Another Sunday in which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, which asks others to share the best sentence(s) we’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”
Beth knew now that her mother had been wrong, that there was something far worse than not knowing—and that was knowing that her son lay, unequivocally dead, in a hospital somewhere in Thailand.
Source: “Gap Year,” by Lori Ostlund, a short story in the Autumn 2013 issue of The Southern Review.
Monday brings the weekly batch of no-fee competitions/contests, paying submission calls, and jobs for those of us who write (especially those of us who write fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction). (more…)
My friends at J Journal: New Writing on Justice have unveiled a spiffy new website. Go take a look. (I’ve been known to send gift subscriptions more than once. This could be a great holiday gift, especially–but not only–for anyone who works in the law and/or law enforcement.)
President and Mrs. Kennedy descend the stairs from Air Force One at Love Field in Dallas, TX, 22 November 1963. (Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)
I wasn’t yet born when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 50 years ago this week. In fact, on that November day in 1963, my parents, then college students, were still a few months away from being introduced. But as I grew up, I heard from both of my parents how much the Kennedy assassination had affected them and everyone else at the time.
Fast forward to the morning of September 11, 2001. Before leaving my apartment to meet with students in my office in a Harvard humanities building, I submitted the new story due later that week for my low-res MFA program (I’m always beating deadlines like that: see “Pünktlichkeit”). The story was titled “Calendar Man”; many revisions later, it received an honorable mention in a Boston-area contest and ended up published by The Pedestal magazine.
It’s a story I’ve read aloud several times, at the celebratory contest reading and in other instances. And I have to confess that a chill always runs through me when I read the part that references the Kennedy assassination’s aftermath as the history-focused protagonist, Jack Dougherty, recalls it:
The movie. In truth, they had been movie-like, those November days. The opening, captured on Zapruder’s camera, even if they hadn’t seen those frames right away. For days they’d stared at the television; everyone was in on it, in on the action of this movie. There was Walter Cronkhite, removing his glasses. And his own real-life father, sober before the screen those days and nights, out of respect. His mother, praying, weeping, praying. His older sister, talking above the other voices about sending birthday presents to Caroline and John-John, because it was important to keep things as normal as possible for the children. The film continued through the funeral; everyone else spoke of the beautiful widow, and the tiny boy’s salute, but Jack’s eyes followed the tall French President, the proud General looking for the first time a little humble, yes, humble, and sad. He wouldn’t have looked that way for FDR, (he’d probably just sent someone else across the ocean for that occasion, though he’d been his country’s leader back then, as well). So this, too, was the power of a single stranger concealed in a southwestern Book Depository. To make even Charles de Gaulle acknowledge that the world would never be the same minus the man who had accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.
A promising new-ish website I’ll be keeping an eye on: “The Writer’s Job,” which describes itself as a “guide to writing and making a living.”
For the next few weeks, Cathy Day plans to dedicate her “Teaching Tuesday” blog posts to some of her teachers and what she has learned from them. First up: Michael Martone.
This Q&A with Adam Berlin addresses the author’s new, post-9/11 novel; his work as co-founder/co-editor of J Journal: New Writing on Justice; and the gaps that can occur between books.
Writing-related resources, news, and reflections to enjoy over the weekend.