How Long B4 Unsaid #4 is Gone?

A while back, I went on a little jag here about David McClendon not making Unsaid easier to buy. It's only fair that I report the good news: you can get it via Paypal now.

#4 is easily one of the best things published in '09. It's 'ginormous,' as my 7yr old would say. After finishing it, I was reluctant to file it away; I'm currently going back thru for rereads of my favorite stuff.

Now that it's paypalable, it'll be interesting to see how long it lasts......

Anatomy of a Flash at The Big Other

My story "The Fifty," from the New York Tyrant, has been reprinted @ The Big Other, with Q+A, as part of the Big O's new Anatomy of a Flash thing. Thnx to the Tyrant and to Greg Gerke.

Some Randomness RE: Am. Gymnos

1. I wrote the first one in the collection, "Houston," first.

2. I've written a couple more after sealing the collection. After the first time we sealed it, I wrote "Nashville" and "Buffalo," and those two ended up getting included.

3. Thirty American states are represented, plus D.C. California has three, and Missouri, New York, and Minnesota have two each.

4. I wrote the "Minneapolis Gymno" while actually listening to Satie, but others came from other musics. "Sandusky" comes straight out of the song by the same name on Uncle Tupelo's March 12 album.

5. Some come from other stuff. I dedicated "Greenbrier" to Blake Butler because I wrote it from a line in one of his lists of 50.

6. "Seattle" was the first one published, in SmokeLong. Among the last to be published elsewhere will be "Mississippi River," in Hobart. That's one of me and Molly's faves.

7. Fourteen of them are set in places I've never seen. That number feels low.

8. I wrote "West Palm Beach" from a photo on Flickr and from the great first song on the Will Oldham Gulf Shores ep.

American Gymnos on Pre-Order (big day!)

I won't try to be all cool about this: so excited!

It's something I'm not used to -- thinking of myself as lucky -- but I really am: to have worked with Molly Gaudry and others on this, and to be part of the WWP Very Short Fiction chapbook series (The first, Matt Bell's HOW THE BROKEN LEAD THE BLIND, is going to be a collector's item, I'm pretty sure, and the next, ALIEN AUTOPSY, is by one of my own favorite writers of vsf, Pedro Ponce). And then the cover art, by the super-sweet James Ulmer.....

Another lucky thing: to have had such fantastic writers as first readers. Some excerpts from their words on the words:

"Like Erik Satie's Gymnopédies, Garson's atmospheric shorts surprised me with their subtle shifts and eccentricities. Linked by geographic places, the collection progresses in tiny increments to become a dance between internal and external geographies. In perception and execution, this is a wonderfully original work."
—Jim Heynen, author of The One-Room Schoolhouse


"Scott Garson concocts, in American Gymnopédies, a diabolical geography of loss out of an atlas of jim-dandy and cracker jack, snap-shotting the American township grid, netting up the world in a strung-out string theory of gorgeous adhesive prose."
—Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone


"There's a world of detail, sound and story humming through each of these short pieces about cities. Garson's an alert writer, and he engages with each place in a way that stirs, worries, and delights."
—Pia Z. Ehrhardt, author of Famous Fathers and Other Stories


"Garson's collection reads like a travelogue of the periphery. These are plainspoken reports from a different way of seeing."
—David McLendon, editor of Unsaid


Now let me see if I can get this paypal button thingy to work.....

New Pages Reads the Wigleaf Top 50

Henry F. Tonn does the write-up in the new group of reviews. He covers included stories by Roy Kesey, Kevin Wilson, Tai Dong Huai and Robert Olen Butler.

There's a little more Top 50 talk in the nice back-and-forth between Ravi Mangla and Greg Gerke at The Big Other.

Hppy 2 Bday Wigleaf

Only two. Hard to believe. Maybe because there are so many babies around -- The Collagist, Matchbook, Necessary Fiction, etc.

Haven't decided what's going up tonight. Erin Fitzgerald's story, "Trumpet Voluntary," holds the top spot now. I love this one, and also Kevin Sampsell's, beneath it, and also Tawnysha Greene's, and also.......

"Interstate" @ The Mississippi Review

Very happy to have one here. It's the All-Flash issue, edited by Kim Chinquee, and it's pretty much tops, with stories from Mary Akers, Randall Brown, Lydia Copeland, Kathy Fish, Avital Gad-Cykman, Greg Gerke, Daniel Grandbois, Peter Grandbois, Tiff Holland, Jeff Landon, Paul Lisicky, Robert Lopez, Darlin Neal, Carol Novack, Lorna Perez, Jen Pieroni, Peter Ramos, Gail Louise Siegel, Carrie Spell, Rusty Spell, Ed Taylor and Diane Willams.

Some samplings:

"She was next to me, all over my side of the question, and I told her, 'You're like an animal!'

Although, nobody worries about her manners, they know they're good."

—from Diane Williams' "Wrigglework"


"In my dreams all those animals talk. I see their eyes in my window, like glowing blue stars, and hear them at the foot of my bed—the pads of their feet, their dew claws in my blankets, their high, unpracticed words in my ear. It's some other language, but I know what they mean."

—from Lydia Copeland's "Checkers"


"I got a ride from a baldheaded truck driver named Gil all the way to Bedford, a small churchy town near Roanoke. Gil was a talker. In thirty minutes he filled me in on the various ways his children had disappointed him, and how to please a woman orally. 



'You just gotta get in there and love what you're doing,' he told me. He gripped his big hands around the steering wheel like someone trying to crack open walnuts."

—from Jeff Landon's "Where I'm Going"


"The trouble is this woman is smarter than me by at least half. I realized I needed a new strategy, something else to go on. This is how I came to the second decision.

I had to start thinking way over my own head."

—from Robert Lopez' "Nine off the Break"


"Am I asking for too much when I propose he was giving us the bones of something we could give flesh to in another life? Life after life—and, oh, the grand dinners beside the littered shore! And oh, the trips given up on two miles before the tip of the continent! Who could ever say what childhood was from here, what it felt like to be caught up inside the mouth of it?"

—from Paul Lisicky's "Mr. Cat"

Link for I-View @ The Collagist

Heah

Wigleaf Subs

....closed until March 1. catch-up time needed.