Reading, Trying to Find My Place

 CRAFT published the winners of its first chapter contest: The Bad One by Sonny Buttar, The Golden Suicides by Melissa Yancy, and My Demons by Jill Rosenberg. Chrome would load the last story, other than the first two sentences; this may be another interference by my monitoring software.

My observations of the first and second-place winners are that there is a sense of a mystery created, a reason to read on. Then there is the lightness of the prose, first-person perspectives all, that carries the narrative and the spice of the character's emotions. 

I feel I can do the former; the latter seems a problem. I think this is what Stephanie R calls depth.

i considered The Georgia Review's short story contest, so I read Prose Prize Judge Danielle Evans in Conversation with Maggie Su. Ms. Evans points out the emotional content of short stories.

Sunday:

I find  Innards by Magogodi oaMphela Makhene review – a stunning Sowetan debut presents some interesting ideas:

On the front cover of the South African writer Magogodi oaMphela Makhene’s impressive debut collection of linked stories about life under and after apartheid, a young Black girl, primly attired in a collared dress, holds in each of her hands a chicken – defeathered and seemingly gutted. Look closer and you’ll notice the horns on the girl’s forehead and a sinuous stream of blood down her left leg. Her eyes stare ahead, whether in resignation or pain or provocation. Makhene’s book, like this image – an oil painting by Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai-Violet Hwami – melds the ordinary and the spectacular, grief, grit and horror, in novel and arresting ways.

***

... To read Makhene is to understand apartheid as a live, unhealed wound. It is to contend with and comprehend, deeply, intimately, the savage realities her characters endure, and the unconquerable memories of violence that they carry. This makes for an extraordinary achievement.

 What memories do we carry with us? How has the world's violence scarred us, deformed our trajectory? I think Joyce Carol Oates and Cormac McCarthy both address these issues, especially the questions of violence. Of the older generations, William Faulkner seems to me to be the one who addresses both the memories we carry and the surrounding violence of our culture

21 Ways to Improve Your Writing by Melissa Donovan. There is not one that does not apply to me, and more than I few I cannot see how to implement - now.

For some reason (my monitoring software blocking again?) I cannot open a Los Angeles Review of Books article (which was billed this way in its newsletter: In a preview of LARB Quarterly no. 40: Water, Dorie Chevlen finds Sisyphus at the laundromat.)

Ooh, I like this headline and its content stacks up, too: Think food is pricey? Wait’ll you see what authoritarianism costs. 

On the other hand, there’s a chance – just a chance, mind – that before voters in Nevada and the nation willingly abandon centuries of progress toward democracy and voluntarily surrender to autocracy because a box of Honey Nut Cheerios is rudely pushing $4, they may start noticing a phenomenon that has been even more rare than spiking inflation over the last several decades — wages have been rising faster than prices. Not everybody’s wages, and not compared to all prices. But in the aggregate, for most people.

Oh, and remember how just about everyone – including and especially Republicans running for office last year – assured the public that a big fat recession was just around the corner and definitely going to pummel the economy into submission in 2023.

That didn’t happen. Go figure.

Onto Antigone!

RAPHAEL’S SCHOOL OF ATHENS: GREEK PHILOSOPHY IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 

HOW TO BE AN ARISTOTELIAN

Let me start with a wild claim that may strike you as outrageous hyperbole: Aristotle is not merely the most important ancient philosopher, and not merely the most important philosopher of all time; Aristotle is the single most important human being ever to have lived.

On what grounds can I make such a grand claim? Well, let us think about what it would mean to be the single most important human being ever to have lived. Who would be a plausible candidate? It would have to be someone whose ideas have impacted on the lives of millions of people over a vast period of time – over centuries, if not millennia. There couldn’t be many serious candidates

The writer backs up his claims.

Back to reading fiction!

Riddlebird's Christmas Interruptus by Laury A. Egan, I have read before and it remains striking to me as what I missed of life while in prison and what I may look forward to in the coming years. COVID just enhanced prison life rather than completely upending it. 

Being alone was Kay’s normal state. She had no family and only a few friends living nearby. Most had moved away or were gone. Seriously gone. Like dead. At seventy-three, dealing with an avalanche of medical issues, Kay was fast approaching the same black-hole fate. And Covid still scared her—dare she say it?—scared her to death and had heaped isolation on top of a widowed lifestyle.

 From Sequesteruem, I read a three-paragraph story contained in the newsletter and what I could of Sex and the Piano; a subscription is necessary for the whole story. The flash piece blew me away - intense emotions, action, and a ghastliness reminding me of Heller's Something Else. The other story captured a sexual identity through history from the 50s into the 80s. Rather surprising for it not being in the first-person and teasing its emotional content.

Over at Narrative, I read Patisserie. Another story written in first-person, a relationship, and one I am not sure what to make of as a whole. Short stories do that to me, sometimes. Not the a definitive ending, explaining all; more like poetry that leaves an ambiguity of feelings. Or is it a proliferation of emotions? I would like to be able to do this - to leave the meaning open to the reader.

I looked at her then, and somehow in that moment I felt a sadness I couldn’t explain, the quiet hum of the white noise machine, the speckling of stars on the walls, the strange fog I’d been wading through lately, the uncertainty of both of our futures. For some reason it all hit me right then, the way she was looking up at me, the hopefulness in her eyes.

Checking out possible places to submit. I have nothing new to submit, but I am paying for Duotrope and today I ran down their listing of new outlets accepting submissions. These are the ones I found interesting.

• Prolit ("a journal that sets out to recognize, interrogate, and resist capitalism’s influence on contemporary art and literature, and to create a space for people to both discuss the realities of its oppression and to imagine better futures in its wake.")
• Antithesis ("Australia’s long-running graduate journal of contemporary theory, criticism and culture. Established in 1987, Antithesis is a refereed arts and humanities journal edited by graduate students and published annually in association with the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne.")

Nothing I can see for me, but the piquing of my curiosity.

Thank you FundsForWriters, this one had my attention:

TARTT'S FICTION AWARD
https://livingstonpress.uwa.edu/htm%20(web%20pages)/tartt_first_fiction_award.htm
NO ENTRY FEE. Deadline December 31, 2023. Winning short story collection will be published by Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama, in simultaneous library binding and trade paper editions. Winning entry will receive $1000, plus our standard royalty contract, which includes 60 copies of the book. Manuscript length: 160-275 pages.

Nathan Bransford critiques opening pages over at his blog, and I took a look at his latest. Vanity being what it is, I came to the same conclusion he did. Take a look at Specificity matters in opening pages too (page critique) Reading Mr. Bransford's edits makes this blog post most useful.

One last short story to read, Claire Cameron’s Jude the Brave from The Walrus. Told in the close-thrid person, definitely hitting the emotional struggles. I do not know that I could write such a story - I have taken as my brief history and social issues, not the intensely personal. Effective without maudlin, in my opinion.

I have one more article to read, about Zola, and two emails to reply to. I am putting off other emails till tomorrow. 

Tomorrow's dinner feels jinxed. I forgot to turn on the crock pot when I left for church this morning. I turned it on high before I left for Dollar General around 4:30. Four hours later, I double-checked it and it had come unplugged. That's the day.

Merry Christmas.

sch