Kyle Minor's Blog, page 7
February 22, 2012
Ninth Letter Serialization of "In a Distant Country"
Untitled, oil on canvas, Frankentiénne
For the last six weeks, Ninth Letter serialized my long epistolary story "In a Distant Country," in six parts, putting up a new section once a week, as part of their Featured Writer series. The story is a companion piece to my novel-in-progress The Sexual Lives of Missionaries. It takes the form of letters home by minor characters from the novel. The letters trace through the decades the observations and complaints of others about the fate of Sheila Brocken, an 18-year-old girl who marries a lecherous 42-year-old missionary she meets on a work trip to Koulev-Ville, Haiti. The letters begin before their marriage, and continue through her husband's death in the dechoukaj uprising at the end of the Duvalier era, and on into an ever more uncertain future. Each installment will be accompanied by a painting or illustration. First up was an untitled oil painting by Frankentiénne (see above), who also was the writer of Dezafi, the first novel ever published in Kreyol rather than French. I've posted links, below, to each Ninth Letter installment, and a link to the final PDF, which includes all six installments as the full version of the story:
Part One · Part Two · Part Three · Part Four · Part Five · Part Six
"In a Distant Country" Complete Story PDF (Ninth Letter Magazine-Style Layout)
excerpt from companion novel-in-progress The Sexual Lives of Missionaries, at Guernica: http://www.guernicamag.com/fiction/2863/kyle_minor_7_15_11/
January 18, 2012
Ninth Letter Serialization of "In a Distant Country"
Untitled, oil on canvas, Frankentiénne
Starting today, and for the next six weeks, I'll be the featured writer at Ninth Letter. The magazine is serializing my long epistolary story "In a Distant Country," in six parts, putting up a new section once a week for the next six weeks. The story is a companion piece to my novel-in-progress The Sexual Lives of Missionaries. It takes the form of letters home by minor characters from the novel. The letters trace through the decades the observations and complaints of others about the fate of Sheila Brocken, an 18-year-old girl who marries a lecherous 42-year-old missionary she meets on a work trip to Koulev-Ville, Haiti. The letters begin before their marriage, and continue through her husband's death in the dechoukaj uprising at the end of the Duvalier era, and on into an ever more uncertain future. Each installment will be accompanied by a painting by a Haitian artist. First up is an untitled oil painting by Frankentiénne, who also was the writer of Dezafi, the first novel ever published in Kreyol rather than French. I will post links to each installment as they are made available by Ninth Letter, and a link to the final PDF, which will include all six installments as the full version of the story:
Part One · Part Two · Part Three · Part Four · Part Five · Part Six
excerpt from companion novel-in-progress The Sexual Lives of Missionaries, at Guernica: http://www.guernicamag.com/fiction/2863/kyle_minor_7_15_11/
October 29, 2011
The Sexual Lives of Missionaries & November Update
1. I ended up taking another run at rewriting the whole damn novel before giving it up to those who will decide its fate. This is probably a poor choice, but I found a few reasons to love the book more than what the book can do for me if I sell it quickly, so here we stand again, in stasis.
Here are four possible epigraphs for the book. They each reflect something of what's at the core of the book, I think, but none of them completely enough:
"At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth." - Virginia Woolf
"There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us." - Samuel Beckett
"'Let us change to another story,' said Obiageli.'This one has no end.'" - Chinua Achebe
"Yet on the walls of my brain, frescoes . . ." - William Goyen
2. If you're anywhere near northern Ohio, I'm reading Friday, November 4, 7 pm, at Annabell's in Akron, for the NEOMFA's Big Big Mess Reading Series, and Thursday, November 17, 7 pm, as the kickoff for Bowling Green State University's Winter Wheat Festival. Both places, I plan to read the first ten pages of The Sexual Lives of Missionaries, which you can read, now, at Guernica.
