Recent Presentations and Lectures by Paula Morell, MFA |
Short Stuff: Short Stories and the Short Story Cycle by Paula Morell Presented to the Fiction Writers of Central Arkansas March 2005 A Short Story Cycle, AKA Short Story Series Narrative of Linked Stories Circle of Stories Ring of Stories Intersecting Stories Unified Short Story Collection Composite Novel Novel in Stories All of these (and perhaps others) have been used to describe what we are looking at today. So, what is this "short story cycle," and how long has it been around, and who has/is doing it, and why would it be helpful for writers to understand it? Well, to have a discussion of the short story cycle, we should first start off talking about short stories. Since the first short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, scholars have been debating what exactly a short story is, if it's a specific genre, and what, if any, elements are particular to it. Today, almost all scholars agree that the literary short story is more than just a short novel. And many agree that it is closer to poetry than to the novel. For instance, short stories, like poetry, are meant to be read in one sitting, not over time as a novel is. Therefore, the effect of the story is more like a poem. Also, literary short stories are meant to be read more than once, and meaning expands with each reading, again, like poetry. Like poetry, literary short stories often require from the reader almost as much as was required from the writer. And, as Pulitzer-Prize winning short story writer Moira Crone once said, at the end of a novel a door closes, but at the end of a short story a door opens. And I think that this is precisely what poetry does as well. So what happens when we put these literary short stories together, not in an arbitrary order but in a very specific structure with obvious or subtle links? We get the short story cycle. In a nutshell, a short story cycle is a group of stories that are linked to create the sense of a larger whole. Sometimes they are linked in chronological order, but sometimes they move back and forth between past and present. Sometimes they are linked with protagonists, but then again each story may have its own characters, and sometimes the characters don't know each other from one story to the next. Sometimes they are linked by geography or place, or perhaps there are repeated themes, myths, or imagery that imply subtle unities. Sometimes it's clear that it is a short story cycle, and other times it's not so clear until you are perhaps halfway through, or even after you've finished. Interestingly, readers, reviewers, and even scholars are often not aware of the short story cycle's rich legacy and consistently call them "novels" or "collections." And publishers add to the confusion by marketing them as novels (they sell better that way). As you can see, there are no "hard and fast" rules for how to structure a short story cycle, and writers continue to invent new ways to create the circular experience of the short story cycle. According to Best American Short Stories editor Katrina Kenison, "A novel requires a real blueprint from the author, whereas a short story has a lot more room for spontaneity, and a whole story can arise from an image or a line or a characterThe linked stories are somewhere in the middlethey feature the same character but do not follow the novel progression. They pick up at different times, different situations. It's just a way of exploring characterization, narrative and plot." Laura Morgan Green writes: "The short story cycle compresses the span of its narrative by reducing it to its exemplary moments, rather than unrolling at length through detailed connections of cause and effect. The narrative of the short story cycle is less like a train, chugging evenly down the tracks through unfolding scenery, than like a news station's traffic helicopter, zigzagging over the interlocking grid lines of highways, swooping in to the dramatic image of the overturned truck or a backed-up freeway ramp. This narrative method offers particular, and not insignificant, pleasures: the resonant moment, the acute observation, and, at its best, a helicopter's-eye view of the interlocking trajectories that form a life." So, who has done this hard-to-pin-down genre? This is just a very small sampling of short story cycles. You may recognize some or all of these, and you may not have known of them as short story cycles, as often they are referred to as either collections or novels: Dubliners, James Joyce Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner The Golden Apples, Eudora Welty Everything That Rises Must Converge, Flannery O'Connor Cane, Jean Toomer Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan The Crystal Frontier, Carlos Fuentes The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisnero The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Melissa Bank A Secret Word, Jennifer Paddock (Arkansas native) 2004 National Book Award Finalists Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories, Joan Silber Our Kind: A Novel in Stories, Kate Walbert What are the advantages of short story cycles? Short Story Cycles mimic the fragmented and inconsistent nature of life. Expand on the tension between unity and multiplicity, Navigate between suggestive brevity and sustained expansion Often emphasize the elusiveness of the "true" story, the partiality of any point of view. Offer multidimensional view