“When Marcel Proust dipped his petites madeleines into his tea, the taste and aroma set off a flood of memories and emotions from which modern literature has still not recovered.” ~Twyla Tharp, from “The Creative Habit” This flash, by Myfawny Collins, first appeared in Monkeybicycle and was later anthologized in Dzanc Books’ Best of the
“I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First
[EDIT: All the books have been sent out now, but I’ll do another giveaway in a couple of months. ~Kathy] I need to clear space and this represents the teeniest fraction of chapbooks I own, but…baby steps! I’ll do another giveaway in a few months. So, just respond here and I’ll send you a beautiful
The snow started late Friday afternoon and everyone struggled driving home. Cars moved funereally up the cul-de-sac, turning into driveways, into garage doors opening like mouths. It snowed through the night while the people slept and they woke to ten inches and it was still coming down, drifting and swirling now, up against the north
I’ve been bad about writing reviews in 2013. I’ve read so many good books and most were by writers I’m lucky enough to know, either well or fleetingly on social media. Anyway, I do HIGHLY recommend these books and the work of all of these writers and their disparate and necessary voices (I’ve also read
I find him sleeping in front of a fan, his shirt unbuttoned, a highball glass of Alka-Seltzer in his hand. The fan’s blowing the little hairs on his chest over the scar that runs like a ladder from the button of his Bermuda shorts to his breastbone. The TV’s on, playing Silverado, a movie he
A tall, skinny boy enters the pediatrician’s office wearing a Poison t-shirt, jeans, and a fisherman’s cap, pulled low over his eyes. He drops into a seat and the back of it bangs against the wall, startling a little girl. She says, “You should probably sit over there,” pointing to the portion of the waiting
They are watching a movie about a man who cheats on his wife, whom he loves, and is so disconsolate that his wife eventually loses all patience and leaves him. They are at the point in the film where the man considers his many blunders as he walks along a rocky shoreline carrying what looks
From the short story “Likely Lake” by Mary Robison: Her hand fell and she gazed off and spoke as if reading, as if her words were printed over in the sky there to the right. “I have a crush on you,” she said. “Such a crush on you, Buddy. The worst, most ungodly crush.” “No,
I read something this morning that was so much YES for me it drove me to actually update this dusty old blog. Dawn Raffel talks about fear and writing, what keeps us from the page, in this short piece, “Writing Well Will Cost You,” at the Jaded Ibis Productions site: “Writing well is a destabilizing