Midnight rambles or writing stories

It's late. I'm home after a nearly perfect Sapphire dirty martini at Frost. I passed a street sweeper on my way home. I tried to guess what the boys had been up to while I was out but I see only six knives of various lengths along the side of the kitchen sink, nothing else. I hear both of them snoring from separate rooms. There is a story here. I've just got to find it.

"The American short story is alive and well," says Stephen King (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/King2-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin). He writes about his task as editor of the Best American Short Story, 2007, and he has a funny story himself of having to crouch at his local bookstore to get at the bottom shelf holding all the literary magazines. The top, eye-level shelves were reserved for People, and US Weekly, and Oprah at Home. I know that feeling. I remember crouching and browsing in the semi-dark for all those short story anthologies at the old Hungry Mind bookstore. God, my knees hurt after that.

One Story, the chapbook that publishes one short story every three weeks, has a new campaign and website to save the short story: http://www.savetheshortstory.org/. They have a really nice list of mags and websites that publish short stories as well as a list of short story writers, although they foolishly left Flannery O'Connor off the list.

There are the short-shorts, too. Wired Magazine once invited all sorts of people to submit six-word stories, along the lines of Hemingway's well-known short-short: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Here are some of the results, many of them from the sci-fi crowd.

Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.
- William Shatner

Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?
- Eileen Gunn

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

It cost too much, staying human.
- Bruce Sterling

Easy. Just touch the match to
- Ursula K. Le Guin

So I've been playing around some with a few short stories. Here's a bit from one about my grandma. I've been missing her. Read here if you like or stay tuned for the full version Thursday. Or even better, try out one of your own.

"Back at the nursing home, I ask Grandma so many questions. What about the time my mom took the fishing boat out and the motor died and when they pulled it back through the river they came upon the dead man in the currents? Or how about the time all the river rats came up to the garage and when Papa went out to dig his garden, he dug up their nests and they started attacking him. Did he really burn down that garage? I wished we could sit down in her old kitchen and she could tell me all about those days. She would say, "Well let's just have a cigarette." And then she would go on. It was like coming home. Like being gone in a strange new world all the time, where everything is so unfamiliar that it is either too sharp or just a soft blur, and then coming through that front porch with the swing attached to the ceiling and then through the front door with the big square of glass, and feeling so much relief. Everything was here: the river rushing past the sagging stoop out back, the hens and chickens spilling over the side rocks, their thick shoots and runners sending out more shoots and offsets, all tender and connected by the mother leek. The one that started it all."