Category: writing

  • Beautiful sentences

    Why do the spaces look smaller than the words that used to fill them? Abby Frucht, Polly’s Ghost.

  • Beautiful sentences

    In the woods, bewildered, in a peck of troubles, at a loss. To ascend a pulpit, to cant, to remove one’s vestments with one’s teeth, to chase foxes at clicked in a hedge, to stand stooped in a pillory, cunny-thumbed, one who has eaten shame and drank a dram after it. Lawrence Sutin, When to go…

  • Beautiful sentences

    Did lifeguards look like lifeguards only after they‘d saved somebody? And what if they failed? What did they look like then? Abby Frucht, Polly’s Ghost.

  • Beautiful sentences

    I want to do everything I haven’t yet dared to do, and to escape everything I’ve already done. I want to die in a cataclysm of my own making, not in a world war fashioned by great nations. And I want to leave a written record of my passage across this earth, so that others…

  • Point of view in “The Casual Carpool” by Katherine Bell

    In her contributor’s note in Best American Short Stories, Katherine Bell writes: I loved the way Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield handled point of view and I wanted to see if I could manage shifting among several characters’ consciousnesses from paragraph to paragraph, or even sentence to sentence, without ever zooming out. (360) Bell manages…

  • Beautiful sentences

    I wanted to believe him and he wanted to be believed, and I guess that’s the beginning of hope anyway, a tiny seed you hold real careful in the palm of your hand. Robert Vivian, The Mover of Bones.

  • Beautiful sentences

    Hector liked the saints best in the early paragraphs of their lives when they were still being tempted. Lawrence Sutin, When to go into the Water.

  • Residency day 3

    The day began with Jeff Parker’s seminar on “repetition” which he turned into a seminar on “not-knowing/repetition” building a great deal off of the essay “Not Knowing” by Donald Barthelme, an author I’ve found I greatly enjoy. A handful of good things and Parker ran his seminar a bit more like a seminar, although having…

  • Beautiful sentences

    So what people think makes you special is just the disappointment of their own lives. Robert Vivian, The Mover of Bones.