Category: writing
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2014 in rejections (and acceptances)
2014 apparently ended up being the year that I got the most pieces out thusfar (although the general trend has been upwards). My personal rejection rate is up to 25% from 20%, a new record and this year’s acceptance rate came out at 3.1% (three acceptances versus 93 rejections). My plan for 2015: Finish draft…
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“Le Pont des Arts”: The Story Behind the Story
I wrote the first draft of this story while staying in the same apartment building in Paris where Katherine Mansfield wrote “Feuille d’Album.” The apartment was located on Ile de la Cité a short distance from Pont de l’Archevêché which has become a popular spot for tourists to attach locks declaring their eternal love as…
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“Thy Neighbour’s Goods”: The story behind the story
Some background on my story, “Thy Neighbour’s Goods” which appears in the Spring 2014 issue of The Southampton Review. The story began with a conversation with my wife about language. We were discussing the lack of distinction between singular and plural second person in English and I told her that actually the English “you” is…
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Beautiful sentences
She looks down at the playbill. She looks down. Terese Svoboda, Bohemian Girl.
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Beautiful sentences
My iniquity/punishment is greater than I can bear. In the Hebrew, her father said, that one word had two meanings and we chose one of them, which may make it harder for us to understand why the Lord would have pardoned Cain and protected him, and let him go on with his life, marry, have…
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Beautiful sentences
Once, five of the six younger Boughtons—Jack was elsewhere—played a joyless and determined game of fox and geese in the tender crop of alfalfa, the beautiful alfalfa, so green it was almost blue, so succulent that a mist stood on its tiny leaves even in the middle of the day. Marilynne Robinson, Home.
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Beautiful sentences
You have probably heard that we all became janitors, sitting in basements next to boilers reading cheap paperback books of Italian poetry, and never sweep a thing. Yet the world runs fine. Mary Ruefle, “Middle School”
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Beautiful sentences
… I haven’t heard from him and wonder if in every contact there are apologies inherent for feelings hurt and falling out of touch— Michael Morse, “Void and Compensation (Facebook)”
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Beautiful sentences
Maybe our own parents will eat us eventually—they may have eaten us already, and the rest of our life is just the process of their digestion. Richard Howard, “A Proposed Curriculum Change.”