May 24th, 2013

Read the new issue of fwriction : reviewMegan Paonessa’s “Paper Bag Dragon”—on your mobile device or tablet!

Happy Short Story Month!

May 22nd, 2013

“For all we knew there was some lunatic planting bombs in packages and placing them on random porches all across town. Before class started, my teacher said the girl had died at the hospital in the middle of the night, and that we should all pause for a moment of silence. We closed our eyes and wondered who would be next.”

—from Chris Tusa’s short story, “The Girl with the Missing Face”

(photo credit)
May 21st, 2013

“After school, my friends and I rode our bikes past the girl’s house. The yard was roped off with yellow crime tape, and the front of the house was missing. The room closest to the street, where the girl had been watching TV, had been nearly gutted, and part of the roof had been blown off. The crape myrtle in the garden near the front door was leafless, except for stringy pieces of insulation that looked like pink flowers blooming along the tangled branches. A dented gutter, shingles, and pieces of sheetrock freckled the lawn. That afternoon, letters cluttered mailboxes all over town, and when the brown UPS truck growled through our neighborhood, everyone held their breath.”

—from Chris Tusa’s short story, “The Girl with the Missing Face”

May 20th, 2013

The Girl with the Missing Face, by Chris Tusa

fwrictionreview:

The bomb had done its job. They said someone had hidden it in a package, and when the paramedics arrived, the girl’s ear was hanging off the side of her cheek. We heard they found her lips tangled in a mess of green shag carpet and had to put them in a bag of ice to keep them alive. While my teacher talked about The American Revolution, I imagined the Ziploc bag filled with ice cubes, fogged up, as if the lips were still breathing.

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Short Story Month rolls on at fwriction : review.

Reblogged from FWRICTION : REVIEW
May 17th, 2013

Read the new issue of fwriction : reviewChris Tusa’s “The Girl with the Missing Face”—on your mobile device or tablet!

Happy Short Story Month!

May 15th, 2013
“She made it through the door, into the sodium lights, into the spitting glare. She froze. Her feet felt peeled, burnt. She found herself on her haunches. She’d dropped the print. The wind scooped it up and whirled it away into the night. Her hair fell into her eyes. A voice. More voices above and beyond her. Someone put a hand on her shoulder. Someone was down at her level, trying to look her in the eyes. Someone said her name. Maybe he’d said her name out loud, the first time he’d said it in years, spoken her name softly and kindly, as if it were still her name. She felt the wind blast her shoulders. She couldn’t be sure that the wind hadn’t spoken. She couldn’t be sure what had happened to the wind.”
—from Ashley Stokes’ “Temple and Space”

“She made it through the door, into the sodium lights, into the spitting glare. She froze. Her feet felt peeled, burnt. She found herself on her haunches. She’d dropped the print. The wind scooped it up and whirled it away into the night. Her hair fell into her eyes. A voice. More voices above and beyond her. Someone put a hand on her shoulder. Someone was down at her level, trying to look her in the eyes. Someone said her name. Maybe he’d said her name out loud, the first time he’d said it in years, spoken her name softly and kindly, as if it were still her name. She felt the wind blast her shoulders. She couldn’t be sure that the wind hadn’t spoken. She couldn’t be sure what had happened to the wind.”

—from Ashley Stokes’ “Temple and Space”

May 14th, 2013
For a split-second she hoped that he would miss her completely and head on back to his car and the house and whichever sixteen-year old girl glittered her moments for him now.
Ashley Stokes, “Temple and Space
May 9th, 2013

What Only You Could Write: An Interview with Ashley Stokes

Interviewed by Lander Hawes

Ashley Stokes writes stories which cover a fictional ground that I once regarded as impassable, and his writing incorporates wildly divergent ends that I once considered irreconcilable. His work is both highly literary and extremely funny; it is as socially and politically attuned as it is tenderly private and intimate; it is, by turns, both subjective and objective in its treatment of obsession, sentimentality and nostalgia. 

One of the reasons I’ve continued to read, and champion, Ashley’s work is that I think he writes colorfully about the colorlessness of regional English suburbia. He explores the tendency of this milieu to be defined in negatives and contrasts, and fictionalizes very adeptly the consequences of this for the inhabitants.

His short story, “Temple and Space,” is currently featured at fwriction : review for Short Story Month.


You write proficiently in both the long and the short form. Do you find it easy to work in both forms?

Any story idea can work itself up to the long or boil itself down to the short form, but a writer has a natural instinct for what he or she wants for a story. With short story ideas I usually have a precise feeling for length, or I’ve been asked for stories of a certain word count by a magazine or website and thus I know it has to be 2,000 or 3,000 words. About switching forms, Flannery O’Connor once said that it can be like escaping from the woods only to be ravaged by the wolves, meaning that each form poses a separate series of problems. 

I used to write short stories between longer projects, as calling cards, and it’s only since finishing my novel Touching the Starfish that I’ve had a sustained period of writing shorts. Now I feel slightly apprehensive about writing a novel. However, I feel that I’ve learnt so much from these recent stories that I will at some point take on a longer project. I should add that some of my short stories are relatively long, novelettes of 12,000 to 15,000 words, stories that could have been expanded into novels with a different approach. A lot of my stories sit between the forms, but I do still like the swiftness of a short story. Chekhov’s analogy to a “shot of vodka” is a fine one. 

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May 7th, 2013
“She followed signs that led to a ladies washroom. Rufus would no doubt describe the creature that stared back at her from the washroom mirror as a dangerous fantasist. With the hood still pulled up and her black parka sodden she looked half seal, half chimney sweep’s brush. She could imagine Rufus, back out there on the motorway, whispering into his phone that she’d finally become another Christmas cracker.”
—from “Temple and Space” by Ashley Stokes

“She followed signs that led to a ladies washroom. Rufus would no doubt describe the creature that stared back at her from the washroom mirror as a dangerous fantasist. With the hood still pulled up and her black parka sodden she looked half seal, half chimney sweep’s brush. She could imagine Rufus, back out there on the motorway, whispering into his phone that she’d finally become another Christmas cracker.”

—from “Temple and Space” by Ashley Stokes

May 3rd, 2013

Read the latest issue of fwriction : reviewAshley Stokes’ short story, “Temple and Space”—on your mobile device or tablet!

Happy Short Story Month!

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