The kind and fabulous people over at SmokeLong Quarterly are publishing a series of essays and asked me to contribute. In “Why Flash Fiction?” writers and editors explore what draws them to the form.

Preview of “Flash Addiction”

Once I wrote my first flash I was hooked. So much so that I often need to remind myself I have a novel to finish. It all began when I brought home The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis from the American Library in Paris.

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A wonderful new issue of Superstition Review was released today and one of my stories is in it!

If you like the style of this story, be sure to check out my upcoming novel, for they spring from the same source.

Preview of “Fistfuls”

“Imagine a woman in a shuttered room, serving afternoon tea. She’s playing the host to five pale women who have barged into her life, she thinks, to size it up. The air hangs heavy, thick with the unsaid, and the eyes of her visitors rove—how shabby the shack, how poor the cups.”

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My personal essay “The Writer and Her Time” was published on Fiction Southeast yesterday. It’s about why and how I began writing in English: a light-hearted summary  of my writer’s life.

Preview of “The Writer and Her Time”

The Writer begins when she is young. She doesn’t want to waste time. Reading is wonderful but writing feels better. After she finishes her first book, she shows it to her mother. Very nice, the mother says while underlining all the misspellings. The Writer is disappointed with herself. Even her main rabbit’s name, Hopper, misses one of its Ps.

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Issue Fifty-One of SmokeLong Quarterly is out today and my story “Copycat” is featured within this great collection.

Preview of “Copycat”

That summer after Jan-Willem left me, I was after Jasper, a twenty-one-year-old surf instructor in Scheveningen who was always in the company of a tittering girl who claimed to be his girlfriend but wasn’t. Not spiritually at least, or so I told myself. She was just somebody with tight skin who happened to be dulling his solitude until a yet unnamed future would claim him.

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Proud to have a story out in Matchbook this week. It happens to be one of my favorites. 

“On Monday, under the weight of routine, she’s nothing but sloppy and dull-eyed, like the unhappy housewives you see pushing shopping carts in gray suburbs, even though she’s a postal clerk and unmarried and lives downtown.”

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The other day, I ran into my tea seller on the street. I recognized his face immediately yet it took me a moment to place the man. How exactly did I know him? I had never before encountered the tea seller outside his teashop.

The man recognized me as well and greeted me in a shy, offhanded manner. A nod, a mumbled “Bonjour.” He was accompanied by, what I assumed, were his wife and their two children, a girl and a boy. The boy’s left arm was tucked in a caste on which his friends or classmates had written names and messages.

Seeing the tea seller with his family was slightly disturbing to me. Clearly, a tea seller has a life outside his teashop, but so far I had failed to imagine it. Do people simplify their lives, I wondered, by denying others the depth and duality they perceive in themselves? On my way home, I made a mental note to look at others from now on in a less self-centered way and see them as full-fletched people rather than flat characters who play a facilitating role in my life.

The next time I went into the teashop to buy an assortment of Japanese greens, I asked the tea seller about his son and his broken arm. The tea seller did not smile. In fact, he answered my question curtly and did not offer me a free tea sample as was his custom. His non-verbal message to me was clear: my life outside the teashop is none of your business. For his customers, the tea seller preferred to be nothing more than the tea seller.

Today, in Atticus Review‘s Filtered Light issue, a short essay of mine was published.

From “Fraying“: Give me another life and I’ll say all the right things at the right moments.

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