Story in The Tahoma Literary Review
News!
The wonderful Tahoma Literary Review has published one of my short stories, “Rewind: I dreamt of flowers and flight.”
I am thrilled and so grateful to the very kind editors. (And I know what a huge amount of work it is to run a literary magazine. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support them by buying individual print issues, subscribing, or making a donation.)
You can hear audio versions of some of the stories, poems, and creative nonfiction pieces from this latest issue at Soundcloud.
Content warning: My piece is pretty heavy, and deals with pregnancy loss.
2022 3-Day Novel Contest update
My submission came in third place!
Thank you to the lovely judges, and congratulations to the winners.
Going back to my Instagram feed from the end of that Labour Day weekend reminded me of just how tired I was, and how I had no idea whether the manuscript was any good or not.
It just goes to show, you never can tell.
Memory and place, redux
It’s early in the Academic New Year, the season of optimism. (And regretful goodbyes, but let’s not talk about that.)
And also memories of past back-to-school seasons.
A couple of weeks ago, just before the Labour Day weekend, I had to pick something up from the student radio station where I used to volunteer, so while I was out there I took some time to walk around the university campus where I used to take classes.
I still go out there a few times a year, usually very focussed on some task, getting something done or meeting someone. But this time I wasn’t in a hurry, so I walked over to the area where all my old humanities classes used to be, past a student lounge with floor-to-ceiling glass (where I had set a scene of Lonesome Stars, last year’s 3-Day Novel), and up the stairs of the building where the Creative Writing department used to be — a place where I spent a lot of time.
And the department is still there, still on the fourth floor, a climb I remember bitterly resenting, and complained about every time I had to go up them — although this time it didn’t feel like a big deal at all. (Apparently at some point I have learned not to hate moderate exercise?)
In that stairway, I thought about how the buildings in that complex were not terribly old at the time I was a student, but yet it always felt to me like they were some distant era. Which of course they are now, being the product of a remote age when people were dreaming of moon landings and driving cars with fins — and not surprisingly after all this time they truly are looking a little shabby. (While meanwhile the parts of the campus serving the law school, medicine, sciences, and business, are new or newly renovated, and look glossy and well-fed.)
When I got there, the fourth floor turned out to be recently painted and quite empty. The students hadn’t arrived yet, and maybe all the faculty and staff were at a retreat, because it was just closed doors on each side of the long hallway, with no hint of the room where we used to have our editorial meetings, the classrooms where we used to sit around big tables to workshop, and the lounge where I used to loaf on a couch between classes.
Even the bathroom, and the hallway connecting the different wings of the building, didn’t really bring anything back — although they looked almost exactly as I remembered them.
I thought I would feel more sentimental. I went there to check in on my memory of the place, with the vague idea that I could chat with someone in the office about alumni events or newsletters or some such thing, and I was expecting something bittersweet, something a little painful, maybe the sensation of picking at a scab, but instead I had very little reaction at all.
Maybe it would have been different if I could have gone into one of the classrooms. Or maybe the place has changed too much, and too much time has passed.
So that’s another thing you never can tell.
