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: “Jhonathan and the Witchs” by Stephen King

Writer and editor Paul Mandelbaum gathered the childhood writings of 22 distinguished authors—including Margaret Atwood, Pat Conroy, Michael Crichton, Allan Gurganus, Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeleine L’Engle, Joyce Carol Oates, William Styron, John Updike, and Tobias Wolff—for the collection First Words, which is a real hoot for fans of any of the featured writers’ more mature works and is also an inspiration for aspiring authors everywhere. For today’s story, I read a short piece that Stephen King wrote at age 9 and lent to the anthology—spelling errors and all! Certainly a pleasure to read (including the editor’s annotations about how this early work prefigures King’s later published writings), and also interesting to learn that King’s aunt paid him a quarter a story to encourage his writing habit— an investment that clearly brought favorable returns. Algonquin Books published the collection originally, and King’s tale can be found on the publisher’s blog here. — Art Taylor

Derringer Award Win (Long Story) & Spinetingler Award Nomination

I’m honored, awed, and humbled to have won a third Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society—this year in the Long Story category for the story “When Duty Calls,” originally published in Chesapeake Crimes: This Job Is Murder and also recently nominated for an Agatha Award. Other winners this year included “The Cable Job” by Randy DeWitt (Best Flash Story), “Getting Out of the Box” by Michael Bracken (Best Short Story), and “Wood-Smoke Boys” by Doug Allyn (Best Novelette). Congratulations to all!

And on top of that news, I also learned that “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” originally published in PANK Magazine and winner in the flash fiction category of the 2012 Press 53 Open Awards Anthology, has been nominated for this year’s Spinetingler Award for Best Short Story on the Web. A thrill and an honor there as well! — Art Taylor

Upcoming Event: Short Story Panel, Saturday, March 30

I’m very pleased to have been invited to participate in a short story panel, “The Long and Short of the Short Story,” hosted by the Central Virginia Chapter of Sisters in Crime on Saturday, March 30, at 11 a.m. The panel features Leone Ciporin, Meredith Cole, and me, and takes places at the Henrico County Public Library, Glen Allen Branch, 10501 Staples Mill Road, Glen Allen, VA.

Here’s some quick info on the other two panelists:

In July 2012, Leone Ciporin’s story, “Invisible Women,” was published in The Hook, a Charlottesville weekly, after being selected by John Grisham for third place in The Hook‘s fiction contest. Her story, “A Grain of Truth,” is included in the mystery anthology, Chesapeake Crimes: This Job is Murder, published by Wildside Press in May 2012. She has also had four mini-mysteries in Woman’s World magazine. Leone is a member of both Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. She lives in Charlottesville and is active with WriterHouse there.

Meredith Cole won the St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best Traditional First Mystery competition with her book Posed for Murder. The book was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Her second book, Dead in the Water, continued the adventures of Lydia McKenzie in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and the anthology Murder New York Style. She is one of the featured authors in Making Story: Twenty-One Writers and How They Plot, which offers writing advice to aspiring authors. She is a member of both Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, and she teaches writing at the University of Virginia.

Folks interested in attending should RSVP to Heather Weidner at heatherandstan@verizon.net by Friday, March 29th for room set-up purposes. And attendees are welcome to bring their own lunch and beverage. — Art Taylor