Not-So-New Fiction: “Visions and Revisions” at Redux

Nearly 10 years ago, I was fortunate to be a finalist for North American Review‘s first Kurt Vonnegut Prize for my story “Visions and Revisions”—a little tale I’d tinkered with on and off over a period of about five years, as I recall. The story follows a woman who may be witnessing her new boyfriend abusing her daughter—or maybe not, as it turns out, and there’s the trouble she’s encountering: what to believe or not, and what to do about it. Here’s the opening couple of paragraphs:

Tending the spaghetti, Sandra studied the cabinets on the wall beside her. Their whiteness, she knew, was proof that she had painted them, wasn’t it? After all, they had been brown once, surely. She remembered picking them out with her ex-husband before the house was built, choosing them from the builder’s ragged catalog, and later she had painted them white when the marriage was over, just to make them hers alone. One hand on the stirring spoon, she raised the other to smooth her fingers across the face of the nearest cabinet’s door. It was slightly wet with steam from the boiling pot, and there was a small smudge near the handle. She’d need to clean that up. These too—the cabinets, the steam, the smudge—were real.

Her eyes swept across the kitchen: the sink, porcelain not stainless (her choice); the sponge perched on the corner, sticky with soap and destined for the trashcan; the microwave, the toaster, the can opener; the pass-through window separating kitchen and living room, its ledge decorated with a small gathering of imitation Herend rabbits, and beyond that her boyfriend Curt slapping her nine-year-old daughter Wendy; a spice rack; a series of containers for sugar, flour, coffee and tea, ceramic containers whose surfaces were shaped like basketweave; the jolt of the cabinets as his hand struck her cheek; a stray red oven mitt, just out of reach.

Sandra gripped her thumb and forefinger around the counter’s edge, pressed it hard. Then she turned her attention back to stirring her spaghetti—turned her attention, in fact, more completely to its swirl and tumble in the big black pot….

“Visions and Revisions” appeared in NAR‘s Summer 2004 issue, and this week it’s been given a fresh life, thanks to Leslie Pietrzyk, the editor at Redux, an “invitation-only literary journal of writers’ favorite, previously published stories and poems, not found elsewhere on the web.” You can find Redux‘s “reprint” of  “Visions and Revisions” here.  Hope you enjoy! — Art Taylor

Interview at Literary Mama

Thanks so much to the good folks at Literary Mama (and to Colleen Kearney Rich, specifically) for including me as a “Literary Papa” this month with a Father’s Day-themed interview—looking not just at my recent and upcoming stories but also at how fatherhood has affected my work. Check out the full interview here!

Story A Day: Wrapping Up May

A couple of reading/writing/reviewing deadlines sidelined my ability to keep up with the blog posts here on my Story A Day project, but I did indeed manage to keep up with the reading through the end of the month (albeit several of the stories were awfully awfully short, I’ll admit). Over the last week, I read Neil Gaiman’s “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” (available for free on Kindle) and Holly Day’s “The Barrel,” from the new issue of Bourbon Penn—two stories about disturbing encounters with the unknown; Joseph Michaels’ “Shadow” from this week’s SmokeLong (a story I didn’t entirely feel like I understood); and a quintet of stories from the collection Micro Fiction, edited by Jerome Stern: “At the Point” by Beauvais McCaddon; “Your Fears are Justified” by Rich DeMarinis; “20/20″ by Linda Brewer; “Guadalupe in the Promised Land” by Sam Shepard; and “But What Was Her Name?” by Dawn Raffel—a mixed bag of stories, with the DeMarinis and Brewer entries striking me as the strongest. Despite best intentions, I didn’t get a chance this month to check out stories from two new collections sitting on my desk: Astray by Emma Donoghue and Bobcat by Rebecca Lee. But whether Short Story month is over or not, I’ll surely be delving into those collections soon. — Art Taylor

Story A Day: “Dead on Her Feet” by Cornell Woolrich

Another story from the Cornell Woolrich collection I started yesterday—this one more of a straight whodunit, but with some grisly imagery and dark flourishes. A cop sent to break up a shady dance contest finds that one of the last contestants is literally… well, see the title above. An investigation follows, but even though the killer is outed, it’s another character who suffers the most from the process. — Art Taylor

Story A Day: “The Night Reveals” by Cornell Woolrich

Just got in the mail the Centipede Press collection Speak to Me of Death: The Collected Short Fiction of Cornell Woolrich, Volume I. We started in the middle of the collection with the story “The Night Reveals” about an insurance investigator who begins to suspect his wife may be a pyromaniac and secret arsonist. While other short story writers might have let that revelation be the end of the story (no spoilers here; any attentive reader will see it coming within the first few pages), Woolrich pushes a little deeper, turns the screw a little tighter, and gives no release, not even in the final actions of the story. Unflinching. — Art Taylor

Story A Day: “Hiding” by Frances Badgett

Flash fiction obviously works on the less is more principle—relying on being suggestive rather than exhaustive in its descriptions of characters, plots, etc. “Hiding” by Frances Badgett—the tale of a young girl struggling to keep a box secreted away from her father’s girlfriend—doesn’t entirely explain the relationships and the motives at its core, but what’s there is more than enough to keep the reader both intrigued and emotionally invested in the narrator’s troubled situation. — Art Taylor

Story A Day: “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client”

In addition to reading the complete stories of Stanley Ellin, Tara and I have also been working out way—aloud—through the complete Sherlock Holmes, novels and stories both. We currently have only one book left, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, the final collection of stories, which we finally delved into last night. The first tale, “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,” has some great lines, a fiendishly despicable villain, and a vivid bit of revenge at the end, but overall, we both found ourselves a little disappointed. While this story has several aspects of the first Sherlock Holmes short story, “A Scandal in Bohemia”—including a scandalous relationship at its core, an incriminating bit of material that needs to be retrieved, and the interests of a royal personage, plus Watson stepping in to provide diversions while Holmes carries out his work—the end result is hardly as complex or rewarding as that first and perhaps most outstanding of the tales. — Art Taylor