S. Craig Renfroe Jr.'s Blog, page 6

Me on Dogzplot 2

You remember last time I had a flash fiction piece on Dogzplot. Ants...Sermon on the Mount...well, you get it. Anyway, this time I have another "religious" (that's right I used quotation marks) piece called "Pre-Revelation Coffee with Ex-Girlfriend."

P.S. Dear ex-girlfriend(s), this is not about you.

Me in Knee-Jerk

So my story "We Sin Like Wolves" is in lucky Issue 13 of Knee-Jerk magazine. It was a great experience working with Jonathan Fullmer, who made me see the story in a whole new way. So you should probably see it now.

This issue also includes a cool interview with Print Ball organizers Fred Sasaki (associate editor at Poetry), Nell Taylor (founder and executive director of the Chicago Underground Library), and Sarah Dodson (director and managing editor of MAKE: A Literary Magazine). Plus there's...

What's in an Epigraph?

So as you will recall, totally, I am reading The Red and the Black. You know what's great? No? According to the translator Raffel, Stendhal either misquoted or made up most of the epigraphs at the beginning of the chapters: "Professor Jean-Jacques Hamm has concluded that only fifteen of the seventy-five epigraphs in The Red and the Black are correctly and verifiably attributed." I like to think he made them up, especially this one:

And am I to blame
If that's how things are?
--Machiavelli

Who's in (to) The Red and The Black

So some friends and I decided to read Stendhal's The Red and the Black--some good old fashioned beach reading. That's right, it's durn near a book club. I now see what all those people saw in having Oprah give them assigned reading.

Melody picked it out of a list we came up with. I think I suggested it for the list because of James Wood's references to it in How Fiction Works. I had actually avoided reading it in the past. I guess because of what I thought it was about. Which isn't really what...

Me on Wigleaf's Long Shortlist

So stuff apparently happens when you're gone. For example, The Wigleaf Top 50 came out, a list of great online [very:] short fictions, this year judged by the amazing Brian Evenson. The list had the likes of Matt Bell, Aaron Burch, Dan Chaon, Dennis Cooper, William Gibson, Barry Graham, Brad Green, Stephen Graham Jones, and Kevin Wilson.

I'm just happy that my story "Death Babies" published in Flash Fiction Online made it to the Long Shortlist.

There and Back, Again

So summer travel is mostly done. I can sit in one place for a couple of weeks at least. And get bored. I'm getting stir crazy already. The good thing about travel is that you learn stuff. Often stuff you didn't know. Or didn't even know you didn't know.

Like I'd been to Christ Church oodles of times (well three at least) and had not taken note of the heart relic. See that picture, there's a mummified heart, a human heart, in there. Some saint or other. Religious people are strange.

Or say you f...

Volcano Blues

Here's a picture from the plane on our way to Ireland of the volcano spewing ash that made us have to fly to Iceland around the spewing volcano to finally get to Ireland. But we did. Get there. And hopefully it will allow us to leave one day.

The Evil Clown Interview

Submit Your Novella

You know what's cool. Novellas. They're like the flash fiction of novels. And we know flash fiction is hot right now. So where are the novellas?

Main Street Rag Publishing Company wants to do a novella series: 12 novellas, one a month for a year. And as I'm overseeing the series, I want to see the best. Better than crap like Of Mice and Men or Heart of Darkness or Animal Farm or Metamorphosis.

Here are details:
Reading Period : Right now! to August 1st. That's right, over the summer, so while...

Let the Productivity Begin!

Ha. That's right. Ha! I'm finished. The grades are in, and I am free. Free to focus. To be truly productive. For example, I made this on an animation site:

Over in the Underground: For Sale



Time well spent. I'm going to be so accomplished by the end of this summer. I just feel it.