I’ve been straightening and going through everything in my old family home. When it’s not too hot, I work in the attic, and one of the many things I found in its open cardboard boxes and bins was, from my childhood, a colorful wooden big-pieced jigsaw puzzle of a monkey wearing a hat. Sadly, when I first found it, most of its pieces were missing. But as I’m rummaging through all the stuff in the house, I will, now and then, in a shoebox of doll clothes or a bagful of toy cars, come across one of the distinctive wooden pieces, and I will run back to the attic to place the piece where it belongs. Bit by bit the puzzle is being completed. As an adult, I find the puzzle considerably more challenging than I found it as a child—it was easier when the pieces were right in front of me.
“Ode to a Flamingo Bag” was recently published in the spring issue of Philadelphia Stories, both in print and online (http://www.philadelphiastories.org/article/ode-to-a-flamingo-bag/).
I recently read Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone—harrowing but also funny and deeply compassionate. A great book and an amazing writer.
I’ve been writing lots of emails lately to my representative in the U.S. Congress. My sister has also been writing to her congressional representative. When sending an email, there’s a drop-down box above one’s name where the writer must choose “Mr.” or “Ms.” or “Mrs.” or “Dr.,” etc. Apparently, the drop-down boxes don’t always work correctly. My sister is a retired pre-school teacher. The other day she received (in response to one of her emails) a letter from her representative that began “Dear General Harris . . .”
My story “Driving the Dodge Over Fifty” is online as Story of the Week on the Short Story America website. There are so many great stories in these volumes: stories by Laury A. Egan, Tim Johnston, Niles Reddick, Mathieu Cailler, Katherine Tandy Brown, and Gregg Cuisick, just to name a few.
I just finished I Will Send Rain, by Rae Meadows. I loved it. What a compassionate and riveting story. Birdie and Annie Bell are now two of my all-time favorite characters, and I hope to read more about them in the future.
As my friend Jana says, Rachel Cusk breaks all the writing rules in Outline and Transit—including the rule of “show, don’t tell”—but she makes it work. And here is a paragraph from Transit with an example at the end of a metaphor that is both surprising and satisfyingly inevitable:
“She reached out for her champagne glass and took a slow mouthful. Behind her, the fog stood blankly at the windows. I was surprised by her age, which I would have guessed to be at least ten years younger, though hers wasn’t the strenuous youthfulness of active self-preservation; rather, she merely looked as if she had avoided exposure, like a fold in a curtain that remains unfaded because it never sees the sun.”
I so enjoyed Susan Engberg’s short story “Breath of Trees” in the Summer 2016 Missouri Review (which I just now read in the near-summer of 2017) that I decided to buy one of her books of short stories, Above the Houses. Each of her tales nudged me, through a detail or image, to remember in my bones a feeling that I’d once had myself. I want to read all her stories.
At the Short Story America Festival & Conference in Beaufort, South Carolina, I met some wonderful writers, including T.D. Johnston, Kathryn Brackett, Katherine Tandy Brown, Mathieu Cailler, Gregg Cusick, John Engell, Susan Molada Madison, and Niles Reddick. I would have enjoyed meeting my fellow award winners, Michael Matson (“Heaven”) and Ray Morrison (“Doyle’s Diner”).
Kitty Resistance
How I wish my cat’s butt
Could truly smother Trump
Or at least fill his mouth with fur
To keep him silent
But, alas, she is curled up, sleeping,
Only on his pixelated face
In the newspaper.
Beverly Jean Harris 