Clifford Garstang's Blog, page 43
August 17, 2018
Everywhere Stories Contributor Spotlight: Teresa Hudson
[image error]Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small PlanetVolume III is now available for pre-order from the publisher. Like the earlier volumes, this one includes 20 stories by 20 writers set in 20 countries. Teresa Hudson’s story takes place in Mongolia.
Teresa Hudson holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Richmond and an MFA in Creative Writing from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she currently teaches creative nonfiction. Her background includes television and film production, music performance, and farming. “The Monk” is her third published story; her unpublished books include two short story collections, a collection of essays and a play (in progress).
[image error]Comment on “The Monk”: The idea for “The Monk” stemmed from a news article in The Siberian Times a couple of years ago: “Mummified Monk Not Dead But In Rare Meditative State”. It described how the 200-year-old body of a Buddhist monk, found in a Mongolian cave, came to the attention of authorities after almost being sold on the black market. The fact that there is a black market for such things, and that some specialists considered the monk to be still alive, inspired me to create a story about a similar discovery. I have never been to Mongolia, but would like to someday.
August 16, 2018
Everywhere Stories Contributor Spotlight: Jeff Fleisher
[image error]Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small PlanetVolume III is now available for pre-order from the publisher. Like the earlier volumes, this one includes 20 stories by 20 writers set in 20 countries. Jeff Fleisher’s story takes place in Australia.
Jeff Fleisher is a Chicago-based author, journalist, and editor. His fiction has appeared in more than three dozen publications including the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, Shenandoah, the Saturday Evening Post and So It Goes by the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. He is also the author of non-fiction books including “Votes of Confidence: A Young Person’s Guide to American Elections” (Zest Books, 2016), “Rockin’ the Boat: 50 Iconic Revolutionaries” (Zest Books, 2015), and “The Latest Craze: A Short History of Mass Hysterias” (Fall River Press, 2011). He is a veteran journalist published in Mother Jones, the New Republic, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Magazine, Mental_Floss, National Geographic Traveler and dozens of other local, national and international publications.
[image error]Comment on “Out Back”: “Out Back” began with a prompt to write a story inspired by the word “atlas.” I immediately thought of my time in Australia: the sheer vastness of the landscape, the unknown, and the myriad ways one can explore it. I decided to use both the freedom and risk that offers as a way to examine a drifting relationship and the ways that not making a choice can be its own decision.
August 15, 2018
Everywhere Stories Contributor Spotlight: Molly Fessler
[image error]Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet Volume III is now available for pre-order from the publisher. Like the earlier volumes, this one includes 20 stories by 20 writers set in 20 countries. Molly Fessler’s story takes place in Belize.
Molly Fessler grew up on a llama farm outside Detroit and studied sociology and conflict resolution at Bryn Mawr College. In her non-writing hours, she works in Community Health, moonlighting as a yoga instructor, sociology teacher, and part-time nanny. Her work has been published in Real Simple, NPR.org, and Cicada Magazine, among others. She bakes a fierce carrot cake and believes the best poems are written when stopped at a traffic light.
[image error]Comment on “To my Daughter: On this your engagement day”: In Q’eqchi Maya, to say “how are you?” one asks “ma’sa a’chool?” This translates literally to “is your heart content?” This question is one that I ask myself frequently; it is a question at the heart of this piece —can contentment exist within the scope of tradition and expectation? I spent two years living with the indigenous Maya in Belize, where this story is set. This is the story of a process I saw often; the engagement of a young girl to a suitor from another village. I learned about duty in Belize, how to wash clothes at the river, how to make tortillas over the fire without burning my fingertips. I saw gender play out on a small and large scale. This story drives these lessons together.
Everywhere Stories Contributor Spotlight: Jeanne D’Haem
[image error]Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small PlanetVolume III is now available for pre-order. Like the earlier volumes, this book includes 20 short stories by 20 writers set in 20 countries. Jeanne D’Haem’s story is set in Somalia.
Jeanne D’Haem was a Peace Corps volunteer in Somalia, East Africa. She served as an English and math teacher in Arabsiyo and Hargeisa. She taught adult education classes and sponsored the first Girl Guide troop in Hargeisa. She was a director of special services and a special education teacher in New Jersey and Massachusetts. She has published three prize-winning books and numerous journal articles. The Last Camel, (1997) published by The Red Sea Press, Inc. won the Peace Corps Paul Cowin prize for non-fiction. Desert Dawn with Waris Dirie (2001) has been translated into over twenty languages. It was on the best-seller list in Germany for over a year where it was awarded the Corine prize for non-fiction. Her most recent book, Inclusion: The Dream and the Reality in Special Education won the Editors’ Special Award for Peace Corps Writers in 2017. She is an emeritus professor at William Paterson University in New Jersey.
