"The Look-Alikes"

"Mixed Fruit" is a new online literary journal. One interesting thing about their submission policy is that they read blind. In other words, they read submissions without knowing who wrote them. I think that this is a great idea. By doing this, it really does allow the work to speak for itself.

In Andrew Valencia's short story, "The Look-Alikes," Richard, a disgraced literature professor tries to redeem himself and win money in a Hemingway look-alike contest held at Hemingway's home in Key West. Along for the ride are Becca, who knew and fell in love with him in better days, and two former students, Silas and Nate. This story raises interesting questions about the nature of loyalty and the meaning of failure and success.

Did you ever have a mentor like Richard?

"What I Lost"

Vestal Review bills itself as "the oldest magazine of flash fiction."

Today's story, "What I Lost," by Dean Keller Jacobs, is in some ways a list of things lost. But it's also a story. The things go from physical objects to abstract ones--teeth and faith. The juxtaposition of the concrete and the abstract is interesting and the way all of it comes together to tell a story. For example, "I lost Dad to AA later that year. I lost myself in the bottom of his bottles."

In a short space, the story tells of lost hopes, lost loves, lost fears. It's a sad story of many losses.

In what way does the list of losses work together to tell a story? Do you find the structure of this story to be effective?

"Ella and the Elephant"

Tiegen Kosiak’s piece “Ella and the Elephant” from the online journal Hot Metal Bridge is well written and sad. The title may very well also be a reference to Hemingway’s story “Hills like White Elephants” although elephants are also mentioned in the story itself. It is set during Lent and covers a week’s worth of time from Saturday to Friday.

I can see how the story fits the journal’s submission guidelines: “We want literary fiction that is so well written, it has a magnetic pull. Stories that make us want to google you and read everything you’ve published. That get us fired up and make us want to write or read or create.” This piece did, in fact, make me want to google the author.

From googling the author, I learned that she has an M.F.A. in creative writing from Minnesota State University Moorhead. I also learned that the author writes poetry, which doesn’t surprise me since the language in this story was so lyrical.

"Peacocks"

It's Saturday night. As Hurricane Irene continues up the coast and to New York, maybe it has already hit, I read this story that screams New York and feel nostalgia for a place I've never lived but always kind of wanted to.

Today's story, "Peacocks" by L.E. Miller is a good story from a good journal, Ascent. The point of view, which at first appears to be the collective "we" is also very interesting, but it later turns out that one women rather than all is narrating, telling the story for the group of them. The story, which is mostly set in the 1950s, begins: "We had values. We had Le Creuset pots. We had fold-out couches in our living rooms, where we slept with our husbands at night. "

The story describes the women in the story as "landsmen, all of us dark-haired women who carried the inflections of our parents’ Yiddish in our speech. Our cramped apartments were fine with us; we would never in a million years live in some bourgeois outpost in Long Island, and the only way we’d return to Brooklyn was in a coffin. We called ourselves The Quorum. We called ourselves the Collective Unconscious of the Upper West Side. " These women are mothers whose children play together "in a bleak little playground near the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine."

All of the women have something in common, but then a new woman moves in who doesn't seem to fit in. The other woman take satisfaction in their lives, but the new woman seems above them and apart from them. But is she really that different?


Like the narrator, do you see a little bit of yourself in Rebecca?

a ballad of childhood

Today's post, focuses on a flash fiction "Ballad of a bumble bee trapped in honey," which is about the senseless cruelties of childhood. But it's about more than that. It's about a moment of innocence turning. It's about a child who doesn't know something, and then he does. It's about learning to make sense of the world. It's about killing bees, but it's also about things and people remembered and lost.




The piece, by Matthew Burnside, comes from the journal Contrary. It's an independent literary journal that's run from the South Side of Chicago.

Read. Write. Think. Discover, and enjoy.
--Lori