News for a new year

I am as always a spotty blogger on this website, but I try to pop in when I have something I feel compelled to say (as per my last blog post today) and when I have some news to deliver.  This post is some news.

If you follow my Facebook or Twitter pages, you’ll already know the first bit, which was announced a couple of months ago now, I think:

In August I’ll be publishing a very short collection of three stories (plus one essay!) called, Birds and Birthdays, which will be produced by L. Timmel Duchamp at Aqueduct Press, a press I’ve always loved and for which I never thought I’d have a project that fits their mission, and then I surprised myself with a small book that does fit in.  Birds and Birthdays collects three stories–“The Creation of Birds,” “The Guardian of the Egg,” and “Birthday” all of which are my fictional narrative responses to the surrealist art work of the painters Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning, respectively. Along with the tiptrych of stories will be an essay entitled “Re-membering the Body: Reconstructing the Female in Surrealism” that provides a context for the women surrealist artists who were working in the Modernist period of Surrealism, when the men were exhibited but the women were excluded from public showings and thought of as mere attachments to their artist boyfriends or husbands or friends.

These artists have been a huge, huge influence on my writing, despite their work being visual, for years now.  I am so happy to have these three stories collected in one place finally (two had been published in separate anthologies in the past decade), along with the essay, as they were intended.

My other big news is that I’ll be publishing a full-length collection of short stories called, Before and Afterlives, with Lethe Press in March of 2013.  The table of contents will most likely collect around twenty stories I’ve published over the past decade, all of which revolve around characters just on the precipice of great change in their lives, or afterward–sometimes long after, beyond the grave.

I started out writing short stories before ever trying to tackle a novel, and the short story is still a favored form for me.  I am so grateful and excited to bring these two collections out in the coming months, after many years of endeavoring to make them.  I hope they’ll find a warm audience waiting for them.

Thanks,
Chris