Category: writing

I’ve upped my submissions a bit from last year, but still below last year. Once again, I fell short of my goal of 200 rejections, but came closer than last year with 160 vs 144. I did manage to set a couple records with my highest ever acceptance rate (4.2%, up from last year’s previous […]

Mariette gazes around the oratory. Each nun stares at the prioress in common. Each stares at her separately. Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy.

Adolescence seems to open a small hole in which the rest of our lives drain. David Gilbert, & Sons.

I want to paint in a foreign language. Beth Ann Fennelly, “Berthe Morisot: Retrospective”

He seemed a veteran of—I don’t know, adolescence, I suppose, which like all wars is particular to the combatant. David Gilbert, & Sons.

Those teen years are when the scars happen. The scars you have to tend to the rest of your life, hoping they heal or fade away. Kevin Sampsell, “I’m Jumping Off the Bridge”  

She had reasonable good looks, like many a reasonable girl at Exeter, the product themselves of reasonable mothers, always with dark hair never cut too short and surprisingly bad teeth—if not crooked, then yellow; if not yellow, then with large gums—and with naturally UV-protected skin, glasses almost mandatory but stylishly framed (their most overt fashion […]

This is another story which has been kicking around for a while before it finally was published, Back in the ‘90s, I submitted this to Story, received a hand-written rejection letter and didn’t realize that was a sign I was onto something and didn’t do anything more with the piece for years. This story has […]

The acceptance of this kind of writing is dangerous not because anybody will confuse it with life, will think, “This is what life is like,” but because readers may read it and think, “This is what literature is like.” James Wood, “Tom Wolfe’s Shallowness, and the Trouble with Information.”