Party! Burrow Press Rolls Out "15 Views..." in Hard Copy

Look!  It's the girl with blue hair! 

Luckily, we can't see the tattoo.  This is the cover of Burrow Press's new book, "15 Views of Orlando," constructed from the serial flash fiction online story project local writers whipped up to celebrate the city.

 Last summer the crew at Urban ReThink/Burrow Press, continued their near obsessive mission to stay deeply connected to the Orlando literary community and really the city-at-large by cooking up an online project, "15 Views of Orlando," an interconnected flash fiction string by 15 very good and not very alike local fiction writers.  Among the stipulations to the contributors was a thematic rule to set the individual stories in familiar or exotic or random unknown places across the town.  Of course, writers were also to connect somehow with previous writers' story lines and pull at least one of them through.  The result was not a story cycle but kind of a story braid.

The drill was that the stories appeared every few weeks on the Burrow Press site.  If you were eighth in line, you didn't really begin your contribution until after number seven was posted, because you were to build on what had come before.  You wouldn't necessarily build on number seven, the one immediately before.  No, no.  Tires ain't pretty, and writers ain't linear.  You might pull through a plot-line from number three, but use a character from number four, a location from number two, and cook a new plot strand from something you noticed shaping up in number seven.  Or whatever.  It was best to take  everything that had come before into account as you began to cook up your own contribution.  You had a week.

I was number twelve, and in my long life I've never written anything in a week!  Trying to do so, in August, just before I left for Shanghai, got me in a giant sweat-down and I was spinning out drafts like a ceiling fan.  How Ryan Rivas (Burrow Press Publisher) and Nathan Holic ("15 Views ..." editor) managed to ride herd on 15 random loose-cannon wholesale neurotic lone wolves and get this thing to actually work could probably be another book.  But let's not get ahead of myself.

Release Party

So Burrow Press made a book of it, the proceeds from which serve their central nonprofit mission of helping Orlando kids.  This coming Tuesday, Jan. 31, 6:00 PM at the local literary community's home base, Urban ReThink, 625 E. Central Blvd. in Thornton Park, EVERYBODY will gather for some conviviality, book buying, writerly and readerly getting together, did I mention book-buying, and the opportunity starting at 7:00 PM to hear John King, Jared Silvia, J Bradley, Hunter Choate, and Ashley Inguanta read from their contributions to the torrid "15 Views . . ." flash fiction braid.  Your interest, presence, and book purchase also helps support Burrow Press itself, Orlando's new pivot spot for the next local literary generation.  Most important, of course, is buying the book, perhaps two or three.  Find out all you need to know at: http://burrowpress.com/burrowing-into-the-new-year/ 

Congratulations to all the writers, Burrow Press, and Urban ReThink for a successful collaboration.  Astounding.

Silent Retreats is now available on Kindle thru Amazon

I'm pleased to announce that, thanks to my publisher the U. of Georgia Press, Silent Retreats is now available on Kindle. The book contains 11 short stories including "Arcola Girls" which appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards after it was accepted by the New England Review and "Silent Retreats," which was first accepted by Kevin McIlvoy at Puerto del Sol. My anti hero Skidmore first appeared in these stories, in serial cameos that frequently acted to take it up a notch, like adding Jack Daniels to your milk. The stories also contain nostalgia, even more than originally I just noticed, as well as an early take on one of my time-honored themes, What happened to men after what happened to women.

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