eSCENE 1997 Authors
Darrin Navarro, Atlas' Hips
"I live in a modest house in Glendale, California, with my wife and our two kids. There is a detached garage behind the house which serves during my prolific periods as my writing space. I've recently cleared it of a bunch of stuff that we don't really need, and am trying to jumpstart one of those periods again."The mortgage on the house is paid with work I do for the movies."
Of Atlas' Hips:
"Atlas' Hips was inspired by two things, each of which had a similar effect on me. The first was some traveling my wife and I did just before we conceived our first child; the second was her second pregnancy. We had travelled very fast, visiting dozens of countries in too short a span of time, and we rarely had an opportunity to thoroughly soak up a moment. By the time our first baby was seventeen months old (the second was due within weeks) I had the same sensation as I had at the end of our trip: that some marvelous things had gone by me very quickly and I'd not known how to observe them fully before they were gone.
"This feeling was distilled and made literal for me when my wife and I were walking past one another in the house and I casually put my hand on my her belly to feel for the new baby. She said, "You're not going to be able to do that anymore." (We were in agreement that this second was our last child). That line seemed to descibe many of the very small but magnificent things I had seen over the previous couple of years."
"I usually agonize over stories for months at a shot, taking weeks to get a single paragraph down and right (or rather, as 'right' as I can get it). "Festival," though, was different - as soon as I had the opening scene on the page, the rest came in a rush, fast and furious: I think because I had such a clear idea of what the backdrop of the action would be. The greasy pole (a real and annual contest at a particular church carnival in Baltimore), the heat of summer, the character's sense of witness and waiting, and the way family members can betray one another without a word: these things seemed to 'tell' themselves."
The inspiration for "Just Another Night and Day" came from a trip her
boyfriend took to Georgia, to pick up a friend's piano. From there it
evolved, very slowly, and with a lot of help from Oyster Boy editor Damon Sauve. Lucy welcomes email questions, comments, or inquiries about her
work, and is always open to publishing in new forums.
"It's been so long since I wrote Kosher that it's a little strange to
revisit that time and remember what gave rise to the story. I did have a
friend with a retarded sister while I was growing up, and when we were in
seventh grade the rumor went around school that he had taken her to bed; I
never spent a lot of time wondering whether the rumor was true or not, but
I suppose this story is a way of letting him off the hook all these years
later. When I started writing it I was working, unhappily, as a paralegal
in California, and taking hockey lessons in an attempt to enrich my free
time: hence hockey's appearance in the story. Beyond these
autobiographical nuggets, Kosher is wholly invented, and stems from my
obsessive neurotic musings on conformity and betrayal."
"As a child, I used to play in the cemetery where Hank Williams is
buried. I also attended a small, liberal arts college, not too
different than the one in the story. Yes, there was a 'real'
George and the Red Lady still walks the halls of the college.
Oh, the Fitzgerald house is still standing. I guess there's something
in the story about man's quest for a nude bibliophile, something
for the great literary symbol hunters to enjoy, but, mostly, I
hope the story makes the reader smile."
When he's not working, writing or trying to make up for chronic sleep
deprivation, he can be found on various balconies around Pittsburgh,
drinking beer with friends and occasionally shouting at passers-by.
"Selections" marks his second appearance in eSCENE.
"'Selections' was conceived during my training in Philadelphia where I saw
report after report reveal that our options for treating infections caused
by organisms we'd cultured from patients were becomming increasingly
limited. The characters are friends of mine, and yes, I do wonder
occasionally if our jobs might not quite literally kill us one of these
days.
"The title is courtesy of the editorial staff of InterText. Without their encouragement, and specifically the help of Jason Snell who helped me
shape the piece, it's likely that I would have abandoned my attempts at
writing years ago."
"I remember that I was interested in writing a small, quiet story. 'When
Something Goes' stems from a few pieces of disparate information. Gossamer
threads, the fireworks displays of my childhood, and a stormy night when I
was 14 or so, living in a small town in rural Iowa in the middle of my
parent's disintegration, are the sources. I tried to let the emotional
content of those items dictate a tone for the story. The plot itself was
simple enough to allow for a wide range of memory and digression while
encapsulating a short time sequence.