3. I've read some good books lately. Can I recommend a few?
Volt, by Alan Heathcock
A Thousand Lives, by Julia Scheeres
The Devil All the Time, by Donald Ray Pollock
Create Dangerously, by Edwidge Danticat
The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides
Bluets, by Maggie Nelson
The House of Breath, by William Goyen
East of the West, by Miroslav Penkov
The Necropastoral, by Joyelle McSweeney
Crimes Out of Southern Indiana, by Frank Bill
Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate, by Johannes Goransson
The Double, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Into these Knots, by Ashley Anna McHugh
Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson
Gloss, by Ida Stewart
We Are the Tribes, by Terrance Hayes
How They Were Found, by Matt Bell
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July 14, 2011
April 30, 2011
May News: Story on Kindle, I Love Louisville, A Couple of Interviews
Reading from my novel-in-progress The Sexual Lives of Missionaries, at the Museum 21c Hotel, Louisville, Kentucky.
April has been good to me. I've spent most of the month plugging away at the novel, which is very, very close to being done, and an excerpt will appear in Guernica Magazine later this summer. I gave the first ten pages at test-run in Denton, Texas, at the University of North Texas's literary festival, and in Louisville, Kentucky, in the Sarabande Reading Series at the 21c Museum Hotel. It was warmly received both places, which felt good and validating, as you might imagine.
"The Truth and All Its Ugly," a short story, is now available for download on the Amazon Kindle, for $1.99. In the Devil's Territory, my 2008 full-length collection, is now available as an eBook through the publisher, although it's not yet in the Kindle Store. Amazon's promotional copy for "The Truth and All Its Ugly" goes like so: A father, a son, a suicide, a pink piano, an axe, a robot, yellowjackets affixed to the eyes of Precious Moments figurines, and the news about how 'dead trees got not one thing on milkweed and sumac, horsemint and sweet William.' A tour-de-force at story length from Kyle Minor, award-winning author of In the Devil's Territory. Available exclusively on the Kindle.
A few good people interviewed me the last few months:
1. I talked with Shawn Vestal, at Bark, the blog associated with the literary journal Willow Springs, about Barry Hannah, writing on the Internet, and revising my novel.
2. Charles Dodd White asked me about In the Devil's Territory, the long short story, and HTMLGiant.
3. The good people at the Used Furniture Review asked super-smart questions, and I answered with news about "the drumbeat of that want."
4. Erin Keane at the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote a lovely piece about The Sexual Lives of Missionaries and what it's like to be in the process of finishing a first novel.
Also, the good people at Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast are offering a free MP3 audiobook download of "The Truth and All Its Ugly" here: http://www.miettecast.com/2011/05/09/the-truth-and-all-its-ugly/.
What's next? I'm not doing anything in the month of May except revising my novel, playing with kids, and playing the Wurlitzer in my living room. I'm hoping by time I check in again in June or July that I'll have some big news about the novel. See you then!
March 19, 2011
Thanks, St. Louis!
It seems so unlikely as to be almost impossible, but three years after publication, my story collection In the Devil's Territory made the bestseller list in St. Louis, Missouri, thanks, no doubt, to the efforts of the good people at Subterranean Books, as well as the Noir at the Bar reading series. A big, warm thank you to the people of St. Louis!
March 13, 2011
How to Do It
Put this on auto-repeat, put on your headphones, go to the Waffle House, pretend you aren't a father or husband or lover or payer-of-mortgage or somebody who has to get up at seven o'clock in the morning and lecture about Cynthia Ozick. Write fiercely till dawn. Repeat. Continue in rabid obscurity until forty thousand somebodies notice, or, if they don't, continue in rabid obscurity anyway.
February 2, 2011
Winter News
The novel-in-progress, The Sexual Lives of Missionaries, is all but done. It's tough to let it go. It's been at the center of my daily work for five years. Sometime in the next three or four weeks, I expect to give it to the deciders and see what its fate in the world will be. Here is a picture of the stacked-up pages:
The project I'm likeliest to complete next is a nonfiction book about Greg McCaw, my childhood pastor, 
who came out as a gay man and lost everything. You can see a preview of his story at The Rumpus.
After that, I'm planning to start a second novel and finish a nonfiction book about a kidnapping, an orphanage, an earthquake, and a rebuilding, in Haiti.
