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Out & Back — The latest newsletters, May 2023
My American Cousin
Bruce McCall, a writer for the New Yorker
Lady Baker, slaves, & and the sword hunters of Hamran
A curious story…
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Out & Back — The latest newsletters, April 2023
The Waning of the World
Microstories
Confusion in the Blood
Introduction to Merle Collins’s novel The Colour of Forgetting
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Out & Back — The latest newsletters, March 2023
Happy, a Song
that will make you happy
The Early Days of Tech
Microstory
As It Falls
A note on Donald Breckenridge’s new novel
Human, All Too Human
My relationship with ChatGPT
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Out & Back — The latest newsletters, February 2023
The McNeilledge Table
More family furniture tales
I know I have sworn off teaching but…
Old habits die hard–story model and exercise
Coffee enemas, Sunday night hockey, Viagra jokes, & playing Scrabble with cats
Random excerpts from a writer’s intimate diary
Death on the Mountain
My unfortunate Uncle William and his adventures in the Alps
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Out & Back — The latest newsletters, January 2023
Happy
How to stop being “a writer” and be happy instead
Neon Memories
Continued adventures of a young writer determined to make an ass of himself
Peludis and Radames
Microstory with notes
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And This, With Wings, a short story | upstreet
Just what every creative writing student fears: Her writing instructor steals her short story then murders her (with a chunk of granite) to cover up the evidence.
Here’s a taste:
He had never experienced inspiration at that level, had never felt so alive. And This, With Wings by Finbar Hanlon. He could see the cover of the book, the Publishers Weekly starred review. He couldn’t stop himself from fantasizing but felt sick at heart. In a spasm of guilt, he clicked the file and hit DELETE. Then spent a frenzied minute scouring the TRASH folder and restoring the file. He was terrified his computer might crash and the file disappear into the ether. He attached the file to an email and sent it to himself. Safe now, he thought, when he saw the email appear in his inbox. It was the child of his heart.
For more information and for orders, visit upstreet’s Facebook group or the magazine’s web page.
(December, 2022)
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Out & Back — The latest newsletters, December 2022
Gilead Lodge and Uncle Walter’s Pelican
The family cottages at Turkey Point
And This, With Wings
A short story
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Teeth, a short story | above/ground press
above/ground press in Ottawa has just published my short story “Teeth” as a chapbook. “Teeth”, as you might have guessed from the title, is a romantic comedy set in a dentist’s office. The hero falls in love with his hygienist and experiences satori during a root canal (with Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels playing in the background). He claims to have “seen the universe in a bicuspid.” Here’s a taste:
She attaches the bib. I can smell the minty aura of her breath, hear the faint passionate susurration of the air going in and out through her nasal passages, feel the hot, gentle anxiety of her soul through the tender ministrations of her fingers. She drops a curette with a clatter, bends to retrieve the errant instrument, and braces herself with her hand upon my knee. “Sorry,” she whispers. “I know your knees bother you.” Her eyes are fixed on mine, wide with surprise at the intimate territory that has opened up between us. When she bends toward me to fix the lead-filled x-ray cape over my shoulders, I try to kiss her, something I have always longed to do. “No,” she says. “We mustn’t.” She glances toward the open door. We can hear Hackenfeller brow-beating, actually verbally assaulting, a frightened patient down the hall. Someone moans, a languid, drawn-out moan of resignation and capitulation. “Open, please,” says Clara, determined to go through the motions.
Click here to buy the chapbook.
(November 30, 2022)
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Out & Back — The latest newsletters, November 2022
Teeth
A short story
Max & Yolanda Blender
Exceedingly short fiction/long commentary
The Devil’s Syntax
A note on eating babies in fiction
A Family Massacre
My great-great-grandfather and the Sovereign murders of 1832
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Out & Back — The latest newsletters, October 2022
Leaving VCFA 3
Bye Bye, the last in the series
Leaving VCFA 2
Perhaps more to follow
Leaving VCFA 1
To be continued probably
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Out & Back — The latest newsletters, September 2022
Keep all your blushes for me
Love letters on the frontier
My father, Tyrone Power, & me
How Hollywood conspired at my birth
Bruce Stone & the Art of Desire
Literary criticism & dg
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Photographs below were taken by Douglas Glover except for the ones in which he appears, which were taken by Jacob Glover (Nova Scotia beach pictures) and Melissa Fisher (British Columbia beach picture).
“And I thought how Proust teaches us that all love resides
in anticipation and not the beloved,
that love achieved is only on loan,
that we are martyrs to our desires, which are endless.”
Douglas Glover, Savage Love