May 2012
14 posts
“The red wine stain on her mother’s prized rug returned. She had tried salt,...”
– Keepsake by Ethel Rohan
“I have a theory that elegant people have an aura of impenetrable private...”
– On Elegance by Lauren Cerand
“While it’s true you’re haunted by your past, it’s truer that you’ve traveled...”
– Sugar
“I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love...”
– Graham Greene to his mistress, Lady Catherine Walston, who inspired him to write The End of the Affair
“Right. I look fine. Except I don’t,’ said Zora, tugging sadly at her...”
– On Beauty by Zadie Smith
1 tag
“Women of color come of age and have the same experiences Dunham depicts in her...”
– Girls Girls Girls by Roxane Gay
April 2012
11 posts
1 tag
“Because of the dolls and the way she held them to her bare breasts, the way she...”
– Twenty Reasons to Stay and One to Leave by Richard Thomas
1 tag
“It’s hard to say whether I would have a different vision of time if I had grown...”
– Stephanie Vaughn
“That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says...”
– Jeffrey Eugenides
“Every day when she comes home from work, Lucy undresses in the foyer of the home...”
– Lucy Lives in a World of Infinite Possibility by Roxane Gay
March 2012
11 posts
“Trust yourself as a writer. Let your creativity tell you what to do. Allow it to...”
– Jeanette Winterson
2 tags
Series
If you have read my most recently published story, Black Wolves, please don’t hesitate to contact me with your reaction (if you didn’t like it, I welcome criticism, but keep it constructive, and please no OMG-kind-of-incestuous-lesbians messages. Or actually, yes please OMG-kind-of-incestuous-lesbians messages). I’m just starting to work on a series of stories concerning...
1 tag
“Jeffrey Eugenides’ prose is intoxicating. His command of detail and atmosphere...”
– Books We Can’t Quit: Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides: A Review (by me.)
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with...”
– Carl Sagan
1 tag
“Madeleine Dunn wants to ask about the bruises. She watches them on the small of...”
– Black Wolves, my new story in Bluestem Magazine.
“We burn the slow branches of our stories to keep the darkness at bay.”
– Breyten Breytenbach
“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The...”
– Tiny Beautiful Things by Sugar
February 2012
11 posts
1 tag
“They’re not your family and they never were. At times they could have...”
– [SPOILER ALERT] by Laura Eve Engel and Adam Peterson
“Already we knew the rest—though we could never be sure about the sequence...”
– The Virgin Suicides
“I read her for the first time in 1993, as an undergrad at Berkeley. I was 22. ...”
– What We Talk About When We Talk About Joan Didion
“In the end, it wasn’t death that surprised her but the stubbornness of...”
– The Virgin Suicides
“You have to go somewhere else, sweet pea. You have to move beyond despair. You...”
– Sugar
“Bubble gum angels swooped from top margins or scraped their wings between...”
– The Virgin Suicides
January 2012
17 posts
“She told her lover she was emotionally homeless and her lover sent her a picture...”
– Stephen Elliott
1 tag
“I’d never felt known in quite that way by fiction-by anything, perhaps....”
– Cheryl Strayed