Yesterday Lindsay and I held our first apartment-wide Short Story Slam.
Drawing from the bookshelves located a strategic intervals throughout our downtown loft, we transported a number of chosen authors to a living room staging area and dug in.
The scheme was simple. After a preliminary “warm-up” period, during which we each read several stories of our choosing, we entered the Slam proper. Lindsay “assigned” me a story she had just read: I consumed “The Wild Plums” by Grace Stone Coates as she continued her independent explorations. Then we discussed.
Then it was my turn. I made Lindsay read Julio Cortazar’s “The Distances” while I forged ahead. And so it went: alternating assignments, which the other reader continued to accumulate new material, the sessions punctuated by brief discussion.
In a word, delicious.
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Short Story Slam
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4 comments:
This certainly makes me wish I'd married someone who defined 'reading' as something more than one does with street signs and comics!
ok, so here's my big question. Is that a picture of your books, and if it is, what's your favorite short story by Orson Scott Card?
I'm torn between several. The Changed Man and the King of Words, is a thousand classical tales retold from one family's point of view, a clash of the modern and the mythic, science vs. magic, free will vs. fate, an epic in 12,000 words, while The Porcelain Salamander is a simple tale of love and sacrifice that never fails to bring tears to my wife's eyes. Unaccompanied Sonata gently pulls me into joy-laced sadness everytime I read it while A Thousand Deaths which seems dark at first, is actually a tale of hope.
So, I'm torn you see. But as Card's stories are, if anything bittersweet, I'm interested in whether you have an answer.
oh yeah reading is a good habit
it can also be interesting...
Hey erin, maybe you could bring your husband along slowly. Try and get him to read a James Patterson novel, or something similar that is essentially a comic book without pictures.
Gymbrall, that is indeed my pile of books, and I've been pondering the Card question.
I'm tempted to run off and read a couple more stories before I answer...
I haven't read The Changed Man or A Thousand Deaths yet, so (although that fact will soon change) I'm forced to answer re: the other two stories.
I think Unaccompanied Sonata gets my nod for its "joy-laced sadness." That story has a haunting quality to it. It would be hard to read it just once.
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