Book Bites: The Heart in Winter

The Heart in Winter: A Novel by Kevin Barry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To look at the logline, The Heart in Winter doesn't look like much: an opium-addled poet and a runaway elope in the Old West. Barry's writing is what makes this novel a delight. Tom Rourke and Polly Gillespie take turns narrating their escapades in voices so singular, so sharp, and so funny, that turning to the next section is always a delight. Even when being hunted by ex-husbands and overzealous bounty hunters, the text is often laugh-out-loud funny. That the book also manages to be in turns heartfelt and life affirming makes it a must read.

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Book Bites: The Mighty Red

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Erdrich's skill as a writer is undeniable; there are passages within The Mighty Red that are so beautiful and absolutely true that it takes a reader's breath away. The text describes Hugo's longing for Kismet, engaged to another, as such: "to love with canine devotion was to live in a state of miserable exhilaration, to exist on the knife-thin edge of joy." There is some plotting; a missing husband, a stolen church fund, an ill-fated teenage marriage. Themes of our relationships to our land, exemplified by factory sugar beet farming vs personal gardening, come back again and again. The problem with this literary approach is that the text at times feels too unhurried and tends to lose its momentum. Fans of Erdrich and readers of lit-fic will certainly enjoy, but slow pacing and scant capital-p "Plotting" may turn off others.

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Book Bites: All That She Carried

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

All That She Carried examines how those barred from creating their own histories preserved their stories for future generations. Through the totem of Ashley's Sack, embroidered with the family history of unfree peoples, Miles shows us how those forced into slavery and stripped of their names and families fought injustice. The text has a habit of falling into academic prose, as if proving its worth by adopting a stilted, fact-dense cadence. There are also, due to the limited nature of historical records available, side-tracks into somewhat-tangential subjects unable to grasp a reader's interest like the story of Rose and Ashley (such as a brief history of pecan farming in the US). In the end, All That She Carried proves an important, interesting lens focused on the small print of American history we ignore at our own peril.

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First Lines: Unravelling

Very pleased to say my flash fiction, "Unravelling," has been published in the latest issue of PULP Lit Magazine. It's only 600 words, so take a second to read it over a sip of coffee:

As I like to do when I'm lucky enough to get one of these crazy works in print, here's a compare and contrast of what the first line of the story looked like in the initial draft versus the published version (I believe I have a written draft somewhere that predates the one below, but it's probably close enough that I'm not going to bother digging through mountains of old notebooks).