New Fiction at jmww,

One of my favorite columns at jmww is Meg Tuite's exquisitely curated "Exquisite Duet," in which two writers are given the same sentence or phrase and asked to write a poem or short fiction piece incorporating it. Of course, I was thrilled when Meg invited me to duet for December, with one of my favorite writers, Elise Levine. Our phrase was "Let's pretend it happened." I've posted the first few lines of each of our responses. You can read the entire duet at jmww:



Elise:


"Let us pretend. On a warm summer afternoon in the country it happened that my brother slapped me. In the flash that followed the bees ceased to hum. The ivy hardened despite the breeze. I wept and our cherished nurse Chantal clucked from her bench and waddled over. Her thick kiss quieted me. My brother—famous now, ruthless even then—bit his tongue from laughing, so hard the blood poured. The wound festered. After a brief confinement, he died."


Me:

I am curious. I guess that’s why I go–I want to know what I’m missing. Like a cast-iron French oven, champagne flutes. Hand-braided abaca placemats and 12-cup Cuisinarts. So many ways to design a life, encapsulated in a printed-out bridal registry at Crate & Barrel.

“You’ll never need all of these things,” I point out as her fingers caress napkin rings, ceramic bowls.

“But you’ll never know which one of them you’ll need,” she smiles. She knows how to knot a scarf so that it floats effortlessly around her neck; on mine, it always looks like a noose. “You’ll get married someday, too.”

Interview on About.com

About.com editor (and amazing novelist) Rachel Sherman took the time me talk with me about my first love, the journal jmww, which emerged in 2005 between me and fellow Towson Graduate Catherine Harrison. We also talk about writing, participating in the writing community, and time management:

not only must you write, write, write, but you must read. You must support the literary ecosystem by attending readings, buying books, writing reviews, sharing on social media, etc. You also have to build your own platform so that, by the time your book is published, you have a cadre of people who know your work and are excited to read more. Your drive has to equal your level of passion, and you have to believe in your work and be resilient. Just as writers are agitated that everyone they meet thinks they can write, that it’s easy when it’s not, writers should treat writing as seriously as they defend it to nonwriters.

To read more, go here.

National Local

Thanks to writer Caryn Coyle for the interview in CBS Baltimore. We talk about the Lit Show, jmww, and more. The link is here.

jmmw fall nonfiction issue is up!

I'm really excited about our special nonfiction issue of jmww (fall 2011), which is now live. Edited by our nonfiction editors, Dario DiBattista and Girija Sankar, this marks our entry into creative nonfiction, and we couldn't be more excited. Check out these opening lines and you'll see why:

"Yellow. Their skin was yellow. They had dirt under their fingernails and their feet were dirty. There were six of them, all women, under the tarpaulin. Some of them lived long enough to have their wounds bandaged before they died. Some died more or less instantly as shrapnel or 7.62-mm rounds entered their bodies."—Yellow, by Ron Capps

"I'd been attacked.

I unlocked the padlock on the door to my small room in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, in northern India, slipped my shoes off, and took a step inside. I closed my eyes. Breathe, I told myself, before I turned on my heels and rushed to the bathroom I shared with the others who had rooms on that floor."—In My Shoes, by Brandi Dawn Henderson

"My son and I have been hiking our local nature trail since he was born. At first I lugged him in a backpack. During toddlerhood's wobbly days, I shadowed his steps, poised to steady each stumble. Beautiful today, early autumn, and the morning sunlight splinters between trees soon to shed their leaves. The sweatshirts that seemed necessary earlier are now knotted around our waists. The trail circles the local park, and through the brush, we catch glimpses of soccer games. The cheers of adults and children echo then fade between the trees."—On Not Believing, by Curtis Smith

"We have just finished our tenth game of pool when someone announces that it's naked time."—Girl in the Hall, by Amy Bernhard


"When I first heard a Beatle died, I felt mostly disbelief; it wasn't true, it couldn't be."—Paul Is Dead, and We're All Listening: Rumor and Revelation, 1969, by Ned Balbo

""Never Mind the Jubilee" runs a 2003 cover of the British rock mag Q, ridiculing the 50th anniversary of Elizabeth II's coronation. The directive relies on an allusion to the Sex Pistols—poster-boys for Malcolm McLaren's Sex Shop who became, in the late 1970's, the anarchist's anarchists with their legendary, grating performances and their only studio LP, Never Mind the Bollocks. As I browsed the local Borders, dodging shoppers who chat on cell phones or flip through paperbacks killing time en route to the adjacent cinema, I was tempted to agree: whether here in America or "across the pond," royal pomp and circumstance matter far less than "the true story of punk" in Q's 148-page special edition."—When the Bad Boys Ruled Britannia, by Jane Satterfield

Check out the whole issue here.