November is strange, barren, wet and seething with ghosts. The haunting, breathing words of the exceptional
fiction writers in this mid-November issue of Connotation Press reach out and clasp our hand or punch us in the gut. Either way we are taken on a journey that whispers of emotional places we know we have been.
Monday
Apr
29
A Note From Meg Tuite - Fiction Editor: November 2012
November is strange, barren, wet and seething with ghosts. The haunting, breathing words of the exceptional
fiction writers in this mid-November issue of Connotation Press reach out and clasp our hand or punch us in the gut. Either way we are taken on a journey that whispers of emotional places we know we have been.
“Besides the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the haze.”
Emily Dickinson
“And when it came November, I sought my heart, and sighed,
"Poor thing, do you remember?"
"What heart was that?" it cried.”
Dorothy Parker
"The body is like a November birch facing the full moon
And reaching into the cold heavens.
In these trees there is no ambition, no sodden body, no leaves,
Nothing but bare trunks climbing like cold fire!”
Robert Bly
"Fog in November, trees have no heads,
Streams only sound, walls suddenly stop
Half-way up hills, the ghost of a man spreads
Dung on dead fields for next year's crop.
I cannot see my hand before my face,
My body does not seem to be my own,
The world becomes a far-off, foreign place,
People are strangers, houses silent, unknown."
Leonard Clark
Angela Woodward is the featured fiction writer this issue. She is a phenomenon! Her three short pieces, “Parallel Stories, by Peter Nadas,” “Liner Notes to Charles Ives’ Psalm 90” and “Several Ideas for Stories that Are Not Stories,” are beyond mesmerizing. A quote from one of these pieces, “I passed like a ghost through the abandoned corridors, the sole reader. On and on, the black words rustled against the white spaces cocooning them.” I couldn’t wait to interview her, then order her novel and collection.
Beth Couture melds together two separate worlds that converge and transform each other in her exceptional short story, “The March.”
Ethel Rohan transports us with her potent twist of language in three sublime pieces, “Skirt,” “Heart,” and “Dying Juices.”
Ron D’Alena has us questioning what we would do with this nightmare of a neighbor in his mesmerizing story “ The Rooster and the Robe.”
Bonnie ZoBell mixes up the lunacy of love in all its facets including vegetables, jailbait and stalkers in her three outstanding flash, “The God of Vegetables,” “Fuschia,” and “Tolls.”
An Tran delivers a heartbreaking tale of the love between an elephant and the humans who care for him in “Asylum.”
Enjoy this superlative group of storytellers and stay safe and warm. Cheers!