UFR Weekly Newsletter #25: Where to Begin
David Cotrone
I was thinking about Judy Clement Wall’s review of If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This. In it, she says that Robin Black’s stories are about “the bonds that connect us, the loneliness we struggle against, the ways in which we are here for each other and the heartbreaking ways in which we are not.” I thought about my time in Vermont a few years ago. I don’t know why. I was in a record store, and there was a woman at the front who was working, wearing a white skirt. Her hair was down. Her arms were loose. She was dancing to the music over the speakers, circling around herself. I asked her what was playing. She pointed in front of her, at a record on the counter. It was this. She told me to take it and listen.
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Astraphobia by Elizabeth Wade
From way back: Three poems by Taylor Mali
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If it’s true that a person’s character is their fate then she was getting it right. Outside, the sky was so blue it looked open.
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Between What Is Calling Me: A Conversation with Curtis Smith, author of Witness
I Learn As I Go: A Conversation with Kevin Sampsell, author of A Common Pornography and publisher of Future Tense Press
The Life of the Heart: A Conversation with Heather Fowler, author of Suspended Heart
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There’s this song about starting over, something I think about each time I sit down to write, or when I finish reading a book. It’s like entering the next phase, looking for a solution to a problem and realizing it's not a problem at all. It’s understanding that beginning is like writing, that life is like giving blood: you can give and give and sometimes it hurts but there’s always more.
By the end of the song Jim James answers his own question. He says, “Somehow I always know.”
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At the end of her review, Judy says that “everything is a surprise and nothing is surprising because [Black’s] characters are us.” It reminded me that we are what we make, that even the most surreal fiction comes from the heart of someone like you.
Always,
David