Probes
From Vian Andrews’ journals about life in Italy’s Umbrian countryside: reflections on the winds that blow, full course meals, the stench of daily life, and even orgasms and anti-vaxxers.
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Mikhail Iossel is riding a city bus in Montreal and thinking about a recently dead friend and a man on the street who resembles the friend with whom he’s lost touch. It’s a no-story in a “hasty” sentence, the latest installment of Iossel’s stories (and non-stories) in a single sentence.
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From the Dooney’s archives.: “Writing Old Age, and two other poems” by Vancouver poet George Stanley, from his book “West Broadway” (2018).
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Oh, yes, there was a third boar on the Sussex pig farm in 1962 where a visiting Canadian with literary ambitions learned a lot about life and livestock. Ch. 10 of Brian Fawcett’s “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars.”
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Mikhail Iossel is having black tea and an almond croissant in a downtown shopping mall when a middle-aged man plunks himself down directly opposite Iossel at the otherwise empty long table. A life story in a sentence.
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Brian Fawcett on the importance of clear instructions, the use of “hogwash,” and the art of playing ping pong in Ch. 9 of “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars.”
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More passages from Vian Andrews’ journals of living in Italy’s Umbrian countryside, a world of mountain hamlets, memories of dancing around the fire pit, old knife-grinders, and burnng the cuttings.
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Seven-year-old Mikhail Iossel is writing out the alphabet in a Soviet communal apartment. Clean writing in a sentence.
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“Painting isn’t dead. The novel isn’t dead. They just aren’t as central to the culture as they once were,” says David Shields in “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.” In an era where we need books for people who find television too slow, where does writing go from here?
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An 18-year-old Canadian with writerly ambitions, working on his uncle and aunt’s Sussex pig farm, gets to meet the butler of famed English literary critic, Cyril Connelly. Ch. 8 of “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars.”
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