Fiction, and other made-up stories
The SUV goes down the road and turns around. It parks on the other side of the street. A man in a turban gets out and starts picking up tennis balls that have flown over the fence from the court. I’m watching videos on my front porch, on the other side of the […]
Like come on, what’s better than music? More amazing songs out there than I can keep track of, but here are the gems released in 2021 so far, that I’ve come across. I promise not to let you down! These are great. The Right Thing is Hard to Do – Lightning Bug Slow, serene, dreamy. […]
I see him every day. He comes to the park and sits on a bench. He eats there and reads. Behind him are trees. When he leaves, I find what he has thrown away. They are wrappers and newspapers. At night, I smell them. […]
‘The first time Jeff Topper realized that something odd was happening, he had been trying to return a wallet to a person on Bank Street. He’d run up to the person and handed it back. No response. The person had just kept walking. Jeff had waved his arms and dangled the wallet in front of […]
Am I Unbalanced? I have dozens of boxes of books in my basement. This week, I put up bookshelves, and went through those boxes, deciding what books I would keep, and what I would discard. I found an old copy of The Sound and the Fury, and remembered how much I loved that strange, unbalanced […]
There were several ancillary matters of interest surrounding Balloonfest, a fundraising event sponsored by the United Way in Cleveland, Ohio on September 27, 1986. During the main event, one and a half million balloons were released into the air from a central containment structure that measured the size of a city block. Netting was anchored […]
The book or the movie version, the original or the remake. Questions I ask myself, as I wonder which side of those coins I sit on. Am I the book or the movie version? Am I an original or a remake of something? Orzabal Roland, through some strange compulsion, wrote a bouncy, upbeat song in […]
Hi all, I managed to make the CBC Short Story Prize longlist this year. The 33 longlisted entries out of the 3000 submissions are located here: https://www.cbc.ca/1.5970008. My individual page is here: https://www.cbc.ca/books/literaryprizes/titan-arum-by-trent-lewin-1.5976780 This is my third straight year being longlisted. Feeling awfully humbled and a little overwhelmed. But really happy. If you’d like to […]
The first child’s name was Mali. Jen had always wanted to go to Africa, but had been afraid of planes, so she’d named her daughter after an African country. Brad had gone along with it. Most truck drivers didn’t care about Africa. “Do you want to make me a popsicle?” asked Brad. “You don’t just […]
I don’t have much to say today. I sat down yesterday and plotted a few short stories to write over the next few weeks, as well as work on a next novel. My work life has been all-consuming lately. Three straight seventy-hour weeks, but that will abate now. My writing dream began when I was […]
