Emerging Writers Network

National Short Story Month - For Out of the Heart Proceed by Jensen Beach

Many thank yous to both the Postman and to the fine folks at Dark Sky for getting me a copy of Jensen Beach's story collection, For Out of the Heart Proceed. It arrived today and brought a great smile to my face. Jensen happens to be both a damn good writer and one helluva nice person, one of my favorite combinations in the world.

What Dark Sky has to say about the book:

In his debut collection, Jensen Beach’s characters discover what it means to be individuals, colleagues, husbands and fathers in a world that too often complicates even the best intentions with sabotage and subterfuge. What’s most striking about these stories is the protagonists’ ability to continually make right, difficult decisions despite being placed in challenging, dangerous situations. Readers will delight in Beach’s powerful, deft prose, and the surprising warmth that radiates from his people. Each story is a robust chronicle that churns and evolves and offers glimpses into fully-realized lives. To say this marks the arrival of a gifted author is true but somehow misses the mark, as the maturity and sincerity that pulses throughout this collection signals a writer whose many talents have been developed and honed over time.

And what much much smarter people than I have to say about it:

– The stories in Jensen Beach’s debut collection unfold menacingly in plain daylight. They seduce us into feeling at ease until the ground gives way under our feet. Here are people who hope to love and to protect those they love and people who fall down trying. Who burn down and stand up and heroically (stubbornly!)
begin to live again. — Noy Holland, author of What Begins with Bird

– Pithy and pertinent, Jensen Beach’s stories reach out and grab you in the opening line, and they don’t let go until the final period. This writer’s not into wasting words. He makes every one count. His fiction is both direct and vivid, and I found a surprise or two on virtually every page. I feel tremendous enthusiasm for this young writer’s work. — Steve Yarbrough, author of Safe from the Neighbors

– This book holds some of the most beautiful father and son stories I have ever read. This book is the father I never had. — Michael Kimball, author of Us

– It’s easy to let a day, or a set of days, pass by; nothing is singular about them, or so it seems . . . and then you read Jensen Beach’s wonderful collection, and you see how there is horror and joy, ugliness and beauty in the everyday, and you’re missing it. Read For Out of the Heart Proceed, and then enter your day with better eyes. — Lindsay Hunter, author of Daddy’s

Visit here and you can listen to two of the stories and read an excerpt from another.

National Short Story Month - Sightings by BJ Hollars

Another one to file under the category of Collections I'm Looking Forward To! This one will have a slightly longer wait though--just under a year from now in March 2013 from the Indiana University Press. Here is the press description of BJ Hollars' Sightings:

B. J. Hollars’s debut short story collection offers ten thematically linked tales, all of which are out to subvert conventional notions of the Midwestern coming-of-age story. The stories feature an assemblage of Bigfoot believers, Civil War reenactors, misidentified Eskimos, and grief-stricken clowns, among other outcasts incapable of finding a place in their worlds. In these marvelous stories, we can join a family on a very 21st century trip along the Oregon Trail, watch as a boy builds a brother from a vacuum cleaner, follow a sandlot baseball team as it struggles to overcome an invasion by its Native American neighbors, and experience how a high school basketball squad takes to Sasquatch roaming its court. This genre-bending collection charts a bizarre pathway through the thickets of life on the road to adulthood. Pushing the limits of realism, these stories capture the peculiar rites of passage of growing up Midwestern.

I'll simply that if you find a piece of writing by Mr. Hollars, fiction, non-fiction, hell, he might even have some poetry out there--find the time to read it. I'll be pre-ordering this one.

National Short Story Month - Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins

File this one under Collections I'm Looking Forward To! It comes out in August from Riverhead Books. Watkins has published stories in such fantastic journls such as Hobart, One Story, Granta and The Paris Review and I know I've already read two of them (the first two journals listed) and loved them.

What Others are Saying:

"As blistering hot and wondrously expansive as the gritty, wide-open Nevada desert."--Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff

"Watkins digs and sifts...finding the bright flecks hidden in her characters' darkest moments, until each story shimmers and shines."--Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief

And from the book's back cover via Riverhead: Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johson, Richard Ford and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice.

 

National Short Story Month - Guest Post - Jac Jemc

The first of what I hope are many guest posts this month:

What “The Man in Bogota” Means to Me – Jac Jemc

In a creative writing class in college a professor passed out copies of “The Man in Bogota” by Amy Hempel.  The story changed my mind in a million ways. 

The message of the story, the moral and the punch line is, “He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good.” It was a time when I needed to re-evaluate my attitude and the line rang in my head. That sentence is so full of assumptions and contrasts.  She doesn’t write, “He wondered how we know that what happens to us is bad.”  Instead she puts the focus on what that something isn’t, suggesting that maybe, after all is said and done, it is. 

The story is short, only a page long.  It was one of the first pieces of flash I read that really made me feel it was possible to tell more in a page than in a whole book.

It’s a story within a story. It’s a story about the power of storytelling and it’s a story about survival. It was a time when storytelling was a survival tactic for me. It’s a “come-down-from-the-ledge” story.

The language is clear and plain, in a way that stuns me.  It’s a way I’m unable to write and so thankful to read. 

