Bonovsky Anderson’s “The Bricklayer’s Club,” both with convincing male protagonists looking to rebuild their self-worth after falling into despair.

At Richard Skinner’s blog, two former students of W. G. Sebald share some of the lessons learned from the late novelist, distilled into categories (Approach, Narration, Description, Detail, Reading and Intertextuality, Style, Revision). Some of my favorites:

Approach: Fiction should have a ghostlike presence in it somewhere, something omniscient. It makes it a different reality.

Narration: The present tense lends itself to comedy. The past is foregone and naturally melancholic.

Detail: It’s good to have undeclared, unrecognized pathologies and mental illnesses in your stories. The countryside is full of undeclared pathologies. Unlike in the urban setting, there, mental affliction goes unrecognized.and

Dialect makes normal words seem other, odd and jagged. For example, ‘Jeziz’ for Jesus.

Reading: Get off the main thoroughfares; you’ll see nothing there. For example, Kant’s Critique is a yawn but his incidental writings are fascinating.

and

I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt.

Happy to break out of my slump with an acceptance today, to Ayris, the magazine of literature and art published by the New Hampshire Institute of Art, for my flash-fiction story “In the Whore’s Style.”