Years ago I took my first writing course, an undergraduate intro fiction offering taught by a high-strung, tenured loon whose own aspirations as a playwright had burned out along with his ability to comport himself civilly in social situations. His over-the-top insistence on a kind of Victorian propriety, combined with his inability to suppress his…
This short story won a 1994 Associated Writing Programs Intro Fiction Award and was first published in the Fall 1994 edition of Hayden's Ferry Review. It presages my novel Flicker in the Porthole Glass as an attempt to mythologize my experiences living in Philadelphia in the mid-1980s. It also attempts to comment on the nature…
Elvis Presley and a host of life coaches, motivational speakers, analysts, and maybe even mom and dad have all told us to "follow that dream." For the fiction writer, especially for the writer of literary fiction (a species nearly on the verge of extinction), following that dream, holding onto to it, is a challenge: the…
(This short story originally appeared in volume 23, numbers 1 and 2, of Pennsylvania English.) Download the entire story. [PDF]
In an earlier post, I presented an experiment in film, music, and short fiction I prepared for a reading I gave at the University of Maine in 2007. It blends clips and stills of Joe Strummer and The Clash, and excerpts from my short bio fic piece, “Joe Strummer Along the Westway to Heaven.” You…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 