Burn After Submitting

Did you know that the fantasy vagina is stimulated most by the hot breath of a sarcastic dragon? I can’t promise you this is true because I haven’t read any of the super popular books about dragon sex. But I know someone who does. And I hear her laughing in the next room. And someone alluded to a dragon going down on a princess on a throne during a YouTube short—so I have extrapolated the rest.

Instead of reading about dragon sex this week, I read a Hemingway story from eighty-ish years ago. I read it because in a letter from Fitzgerald to Hemingway, Fitzgerald kept praising the story from Hemingway’s then new collection Men Without Women. I have read Men Without Women so many times the book has fallen apart. I carried the two halves of the book with me to work to read Fitzgerald’s favorite story on break. While in the accounting office getting a new bank I found a bag of rubber bands from which I procured one to hold the pages together.

The story is Now I Lay Me. I started during break on a bench outside the hotel. But the light on the side of the hotel kept going off and on at one to two minute intervals which made it very difficult to read. So I only made it a few pages into a nine page story. As I returned to the bar, I thought it was a Big Two-Hearted River Part 3, which is a reference that will only mean anything if you remember reading Hemingway’s In Our Time from college.

The story opens with a man unable to sleep listening to the silkworms eating beyond his head. He prays. He considers all the rivers he ever fished in his life. Thus the Big Two-Hearted River comp. Just before I closed the book, I learned that the man had survived an explosion in the war. That’s where I had to leave it.

It seems foolish to say, Hemingway is a staggering genius. Not because he wrote about a man suffering crippling anxiety after experiencing a bomb going off very near him and doing something horrible to him that is never described. He is a staggering genius because he spends six pages in the man’s head as he prays, listens to silkworms chewing, and remember rivers, and then spends three pages listening to that man talk to another man in the bed next to him. Hemingway doesn’t intersperse this internal monologue with the dialogue. He spends six pages inside the man’s head. Then three pages outside the man’s head.

The three pages of dialogue up-end everything that was going on inside the man’s head. Through the conversation about prayer, rivers, and cigarets we come to understand more about the man and what he has suffered than we would have if Hemingway had described what happened to the man when the bomb went off.

Did I mention that the dialogue is perfect? The dialogue is perfect. It is everything people talk about when they talk too much about compression in Hemingway’s dialogue.

In the letter from Fitzgerald to Hemingway, Fitzgerald mentions that he is recovering from another bout with anxiety. His doctor has prescribed low nicotine cigarets to help his nerves. Maybe this is why Fitzgerald liked this story best? I just want to find a doctor willing to give me the go-ahead to smoke two cigarets a day—one before work on the roof of the garage and one after work on the roof of the garage.

I made a huge mistake this week. Usually, I save the links to the stories I read to my Notes App. That way I can just copy and paste the list here. Now I have to go through X to see what stories I reposted and hopefully pick the right ones.

Truth is, this week, I read way more stories in physical books than online. I have been trying to get back to reading the story collections in my office and less time reading on screen. Why? Because I tend to read shorter stories on screens than in physical books. And I want to get back to reading longer stories. I love micro fiction. I love reading micros. I love writing micros. There is a Carver essay in Fires where he talks about why he wrote short stories. Answer: time. That was all he had time for. I feel lately as though my time management is terrible. Also my energy level is abysmal. I have a million projects going and no sustained time to contemplate the longer pieces. So I focus on the ones I can manage with the time I have. I don’t like this, but I must face reality.

Originally, I was going to write this whole intro about time management, but I decided to return to my original idea, which was to talk about Hemingway’s story.

I would have written about my favorite recent read, The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry, but I want to get that essay perfect and send it out to see if someone else might publish it. I have a place in mind. But again, I don’t have a lot of time to deep focus on things. And to get it right and the other essays I’m working on and a longer story that I started this week and another longer story I started last summer I need more deep focus.

