I have a story published in the new issue of Generate Magazine, out now. When my copy comes, I’ll post a picture. The piece is called “Fisher Kings”. It’s very short, and I’m very pleased that it’s included in this issue of Generate.
Tag: writing
A Short, Good Read about First Person Narration
Kyle Minor posted “I Like It When Thom Jones’s First Person Narrators Break Into Essay in the Middle of a Short Story” yesterday at HTML Giant. He makes a great point about where we can really go with first person narration if we choose to (and, you know, if we do it well).
Spanbauer, Palahniuk, Hempel, and My Dog
Tom Spanbauer calls cliched words and imagery received text. I know this because of a great essay Chuck Palahniuk wrote about Amy Hempel and minimalism. I try to by hyperaware of received text in my work and when I’m reading manuscripts in workshop.
Case in point: On a recent walk, when my dog moved to use a fire hydrant in typical cartoon fashion, I actually said to myself, “Come on, boy, you’re better than that.”
(Yeah, I’m in an MFA program).
Woody Paige’s Little Chalkboard
Today, Woody Paige’s little chalkboard says “You Can Trust Fiction but Never Facts!”
I think there’s something to that.
(March, 2010)
Some Open Letters Answered
A follow-up from a few days later in 2010.
Looks like my “Open Letters to the Radio” were read by some people. Now that Civil Twilight is following me on Twitter, I feel like I should expand on my comment from last week. I was mostly making a joke about those vampire books and movies. I actually didn’t know civil twilight was meteorological (?) term, and I’m assuming there’s an intended double-meaning about the piss-poor state of civilization. It’s a cool concept. Just not a great name. Thanks for the follow!
Other letters answered this week: a couple rejections from non-paying fiction venues for some experimental things. I have a good feeling about some other pieces currently making their way out there in the world.
What I Do Instead of Sleep
This is from 2010. It’s kind of funny. But if you want to do almost anything well, you need healthy sleep. Knowing that is the difference between my late and early 30s.
if it’s quarter to 4, I must be writing an essay about Bob Dylan in one window and an essay about postmodern ontologies in another. check.
The Once and Future Blog
When I went on a blogging hiatus back in December, I called this “The Once And Future Blog” and I took a lot of the old content offline.
I guess it’s the future. The other day someone was talking about swine flu and I only vaguely remembered my own paranoia (or caution) about it last year. As in a few months ago. How quickly I forget about these things. It’s ridiculous.
The old stuff is staying offline, maybe forever. I’m not sure. I do know that I continue to focus on fiction and that I’ll also be having some essays published around the web soon. But I still like this idea of a “Once And Future” blog, probably because I like thinking about the past and the future, and because, inevitably, we all end up coming back to these old ghosts.
On another level, Once and Future has a lot to do with writing. “This thing I wrote based on this thing that happened somewhere is going to be published at some point in the future at this or that place” or “this thing I thought about religion or love or God or economics or myself turns out a little different because all of the sudden this other thing.”
Theologians talk about “ancient-future” modes of worship, biocentrists speculate about the courses of the indestructible energy powering consciousness, astrophysicists talk about expanding and retracting universes, my son and I are fascinated — fascinated — by dinosaurs, and I imagine a world where his kids or grandkids live on the moon or a terraformed Mars. I like to think that the past and the future both belong to our story.
And so I consume tech blogs and social media and news and write stories about the Pennsylvania rust belt and hope we figure out ways to keep all of this going. But, you know, better.
Chris Cocca 