of things (of voice, of view, of cause and effect) For the reader, reading one story at a time can be more suited to our hectic lives, reading on the subway or while the baby naps or after the nightly news. For the writer, writing one story at a time can be well-suited for the spurts of time we have to write (although, having said that, I don't want to give the impression that a short story cycle is easier to write than a novel. Actually, I would say it's just the opposite. Having completed one novel and working on a second, the short story cycle was far more difficult and time-consuming than either). What might be some of the weaknesses? The whole can be less than the sum of unequally impressive parts, whose linkages can seem arbitrary. Difficulty of ending each story without feeling forced. Stories are just arranged in chronological order instead of building on or interacting with each other. Can feel contrived, particularly when characters' names are repeated and those characters aren't ever developed. Why would it be important for writers to know about this form? According to James Nagel, a Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of Georgia, the short-story cycle has rapidly ascended over the past 20 years to become one of the dominant forms in American fiction. 2004 National Book Award Finalists As far as publishing, the fact is that publishers are more comfortable with novels than they are with short-story collections. The short story cycle, in ways, is the best of both worlds. Some say that short story cycles are a defensive move by writers to get a chance of publication, taking advantage of the novel's more established commercial viability. Others say that short story cycles are an offensive move, with writers conceiving them as an organizational tool. (that writers are conceiving them out of creativity not out of necessity) In any case, short story cycles have been around and will continue to be around, and writers will continue to come up with new ways to express themselves with this form. My short story cycle broken water Okay, so, if this is the first time you've heard about short story cycles, and you feel a bit in the dark, you're not alone: I had not heard the term "short story cycle" until I was in graduate school, and I have an undergraduate degree in English. As an undergraduate I had studied Hemingway and Faulkner and Joyce and Anderson, but the professors had referred to them as collections, not cycles. It was not until a short story scholar gave me Jean Toomer's Cane and explained that it was a short story cycle that I was introduced to the genre. Cane blew me away. It took all my preconceived notions of literature and blew them out the window. And reading it immediately influenced my writing. Interestingly, the other book that influenced me and inspired me to write my short story cycle was Barbra Kingsolver's novel Animal Dreams. Though a novel, she centers the story around two main characters' POV'sthe daughter's and her ailing father's. We get to see the father's perspective, while the daughter cannot. I did not sit down and say, "I'm going to write a short story cycle" (though that certainly may work if you want to try that). How it started for me was that I wrote the first story, "Overlapping," which ended up being the fourth story in the book. It is the story of a mother and daughter, told from the daughter's perspective. As soon as I finished that story, I realized that the mother had a whole lot to say; that she wanted to tell her side of the story. So, I let her tell me a story. The creation of the cycle worked like thisI would write a story in Ellie (the daughter's) point of view, and almost inevitably there would be Elizabeth (the mother) there telling me things that Ellie didn't know. After 4 stories, I realized that I did have what appeared to be a short story cycle in the making. At that point I didn't know a lot about cycles, nor did I need to. I just let the whole take shape as it wanted to, not as I tried to make it. One of the most interesting things for me was structuring the whole once I had written all 10 stories. Like I said, the first story I wrote is not the first story in the cycle; it ended up being the fourth. The last 4 stories were pretty much in order; it was the first 6 that I kept on moving around. Each placement had a different effect. An earlier draft of broken water was my thesis for my MFA. My thesis committee was unanimous in recommending that I "fully realize it as a novel." Earlier that year I had been at a conference where Louise Erdrich was discussing her cycle Love Medicine. One of the questions she was asked was why she hadn't made it into a novel. She was very insulted and got quite angry with the question, as she felt it insinuated that the novel was somehow superior to the short story cycle. I didn't feel angry when the thesis committee recommended that I turn it into a novelwhat I felt was utter confusion. To me, their suggestion was the equivalent of saying, "Turn this haiku into a screenplay." I could not even fathom it. I wouldn't even know where to begin. One of the very interesting things for me is to have readers point out links that I did not consciously know were there. A high school in Colorado is using broken water as a text for a creative writing class The teacher sent me some student essays about the book. I was fascinated and thrilled with what they found that I didn't even know was there. And a few astute reviewers have also picked up on subtleties that, once pointed out, were right-on. So, today I thought I would read the first story in the cycle, "Bait," which was the fourth story that I wrote. For a long time (several years) it was the second story in the cycle. But then, on a whim, I moved it to the front as the first story, and the cycle suddenly came together in a way that it hadn't before. The links forged throughout, and the imagery in this story sets up the rest of the cycle. I just hadn't realized it until I moved it to the front. "Bait" |