[image error]Comment on “The Promise”: I joined the Peace Corps to help people and was posted to Northern Somalia, now known as Somaliland. However, most Somalis did not consider me to be at all helpful. When I cried in frustration about this to my friend, Asha, she told me, “Listen and watch, listen and watch. When you finally think that you understand, do not say anything, because you don’t. You need to listen and watch some more. You cannot speak until you have learned to listen.” She pointed to her mother pounding grain in the courtyard of the house and continued, “Somali women see the world through the veil of their experiences. You cannot communicate with them until you understand where they are coming from.” Asha Muktal had lived in London for many years with her father who was a Somali diplomat. She understood better than anyone else the discrepancies between the Somali view of the world and mine. I wrote this story about a neighbor in my village. She came to live next door to me as a very unhappy young wife, making me furious about arranged marriages and the Somali practice of infibulation. However, over the next few months, I watched as she and her husband fell in love. Gradually, even I learned that you must look carefully in order to see the fragile beauty of the desert and the resourceful people who grace the land. If you are not mindful you may not recognize what is there, and you may even upset the delicate system that succeeds in the remorseless desert.
August 14, 2018
Everywhere Stories Contributor Spotlight: Brenda Peynado
[image error]Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet Volume III is now available for pre-order. Like the earlier volumes, this book includes 20 short stories by 20 writers set in 20 countries. Brenda Peynado’s story is set in the Dominican Republic.
Brenda Peynado’s stories have won an O. Henry Prize, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, a Dana Award, a Fulbright Grant to the Dominican Republic, a Vermont Studio Center Residency, and other prizes. Her work appears in The Georgia Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, Black Warrior Review, and other journals. She received her MFA at Florida State University and her PhD at the University of Cincinnati. She currently teaches at the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.
[image error]Comment on “The Great Escape”: I’ve always been fascinated by the metal grates on doors every time I visited family in the Dominican Republic. What did they keep out or in that you wouldn’t expect? Often I had family looking for the keys to let ourselves out at the end of a visit. One particularly forgetful aunt had us worried she would get locked inside. This story is an exaggeration of what would happen if someone lost their keys forever and refused to come out.
August 13, 2018
My Library
[image error]A friend recently posted on Facebook about how she has organized her library in her new house, and it made me realize I need to rethink my own organization, but it’s a monumental task. There are a lot of books to organize.
When I bought this house in 2001, I had bookshelves built in the living room, on the lowest level, and in the loft where my office would be. I also brought with me from my old house some freestanding floor-to-ceiling shelving units that went into my bedroom and the guest room. As the collection grew, I added some lower units in the hallway just outside the guestroom and one more small unit for my bedroom. I long ago ran out of space on the shelves and I’ve run out of space for new shelves, so I’ve been slowly culling, but it’s a long process. I haven’t really stopped buying books, either, so I’m swimming against the tide.
Here’s the current organization:
Fiction begins in the living room, arranged alphabetically by author. (You can see those shelves behind me in the photo.) It continues in the hallway and into the guest room. However, there’s no more space on those shelves, so more recently acquired fiction is in my office, which is on the 3rd floor. Which means if I’m looking for a book, I have to remember when I bought it or look in two places. I ought to reconcile this arrangement or remove enough books that all the fiction could be on one level. Also, there’s a small shelf on top of which I have piled the newest of the new books, the ones I haven’t squeezed into their proper places. Asian Fiction (mostly in translation) is a separate shelf in the guest room, although newer books in that category are shelved (or piled) with the others in my office.
Poetry is similarly divided. There’s one poetry shelf in the guestroom–mostly anthologies and classics I’ve had forever–and another in my office for the more recent stuff. In fact, the recent poetry books are piled on top of a shelf because there’s no more room. No organization here because they aren’t shelved.
Drama is in the guest room.
Nonfiction is scattered, but not as badly as the fiction, and it’s arranged pretty haphazardly, so I have to scan the shelves to find anything. Philosophy and Psychology are in my office (because I was a philosophy major with a minor in psychology, I guess) as is Writing (I have a nice collection of books about the craft) and my reference books. I also have some general nonfiction that came to me relatively recently, some in the office and some in my bedroom. Asia Nonfiction–lots of books about Korea, China, and Japan–and Language books are in my bedroom along with the oversized Art books.
Literary Magazines used to occupy space on the shelves in my office, but they had to make way for books, so they are now in boxes until I can figure out what to do with them.
Something needs to be done.
Everywhere Stories Contributor Spotlight: Colwill Brown
Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet Volume III is now available for pre-order from Press 53. Like the first two volumes, it includes 20 stories set in 20 countries by 20 writers. Colwill Brown’s story is set in England.
Colwill Brown is the Writer-in-Residence at Wellspring House, a 2017 recipient of the work-study scholarship to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, fiction editor at Pangyrus magazine, and blog editor at GrubStreet creative writing center, where she also teaches the novel. Her work has appeared in Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, The Conium Review, Poetry & Audience, and other places. Hailing from Yorkshire, in the North of England, she is determined to introduce the word “sozzard” to the American vernacular.
