“A sentence can offer a moment of quiet, it can crackle with energy or it can just lie there, listless and uninteresting.”
The opening to my novella, Memorial Day, is up right now at Fictionaut. Give it a read, if you’re so inclined, and let me know your thoughts.
The novella (currently seeking a home) serves as the prologue to my novel-in-progress, which features the same narrator and protagonist, Roddy, nearly three years after the events of Memorial Day.
Thanks as always for your readership and support.
The kite hovered like a gull, just high enough that I thought, for a moment, it might break from its string and glide over the Atlantic.
My father pointed out into the expanse and said, See kids, there’s Ireland.
The way he looked at the water, I believed he could see it. My cousins, Liz and Casey, were so damn gullible, hitting one another and pretending that the island took shape before them. I slapped my brother, Liam, in the back of the head, hoping to instigate something.
Not gonna happen, dipshit, he said.
I wondered if anything would break if I shoved him off the pool deck. The sand below appeared soft.
“…who will swim to safety
& who will be pulled under by sharks.”
Nick Flynn, “Cartoon Physics, Part 1”
(I adore this poem, and am strongly considering this as an epigraph to my novel-in-progress.)
Here is the fourth set of showcased linked stories: The Nathan Stories. I hope you enjoy.
√ Superman Comes to Dinner (in Ducts)
√ Riverbed (in Connotation Press)
For other showcased series of linked stories, see below:
The soundtrack to Book One of my novel-in-progress. Cannot get enough.
Three in the morning. I knew because the numbers on my clock shined brighter than the streetlights, those beacons keeping the city awake. I barely slept. It didn’t matter how hushed things were, how still; in fact, the quiet seemed to worsen my restlessness. I’d been sleeping on a twin-sized bed for a while now, but I still wasn’t used to it. A few nights back, I rolled right off and ended up with my head shoved in the closet door. Good times. It was a choice I’d made, though, the bed. Josh thought it was ridiculous, going as far as to sermonize me on the benefits of a proper mattress. He seemed inordinately preoccupied with my back health. I had tossed my old king-sized mattress out during a Jerry Maguire-esque breakthrough. Or breakdown. Not sure which. There was just too much room in that bed.
In the living room, I opened a window and smoked a cigarette. The summer heat was unforgiving, sticky, even in the middle of the night, and the cool apartment air escaped alongside the smoke. Without provocation, I thought of Ashley. These nights occasionally brought me back to her, and it drove me mad. No explanation. She was just a good fuck. I took a long drag and repeated the sentiment in my head. That’s all she was. Then she was gone. I turned on music in an effort to stop thinking. I flicked the finished cigarette out the window and imagined its smack against the quiet street.
(To read more of “Somehow There Was More Here,” stop by here.)
I am in love with everything here.
(via vol1brooklyn)
He suggests my purchase is a metaphor. His cracked smile reveals years of tobaccoed abuse, and for some reason I find this magnetic. I ask what he means, and he points to the cover. I shake my head. It’s only a book, I assure him, just pages. They should add up to something, he says, hold weight. I pay with cash. He hands me the paperback, and I nod. He is right, about the weight.
I’m rocking two boards right now, showcasing my publications as well as the books I wish I’d written. Come say hi!
“He wrote me a letter a few months back,” Dennis said. His voiced cracked. “We didn’t know each other very well. Spent most of his life with his mother on Long Island.”
“Like his father,” Maggie said. She smiled, and it pulled Dennis in.
“He told me about this girl he loved,” Dennis said. “She’s it, he kept writing. Then he lost her. I think that was everything for him.”
“Did you visit him?” she asked.
“No. I got the sense he didn’t want to. He just needed to let me know that he was still there.”
