My story collection, When Are You Coming Home?, officially lands in the world today! Thanks to everyone at University of Nebraska Press and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize who made this happen (here's a post from when I first found out). Thanks, too, to current and future readers; it's a true honor. BC
Maps and legends
Oh, little blog, I've neglected you so. If you were a garden, you'd be a shriveled, gasping mess of brown stems and dry soil that loose cats have turned into a litterbox. Oops. As usual when I sit down here after an absence, I'm all over the place, squirming and twitchy, struggling to make order …
Radio interview, more Jentel pics
I recently spoke with the wonderful Anne Kimzey, Literary Arts Program Manager at the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and the radio interview has been posted. I was super fortunate to receive an ASCA fellowship for 2015, which has been such a boon. A million thanks again to ASCA and to Anne for taking …
Interview with Prairie Schooner
I spoke with the good, good folks over at Prairie Schooner about the Book Prize for my collection, When Are You Coming Home?, which will be released this fall. Among other things, I talk about a visit to the optometrist. Because, sure. Here is the interview if you're so inclined. And submit to the prize …
The thunder of the ground sea, or what’s under the boat
One of my favorite things about rereading/reteaching stories is that no matter how well I think I know a work, I always unearth new intriguing bits. This past spring when I taught Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, I zeroed in on how Shelley describes the breaking up of the frozen northern ocean where Walton and Victor become …
Continue reading "The thunder of the ground sea, or what’s under the boat"
A bit of good news
I got some happy writing news a few days back that was announced officially yesterday: I was selected as the winner in fiction for the 2014 Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award: http://www.pw.org/about-us/maureen_egen_writers_exchange_award I still hardly know what to say. When the call came in, I was sitting at my desk at school, …
Unspooling, and the story of now
Of late, I have the word unspooling unspooling in my head. It occurs to me as I type that perhaps this longtime obsessive habit of hearing words, bits of sentences, and lines from stories in my inner ear, is, um, not normal. Is this one of the dangers of reading that "they" warn about? Is …
The heart, ‘that bloody motor’
I've been wanting to sit down here in Blogsville and compose a new entry to keep my writing engine warm in what has so far been the frozen tundra of 2014, but I've been doing the proverbial spinning in my chair. Yesterday I started an entry about time and compression in fiction, which I'm wrestling …
Resolution redux
Like a kajillion others out there on the planet, I sat down today thinking about New Year's resolutions: the (in)famous list of things we optimistically hammer out about what we will or won't do in the coming new year and then give up on around, oh, the Ides of March. Pretty straightforward, these resolutions, right? …
Letter to a Young Self
Dear Little Brynnie, It’s been a letter-y semester in my classes this fall as students try forms as a means of storytelling and essay-writing. I thought I’d give it a shot, too, because the truth is, I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately. Mom just turned seventy a couple of weeks ago, which meant …