[image error]Comment on “Games”: In “Games” and the story series it belongs to, I set out to explore how girls and young women in economically deprived and working-class spaces struggle to develop agency and self-understanding when the world demands that they define themselves in relation to a dominant—and often brutal—masculinity. Mining memories of growing up in a formerly industrial Yorkshire town, I became interested in the body’s liminal space between girl- and womanhood, between naivety and desire, between “empowered” and “disempowered.” In this particular moment, I wanted to see what might happen if my characters harnessed their body’s power to disrupt the terms of the male space they’re forced to occupy.
August 12, 2018
Everywhere Stories Contributor Spotlight: E. Shaskan Bumas
Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet Volume III is now available for pre-order from Press 53. Like the earlier volumes, the book contains 20 stories set in 20 countries by 20 writers. E. Shaskan Bumas’s story is set in Chile.
E. Shaskan Bumas writes fiction (The Price of Tea in China, U Mass) and essays (The Daily Beast, American Literature) and translates (Nietzsche on His Balcony, Dalkey Archive) and teaches (New Jersey City University). Some of these works have received awards from the AWP, the Pushcart Press, Southwest Review, and Early American Literature.
[image error]Comment on “The Outcast of the Universe”: I first wrote “Outcast” as a screenplay for my partner, Alejandro Branger, to direct. We wanted a South American Hawthorne. “Wakefield” (1835) seemed the appropriate tale: Borges, writes that the story is Hawthorne’s best work because it is a precursor of Kafka (meaning a precursor of Borges). My struggle was not to be wicked when describing a guy who goes on the lam in a dictatorship that “disappeared” thousands of people. As Hawthorne writes, “by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the outcast of the universe.” This novella is the unproduced screenplay reimagined.
Everywhere Stories Contributor Spotlight: J. Thomas Brown
[image error]Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet Volume III is now available for pre-order from Press 53. Like the earlier volumes, the book contains 20 stories set in 20 countries by 20 writers. J. Thomas Brown’s story is set in Finland.
J. Thomas Brown lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife, Deborah, two cats and a dog. They have raised three children and have three grandsons and a brand new granddaughter. He has coproduced local TV writing shows and coordinated poetry readings at the Richmond Public Library. His short stories have appeared in The Zoo Fence and the Scarlet Leaf Review. J Thomas has poems due for publication in the River City Poets Anthology (2018). His novel, The Land of Three Houses, was released in March of 2018. Currently he is completing a second novel that takes place in Xinjiang, China.
[image error]Comment on “Breaking Them with Words”: My father had the wanderlust. By the time I finished high school, he had moved our family up and down the east coast of America several times and to Sweden and England as well. During our stay in Sweden, we lived on the island of Lidingö near Stockholm, and became friends with a Swedish couple who, I later learned, were in fact born in Finland and became citizens after WWII. As a boy, one of my first impressions of Sweden was being invited to their home for Christmas Eve dinner and singing hymns around a tree decorated with real burning candles. They remained good friends of our family for many years after we moved back to the States and visited with us many times. One day we received the sad news that “Uncle Ari” had shot himself in the temple with his service revolver. My father thought the war had something to do with it and told us how “Uncle Ari” had been an officer in the Finnish Army and had to shoot a German soldier he had fought alongside of and befriended. The story is an attempt to understand what the Finns sometimes call “The War of Continuation,” and to speculate on how the insanity of any war can bleed into society for years afterward.
Everywhere Stories Contributor Spotlight: Ben Berman
[image error]Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction From a Small Planet will be published in October and is now available for pre-order from the publisher. The anthology contains twenty stories set in twenty countries. Contributor Ben Berman’s story is set in Zimbabwe, where he served in the Peace Corps.
Ben Berman’s first book, Strange Borderlands, won the 2014 Peace Corps Award for Best Book of Poetry and was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Awards. His second collection, Figuring in the Figure, probes the perplexing and transformative experiences of fatherhood. He has received awards from the New England Poetry Club and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Somerville Arts Council. He teaches in the Boston area, where he lives with his wife and daughters. www.ben-berman.com
[image error]Comment on “Disambiguation”: These flashes are part of a larger sequence inspired by the many conversations I have had with my young daughters about words and their amazement that a single word can mean so many things. I began to wonder what it would be like to write narratives where each section explored a different sense of the title word. Each piece, here, is structured in a similar way—written in three parts, with each section exploring a different meaning of the title word. And many of these stories are based on actual events from my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Zimbabwe—a fellow teacher really did organize a strike at a funeral over not being served beer; there really was a tall mute who saved me from a conman with a flying karate kick—but the form that I worked in allowed my imagination to take these stories in new directions, to seek turns and counterturns, and to probe the strange relationship between language and meaning.
