Glimmer Train Stories, #83 - Softcover

Joseph Johns; Askold Melnyczuk; Joanna Arnow; Melissa Yancy; Ann Hood; Brian Gresko (interviewer); Graham Arnold; Natalie Teal McAllister; Anna North; Linda Legters; Abby Geni; Dana Kroos; Claire Vaye Watkins; Matt Lapata

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1595530320 ISBN 13: 9781595530325

Publisher: Glimmer Train Press, Inc., 2012

Synopsis

Literary short stories by established and emerging writers

Excerpts:

Matt Lapata
Ohio Home
"Your aunt's drunk. Your grandma's catching up. There's mail for you. And Tony's here. He's nice. It's good to see you. Welcome home." And that's how she talks, Mom, in semisweet machine gun rat-a-tat rounds.

Claire Vaye Watkins
The Archivist
Carly lost one of her fallopian tubes to an ectopic pregnancy when she was my age. Between that and her husband Alex's reversed vasectomy, my niece is a regular miracle. I love her more than a person ought to love one thing.

Joanna Arnow
Waiting for Food Stamps
But is it really the things that people say and do that make them who they are? I ask this, but the question seems childish as I say it.

Askold Melnycyk
Michael Jackson in Gaza
The animals are speaking to us. The Times ran a story about whales in Baja, California, coming up boat-side to be petted. On Nova, a young Chinese-American scientist who translated the language of spiders played a tape of an arachnid love song.

Dana Kroos
Sleepwalkers
It was as though her leaving had let everyone go, or as though in the single day that she had been gone they had already accepted her loss and moved on.

Ann Hood
interview by Brian Gresko
Whatever it is you're writing about, if you stop short your work shows that. Good writing keeps going, it pushes past the safety zone. And that's why it matters, that's why it resonates.

Linda Legters
When We're Lying
I'd clung to the belief that Donald and Elaine were at the top of the ladder this was important to me since Mark and I dangled off some rung in the middle; maybe their position kept us from slipping down further.

Melissa Yancy
Teeth Apart
Or perhaps they'd just surmised that he wasn't the sort of man who'd complain. And they were right. It was like a mining town. As long as you stayed and kept working, everything was fine, but you could never have the means to leave.

Joseph Johns
Strange Birds
I resented how she'd quietly disassembled the geography of our life without my consent, my wife, that is: our street, the gardenia bushes, the slow-growing beech I'd planted. Even my pigeons, the kit of white homers I'd hatched over the years. The new owners wanted nothing of them.

Abby Geni
Dharma at the Gate
At first Lucy had been proud to have a real boyfriend, holding hands in the movie theatre, falling down the rabbit hole of delirious make-out sessions, her friends cornering her in the hallways to demand all the details.

Natalie McAllister
Is There Someone in Here With Me?
The grandmother of the family had escaped from East Germany in 1945 and she told three different accounts of this escape, depending on the occasion.

Graham Arnold
A Difference of Nothing
"You don't love me. You never really loved me." Regret is not always an afterthought. Sometimes it occurs instantaneously with the action. She'd played this hand before. I called her bluff. "Nobody's forcing you to stay," I said. ?"You're eighteen. Do what you want."

Anna North
Everybody's Favorite Baby
When her grandfather died, her grandmother had cried for a full day and then gone on as before, sprightly and self-possessed. So Mandy had iminaged that, for older people, loss was manageable, like a cold.

About this title

About the Author:

Joseph Johns is a writer, traveler and fine art photographer living in the South. He also has been raising homing pigeons for a number of years. Django, his favorite bird, often flies in the upstairs window to sit on the edge of the desk and proofread his work.

Askold Melnyczuk was born in New Jersey. He's published three novels and a novella about the poet Rimbaud. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston and in the Bennington Graduate Writing Seminars.

Joanna Arnow is a filmmaker and editor based in Brooklyn, her hometown. She recently finished a short documentary on acclaimed avant-garde dancers Eiko & Koma. This is her first published short story.

Melissa Yancy is a fiction writer whose work has appeared in One Story, Meridian, The Journal, Barrelhouse, American Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, The MacGuffin, At Length, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Master of Professional Writing at the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles, where she has worked in the nonprofit sector for the last ten years.

Ann Hood published the novel Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine in 1987, followed by fiction, essays, a memoir, and a book on writing. In her best-selling novel The Knitting Circle, the novel's protagonist, mourning the death of her only child, learns how to heal as she learns how to knit. A nonfiction book followed, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief. Her latest novel is The Red Thread.

Graham Arnold teaches English as a Second Language in Toronto, Canada. His work has appeared in the Malahat Review, Echolocation, Event Magazine, and Ninth Letter. He is currently working on a collection of short stories about Japan and a novel set during the 1923 Tokyo earthquake.

Natalie Teal McAllister completed her MFA in creative writing in 2010 at the University of Kansas. A fiction writer at heart, McAllister seeks to connect her love for story to her journalistic endeavors as an editorial assistant and freelance writer in Kansas City. This is her first publication.

Anna North graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2009. Her fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and her nonfiction appears daily on Jezebel, where she is a staff writer. Her first novel, America Pacifica, was published in 2011.

Linda Legters's short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, Other Voices, and High Plains Literary Review. She teaches writing at the University of Connecticut and Norwalk Community College.

Abby Geni's pieces have appeared in Chautauqua, the Indiana Review, Confrontation, New Stories from the Midwest, Fourth River, and Glimmer Train. She lives in Chicago nowadays, where she is hard at work on a novel.

Dana Kroos's short stories and poems have appeared in the Florida Review, Penumbra, the Superstition Review, Minnesota Monthly and others. Currently Dana teaches creative writing and ceramics at Alma d'Arte High School in Las Cruces, New Mexico and English courses at New Mexico State University.

Claire Vaye Watkins's stories and essays have appeared in Granta, the Paris Review, One Story, Ploughshares, and Best of the West. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire is an assistant professor of creative writing at Bucknell University. Her collection of short stories, Battleborn, will be released in 2012.

Matt Lapata is working on degrees in philosophy and creative writing at the University of Chicago. Originally from Bellevue, Ohio, he now lives in Chicago. His work has been published in PANK Magazine. "Ohio Home" is his first print publication.

About this edition

• Publisher: Glimmer Train Press, Inc.
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1595530320
• ISBN 13: 9781595530325
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 236
• Editor: Susan Burmeister-Brown, Linda B. Swanson-Davies
• Illustrator: Jane Zwinger