Category: literary magazines

My long, strange journey to “One Night Only”

Nearly four years ago, I woke one morning with a vivid scene from a dream hanging inside my head. Most nights, I dream crazy shit, but forget it all before I wake. This was different. And rich.

I ran for a pen and paper. Later, I used the scene as the jumping off point for a story that, recently, found public display at The Lowestoft Chronicle. It’s a web journal dedicated to tales of travel.

The story that emerged from my dream became “One Night Only.” It’s absurd, from start to finish, as dreams always are. I took the remembered part of an actual dream and used it as the diving board for a plunge into a litany of imaginative nonsense.

I love the story, because of its non-traditional narrative arc. There is no plot, just nonsense. The reader, I hope, sticks with it, to see where each inexplicable moment will lead. True to form, these moments lead to other inexplicable moments, inside which, a weird logic prevails. How can things make sense while making no sense at all?

Here’s to the spirit of fun. BTW, I was under no chemical influence at the time I wrote this piece. Proof, if ever it was needed, that we don’t need no stinkin’ drugs to act like we’re on drugs. Herewith, “One Night Only.”

“Hobo Heart” publication is a little bit like pregnancy and birth

Not that I would know a bit what it’s like to be pregnant, or give birth. The analogy may make a little more sense if you understand that submitting a story for an editor’s consideration, and then hearing that they want to publish your story is only the start of a process.

It takes time, just like a baby, for a story to reach the oxygen outside. Lots of work on the publication’s side, to tweak your text into the format the publication features. And time to wait until it can fill a hole in the calendar. Other stories and other writers must land their planes first.

Now I’ve gone and done it. Switched metaphors in mid blog post. From babies birthing to airplanes landing.

All that is prelude to the news that a long-loved and labored-over story of mine, “Hobo Heart,” has launched at the highly regarded Mystery Tribune. This story emerged from a variety of influences. I routinely read the police reports in our local paper. Sometimes bad behavior suggests fiction.

I also am a student of our nation’s sad history around race relations. I didn’t know much about it until I went away to college. When I started studying abuses heaped on black Americans, the history of chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws, terror lynching, economic disadvantage, I found myself trying to imagine what it was like, growing up black in America, when the weight of social oppression awaited every day.

Then I read an item in the paper about a report of books and a bicycle being found along our local tracks. And missing cattle. All that started mooshing around in my head until I had created a black sociology professor interested in seeing for himself what his father and grandfather had seen. And Bub, the white hobo embodiment of all that history and hatred. I set the major part of the story in my own backyard, the cities and towns of the Columbia River Gorge.

Anyway, if you get a chance, please read it. The folks at Mystery Tribune told me about a year ago they wanted to run it. Like babies, these things take their time to see the light.

In the land of mashed, fried and dipped, too many spuds is just an opportunity

New stories up on the webisphere.

Check out “A Thing of Beauty” at the Barzakh magazine, a story that I’m quite proud of.

Also, a new absurdity at the Potato Soup Journal (yes, that’s its name; got a problem with that?). It’s a fun little tale with an skewed tilt (what else, right?) and made for prime time. Read on. 

Check the Writing tab to see links to more stories, if you’re tired of watching “Letterkenny” on Hulu. Was that a plug? Sorry, but nobody paid me, soooo …

Free fiction for anyone who visits this …

blog post. That’s right, if you’re tired of paying for books and magazines, just follow this link to my most recent online publication, a short story titled “Defending the Home Front.” It appears in the most recent edition of Bending Genres magazine. Thanks to editor Robert Vaughan and fiction editor Meg Tuite for recognizing genius when they see it. The story is a whacky take on how local political disputes can lead to over-the-top escalations of response and reprisal. Have at it.

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