Other people’s dreams are boring, aren’t they? In direct inverse proportion to how intensely interesting our own are. Don’t worry, I’m not going to detail mine, partly because I can’t remember them in the cold light of the grey January day that is today. But oh boy. They were vivid. And awful. I do remember … Continue reading Dreaming in fiction
It gets a bit much, this writing malarkey. The weight of my own expectations. The need for validation. Blame my childhood. Blame my hormones. Something. When I get like this I retreat into books. The Artist’s Way tells me it’s imperative to have an Artist’s Date with myself. Quite tricky in lockdown, but there’s always … Continue reading New Year’s Eve 2020
Came across a reference to Peter Christopher in Consider This by Palahnuik. Christopher taught Palahnuik to write in first person but ‘submerge the I.’ Sounds like great life advice, never mind writing.
Somehow Christopher’s slipped away, out of print. This link/reblog contains a Christopher short story called Flight. I would love to read more.
This book is probably the best example of these unfairly forgotten books and of a great writer few knew and who is no longer with us to share his words and sentences.
Peter Christopher was a Lish student from the Columbia U days (along with Amy Hempel, Christopher Coe and Anderson Ferrell), whose collection,Campfires of the Dead (1989) is as fine a first volume of short stories as any of the best being released today via the Flannery O’Connor Award, the AWP Awards, Drue Heinz, Juniper, Dzanc, or the Iowa Short Fiction Award. The fifteen stories were developed in Lish’s class and published in either The Quarterly or a special issue of StoryQuarterly that Lish edited. We remember well, in 1989, finding this book in a Los Angeles store and getting giddy when reading it. Where did this whacky gfeat fun stuff come from? They are quirky stories about…
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Just waving 