Tim Blackett

I hadn't noticed how secluded I had become before my split with Chelsee in 2017. We split the kids half-time, so in the months following, when I went from living with her for the previous eleven years, raising kids for the previous nine, to all of a sudden having (comparatively) huge sloughs of time when it was just me, I felt kind of lost. I had friends. She and I shared friends. I didn't think I was a huge loner, but in that first year when I just needed to go hang out with someone, anyone, I found it really hard to find people to do that with. I seemed to have very few friends who I could just call up and meet up with. I felt alone in a way I had never really felt before. So I started doing things on my own.  I went to Starbucks on my own, which I had always done when I had a spare minute. I went to movies on my own, though I rarely made it through a whole film. I went to eat on my own, reading novels and sipping on a Guiness at Bonzinni's, or eating my weig...

Week 2 Stories: 8)   "Funny Little Snake" by Tesa Hadley - O. Henry Anthology (2019) 9)   "No Spanish" by Moira McCavana - O. Henry Anthology (2019) 10) "Girl of Few Seasons" by Rachel Kondo - O. Henry Anthology (2019) 11) "The Finkelstein 5" by Nan Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - Friday Black 12) "Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain" by Jamil Jan Kochai - The New Yorker 13) "Your Duck is My Duck" by Deborah Eisenberg - Your Duck is My Duck 14) "Next Door" by Tobias Wolff - In the Garden of the North American Martyrs * * * I read Life of Pi by Yann Martel in my senior year of Bible college. I was reading a lot back then, particularly C.S. Lewis and another student said, "You like that fantasy stuff?" I told him I did, though I was slightly embarrassed by it. He asked me if I'd heard of this book. "Apparently a boy is stuck on a atwith a talking tiger," he said. Talking beasts ...

Week 1 stories:  “I Can Speak!” by George Saunders - The New Yorker  “Slingshot” by Souvankham Thammavongsa - How to Pronounce Knife “Lady Neptune” by Ann Beattie - The Accomplished Guest “Synchronicity” by John Keeble - O. Henry Anthology “Mott Street in July” by Xuan Juliana Wang - Home Remedies “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolsen is Buried” by Amy Hempel - Reasons to Live “Light-skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands” by Alexia Arthurs - How to Love a Jamaican When I was in English 100, we spent a month reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the author—Philip K. Dick—was “trying to say,” what the story was telling us about ourselves as humans and all of that. I remember thinking the prof was reaching at one point, thinking there’s no way that bit meant anything more than what it said (though I’ll never remember which bit it actually was, sorry). I remember going up to her after class one day and asking, “Isn’t i...

I've been reading this year's (2019) collection of the O. Henry prize stories, but I began by reading the essays at the back of the book by the jurors on their favorites. They're short essays, but interesting, particularly Lynn Feeds. She begins by saying she has "read any number of metaphors for the difference between novels and short stories. The one [she favors] concerns plum pudding. If the novel is the whole pudding, the theory goes, then the short story is the piece with the coin in it." There seems to be as many metaphors for this difference as there are people who actually think (and write about) about it. This one, I disagree with, although I, admittedly, haven't heard it before and this brief paragraph is all she gives as context. I disagree in that I do not believe a story (which I use interchangeably with "short story") is simply a distilled version of a novel. Whereas you may read 200 hundred pages of a novel before getting the coin, ...