Tag: Short Story Friday

Short Story Friday: Sign of the Gun by P.D. Mallamo

This story is for the fans of modern, gritty literary fiction. If you aren’t one, then skip it because next week we’ll start a run of stories by people connected to AMV. Submissions continue to come in — we’re up to 25 total — but if you have something good, please don’t hesitate to toss it in to the spreadsheet. The form is below.

But I do it a disservice by using terms like gritty and literary. It’s a good story. The Mormon-ness is used well and used thoroughly. If you like Cormac McCarthy or Flannery O’Connor (or extrapolate from those two names to get to your favorite authors if possible), then you should give it a try.

Title: Sign of the Gun

Author: P.D. Mallamo

Publication Info: Granta Online, April 28, 2008

Submitted by: Theric Jepson

Why?: “This was the first story published as part of GRANTA’s New Voices series. Mallamo who is a Mormon* from Arizona and attended BYU which, he says, ‘In cultural terms…was a lot like going to school overseas and having to learn a new language, and as such was one of the great experiences of my life’—–

This story is heavy on the Mormonism and an email to myself reminding me to read it has been staring at me since mid-April 2008. I may never actually read it if you don’t pick it, William, and I really want to.”

Content Warning: Some violence and drug references. Oddly enough, there’s no profanity.

Participate:

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* Corrected 5/15: Th has found a source that suggest that Mallamo is Mormon.

Short Story Friday: The Bluest Eye by Lance Larsen

As Tyler points out below, this is technically creative nonfiction. But it’s a story. And it’s short. And it’s by Lance Larsen. And its features the name La Vawn.

Title:

Author: Lance Larsen

Publication Info: Brevity 29, January 2009

Submitted by: Tyler Chadwick

Why?: “Though this isn’t technically a short story, it is a very short narrative that shows Larsen’s poetic acuity and that blurs the generic distinctions we like to make. It also speaks to some interesting things about sight and perspective, about how we view the world, and about the wonder of human relationships (as comes through the eyes [pun intended] of childhood).”

Participate:

Submit to Short Story Friday

Possible online sources of stories and link to spreadsheet with current submissions

All Short Story Friday posts so far

Short Story Friday: “Jim of Provo” by Tim Slover

Now that all that poetry nonsense is over* we can get back to the good stuff: short stories. And with the return of Short Story Friday, I hope some of you out there will dig back into some of the archives and come up with some good finds. For example, the following story is the only Sunstone story submitted so far.

Title: Jim of Provo (links to search results with PDF download of the story)

Author: Tim Slover

Publication Info: Sunstone, June 1998

Submitted by: Andrew H.

Why?: “Modern-day Job. Interesting switches of tone from the somewhat silly scenes in heaven, to the serious scenes of a suicidal Jim. The biggest problem is that the formatting is off, it was in my original copy of the magazine, and I see it still is off in the PDF. There are a few lines of the story lost.”

Wm adds a teaser line for you: “God’s coyness about free will and determinism gets my goat.”

Content warning: As Andrew mentions, this story alternates the events leading up to and the act of suicide (slight spoiler, but the act isn’t really the point of the story) with humor. I think that it’ll work for most readers, but if you have particular sensitivities to the subject, you might want to pass this one up.

Participate:

Submit to Short Story Friday

Possible online sources of stories and link to spreadsheet with current submissions

All Short Story Friday posts so far

* I play the curmudgeon, but seriously: many thanks to all the AMV bloggers and commenters who participated and the other Mormon lit bloggers who embraced the spirit of the month. And a big thank you to Laura Craner for sparking the whole thing. Yes, I know that poetry shouldn’t need a month, but the reality is that I, at least, often avoid it and so this was a good reminder of what’s to like about the form.

Short Story Friday: “A Picture of My Father as a Young Man” by Eugene Woodbury

This will be our last Short Story Friday for a bit — this feature is going on hiatus for a month so that AMV can celebrate National Poetry Month (more on that when April hits). This week, we’re circling back to Popcorn Popping for a story by Eugene Woodbury.

Title: A Picture of My Father as a Young Man

Author: Eugene Woodbury

Publication Info: Popcorn Popping, Sept. 2006 [Wow — was it really that long ago?]

Submitted by: Eugene Woodbury

Why?: Eugene writes:

“This story is based on a true incident, the Schenectady/Glenville (New York) ward chapel burning down.”

Wm adds: What I liked about this story when we accepted it for publication was how it brings together the issue of children with much older parents (often the result of second marriages) and on how some generations of Mormons, those who were around when congregations paid for and built their own chapels, have a different relationship to their ward buildings than younger generations. In particular, it fits in to my own Mormon lit hobby of desiring more stories that deal with the issues that arose/arise out of the post-WWII Mormon diaspora.

Participate:

Submit to Short Story Friday

Possible online sources of stories and link to spreadsheet with current submissions

All Short Story Friday posts so far

Short Story Friday: Mother’s Day by Nephi Anderson

Switching back to something very old school this week — next week will be something by one of the AMV crowd.