A Presentation On A Way With Words Writing Workshops by Paula Morell National League of American Pen Women January 2005 I remember vividly the first creative writing workshop that I took. It was almost 20 years ago: I was nineteen years old and in my second year of college. Before this class, very few people had read my work. One of my high school English teachers turned in a poem I had written to a contest, unbeknownst to me, and it won Third Place, but other than that I had kept my very private words private. So, this college creative writing workshop was the first time I had really exposed myself. The class started out harmless enough, with the instructor explaining how we would be handing out our works to him and the rest of the class to be discussed. His attitude was negative; he made it clear that we would have to be thick-skinned in order to take his criticisms. I should have dropped the class then. Unfortunately, I didn't. As the weeks passed, and the instructor's arrogant tone began infecting the others in the class, I came to realize that the instructor's slicing comments were centered around what he wanted the work to be, not what the writer wanted the work to be. He, and sometimes others in the class, would inappropriately and mean-spiritedly tear apart the work being critiqued. I sat silent during the tirades, until it was finally my turn to get up on the block. True to fashion, my work was ripped up and down, and I left that afternoon in tears. I dropped the class and didn't write for six months. Fortunately, the writer in me wouldn't stay down for long, and I was able to pick myself up, brush myself off, and realize that one (or twenty) people's opinions are just thatopinions. That also started a learning process that I have based my methods of teaching on: what NOT to do when teaching writing. And, as everything and everyone has a purpose in our lives, I have come to be thankful for that first, albeit painful, workshop, as it put me on the road I have been on ever since, which is honoring, helping, and encouraging others to find their own unique voices and truths through their writing. Luckily, I have also been blessed with a couple of wonderful guides who have shaped how I teach (and how I write). The first is Dan Wakefield, the Emmy-award winning writer, who I took several classes with as an undergraduate in Miami, FL. Dan has a wonderful spirituality about him, and this spirituality bleeds over into his approach to the teaching of writing as not only a craft but also as a way to access ourselves and subsequently others. Dan was the first writer I worked with who honored his students with genuine support. He continues to be one of my greatest mentors. As a graduate student in New Orleans, synchronicity introduced me to the teacher/scholar Dr. Mary Rohrberger, one of the leading short story scholars in the world. Like Dan, Mary has a deep spiritual base, and she took me under her wing and introduced me to the metaphysics of short stories and their writers. As a teacher, she helped me as a writer to delve deeper into myself to access my own inherent symbolism and archetypes to speak to readers on deeper levels. Like Dan, Mary continues to influence me today. So, in 1998 when I taught my first creative writing class in New Orleans, I had an idea of what I wanted to do as well as what I didn't want to do. What I wanted to do was to guide people as they found their own voice, their own truths, and honor those works. I wanted to offer constructive criticism, but never to put down the writer or his/her works in any way. I wanted to get at the heart of what the writer was trying to say, not what I wanted him/her to say, and help her bring that full-circle. And I wanted to help the writer discover the wonderful potential in his/her work, not to gush about how good it is, but to give the writer tools to make it even better. At first I was amazed at how much I learned from my students, sometimes far more than I felt they learned from me. Over the years I've come to understand that that's what teaching is all about. Many people tell me that they are taken with not only the types of exercises we do in class (we use a lot of different art forms and techniques not generally used in writing classes), but also the way that sharing their work in a supportive environment gives life to the work that would not have been there otherwise. I honor every piece that people give me to critique, and people often tell me that they have never had someone spend so much energy helping them. I see that as my job in my workshops: to offer help to the people who give me their work with trust. In 2002 my family and I moved back to Little Rock. I had been teaching creative writing classes in Florida to both adults and children at an education center, and I had also been teaching college writing classes, both online and grounded. I was still teaching online college