I have two short stories in the new edition of a local, online literary journal (it's free!). This quarter's theme is "Golden Age," and my two stories are: "Water Meat" about a date in South Korea, and "The Third Loneliest Woman in All of Whatcom County," about working in a kayak factory.
I've been enjoying the other stories as well.
And Happy Thanksgiving!
I've really appreciated the feedback and encouragement on what's shaping up to be -- gasp! -- my first novel, The Give and The Take. I've been writing a lot, much more than I expected, since I got out here in February to take care of my Dad. The subject matter is, of course, pretty damn obvious. But I do feel as if the project has arrived at an important point -- a good point -- where it would be best to keep my first drafts more private, less public. For a while though it really felt good to get something out there, even if this blog doesn't get a whole lot of readers (Quality over Quantity!). It's funny living in the middle of nowhere -- on the one hand I'm surprised, daily, by something, something the Old Man says or does, or talking to a neighbor. But it is lonely out here -- there's no other word for it -- and the gates of my memory are more greased-up than usual, and have been for months. There's no telling what ghosts, friendly or otherwise, will walk out and start yapping at me at any given time.
I was keeping notebooks in South Korea but rarely taking the time to go back and give that material the editorial muscle it really needed to be shaped into something worth sharing. A few good bits of it have made their way into The Give and The Take, and will continue to do so. But while I'm going to keep that stuff "private" for now, I am going to start posting some of my short stories on this here blog. At some point I'll even polish them up and send them out for potential publication, but I know from experience that that whole dance takes work, and you can't half-ass it the way you can popping up an eight page short story online.
For what it's worth, I wrote poetry for many years but basically stopped around the half-way mark of my time in Korea, around 2013 or so. There were a number of reasons, but none more important than the fact that I haven't really read much poetry since then either, and don't miss it all that much.
So my longer work is going into the garage and I'm lowering the doors for now, but hopefully you'll be entertained by some of my recent efforts in writing stories. And, for better or worse, they aren't all about my ten years living in South Korea!
"But writers whose insufficient deference to power rendered them unemployable by The New York Times still had, until recently, hope of finding employment elsewhere. When I was growing up, every major American metro area had both a polite press—the local dailies—and a rude one: the alt-weeklies. The alt-weeklies were funded by advertisers the family-friendly media wanted nothing to do with. Craigslist put a large dent in that revenue (and the government has now effectively banned much of it), and Facebook vacuumed up the rest of it, leading to the alternative press’ rapid decline. But it was not merely the market speaking: In the end, many of these publications were also simply killed by rich idiot owners or corporations that routinely purchase publications and ruin them out of both greed and incompetence. And so we (mostly) don’t have alt-weeklies anymore.
Still, we thought as we watched this process, it was fine, because, after all, we had blogs! Blogs were a refreshing novelty in the rapidly constricting world of print because they were allowed to be rude. This made many people—primarily people whose most consistent belief is that they are owed deference because of their social or professional status—outraged. David Denby, America’s worst living film critic, actually wrote a book about how much he detested this rhetorical mode he couldn’t even accurately describe."I'll be the 1,000th person to point out the obvious as well -- Deadspin was actually profitable, but got killed by suits who had no idea that plenty of sports fans actually care about the larger world as well, and happen to vote for Democrats. But he's right that the larger problem is that calls for "civility" have really come to mean "never criticize the powerful or the privileged."
"Rudeness is not merely a tone. It is an attitude. The defining quality of rude media is skepticism about power, and a refusal to respect the niceties that power depends on to disguise itself and maintain its dominance. It’s often hard for me to imagine that anyone can grow up in this era and not end up doubting the competence and motives of nearly everyone in charge of nearly every American institution, but some of us grow up instead to be Bari Weiss."Enough said.
