she has been dancing forever
- At February 15, 2017
- By Bob Howe
- In Blog Posts, Fiction, News
0
He stands on a January hilltop in Green-Wood Cemetery, chilled in a navy peacoat, and tries not to think too hard. She told him to meet her at the Marcoux family mausoleum, after 3 a.m. He waits motionless in the frigid night, with a long patience cultivated in Rockaway lifeguard chairs.
Emil Marcoux, the family patriarch interred within, had been mauled to death by a circus lion in Bernardsville, New Jersey, in 1927. Witnesses told the Somerset County Bugle that the lion had bounded up nine rows from the ring, directly at Marcoux Père, who shouted “Karl Friedrich May!” at the moment of his death. Rather more recently, someone painted, “Visit Mordor before Mordor visits you,” in heavy black Gothic letters on the mausoleum’s chalky side.
Read the full story at The Flatbush Review
Writer’s Workshops: Under the Black Flag
- At August 10, 2014
- By Bob Howe
- In News
- 0
My essay, “Writer’s Workshops: Under the Black Flag,” is live at Black Gate.
Our class t-shirt, Clarion ’85. Image courtesy of Bill Shunn.
I actually once said to a fellow writer, “The best thing you could do for art is cut off your hands and bury your typewriter.”
Beyond the words themselves, it’s hard to know what’s worse about this: that I said it to someone I’m sure I liked or that I can’t remember to whom I said it.
I know it was at the Clarion Writer’s Workshop in the summer of 1985, then held at Michigan State University in East Lansing. I knew it was someone I liked, because I liked every one of my fellow workshoppers. As I got to know the 16 other participants, I felt these are my people!
The context for the remark was a workshop session. For those unfamiliar with the format, everyone in the workshop delivers an oral critique of a manuscript handed out — and one hopes, read — in advance, then the author responds. Clarion workshops are machines for producing pithy one-liners — often put downs — the best (worst?) of which are memorialized on tee-shirts printed in the last week or two of the workshop. [More]
IGMS Reader’s Choice Award
- At June 05, 2014
- By Bob Howe
- In Fiction, News
- 0
“Fantastic Landscape” – used with permission from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Artwork by Francesco Guardi
You can read the story in IGMS #33.
It’s humbling when I think of the other works they published that year. Thanks to Edmund Schubert who published the story, and all the readers who voted for it.