March 2012
1 post
“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
“I draw you a bath and sit on the warm, damp edge of the tub while you soak and...”
– In the Dark of Day and Light of Night You Call Me Your Bright Shining Star, Roxane Gay
1 tag
“Obscene things should always strive to be beautiful.”
– Tim Jones-Yelvington
Revelation
Because we were boys,
I could only touch you in the dark.
Where we pretended the sins
promised by our fathers
could not find us.
In the path of trembling hands,
the hair on our thighs rose
against the night, and I dreamed
the extraordinary things
light would do to the parts I touched:
tuft of hair, silk of foreskin, the wet pearl
emerging from its sheath.
As I tasted myself inside...
1 tag
“And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long...”
– Tayari Jones
list respository and moodboard →
“A story is a kind of biopsy of human life.”
– Lorrie Moore
“We mistakenly equate emotionality with the primitive and rationality with the...”
– Natalie Angier
3 tags
“This alley behind our houses used to be for delivering milk and coal. Now we use...”
– When We Run Away We Will Eat Red Velvet Cake With Our Hands, my new story in Midwestern Gothic Issue 4.
December 2011
12 posts
“Because this, after all, was the basic truth they all chose to live by: that...”
– Brady Udall
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home. Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for love.
Therefore, Their sons grow...
“By all the words in my hands and the sea that bangs in my throat.”
– Anne Sexton
“Maybe we build the stories we love into ourselves. Maybe we digest stories.”
– Anthony Doerr
Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes
First, her tippet made of tulle, easily lifted off her shoulders and laid on the back of a wooden chair.
And her bonnet, the bow undone with a light forward pull.
Then the long white dress, a more complicated matter with mother-of-pearl buttons down the back, so tiny and numerous that it takes forever before my hands can part the fabric, like a...
“A man with such loneliness repels even the moon’s face in water.”
– Terese Svoboda
November 2011
10 posts
“We like to say how things are, perhaps because we hope that’s how they might...”
– Cheryl Strayed
“All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking....”
– Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas” (Praise, Ecco, 1979)
“The privilege of whiteness in America—particularly male, heteronormative...”
– Jaswinder Bolina
“There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the...”
– Jeffrey Eugenides
1 tag
“If I had to pick, I would say that Homesick is my favorite story. It revolves...”
– Paula Bomer’s Baby and Other Stories: A Review (by me.)