"'Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering
Husband' was inspired, as were all the stories in Tabloid Dreams, by the
headlines in that bottom rack at the supermarket, the fantasy-apocalypse
rack, which includes The Weekly World News and The Sun. I figured these papers consistently got the headlines right but the stories all wrong, so I took on the first-person voices of the central characters behind the headlines and set the record straight. I could have placed this story in a
print magazine, but I made the conscious decision to embrace the Web.
Sitting at my computer screen with the whole Internet laid out before me, I
feel the same way my great grandfather must have felt sitting on his front
porch watching his first horseless carriage go by. The technology still
may be crude, but this is the future."
Victoria Lancelotta, Festival
Victoria Lancelotta was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, before driving south a few years back and winding up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Her fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Threepenny Review, the Mississippi Review Web, and other magazines. She has been a resident of the MacDowell Colony and the Djerassi Resident Artists' Program and will be a visiting scholar at the 1997 Breadloaf Writers' Conference. She is the fiction editor of the Georgetown Review.Lucy Harrison, Just Another Night and Day
Lucy Harrison works full time as a Reference Librarian at a community
college in Florida. She has been writing fiction for some years now, since
taking Harry Crews' creative writing class at the University of Florida. Many of Lucy's works have been published online in the ezine Oyster Boy,
and another one of her stories, "Sanctuary's for the Birds", was also
selected for inclusion in eSCENE 1996.Gregory Cowles, Kosher
Gregory Cowles is pursuing his MFA at Columbia University, where he has a
teaching-writing fellowship, and where he serves as editor of Columbia: A
Journal of Literature and Art. He is writing a novel.Allen Woodman, Saved by Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Allen Woodman was born and raised in Alabama. He was educated
at Huntingdon College and Florida State University. Woodman's
latest collection of short stories, Saved by Mr. F. Scott
Fitzgerald, was published in 1997 by The University of West
Alabama's Livingston Press (Station 22, Livingston, AL 35470),
in their Contemporary Writers Series, specializing in offbeat
and Southern literature. Woodman is also the co-author
of several children's picture books, including the popular
classic, The Cows Are Going To Paris. He now lives in
Flagstaff, Arizona, where he directs the Creative Writing Program
at Northern Arizona University.Marcus Eubanks, Selections from the New World
Marcus Eubanks' day (and often night) job as an Emergency Medicine
resident at a big inner-city teaching hospital leaves him rather less time
for writing than he'd really like. He has an almost maniacal passion for
the work though, so he puts up with it. His sole regret about the whole
thing is that unlike the characters in the tv show E.R. he has yet to
arrive home after work to find a lovely dripping-wet nude woman waiting
for him in his living room.Neal Gordon, When Something Goes
Neal Gordon began studying writing at Iowa State University under Jane
Smiley. At her recommendation, he transferred as an undergraduate to the
University of Iowa creative writing program. Following completion of his
degree in general studies, he took Frank Conroy's recommendation and left
the Midwest for the east coast. In 1991, he began to study with David
Bradley at Temple University in Philadelphia and completed graduate school
while publishing several stories, including an excerpt from an unpublished
novel. Currently, Gordon teaches at the Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia
and works with the Working Writer's Group, a long-running critical group
residing in the Philadelphia area.Robert Olen Butler, Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband
Robert Olen Butler has published nine critically acclaimed books since
1981 - seven novels and two books of short stories, one of which, A Good
Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1993.
The other collection of stories, Tabloid Dreams, was published in the fall of 1997 and included "Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband." Though some of the stories in that volume first appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Paris Review, two of them made their debut online, at the Mississippi Review Web. Butler's short fiction has been chosen four times by Best American Short Stories and six times by New Stories from the South. He is currently co-producing a proposed HBO series based on Tabloid Dreams.
