"My Story of Us Looking for My Comic Strip, by Franklin James Nemeth" appears in the online material for the current issue of Stone Canoe, produced by Syracuse University. The story appears here. This is not a "genre" story, but (arguably) literary fiction.
My daughter's poem, "Baptist," appears in the same issue. That's here.
There's a link to the print issue, but, at present, the link still takes you to the previous issue.
3 comments:
Thanks for the links. I enjoyed your daughter's poem, especially all the locust imagery, which was very well done and triggered all sorts of memories about grasshoppers, which I take to mean it was successful.
Your story was well done, although I confess I found it slower to engage me compared to your other stories, which I just chalk up to personal taste. I found the final quarter the most compelling.
Congratulations to both of you!
The story does read quite differently from the rest of my work; the voice moves in such a fragmented way, but that's the nature of his logic and speaking style. I think the latter part reads more fluidly because so much of the earliest material needs to establish the logic of that voice--its logic being key to the plot--but I wonder whether I could have tightened it even more. I reread it yesterday for the first time in probably a year and, having utterly forgotten most of its steps, I got a kick out of it.
Glad to hear you liked Elizabeth's poem. We were both, she said, working outside our usual voices.
Yes, for me the logic of the voice seemed to be established, and established well, quite early on, and so there followed a long early section that felt static. It's also entirely possible you were doing all sorts of subtle things in that section that I was too dense to notice.
Of course, this relates to a general issue once one has constructed a fictional world: some readers like to linger in it, while others are impatient to get moving. I've had that happen in my sf settings: some readers want to see more, others to see less, often of the same section. And the same is true of voice and character.
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