Thinking Out Loud: Blog

Hello from Writerslandia. 

Mark your calendars for October 22 for my short story, "Alien" posting in Potato Soup Journal at http://potatosoupjournal.com/

On October 26 at 7:00 pm EST, listen to the readings by the winner and the two honorable mentions (including me) for the Doris Betts Fiction Prize 2021 hosted by the North Carolina Literary Review and the North Carolina Writers Network.

Facebook Event Link

https://fb.me/e/1x7hglxyx 

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October is spectacular! Read my story Alien at Potato Soup Journal at http://potatosoupjournal.com/ beginning October 22. Potato Soup Journal seeks a story that “digs at a facet of humanity” and I’m proud to contribute. 

On October 26th at 7:00 pm EST, please attend (online) a reading sponsored by North Carolina Writers’ Network and the North Carolina Literary Review. I am delighted to join the Doris…

After a wait of twenty years since Lee Durkee’s Rides of the Midway (Norton, 2002), we might expect The Last Taxi Driver (Tin House, 2020) to be overworked, joyless. No. The readers are right; the reviewers are right. Bukowski and Hunter Thompson meet Chaucer. Durkee’s day in the life of taxi driver, Lou, whose passengers’ ribald stories weave through his hallucinatory day, carries the reader beyond amusement to illumination as brilliant as the beam of light from the…

My contribution to National Poetry Month. Thanks to North Carolina Writers' Network: Writers' Morning Out. #poetrymonth #NationalPoetryMonth

http://pittsboro-wmo.blogspot.com/

I have been selected to participate in the AWP Writer to Writer program paired with my mentor, Rus Bradburd, see All the Dreams We've Dreamed: A Story of Hoops and Handguns on Chicago's West Side (Chicago Review Press, 2018).  Rus has a great heart and an "enthusiasm for the world of writing that supports my efforts so well. I'm enjoying our work together. Check out his bio and the other mentors and mentees here:

Mentees

Mentors

AWP has excellent programs. Check them out at AWP…

Check out this great new author! Dantiel W. Moniz's new collection, Milk Blood Heat, is alchemy on a page.

See my review at The Southern Review of Books!

The North Carolina Literary Review 2021 is published online. To read my story, "Wherever You Go", an Honorable Mention for the Doris Betts Fiction Prize of 2021 click here.

Or see the entire issue published online annually by East Carolina University and by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. Just click on the cover below.

Today I am grateful to announce that I have won an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Doris Betts Fiction Prize, sponsored by the North Carolina Writers' Network. Judge Josephine Humphreys called “Wherever You Go” “a powerful story about the need to escape—from grief, from memory, from love—and the gradual realization that escape may be impossible. Moving to a new place will not be the solution. The narrator is ultimately able to extract only minimal compensation, and yet…

Please enjoy my interview with Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle about her new historical fiction set in Asheville and Cherokee in the North Carolina mountains of 1942.  Recently she spoke at the North Carolina Writer's Network's Writingest State Online Conference about socially engaged historical fiction.

Open for reading at the Southern Review of Books on December 2!

at https://southernreviewofbooks.com/2020/12/02/even-as-we-breathe-annette-saunooke-clapsaddle-interview/ 

In so many ways I am obsessed by the concept of the liminal, the threshold of change. The dictionary definition – barely perceptible, or being in an intermediate state, these only begin to open the meanings of this word in so many worlds – color theory, psychology, anthropology, spirituality and myth. Betwixt and between - at the threshold, at the crossroads, neither one not the other. Neither an elder nor a child, not belonging nor alone, a shapeshifter…