The one where Harvey, the giant Pookah, tells Jimmy Stewart about a swamptown in Florida where people amputate limbs in attempts at insurance fraud only to be attacked by aliens that emerge every eclipse, and then ol' Chucky Bronson shows up and tells the guys "You brought two horses too many" and bang bang bang and the music swells under a shot of the snowblown Minnesota highway as a short, kinda funny-looking guy buries a bag full of money. I love that one.
Books
Forget entire books for a second (though you can keep E.L. Doctorow's City of God top-of-mind if you like, and, why not, Cormac Mccarthy's The Road), and let's talk short fiction. Annie Proulx's The Mud Below, Mister Squishy by David Foster Wallace, a wee bit o' the new classic with Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders, A Distant Episode—Paul Bowles, Pilgrims—Julie Orringer, The New Automaton Theater—Steven Millhauser, Runaway—Alice Munro, The Library of Babel—Jorge Borges, The Ceiling—Kevin Brockmeier, The Snows of Kilimanjaro—ol' Ernie Hemmingway, Double Birthday—Willa Cather, The Half-Skinned Steer—Annie P again, The Bees—Dan Chaon and then the other ones I can't quite come up with right now.
It's only recently that I've begun to more fully embrace the stereotype of the copywriter with a manuscript in his top drawer. Instead of the Great American Novel, mine is a pile of short stories constantly in search of a printed home. I've written fiction as long ago as the sixth grade. (It was a play loosely based on the big Dallas cliffhanger, Who Shot JR? Turns out none of the other 6th graders wanted to skip recess to rehearse. Go figure.) It wasn't until about three or four years ago that I started to focus on it again. I joined the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver for roughly a year. My wife and I then moved to Shanghai, where she taught English and I concentrated on writing full-time. When we returned to the States, I started sending things out in earnest.
At this point, my life revolves more around my toddler, wife and work than the written word, but the stories are still in the drawer, still occasionally pushing to get out.
I like to think of your avatar as a kind of Justice Center where all the puritanical superheroes meet and rest up. Where've you been by the way? Fridays aren't the same without fluid pudding.
Jody
