Back to School

I'm such a lazy blogger, but here goes. It's August 19th and tomorrow is back to school for teachers and vote to strike. Ayee. On the writing front: trying to revise an old story about teaching called "Ana from Panama." I think I finally hit the mark. You know when you write a story and you work on it and it's all polished, but you feel like, Oh, I know if I send that out, it's not going to hit. Even though it's a perfectly good story. What is that about? It's because you are hinting at what you wanted to get at with this story, but you didn't dig deep enough. I was on the surface of that situation, but I had to get down to why the narrator was telling the story in the first place. Get at the HEART of it, as I say in my class. I finished reading the O'Henry collection and was glad I picked it up. Some really fine stories in there. We're discussing Junot Diaz's story "Wildwood," which was in the New Yorker last year. Go on-line and read the New Yorker blog. Diaz (Yunior) responds directly to comments on his story. I'm also reading the Best of the Web collection put out by Dzanc. I found some pretty cool stories in there, but I'm also, once again dismayed at the high number of male writers versus female. I know there are plenty of women writers on the web. Maybe it's the particular take/taste of the Dzanc Editors. I hate to be such a feminist, but the numbers don't lie.
I will try to go on sooner rather than later and talk about the individual stories from that collection that I like.
Steven McDermott is going to (hopefully) have a section of Storyglossia on review of the short story. That should be intellectually interesting. That is about all I read these days. I'm getting ready to reread Angela's Ashes this week and make a project / test for my students' summer reading assignment. Sad sad sad that Frank McCourt is gone.
Writing: Work on a story about music and obsession for Storyglossia. Out.