Some other things I've been doing:
1. "The Question of Where We Begin," an essay about point of entry, suicide, and the origin of the world, at Gulf Coast.
1a. Nick Bruno printed a limited edition (75 copies) letterpress chapbook (with woodcuts!) of my story "The Truth and All Its Ugly," which originally appeared in Surreal South and Harper Perennial's Fifty-Two Stories (you can read it here.)
2. New essays out the next couple of months in Arts & Letters, Sou'wester, and Cream City Review.
3. A weird reviewish piece about Lydia Davis and Amelia Gray's Museum of the Weird at The Faster Times.
4. I've been playing in a new sandbox called HTMLGiant. Here are a few blogs I've blogged there:
Which Problem Is the More Vexing Problem?
A Conversation with Deb Olin Unferth
Deb Olin Unferth and the Double-I
Looking at the Looker and the Lookee and Thinking about the Looking and the Looking
Seminar in Sentence-Making #36: Nabokov Edition
Literature as "What Survives"
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A Conversation with Andrew Ervin, author of Extraordinary Renditions
Reading as a Comfort
What Do You Mean When You Say "Brooklyn"?
Cuckold, Widow, Retard
A Conversation on Literary Translation with Elizabeth Harris
Matt Bell's Catalog of Structures
Bernhard's Shadow
Thoughts About A Televised Performance of John Cage's 4'33″
Kindle
The What-If Game (Stephen Dixon)
Literary Forebears of V.C. Andrews #1: The Book of Genesis
This Basque is Badass
First Sentences or Paragraphs Series:
#1 Mary Miller Big World Edition
#2 Big Novel Edition
#3 Philip Roth Edition
#4 Norton Anthology of Short Fiction Edition (A-G)
#5 Best European Fiction 2010 Edition
Suggested Reading List for My 2011 Spring Fiction Workshop
False Dichotomies Are Not Honorable
Pale Fire
Bonnie Jo Campbell and the Strategy of Negation
Here is an Obscure Book of Poetry I Like
I Like It When Thom Jones's First Person Narrators Break Into Essay in the Middle of a Short Story
Dept. of Arbitraryish Statistics: Three Variations on Three-Act Structure (Coetzee, Roth, Schlink)
Jealous of the Jews
The Essential Rabbit in the Sky
The Greatest Show on Earth
Department of Regret, Kurt Vonnegut Edition
Opening Sentences
Five Preoccupations of the New Guy
5. An ebook edition of my 2008 story collection In the Devil's Territory will be available later this year from Dzanc/Consortium, for Kindle, Nook, SonyReader, etc. (!)
6. I'll be doing readings this spring in Blacksburg, Virginia; Columbus, Ohio; Denton, Texas; and St. Louis, Missouri. Details here.
7. I'm now Twitter-followable @kyle_minor.
Thank you for paying attention!
December 5, 2010
Barry Hannah Marathon Reading
On Sunday, December 5, starting at Midnight, my friend Nick Bruno and I read Long, Last, Happy in its entirety in an exclusive HTMLGIANT webcast. Thanks to the good people at Grove/Atlantic, we gave away copies of the book and exclusive Barry Hannah bookmarks and stickers manufactured by Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, Barry's hometown bookstore. The estimated duration of the webcast was 15-25 hours, but we finished in just under 12 hours, probably because the yammering cadences of the narrators encouraged a more-or-less continuous reading style. Many thanks to everyone who stopped by to listen, to leave a comment, or to participate in the Twitter feed. I hope we honored the memory of a great writer and maybe even introduced his stories to some new readers.
Ancillary coverage at Publishers Weekly, Uncanny Valley, Jack Pendarvis, National Book Critics Circle Critical Mass, and The Faster Times.
March 27, 2010
Chimpanzees in Bangui, Central African Republic, Reading In the Devil’s Territory
Former student, friend, and UN aid worker Karen O’Reilly carried a copy of In the Devil’s Territory with her when she moved to the Central African Republic. These chimpanzees found it in her bag. Of all readers, they are now my favorites.
