Too Distressing?
August 17, 2022
A new story of mine, “A Topic Too Distressing to Mention,” is now posted on the Bangalore Review website. This marks my first attempt to deal with transgender issues, and it’s also an experiment in communal voice, the narrator being unidentified except as a member of a certain club of women. Anyone who has a chance to read the story is welcome to post a comment here, as long as it’s reasonably polite.
Wonderland Stories
May 3, 2021
My pandemic productivity hasn’t been great, but by chance I have three works of fiction being published this spring. My short story “Crabs,” originally in Wilderness House Literary Review, has been selected for The Best Short Stories of Philadelphia 2021, edited by Matthew M. Perez.
A new piece, “Wonderland Stories,” a four-part exploration of the way we’re always telling ourselves stories—and consequently not seeing what’s in front of our noses—has just appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal.
Finally, we’re getting closer to the pub date for my novella The Bourgeois Anarchist, which can be preordered here.
Blue Light
June 30, 2020
Lately I seem to be posting only when I have a new publication to promote. Guess I’ve been too depressed by Trumpism, police violence, virus deaths and the like to have many thoughts worth sharing.
However that may be, there’s another new piece of mine out there, a short story called “Blue Light” in Coal Hill Review. It has nothing to do with Trump.
Many thanks to Fiction Editor Christine Stroud for including this story in the latest issue.
A Dog for the Season
April 21, 2020
Despite nagging from the Spirit Animal who presides over this site, it’s been a while since I published a story in which a dog plays a major part. I hope the piece just issued in Cagibi, “The Goodbye Dog,” will make up for that dereliction of duty.
Since canines are one of our comforts during the ongoing pandemic, this is a perfect time to give one a title role.
The story did present a special challenge in that it required translations from two foreign languages: Italian and Boerboel. For any clumsiness therein, I apologize to Dante and to the Spirit Animal, respectively.
Elsewhere in the April issue, I recommend the essay by Robert Close. And the graphic here links to the cover page.
A Silent Breeze
January 2, 2019
Isn’t it especially creepy when a threat makes no sound?
That’s what the protagonist faces in “A Silent Breeze,” my latest story now up on the Pithead Chapel site. It was a finalist in the magazine’s story contest judged by Silas House.
Sirens
December 21, 2018
On certain days in the city, they seem almost continuous, always in the background, waxing or waning, closing in or fading. Police sirens. Fire trucks. Ambulances. Maybe I imagine them when they aren’t there. But they always have to be there, don’t they?—because at any given moment, there must be an emergency somewhere.
Just as the dog says when he refuses to go out: “I don’t care if the sun is shining here, I hear thunder somewhere.”
Whether the threat is real or imagined, I imagined a character for whom it’s both imagined and real, and she’s in the Adelaide Awards Anthology for 2018, in a story called “Sirens.” If you can tolerate the interface called Anyflip, you can read for free here, starting on p. 77: http://online.anyflip.com/fypa/nifd/mobile/index.html
If you find Anyflip unbearably annoying, just flip it one and go listen to sirens on your own. They’re everywhere, like the thunder. 
Two new stories
June 1, 2018
Two of my stories are being published this month, both of them somewhat peculiar (of course) but otherwise very different.
“Minus the Angels,” in Pif Magazine‘s June issue, is what I consider a very short piece, less than 1,500 words, though the magazine calls it “macro” fiction. However they label it, I’m grateful for the publication. It’s about a couple vacationing in Italy while one of them, the narrator, is recovering (or not) from an illness. Interestingly, the sex of the narrator is never specified, but the magazine has a photo of two men in the header. As I wrote the story, I did imagine the narrator as a man; but when I realized on revision that I hadn’t assigned a name or a pronoun, I decided to leave the gender unstated. If you could read the story without seeing the picture, and without knowing that the author is male, what assumption would you make?
Now, if you want REAL “macro” fiction, my story “Survivors” in The Piker Press is over 10,000 words—or will be, once all three installments are up. This piece is about a long-delayed reunion of a broken family, a get-together that perhaps should have been delayed even longer. I think there should be a prize for readers who survive all the way to the end of the work, but I don’t know what to offer. Maybe, if you contact me, I’ll burden you with another free story.
“Polly wolly doodle all the day”
May 4, 2018
Yeah, I know, everyone’s been waiting for my latest insightful comments about President Twitterman, Paul Ryan, Steamy Dangles or whatever that porn star’s name is, and all the other pressing issues of the day.
Instead, I’ve published a story with “Polly wolly doodle” in it. Sorry.
If you strain your eyes, you may be able to parse the first lines in the image accompanying this post. And if that doesn’t discourage you, the rest of the piece can be found in the April issue of Adelaide. You have to read a ways into the story before polly and doodle appear, but they do live up to their names.
Many thanks to Adelaide‘s editors, Stevan V. Nikolic and Adelaide Franco Nikolic, for accepting this story for their fine magazine, which is based in both New York and Lisbon. Without leaving my desk, I feel much worldlier.
Feelin’ Crabby
July 23, 2017
Partly because my family was on vacation but more because I’m oblivious, I didn’t notice when a new story of mine was published in early July: “Crabs,” in Wilderness House Literary Review. If you’re feeling crabby in the summer heat, you may want to check it out. Thanks to the editors of WHLR!
Our vacation was to the island I call Mosquitoland USA, and the central image in this story comes from an event during our stay in the same place last year. Usually truth doesn’t make for good fiction (imagine a novel about Donald Trump—would you have the slightest inclination to read it?), but in this case the real incident, which lives up to the adage about truth being stranger than, may amount to a decent metaphor. Or it may make you queasy about seafood. Feel free to let me know.
In the meantime, watch out for the Trumpsquito, whose bite will make you itch uncontrollably for four years.
The News from Gridleyville 