Maggie nodded but said nothing. Dennis stared at her. He wanted to lean over the table and kiss her. He had countless questions to ask her, probably countless more to answer. Things had never really ended, at least not in any way that could be explained. Maggie, their life together, his feelings—everything had become too much and not enough and beyond reach. Dennis wasn’t the kind of man, ever, to demand. Instead, he just let her go. But none of that mattered. He hadn’t seen her in three decades yet, at that moment, she was his closest friend.
“It’s a good way to think of him,” Maggie said. “Still there.”
Dennis allowed himself to smile, really smile, and become caught up in the woman sitting in front of him.
“At the end of the letter, Andre asked if I remembered a particular baseball game—game four of the division series, when the Mets played the Giants. It was years ago, but of course I remembered. That Bobby Jones, he wrote. What a bum. It made me laugh out loud.”
Maggie was smiling when Dennis looked up at her. “That’s your word.”
“Yeah. That’s my word.”
√ Read “We’re Grownups, After All” in its entirety over at Assisi
√ Read another of The Andre Stories, “Based on True Events,” in Mixer
“Irregularity is the only pattern I know, so I must trust it. Nothing good may happen on the page today, but eventually I’ll get there. Stories await. There is a persistent curiosity that cannot be ignored. Before long I will heed the imperative and the unknown, the driving force that sends me to my knees, peeling dark scraps off the floor. I will cradle the film like a broken ghost in one hand while sucking a thread and slipping it through a needle’s bright eye to resume once more the humble work of stitching shadow to soles of feet.”
Sara Lippmann, “Why I Write, From Both Sides Now,” from Stymie Magazine
I’m not always great at self-promotion, but the storySouth Million Writers Award is pretty fantastic, so I thought I’d toss up a quick link.
If you loved any of my stories published online during 2011, please consider nominating one for the storySouth Million Writers Award. Thank you so much, as always, for your continued support and generosity.
Here’s a quick list of potential stories:
√ Cloisters, in Mixer
√ Don’t Forget You Love Me, in Used Furniture Review
√ Somehow There Was More Here, in Found Press
√ Greenpoint, in Paper Darts
√ Based on True Events, in Mixer
√ Forest Hills, in jmww
√ What About Sushi?, in Wufniks
√ It Was the Light, in Metazen
√ We’re Grownups, After All, in Assisi
√ Sometimes When I Talk, It’s Like You’re Not Even There, in Up The Staircase Quarterly
“A train echoes off sleeping brick apartment buildings, the shadows of fire escapes frozen against the walls, the rails rattle, and sparks float to the asphalt like electric snow. The train screeches to a stop. Sliding doors swish open, a bell, swish close. Nobody gets on or off. Nobody else is awake in the world.”
Robb Todd, “Razor Wire,” from the collection Steal Me For Your Stories (published by Tiny Hardcore Press)
This is a piece of nonfiction I wrote almost two years ago. It’s funny how the emotions, the raw energy of writing and failure and the never-ending passion to do both, changes little over time. I’m happier now, so much more so than when writing this piece, but I still desperately want it, everything, to be good, either way.
The whiskey coated my gums like molasses. I sucked in air between my two front teeth, and a soft whistle hung between the group.
“So tell me, Fucker,” Joseph said, his hand coming down forcefully on my shoulder, “how’ve you been?” He was scruffier than normal, and his light beard seemed off on his face.
We shared a laugh, mostly because “Fucker” was a deviation from his regular nickname for me: Fuckface. I took a drink and a few drops splashed from my bottom lip to the table.
“Is it a novel yet?” he asked, referencing my thesis project, a collection of linked short stories.
“Still a collection,” I said. “I thought that’s what you wanted, too. What was best.”
“Either way,” he said, drinking his Pinot Grigio. “It’s good either way.”
“The novel’s coming,” I said and let Friday lick my knuckle. “Something separate.”
(This piece originally appeared in April 2010, in fwriction.)
Unrelieved Responsibility & Permanent Distraction: The Writing of Danny Goodman
“My circumstances
of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the
short story form." ~ Raymond Carver
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