"Never Forever: Where Does the Story End?" at HTMLGiant

I wrote about when to know how to end it over at HTMLGiant:

In college I was introduced to Raymond Carver, not in a class, but by a roommate who loved the short story "Fat." When I first read it, I was confused; a waitress recounts to her fellow co-workers her revulsion and confusion over a recent, extremely obese diner, a man who eats more than she has ever witnessed anyone eat and refers to himself as “we.” The story mysteriously ends with the waitress, speaking to the reader: "It is August. My life is going to change. I can feel it."

To read more, go here.

Some new reviews of Could You Be With Her Now

Today was a good week on the writing front. Several reviews came out this week for Could You Be With Her Now, and they were very complimentary. It's funny that I didn't think I'd ever want either of the novellas in the collection to see the light of day, fearing they'd be ridiculed or, worse, ignored, considered gimmicky. So it's a relief that reviewers and readers have taken away from the novellas the same things I saw when writing them. Here's a sampling:



 In HTML Giant, Adam Robinson said that "Jen is an astonishingly sensitive writer." and that "It’s really great, reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates in a good way."

 Over at Electric Literature, Nik Korpin said that "Yet in tandem, [the novellas] inform one another, their threads entangling, ultimately affording a more complete reading of the collection as a whole."

At Ampersand Review, Cort Bledsoe says that "Michalski is just a damned good writer, and her subject matter is, at the same time, the most common story there is: love. She handles it beautifully, revealing herself as one of the finest writers working today."

At the [Pank] blog, Sara Lippmann says that "At the center of it all is Michalski’s masterful hand, at once compassionate and unflinching, possessed of extraordinary, aesthetic restraint. What she has given us are two lean bodies of incredible depth and ambition."

Finally, the wonderful Danielle Ariano interviewed me at Baltimore Gay Life: "As different as they are, each novella shows Michalski’s distinctive ability to explore difficult situations with a realistic and heartfelt sentiment."