classes in Little Rock, and I missed my grounded creative writing classes, so I put together a class at the Oasis (now called the Arc). I had 12 people sign up, which frankly surprised me. In that first class was Elaine Corum, and she approached me with the idea to put together a company. I had just been freelancing, and I had never worked with a partner, but we got together and talked about our goals and our philosophies and found that we really had some good ideas. So, we formed A Way With Words Writing Workshops, and we have been adding classes ever since. I teach Creative Writing, which is for beginning and professional writers alike and covers fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. We do in-class exercises, freewriting, workshopping, and take-home journal prompts. I also teach Spiritual Autobiography, which is based on the methods of Dan Wakefield, integrating drawing with writing in order to access both right and left brain while writing. Both of these classes are offered several times a year at different centers in town. I also teach Intro to the SS and Advanced SS Techniques, which are more academic in their approach. Both are offered grounded as well as online. Elaine teaches Memoirs and Writing to Heal, which is her area of study in her Master's program at UALR. At the core of all these workshops is writing and sharing. We write in class, we write out of class, and I always offer the opportunity to share by reading aloud, which is optional. We focus on trying to "listen" on the page instead of trying to "speak" there. We do quite a few impromptu writings, which help the participants to let go of trying to be "good" and to rather just discover what they have to say. And as people get to know each other, we form a bond, and it's not uncommon for half or more of the participants to sign up for the next class so that they can continue working together. I have become increasingly interested in using other art forms in the creation of writing, something I have always done myself, and I have begun a series entitled "Invoking your Muse." The idea is to use different forms of expression to tap into your inner self, your Muse, in order to write more deeply and profoundly. Along with Dr. Jan Dean, we offer monthly "Invoking your Muse: Yoga and Writing" classes. And I have collaborated with writer/artist Linda Butler for our "Invoking your Muse: Touch Drawing and Writing" classes. Both of these very talented ladies I met in my writing workshops. I am currently working on a project as an extension of the "Muse" series that integrates Allison McNeill's Book of Gifts and a writing workshop. It is called "Invoking the Gifts: Writing and Spiritual Gifts." We are in the editing stages now, and the book and workbooks will be out by spring. This course utilizes meditation, art, writing, and sharing, and I will be teaching it as well as our publisher will be selling the Facilitator's Workbook and Participant Workbooks for anyone who wants to lead the course themselves. Helen asked me how I choose classes: I have to say that the classes choose me. I've been privileged to work with many, many talented people, and I'm always open to what synchronicity has in store for me. Today I brought an example of an exercise that I did in one of our Invoking your Muse: Yoga and Writing classes. In all of our classes we use different art forms in different ways, and in the Yoga classes we use not only movement but also drawing along with writing. For our Yoga and Writing classes, we center the class around a theme. For this particular class, the theme was the element Earth. The first half of class we did the yoga, focusing our movements and meditations on the Earth and the ground and being grounded. Then, I read the following: For this exercise, think about earth not as a vast planet but as the ground we walk upon. When we speak about being grounded, we're generally referring to the quality of being firmly rooted to the earth beneath ussolid, in contact with our bodies and realities. So, close your eyes and spend a few minutes thinking about the ground you walk upon. Think of the many different kinds of earth you remember seeing. Notice how the qualities differ from one kind to the other. Think about how the ground looks in different situations and places, such as an earthquake, an excavation, a garden, a fertile plane, a rocky mountain, a desert. Let your mind drift through various images of dirt and earth, such as a dug grave, a terrarium, a potted plant, mud pies. After a moment, draw a picture of your representation of earth. This can be a picture of how a particular type of earth/dirt/location looks, or it can be a symbol of your relationship to dirt and earth, or shapes or colorsyour representation of earth. Don't worry about being an artist. (This is what I drew) Then we moved onto the writing portion: Start off with the word "earth." Write any associations you have with the word itselfyou can write sentences or just string along words. Think of sights, sounds, smells, touch, adjectives, similesanything that you might associate with "earth." After a few minutes, write about what you are imagining, thinking, remembering, or feeling. Go where the writing takes you. (This is what I wrote) In Harmony It was a cold night; the great Redwood trees around us had kept the forest floor shaded all day from the summer sun, and I could see my breath now that night had come. Jason had built a campfire, and it