Online Fiction:

The Moviegoers by Robert John Miller

https://www.scaffoldlit.com/microwritings/the-moviegoers-by-robert-john-miller

Four Stories by Parker Young

https://mcrb.neocities.org/FourStories_ParkerYoung

2 Poems by Scott Laudati

https://www.bottlerocketlitmag.com/the-work/2-poems-by-scott-laudati

Clown Face by Ben Drevlow

https://burialmagazine.neocities.org/clownface

Physical Books:

The Eye in the Throat by Samanta Schweblin

This story about killed me. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. It joins the ranks of JEALOUS HUSBAND RETURNS IN FORM OF PARROT by Robert Olen Butler that I think I won’t stop being able to think about this year. The Eye in the Throat is about communication—how fathers and sons can’t communicate sometimes.

Salem by Robert Olen Butler

Which I could write a whole post on. Which I think I did write a whole post on at some point this week. But maybe it is just in my journal. I keep a journal of all the stories I read. This is something I started a couple years ago and it is the most rewarding thing I do these days.

Landscape and Dream by Nancy Krusoe

I would like to read this one again before I say anything about it. I definitely liked it but I don’t know what to say yet. Maybe next week.

Things Left Undone by Christopher Tilghman

Started this story the other day. It was also about a father and son—and I don’t think I can handle two devastating stories about fathers and sons this week. Also, when I got to the tragic part, I remembered I had read this story before. So it wasn’t a story I wanted to go through again. Tilghman wrote a couple stories that had a deep impact on me when I was young, just out of college. The Way People Run made me want to run. I wanted to be the character in that story. I wanted to run into the west, live in motels, eat at diners, talk to waitresses around the country. So I did. And for five years after college while I tried to write stories, I did exactly that. So I think of Tilghman’s stories quite a lot. So I will revisit that collection and post more on it in the future.

Pool House by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

Loved! The ending really took me by surprise and I am very excited to give this one another read and extrapolate.

Insects by Arthur Bradford

I read an Arthur Bradford story on the Esquire site this week because I couldn’t find it in any of his books. A lost Bradford perhaps. This should count as an online read. But it is in this list instead because I am always returning to Dogwalker. And I took Turtleface out of the library and it is sitting in my living room. And I came to Bradford at a particularly important moment in my life. I wasn’t roaming the country any more. I was living in Santa Fe. Had been living in Santa Fe for a minute. And I was grabbed by the cover at Borders Books and music. Then even more grabbed by the writing. It was everything I loved in short story writing. So I have read it a dozen times at least.

The High Divide by Charles D’Ambrosio

D’Ambrosio is another writer that came to me at a perfect moment. Was incredibly influential. Writes exactly what I want in a short story. This week I’ve been reading all of Andrew Porter’s posts on the short story collections that impacted him as a young writer. I have been excited by how many of the same writers and stories we have in common from the same period in our lives. Partly because Andrew Porter is one of my favorite short story writers working right now. He mentioned The High Divide which I don’t think I read—but I can’t seem to remember. But I’m glad I took it on this week because it was a staggeringly good story. Easily one of the best I read and it got me to read D’Ambrosio again, which is always welcome. I think I read Screenwriter back in 2024 when I started reading a short story a day and journaling about it.

Recently I read a Bomb Magazine interview with Bret Anthony Johnston who is a favorite current story writer with a new book. And he talked about opening a document on his computer to collect this Weird Horse story he was working on that took him many many years. After he collected all the stories he wanted to fit into the one story he sat down with a printed copy of all of them and almost lost his mind trying to find the pattern they belonged in to make the larger story he wanted to write.

I have taken this as permission to do the same thing. Last summer I started writing out the stories men were telling at the golf course. The random men who joined me and dad from week to week to play a round of golf. My dad is 86. Recently he has been forgetting things. But during the 50 years he was a preacher he told stories—sometimes the same stories over and over. Preaching and golf are my dad’s greatest passions. I have always wanted to write a golf story. So I have opened a google doc and I am just saving stories and ideas to eventually write a long story about dementia and stories and golf. I always think I should just write the draft out then go back and work and work and work on it. But this interview with Johnston has inspired me to try something new. I’m excited to see where it takes me as golf season in New England begins again—and before my dad passes away…