C a r o l y n D a u g h t e r s

(a story in the form of a voicemail)

Hi, Mom. It’s me. Marianne.

Remember the day you stripped the kitchen? You packed eight teaspoons, eight soupspoons, eight knives, but only seven forks. You looked everywhere for that missing fork, the dishwasher, cabinets, drawers. “It was probably thrown away,” that’s what you said. “That’s what happens when you eat on paper plates. The plates are disposable, and suddenly everything seems disposable.” You wore your trademark look, agitated with a hint of haughty. Once when I broke my arm, I did exercises to increase my range of motion. You might benefit from a similar … Continue Reading

Author Mona Simpson, the judge for Round 10 of NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction

The assignment: Write a short story in the form of a voicemail message. That message must be 600 words or less in length.

Says contest judge Mona Simpson, “It’s spoken, so it has the texture of voice, but … it’s essentially what 100 years ago a short story in the form of a letter would have been. I think we’re hoping for spontaneity and intensity and personality, freedom.”

On … Continue Reading

Yesterday, I told a friend about an NPR report on a book called The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. The book was inspired by the 2004 earthquake in Indonesia, which “was so powerful that it accelerated Earth’s spin, shortening the day by a tiny fraction of a second.”

As NPR reporter Maureen Corrigan notes, the protagonist, Julia, takes us back to “the year everyday life fell apart. At first, Julia tells us, nobody noticed ‘the extra time, bulging from the smooth edge of each day like a tumor blooming beneath skin.’ That so-called extra time is caused … Continue Reading

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the writer’s identity, specifically the public persona and the private, the (wo)man and the wordsmith.

Back in November I heard an NPR interview with author Joan Didion. At the time, I was surprised by how little she had to say, by the faltering way in which she spoke, by the excruciating seconds of dead air that followed her terse responses to open-ended questions. Is this clunky Q&A a subtle form of authorial rebellion, I wondered? Is this most uncomfortable of interviews Didion’s way of telling an overzealous booking agent “screw you”?

Yesterday I read an … Continue Reading

What do you remember, and exactly how do you remember it? I like to say my truth is in my fiction, though I believe I know the one from the other. Still, I probably have as many issues as most folks in differentiating between what really happened and the version I’ve told myself. Our revised accounts are composed of any number of tiny, seemingly innocuous fictions. But, thing is, these mite-sized fictions evolve over time. A detail here. A timeframe there. The cast made larger, smaller. The setting or tone changed. The dialogue made ever so slightly different.

We all have … Continue Reading