5/31/13: Short Story Month: My Post on Dawn Raffel

In honor of Short Story Month, which draws to a close today, I examine Dawn Raffel's "Our Heaven" over at Emerging Writers Network. Dawn is one of my favorite authors, and her collection of short stories, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (2010), a primer of how to really develop one's own language for telling, as it were. Her prose is like waves, bringing shells to the shore and tossing them back, their configurations bringing new meanings with each trip to the shore.

Our Heaven” is one of my favorites. What seems like a loose, list-like collection of memories of the narrator’s family and childhood home in Illinois is actually a multilayered painting puzzle that uses repetition, symbolism, juxtaposition, and word choice to great effect.

To read more, go here

Pushcart Nomination for "The Goodbye Party"

Great news from Dawn Raffel and the folks at the Literarian: my story, "The Goodbye Party," has been nominated for a Pushcart. Here's a teaser of the story, in case you missed it:

Alvin said he wanted to go to the goodbye party with Sam. They were on the subway coming home from Alvin’s school. Alvin wore the straps of his child-sized backpack around his ankles, the pouch part resting atop his outstretched legs. Sam had always told him not to do that, that they needed to get up and off the subway car quickly, but what Alvin said about the goodbye party stunned Sam into silence, and when the car braked at their station, he lifted Alvin over his shoulder and ferried him off, backpack hanging from Alvin’s legs.

Sam had not told Alvin about the goodbye parties, believing he was not ready to understand. Alvin had barely understood his mother’s death almost a year ago, although now and then he displayed such surprising resoluteness and peace about it that it had aged him, had made Sam feel like the child instead of the father, crying while making a peppered-turkey sandwich in the kitchen because he had gotten the turkey from the deli Elizabeth had loved.

But last Saturday, when Alvin had gotten up in the middle of the night, a bad dream, and found that Sam wasn’t home, he had asked his grandmother, who was babysitting, where his father was. Sam’s mother, not sure what answer would be acceptable to Alvin, and very annoyed at Sam for not accounting for this scenario (but only slightly so that she had not accounted for it), told Alvin to wait until his father got home.
It was a goodbye party for the dogs at the shelter, Sam had explained to Alvin later that morning, his eyes still wet, a burn in his left shoulder from cradling an 80-pound Rottweiler, Mugsy, whose eyes were root-beer candies, as the shelter employees had arrived. A goodbye party because they’re getting adopted.

For more, go here: http://www.centerforfiction.org/magazine/issue-10/the-goodbye-party-by-jen-michalski/