“Maybe it’s just our generation, but there’s always been this constant pressure to actively work towards success, money, or fame… There’s this fear that if you haven’t made a name for yourself by the age of twenty, you’ll never be successful,” says a member of Kindergarten Breakfast, a highschool-based satire band, “And when you’re working with the arts, that pressure is even more extreme. You have to be amazing. You have to be the best. You have to be something the world’s never seen, or it feels like you’re nothing at all. It’s absolutely dreadful on the mind—it makes you feel worthless, it makes you feel guilty if you’re not always working, working, working . . . and it’s exhausting. Oh boy, is it exhausting.”
Amazing.…
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Darrin Doyle is quite an accomplished writer, having published two novels (Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet: A Love Story and The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo), a sequence of fiction (The Dark Will End the Dark), and many individual pieces in various journals over the last decade. Couple that with his diverse history of jobs (including paperboy, pizza delivery job, janitor, door-to-door salesman, telemarketer, and janitor)—as well as his experiences living around the country and teaching English in Japan—and it’s no surprise that his latest short story collection, Scoundrels Among Us, radiates a mixture of [mostly] down-to-earth situations and eloquently refined yet quite accessible language. While not every piece in it is as conclusive, eventful, and/or impactful as it could be, they’re all at least enjoyably inventive, with a few downright enthralling entries that’ll stick with you long after you’ve read them.…
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In the aftermath of my father’s terminal cancer diagnosis, I “repatriated” myself into small town life in my hometown in rural Minnesota.
Among the major cultural differences between life in downtown Chicago and a prairie town of 1,500 people (population, ethnic food, lack of diversity, etc.) lie a few more insignificant quirks. Everybody knows each other. The same woman has been working at the grocery store since I was a child, my best friends’ parents run many of the businesses in town, people I don’t even recognize call me by name when I see them at the library. And because of this connectedness, one cannot simply mail a package or buy the newspaper or stop in to the butcher for a round tip steak without answering a line of questioning that always began with:
“How is your Dad doing?”…
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On March 7, 2004, the lifeless body of 62-year-old Spalding Gray was pulled from Manhattan’s East River. He had been missing for two months. An actor/storyteller who wrote and performed autobiographical monologues for stage and screen—his most well-known is Swimming to Cambodia—Gray had apparently committed suicide.
Gray became famous by talking about—among other things—his experiences in the warm waters of Southeast Asia while working as an actor in the acclaimed 1984 movie, The Killing Fields. But he ended his life twenty years later in the cold waters off New York City. Was he aware, during the last moments of his life, of that morbid irony? …
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“Mere, pere, și bretele,” went the old Romanian joke, which loses all its rhyming wordplay in English: “apples, pears, and suspenders.” This was my first exposure to the indignities of female body image, and it came not, as you might imagine, from my mother, but from my dad. A recognized world-class curmudgeon, my father never even tried to reign in his colorful expressions to shelter the budding sensibilities of his daughter and only child. He would repeat this joke with glee, ignoring my mother’s frowns; I would giggle blithely.
If you haven’t realized already, the joke refers to the physical state of a woman’s breasts through life: in her youth, firm apples standing proud on her chest; in her middle age, pears tugged by gravity earthwards; and finally, in late life, suspenders that have entirely given up their shape and the fight with gravity.…
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