Title: Mother’s Day

Author: Nephi Anderson

Publication Info: The Relief Society Magazine, January 1916

Submitted by: Theric Jepson

Why?: Theric writes — “.

This is an extra short story from Nephi Anderson at his preachiest. It gives a nice taste of Home Lit at its homelittiest. Plus, it shows that the Mother’s Day troubles we often hear of are older than you or I.”

Participate:

Submit to Short Story Friday

Possible online sources of stories and link to spreadsheet with current submissions

All Short Story Friday posts so far

Short Story Friday: “Talk” by S.P. Bailey

So after pouncing on the opportunity presented by the AML Awards, we’re picking back up with submissions to Short Story Friday. Some of these early submissions are some of us active AMVers talking up each other’s and our own work.

But that’s okay because there are some good short stories involved.

Title: Talk

Author: S.P. Bailey

Publication Info: Popcorn Popping, December 2007

Submitted by: Wm Morris

Why?: “I don’t think that this is Shawn’s best short story even though it’s pretty good and quite funny. But I think it’s worth reading because it addresses a specific element of Mormon culture: giving a Sacrament Meeting talk. And especially because it is in very relatable for those of us who’d love instruct our fellow ward members in the appropriate way to give a talk or bear a testimony. Of course, it doesn’t quite turn out the way the main character in the story hopes.”

Participate:

Submit to Short Story Friday

Possible online sources of stories and link to spreadsheet with current submissions

All Short Story Friday posts so far

Short Story Friday: “Amanuensis” by Stephen Tuttle

As mentioned in my post on the 2008 AML Awards, this week’s Short Story Friday features the 2008 winner for short fiction — it’s awesome that the story is available online because oftentimes the winners aren’t. Next week something from Popcorn Popping and the week after that another story from Dialogue. Still looking for someone to pull a story out of the Sunstone archives. I’ll see what I can do about that in the next couple of weeks, but if something comes to mind fill out the form that’s linked to below.

Title: Amanuensis

Author: Stephen Tuttle

Publication Info: Hayden’s Ferry Review, Issue 42 (Spring/Summer 2008)

Submitted by: Wm Morris

Why?: Because it won the 2008 AML Award for Short Fiction. To be honest, I haven’t read it yet and probably won’t until tomorrow morning.

Participate:

Submit to Short Story Friday

Possible online sources of stories and link to spreadsheet with current submissions

All Short Story Friday posts so far

Short Story Friday: Just Cut on the Dotted Line by Jack Weyland

For this week’s pick, I’m going to go with a story from the New Era. We’ll get to a Popcorn Popping story next week and we have several more excellent submissions of stories that appeared in Dialogue. Nothing from Sunstone so far, though. And so far no women have submitted to the spreadsheet.

Title: Just Cut on the Dotted Line

Author: Jack Weyland

Publication Info: New Era, 1997

Submitted by: Theric Jepson

Why?: Theric writes — “.

“My only run-in with Weyland to this point was his egocentric If Talent Were a Pizza self-help book. Which turned me off him as nothing else could.

“Fastforward a couple years to the final weeks of my mission. We’re in the church waiting for someone and, huh, and English-language New Era. Weird. I pick it up, read the cartoon then the fiction. And maybe it’s because I was nearly two-years fictionf ree, but I loved it. When I saw who it was written by I was shocked.

“But apparently, I still haven’t quite forgiven him for his Pizza monstrosity as I’ve never read anything else of his since.”

Thanks Theric!

Participate:

Submit to Short Story Friday

Possible online sources of stories and link to spreadsheet with current submissions

All Short Story Friday posts so far

Short Story Friday: The Willows by Eileen Kump

There have been some excellent submissions so far to Short Story Friday. But too many of them are from Popcorn Popping and several are rather self-serving. That’s not a bad thing at all and we will get to them, but to kick things off, I decided to dig deep in to Dialogue’s archives. Here’s what I came up with:

Title: The Willows

Author: Eileen Kump

Publication Info: Dialogue v. 8, no. 2 (1973)

Why?: For these words: “If she heard the boulder.” Sorry to be so coy, but really, when the story hit that point all of a sudden it got me good.

Note: If you perfectly center the bottom slider the text should just fit in the window. Otherwise you have to scroll left and right.

Submit to Short Story Friday

Possible online sources and link to spreadsheet with current submissions

Short Story Friday: The Plan

Thanks to your encouraging comments, I have decided to go forward with the Short Story Friday experiment. Yep, we’re going to crowdsource the Mormon short stories available online. The premise is this:

  1. That there are numerous Mormon-themed short stories available for free on the Internet.
  2. That the best way to find the goods ones is via a crowd-sourcing project.
  3. That this will not only be entertaining and interesting, but that it will create a data set that may be of use to the Mormon Literature Database and perhaps the AML, and more importantly that this will be a nice way to collect some of the better and/or more interesting stories out there. The idea is to not be exhaustive, but to create exposure for the stories that participating individuals dig up.

How it’s going to work:

Continue reading “Short Story Friday: The Plan”