"Zurich, 1989" will appear at LitSnack In the meantime, an excerpt: "A group of adults, mostly men, are sitting around a table covered in heavy cotton cloth, the corners pressed to sharp pleats. I am among them, although I am not an adult. I am fourteen, the only teenager there. The group is drinking. They’ve already emptied three bottles at one end of the long table. I cannot account for what the other side has polished off because I have not been watching, although I can tell by their laughter, by their raucous exclamations, that they are drunk. Because we are in Europe, I drink with them, although I have twice tipped sparkling water into my glass because I have learned the wait staff will replenish my drink without asking, and I, in turn, will drink it because, among these adults, the wine is my mark of equality." * * * *
Savannah at the Carnegie Library on October 17, 2010-- Savannah is excited to be part of Carnegie Library's Sunday Afternoon Poetry & Reading Series. Join her between 2-3 p.m. on Sunday October 17, 2010 and she'll tell you a story...or two.
A review of Janet Frame's posthumously-released anthology Prizes will appear in October's Gently Read Literature In the meantime, an excerpt:
"Frame’s stories flower outward from the initial stream-of-conscious narration of The Lagoon, where the candid expression of ideas mimics the concerns of her principal characters, usually children who fail to understand their parents’ seemingly irrational motivations. It’s interesting that this broader theme continues even as Frame’s voice becomes sharper and more finely tuned, using unflattering truths to slice keenly through narrative traditions and saccharine moral meanings. (A change that’s perhaps most evident in Snowman Snowman and the one-page fable about faithless Daylight and exiled Dust, who travel together “to blind and smother.”) Each engaging collection, organized chronologically and brought together in one volume, reveals the development of Frame’s mind, its affinity for the ideas of freedom and isolation, innocence and awareness." * * * *
"Buddha is actually part of San Francisco-based Jim Campbell’s “Shadow (for Heisenberg)” (1993-94). The work is a wily nod to quantum mechanics’ Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that a particle’s position and momentum can never be mutually defined. It’s fitting then that as visitors approach the work, the glass box around the diminutive Buddha sculpture fogs to opacity, leaving only its baffling, seemingly all-pervading shadow behind. This somehow suggests that the more we humans scrutinize and intervene, the more veiled larger spiritual and scientific matters become." * * * *
"The Only Thing You Will Ever Give Birth To" appears in the August issue of Foundling Review In the meantime, an excerpt: "This was not what you had expected to come from him. Something inappropriate yes, but not this. You look at him for a moment, frozen, but with the sensation that your face has gone red with heat. Your ears tingle with an influx of blood. The man continues to smile, percolating now with an unsettling chuckle. The strange, bright eye bulges further and travels left. The other one continues to focus on you."
"When Clark woke up after midnight in a mood mean enough to do what he felt needed to be done, he went out with his 12-gauge and shot up the metal cage once, then put another shell in the chamber and hit it a second time, blowing out the trap door. The sound of the gun dissipated some of his rage, but the noise made his head clatter. He sat down a few feet from his handiwork, not really looking at it. On this moist plot of crab-grassed soil, he put the shotgun down beside him and, under the waxing gibbous moon, waited for his headache to pass. The boys, who woke up after hearing the gun go off the first time, came outside. They stood behind their father. Jimmy was holding the skunk like a baby."
A Review of Fiberart International 2010 appears in the July 28th issue of Pittsburgh City Paper . In the meantime, an excerpt:
"Yet, humor is not absent. Canadian Dorie Millerson’s 1” x 1” x 2” red needlepoint lace “Car” cuts an icon of petroleum-reliance down to size, while back at the PCA, American Stephanie Metz’s felted wool “Muscle Heifer” (2010), is all body and no head--just the way (one might joke) consumer culture prefers commodities to be."
"The World's Most Famous Debutante" appears in the July issue of JMWW!
"And so, the surgery was performed on Beverly just after her sixteenth birthday, and she emerged from it in a constant state of pain, which made her nauseous and unable to eat. She dropped nearly fifteen pounds while the screws were turned twice daily, even though she had to lay still for nearly six months. Once, when her mother came into her room and noticed Beverly's thin wrist on the comforter, the bones protruding so elegantly, Louisa smiled in her prim way. She then touched it with the same hand that held her cigarette—her nails a lustrous poppy red—and said, 'good girl.'"
Read Part I of "1,000 Incarnations and 1,000 Deaths" at Fictionaut An excerpt: "The man turned. The rain was pelting him, and his steel-colored hair formed a geography through which rivulets of water coursed. She could not see his eyes now, they were hidden in the shadowy recesses under his brow, which was starkly lit from above. She could not even see a sheen of lid. The man's hands were in his coat pockets, and as she moved down the sidewalk towards him, half running, he opened his coat wide, exposing a scarlet satin vest she hadn't noticed before. He kept his dark trench coat open, his arms wide apart in a way that made it look like he had developed jet-colored wings. She did not think now. She hurried forward and stopped only when her cheek was against the cool scarlet fabric. The black coat closed around her, covering everything but the very top of her head." * * * *
Read "The Color of Silence is Radium Green" at Fictionaut The story details the lives of three so-called Radium Girls, who painted glowing numbers on watch dials in the 1920s.
An excerpt: "Beverly's father, who sat in the evenings by the phonograph with his spectacles on, staring at nothing at all, listened to Franz Liszt and Sergei Rachmaninoff. The music pervaded Beverly's world as it glided up the stairs and through the open door of her room, inside which she sat with her own eyes closed. Had she been able to see in the dark, she would have been able to discern her pupils pushing light through the thin veil of skin that was her lid. And they were not at rest, but pitched to and fro as she dreamed her twilit imaginings, which occurred now whether she was upright or prone."
Click on the linked title above to read the whole story. * * * *
The American Soma Blog Keep up with Savannah's jonzes here: www.american-soma.blogspot.com Lit. bits, book reviews, author interviews, art criticism, musical fascinations * * * *
"While Boone did not project the kind of immortality political leaders sometimes did, he still wished for it in the metaphorical sense. He yearned to be recorded in historical annals as more than just an oil man. While money and purpose were important to him, historical meaning was, by far, the superior reward. He wanted to be one of the great forces in history."
"The landscape and the local culture have a definite impact on my world view, and this mood trickles into my stories. I used to work at a newspaper after I got married, and I would hear terrible things on the police scanner. One of the stories in American Soma is called “Horizontal Plane” and that is based on one of the conversations that I heard between policemen talking to each other on the scanner." * * * *
All writing copyright 2007-2010 Savannah Schroll Guz