Sydney Avey's Blog, page 23
July 16, 2013
Why We Love Paris
The Garden of Luxembourgh
Paris is a much loved city. Beautiful works of art adorn her. When the people of France overthrew the monarchy, I suppose they crowned Paris their queen.
Throughout Paris, monuments, statues, and paintings stand in our midst and tell their stories of human struggle and divine intervention. So numerous, dominant, and spectacular are public works of art, people seem to understand their place in the old world in ways that we of the new world can only imagine through readi...
July 14, 2013
365 Short Stories (character)–Week Twenty-eight
Bowing out while I’m at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, author and educator Marcy Weydemullerfrom San Francisco sits in my chair and offers glimpses of character, and award winning author Rebecca D. Elswick from Virginiashares her story, Poppy’s Penny.
Week Twenty-eight
“Poppy’s Penny”, by Rebecca D. Elswick
When I was a little girl, my grandmother would give me shiny new pennies every time I visited her. She would show me the old pennies she had collected. Many of them had been...
July 9, 2013
Fashion in Paris
A little Louis XIV flash
I spent as much time gawking at how Parisians put themselves together as I did at the art and architecture. Either they wear black, a splash of color, say a classic leather jacket in bright blue, and fabulous jewelry (they must all have personal jewelers because I never saw anything in a store like the baubles that adorned les femmes), or they wear black and set it off with a bright shirt and matching flats.
Orange is the new black; not prison or road crew orange but ap...
July 8, 2013
365 Short Stories (honor)–Week Twenty-seven
Ah, the French; In Paris they name streets and erect statues to honor great short stories! I searched online and found a lovely translation to print for free. Also this week, I was honored to have two prose pieces published. 
“The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls (Le Passe-Muraille)” , by Marcel Aymé, Translated by Karen Reshkin
This tale written in the 1940s is as contemporary an observation today as it was in its time. Workplace politics and human behavior provide great grist for the mill of A...
July 6, 2013
Flight to Paris
Paris is now a recent memory and the hard work of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival shimmers before me like jet exhaust on the tarmac. I’ll share a few thoughts on travel and Paris in a series of blogs.
Bouncing around on a British Airways jet, I yielded my aisle perch to a young woman who wanted to sit beside her boyfriend. Stacked in a middle seat like a prisoner in a California penitentiary, my new seat mates welcomed me and remarked on my kindness, but they soon came to regret my generosity...
June 27, 2013
365 Short Stories (guests)–Week Twenty-six
jphase|www.sxc.hu
Zig-zagging from my normal routine, this week I have invited some writers in my network to introduce short stories they have published.
Week Twenty-six
“Stripped Clean,” by Cassandra Dunn, Every Writer’s Resource
They say that scent carries the strongest connection to memory. But what if the scent is of someone you’re trying to forget? This flash fiction piece is about letting go of someone, and the lingering feelings that we need to work through as part of that process.
June 20, 2013
365 Short Stories (yearning)–Week Twenty-five
© Lyn Baxter | Dreamstime
Yearning motivates most characters in stories. What does the protagonist want? In these stories, the main characters want relevance, love, escape, recognition, connection, and more.
Week Twenty-five
“Mother of Hope”, by Laurie Baker, NarrativeMagazine.com
The teaching experience becomes a learning experience for a newly minted college graduate grappling with the entrenched cultural values of a religious community and a third world country.
“Mostly I was just bent on makin...
June 16, 2013
365 Short Stories (joy of reading)–Week Twenty-four
elkfish|iStockphoto.com
X marks the intersection of my youth’s joy of reading and my discovery of great storytellers like London, Poe and Hardy. Walking down memory lane this week with some old friends.
Week Twenty-four
“The Three Strangers”, by Thomas Hardy, www.everywritersresource.com
I did my senior project at UC Berkeley on Thomas Hardy. Hardy remains relevant in our time; his writing shows how far we have traveled from our agrarian roots, where seasons and weather determined how we lived—an...
June 9, 2013
365 Short Stories (Smoking)–Week Twenty-three
What a find; I’m having a smoking good time this week reading these stories! I discoveredThe Online Archive of Nineteenth Century Women’s WritingafterChoral Director Dennis Brown mentioned Harriet Prescott Spofford at the Pine Cone Singers Spring Concert in Groveland, CA. Her short story sparked poems and songs—there’s something to aspire to, my writer friends!
Week Twenty-three
“Circumstance”, by Harriet Spofford
In this gruesome tale with dense and tangled forests of long and twisted prepositi...
June 7, 2013
Futility
John Updike captured the stubborn futility of hanging onto our stuff in his short story, “The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe”—he calls it “thrift’s absurd inertia.”
I looked up the word futility in my grandmother’s 1938 multivolume set of The Universal Dictionary of the English Language (I keep this set in one of three bookcases I own that will have to go when we eventually downsize; two of which I absolutely will not part with.) In simple language, it is hard for some of us to throw t...
