House Calls

A while back, NPR issued a prompt for their second Three-Minute Fiction Contest, which asked potential participants to begin their stories with the line: The nurse left work at five o'clock.

I started messing around with something that spoke to the prompt and eventually finished it. A couple of months later, that piece has been published in the November issue of Hobart. You can read "House Calls" here.

Huge thanks to Aaron and Jensen for having me.

For some (fairly) recent favorites of mine from Hobart, check out the following:

"My Hand, Dead Tissue, Severed at the Wrist" by Kevin Wilson

& two stories by a couple of friends of mine:

"Hunters" by Eugene Cross &

"The Secret of Healers and Monsters" by Justin Hamm

Umm...While I was linking to those, I noticed that Hobart is down. I'm guessing (hoping?!?) that Aaron's going to be all over that, and that things will soon be back up. So, I'm going to leave the links the way they are for now.

A Vocation Without the Competence

I'm not a huge fan of the word "charming," but I found this interview with Mavis Gallant just that.

Of particular interest to me: Early in her career, Gallant feared that she might have "inherited a flawed legacy," like her artistic father, afflicted with "a vocation without the competence to sustain it."

This reminded me of a line from a play I attended when I was twenty-one. I don't remember much about the play at all--not even the title--just this, the gist of a single line spoken by one of the main characters: He worried the only talent he had was a talent for appreciation.

That bit struck home then, and it continues to strike, on an almost daily basis.

It made me feel a little good to know that Ms. Gallant once suffered from a similar affliction at the beginning of her career.