flickered and glowed, casting shadows on the primeval bark. We were in a secluded campsite in a remote area of the forestthe four of us had opted to hike in rather than have neighbors. This was my first visit to the ancient groves in Northern California. It was like an earlier trip to RomeI knew I'd been there before, and I knew I'd be back. Even the smell of the mossy floor between the roots was familiar; I can smell the soft, damp green even now. After a campfire dinner of red snapper we had caught earlier that day and cold beer, Jason and I snuggled into our tent while Brad and Robin nestled into theirs. We were planning to get up before sunrise, and we were exhausted. It wasn't but a few moments before Jason started snoring and Brad and Robin no longer rustled beside us. I slipped easily into sleep myself, the popping and crackling of the fire lulling me. The last thing I remember was thinking how soft the ground was, roots and all. The next thing I remember is the distant sound of music. No, not music, reallysinging. It was like hundreds of celestial voices singing in harmony, and I lay there letting it surround me and hold me in its embrace. I didn't open my eyes or question where it came from; I just let it envelop me. At some point the singing slowly faded and I fell back asleep. Morning came very coldly, and we packed up and hiked out to watch the sun rise over the Russian River Valley. The oranges and reds danced across the sky as we sat on the bank and drank steaming coffee. As we stood up to go, I asked Jason what he thought about the singing the night before. I was sure that every one of us had heard it; it encompassed the whole grove. But he and the others just looked at me blankly. No one had heard but me. We drove north that afternoon to another grove. Then, two days later we headed south out of the forest on our way back to San Francisco. We passed by the grove we stayed in that first night. As we were leaving the canopy of the trees, a motel caught my eye. It was brown and rustic, and the sign hanging out front said "Singing Trees Motel." We didn't have time to stop, but that was okay. I didn't need to. For several miles I watched the great trees through the back window of the car. They never disappeared, just faded into the horizon. Thank you again for having me. It's been a pleasure and a privilege. |
Reverberation: Art, Poetry, and the Short Story by Paula Morell Presented at the Arkansas Literary Festival's Day of Poetry April 2005 James Fenton wrote, "The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation." As a reader, poetry for me has always been about that reverberation as the words, images and ideas echo around me for several days. I'll discover a word tapping me softly on the shoulder as I take a shower, an image lightly brushing my cheek as I pick up my daughter, the poet whispering in my ear in rush hour traffic. I love to hear poetry read aloud (especially by the poet), and I am always in awe and reverence when poets bring together words in a way that, as Emily Dickinson said, "blows the top of my head off." As a writer, poetry is what I write the most but share the least. The vast majority of what I write, when either prompted to write or writing by hand, is poetry. Oftentimes I find my prose breaking itself into lines when I'm writing a short story by hand. The majority of what I write when on the computer does not break so naturally into lines--I usually have to do this manually. The first piece I wrote was a poem, my first publication was a poem, and the first contest that I entered and won was for poetry. Short Stories Then, after a couple hundred poems, I wrote my first short story, which opened up a whole new world, and my poetic love affair with imagery and language and symbolism and "truth" seeped over into my fiction. In my MFA program for fiction, the poet John Gery once told me that I was a "poet disguising herself as a fiction writer." And perhaps that's right, though what I've found is that literary short stories are very similar to poems in many ways. For instance, short stories, like poetry, are meant to be read in one sitting, not over time as a novel is. Therefore, the effect of the story is more like a poem. Also, literary short stories are meant to be read more than once, and meaning expands with each reading, again, like poetry. Like poetry, literary short stories come from the inside out and often require from the reader almost as much as was required from the writer. And, as Pulitzer-Prize winning short story writer Moira Crone once said, at the end of a novel a door closes, but at the end of a short story a door opens. And I think that this is precisely what poetry does as well. I think it's very helpful for writers and readers to understand the similarities between poetry and short stories and approach literary short stories in a poetic way. For writers, opens up possibilities. Shows that everything doesn't have to fit in a box, and it allows us as writers, instead of trying to be "good" or "right," to be, as Julia Cameron said, "accurate." For readers, it opens up the stories in a way that lets them reverberate, the way the stories were meant to. Writing Jorge Borges wrote, "Writing is nothing more than a guided dream." I have found that this is particularly true with poetry and short stories, and, when done accurately, o the writer taps into the reader's subconscious, thereby guiding the reader. Julia Cameron wrote that writing is