I remember sharing the story with my dad when I was home for a break.  “Isn’t it awesome? She’s a minimalist!” I exclaimed, boiling down what I knew of the Lish style of editing to a statement that no longer resembled the truth. I remember my dad giving me a hard time for using the word “minimalism.” We argued, laughing.

And now, I’ve taken up more words talking about what this story means to me, than the story itself allows. 

The narrator says she tells the story to try and get the woman on the ledge to ask herself a question.  I don’t know any better reason to tell a story.

 

Jac Jemc is the author of My Only Wife. Her work has also appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Caketrain, Handsome and Sleepingfish, among others. She is the author of a chapbook of stories, These Strangers She'd Invited In (Greying Ghost Press) and the poetry editor for decomP Magazine. Jac blogs her rejections at jacjemc.wordpress.com.

National Short Story Month 2012: "In His Last Will and Testament, John Hughes Leaves Specific Instructions for a Breakfast Club Sequel" by Michael Czyzniejewski

 

Curbside Splendor has recently published Michael Czyzniejewski's second story collection, Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions, from which "In His Last Will and Testament, John Hughes Leaves Specific Instructions for a Breakfast Club Sequel" comes. The collection is described as "40 dramatic fictions by Michael Czyzniejewski, each told in the persona of a famous Chicagoan, from Mrs. O’Leary to Barack Obama."

Czyzniejewski does a fantastic job of getting the voices right behind his narrators--can't you just hear John Hughes pitching the sequel?

That's when it would all come out, how their seemingly perfect lives are not  so perfect, how the faces they put on aren't who they really are. There would be dramatic monologues. There would be tears. Tempers would rise, spurring at least two fights. Somebody would kiss someone--Brian and Allison jump out at me--and it's logical to have at least one of them divorced and another with cancer, whatever cancer needs the publicity, something we could donate 1 percent of the box to.

Czyzniejewski fills each of these tales with just the right blend of humor and heart, while again, capturing the narrator's voices perfectly--a pretty damn impressive job considering these stories are between 2 and 4 pages in length.

Man, after typing all of the above out, I realize the story is also available at Knee-Jerk, something I had long forgotten. You can read it here.

Michigan Mavericks

Courtesy of the wonderful Goodloe Byron (author/artist/musician extraordinaire)

National Short Story Month 2012: "Dedication" by Stephen Graham Jones

"Dedication" by Stephen Graham Jones was published in Smokelong Quarterly just yesterday (great timing over there!).

It begins:

This is to Tammy Carlton, who sat two seats up and one over in fourth grade, and said once "Why don't you just write a book about it?" This during my explanation to the teacher about the gum and monkeybars thing. This is to Ms. Glynnis from my sixth grade science, for reading my note out loud to the class in a voice I still hear. This is to Michael K. and Lacy and Nicholas, for paying for their order at my drive-through window that time with a squirrel scraped up from the street. This is especially to Lacy, for looking at me like she regretted that these kinds of things had to happen. This is to my dad, too, of course. I really thought you were dead that one morning. And this is to Coach Barker, for throwing the ball just far enough that I had to cradle my arms out over the track that time. This is to Wayne and Wayne, for showing me that place behind the gym, between the air conditioner and the fence with all the newspapers blown up against it. It was perfect. This is to Tammy Carlton, for having to look away when I walked into senior prom. This is to her friends, all suddenly applying lipstick, their mouths definitely not laughing. This is to the band that night, for only playing slow songs. This is to the radio all these years later, for reminding me about those songs when I least expect it. This is to Wayne and Wayne, for slipping me a beer through the drive-through window once. This is to Albert, my assistant manager, for pretending not to see. This is to Albert, for having been seventeen once as well, I guess.

This reminded me at first of Michael Martone's Michael Martone which had Martone putting together a collection of Author's Notes--these were usually found in the Author's Notes section of the journals they were published in at Martone's request, and not with the fiction or other elements.

What Jones has done is similar, but instead of using the Author's Note as his muse, he's opted to use the Dedication. It's creative both simply as an idea, and would be interesting to see him do more of them, but also specifically with what he's chosen to dedicate this particular story to--people from his past, specific incidents and how the people related to them. Some of those listed above, such as Tammy Carlton, appear again later in the dedication, creating an actual narrative that the reader can get involved with. I'm glad there was somebody out there like Smokelong Quarterly willing to publish such an interesting piece.

Short Story Month 2012 at the EWN

The idea for the EWN in 2012 is going to be various as usual. I hope to review specific short stories from both journals and collections, I hope to review a few collections as well. I will have guest posts from authors and editors alike. I'll post some old "classic" EWN short story collection reviews. I will do some "advertising." That is, do posts of collections I've not yet had the pleasure of reading but will post the collection's cover, some jacket copy and a blurb or two. I'll probably promote some forthcoming collections and I'll do my best to link to all the other blogs or website that are celebrating National Short Story Month this May. It's year six here at the EWN--I hope many other sites join in.

Short Story Month 2012: Logos Over the Years

Logos through the years--all thanks to Steven Seighman:

 

National Poetry Month

What a poor job I've done covering National Poetry Month. On its last day I finally remember to point out that Black Lawrence Press is selling all of their collections at a fifty percent discount this month (ie, order today!):