You never hear much about river mussels. That’s even in comparison to other bivalve mollusks. While a river mussel sits in that stream bed cleaning gallons of fresh water daily, water you and I and countless animals straight out of a Disney film depend on, who gets the attention? Clams. Clams have restaurants and packaging…… Continue reading Stagg, For The Little Guy: Behind “Lord, Spare the Bottom Feeders”
Category: Short Stories
Title Fight
You can do a lot with fiction. You can remove all narrative or all punctuation. You can go stream of consciousness and remove spelling norms and paragraph breaks. Cormac McCarthy removes the dialogue quotes. Do it right, and you can remove most everything in fiction and still have terrific writing. Except for one unavoidable thing:…… Continue reading Title Fight
Pride Cometh Before the Sale: Behind “Murder on the First Night’s Feast”
There is a C.S. Lewis quote about the blindness of the proud. To paraphrase, someone completely full of themselves is so busy looking down their noses that they’re blind to what’s above them. And what’s above them, of course, is the whole, wide world. We’re all prideful. Someway, somehow we’re all darn proud of something:…… Continue reading Pride Cometh Before the Sale: Behind “Murder on the First Night’s Feast”
She Who Must Be Seen: Behind “Star of Zoe”
I just have to see her. How “Star of Zoe” first got going, well, it was without Zoe. Not technically, I mean. I was riffing on this idea, this phrase: I just have to see her. So right there comes a She Who Must Be Seen. A proto-Zoe in the mix. My first riff, though,…… Continue reading She Who Must Be Seen: Behind “Star of Zoe”