Tag: Just published
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Is there anything as singularly impressive and affecting to the imagination as when, in a perfectly calm tropical sea, under a vertical sun, one is able to look down through a depth of thousands of fathoms of clear water and see on the ocean bottom glimpses of the City and all its strange and wonderful objects?
— “Residents of the Deep” by Marianne VillanuevaRead the whole story here.
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Is everyone addicted to extremes? How do people stay married? Surely they reach a compromise between infatuated and withholding. I never thought of Marc as a boyfriend. Boyfriends were people who fled. Marc stuck around. I was his boyfriend; he wasn’t mine.
— John weir’s “katherine mansfield,” in the collection your nostalgia is killing me -
Phil, who has a girlfriend, brings the narrator, who has a boyfriend, back to his family’s for Christmas Day (Is it weird that self has not spent Christmas with anyone, not even when son was living in the Bay Area, not since maybe 2014? She can’t even remember what she did last year. Most every year, she manages to be abroad on Thanksgiving and/or Christmas. So probably that’s what she should keep doing, for her sanity). Anyhoo, this part of the story is very funny:
- Throughout dinner, Phil’s stepdad told gay jokes, not the fun kind, and Phil grinned and ignored me. Anybody could tell we were sleeping together because of how we never touched. I was a signifier for what couldn’t be said. Phil’s family was too absorbed in their compulsory heterosexuality to see that they had at least one gay man at the table. Or maybe that was how they noticed change, by pretending it wasn’t there. Maybe they thought fag jokes were what queers liked. I’m addicted to boyfriends with a hostile entourage.
Let me just tell ya, passages like the above had self rolling on the floor.
Stay tuned.
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In L.A. you could be alone in the middle of things. The city was not built high, it was spread flat, with people scattered across it like pieces flung from a clenched fist onto a game board. You were never more than fifteen minutes away from being alone on a blue hill surrounded by scrub oak and looking down at everything.
— john weir’s story “katherin Mansfield,” in the collection your nostaligia is killing me, -
Sincerity is my Kryptonite. It strips off my fabulous cape and leaves me feeling stunned and human. Too bad I can’t resist it. In spite of myself, I crave the literal-minded. All my life, I have wanted to marry someone prosaic, and the people I have yearned for most have been the ones who don’t really get me. They never know when I’m kidding and so they keep their distance.
— John Weir’s story “Katherine Mansfield,” in his 2022 collection your nostalgia is killing me -
The narrator takes his friend, who is dying of AIDS, to see the literary agent Charlotte Sheedy, hoping that she can help them find a publisher for his friend’s AIDS diary:
She is so smooth, I want her to be my literary agent too, possibly my mom.
from the story “scenes from a marriage,” in the collection your nostalgia is killing me -
If I kept going back to Armageddon, I thought, it would eventually turn out to have a plot. I saw it six times, and I never did. I was grateful; it was a relief to be spared the pain of cause/effect. Thank God for a plotless world. Watching the scene where Bruce Willis, draped in an American flag, says goodbye to earth from the floor of a crater in a huge piece of orbiting igneous rock was the most satisfying emotional experience I have ever had.
— “Neorealism at the Infiniplex,” in Your Nostalgia is Killing Me
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Ever since Cleaver Magazine published self’s story Toad, a few years ago, she has had a soft spot for this scrappy little independent publication, based in Philadelphia, a city always close to her heart because that was where Dearest Mum studied piano (at Curtis) and where Dear Departed Sister got her MBA (at Wharton).
Given how they were already operating on a shoestring budget, self offered fervent prayers that they would somehow make it through the pandemic, and they have!
Today, they announced the winners and finalists of their 2022 flash contest. Let’s give all the winners and honorable mentions a big hand!
First Place: Sabrina Hicks, “When We Knew How to Get Lost”
Second Place: Janet Burroway, “The Tale of Molly Grimm”
Third Place: Dawn Miller, “The Egg”
Honorable Mention: Laura Tanenbaum, Fannie H. Gray, Andrea Marcusa, Lisa Lanser-Rose, Andrew Stancek, Luke Tennis, Emily Hoover, James LaRowe, Paul Enea, Kris Willcox, Christina Simon
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It’s in the latest issue of The Citron Review.
Notes from Hedwicka Cox, Fiction Editor, on the issue’s Fiction Selections:
- What is magic? Magic is dreaming. Magic is fantasy. Magic is speculative. When we think of magic, we think of the unreal, the ethereal.
So, yes, her story is about magic.
Self has another kind of tale, somewhat different in tone, which came out in Menacing Hedge earlier this year. It’s called Down.
She has another story coming out spring 2023, in J Journal. That one’s about a ship that discovers, completely by accident, a city at the bottom of the ocean.
Much love to all the editors of these hardworking little magazines, for giving her stories space to be shared. These stories are in a collection she’s been entering into contests. But they haven’t made it to the longlist, anywhere. Maybe they are just too different.
Kanlaon 