Thursday, February 10, 2011

Sick as a Dog & Linked Stories

Yes, cough, cough…I shook hands with a germy poet or the cough drop scented waitress infected me or whatever, but I have the so-called AWP Plague. Regular posting will resume next week when I emerge from my DayQuil/NyQuil haze and am feeling fit as a fiddle (sorry for the clichés, but I can’t think clearly!).

In the meantime, please check out this great discussion of linked stories written by my friend Dylan Landis: http://www.dylanlandis.com/notebook/?p=352

“I began rereading linked collections, among them Harriet Doerr’s Stones for Ibarra, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Elissa Schappell’s Use Me, and Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich, to see what I didn’t know. Sometimes, when you are in dire need of a craft lesson, one book opens itself up like a flower for your inspection, and for me, that book was Love Medicine. It revealed that stories can be crocheted together so intricately and dimensionally that they form a kind of lacework.

“It made my own linked stories look like a child’s paper chain.”