about ". . . getting something down, not about thinking something up. . . . Another way to think of it is that writing is the art of taking dictation, not giving it." Cameron goes on to say, "When I listen to what I hear and simply jot that down, the flow of ideas is not mine to generate but to transcribe. When, on the other hand, I struggle to write, it is because I am trying to speak on the page rather than listening there." And I've found this to be very true with my own writing: When I allow myself to, as Cameron says, "listen on the page instead of try to speak there," I find my work has much more resonance and depth and reverberation. One way that I discovered early on to "listen" is to use other art forms such as drawing and music either before I wrote, while I wrote, or both. So, over the years I've adapted my writing techniques of using other art forms to create both poetry and short stories, even thought I'm not an "artist." This can be as simple as a quick sketch with a colored pencil before I begin writing to several abstract or concrete drawings while I'm writing the first draft. Oftentimes what I draw is a surprise, sometimes it's puzzling, and sometimes I don't know what it is telling me until I finish writing the first draft. But it always helps me to delve deeper into the work. Then, when I taught my first creative writing class ten years ago I found that other people also tapped in deeper and their work resonated more when we used other art forms in our writing exercises. People who were "not writers" were writing exceptional work, and I was moved many times by the truths that emerged in their writings. Dr. Lucia Capacchione's journal writing theory may explain why this works. The theory centers around joining the two parts of the brain (left brain/right brain) to access deeper levels. Writing words is predominately a left-brain function, while activities such as drawing and painting are predominately right-brain. So, by first opening up right brain by drawing, for example, when we then write we have access to those wonderful right-brain characteristics such as intuition, insight, creativity, archetypes, symbolism, etc. : delving into what Carl Jung called the Collective Unconscious. And this is where we speak to each other on those deeper levels, levels we may not be able to articulate, those "places where we dream." So, I thought today I would take you through one of my processes that started with a drawing, then a poem, then a short story, which was the first story I wrote for my novel-in-stories broken water. Robert Frost wrote: "A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness...It finds the thought and the thought finds the words." And I think that's a wonderful description of what happens--something gets under my skin and won't go away until it points me to the words. So, several years ago I remember sitting down at my desk to write, though I didn't know what about, and I started to sketch. What appeared on the page were sharp, jagged shapes, layering on top of each other, overlapping each other just enough that the underlying layer barely showed. There were layers and layers and layers when I finally finished. I didn't know what the drawing was about- I tacked it up on the wall beside my computer and picked up my pen and wrote the following poem entitled "My mother is dying." My mother is dying. Again, today, I say these words, sharp, slicing words that spit from my mouth, shards of broken glass splattering on the floor in a pool of saliva, blood, thin chip of a tooth. I don't know if she ever lived. For years I've tried to pick up the pieces, carefully fit together the shattered glass as it cut my fingers, peer past the distortion cast back. But like a jigsaw puzzle with missing parts the words will not come together, will not complete, will not reflect the reason for her seventeen year suicide. Again, today, I say the words. And again I walk away, glass crunching underfoot, a thousand tiny pieces reflecting a thousand tiny mes. Christmas came a few days later, and that year I received 5 calendars. The calendars weren't a symbol, they were calendars. However, they began to speak to me, tap on my shoulder, bother me just enough that they required that I write about them. My drawing was still on the wall beside me, and I had put the poem right beside it, and I sat down and wrote a short story. It was only after completing the first draft of the story that I began to understood what the drawing might be telling me: It was the central metaphor and image for the story that ended up being titled "Overlapping." It also ended up being a central theme for my novel-in-stories broken water that "Overlapping" instigated. So, in a sense, I started with the drawing, which moved out to the poem, which moved out to the story, which moved out to the book. As the creator, with each reverberation I was further away from the "core." o The drawing for me was the very center, then the next reverberation out the poem, then the story (which is a fictional character in a fictional situation who is wry, a bit jaded, and sarcastic) o And then finally the book, which is many characters in many situations. Even with the book being the third reverberation out there, to me it's still saying the same basic thing as the drawing. So, this is "Overlapping," which, like I said, is the first story I wrote for broken water, but it ended up being the fourth story in the book. "Overlapping" |
2005 |
