I’ve had a new piece, River Babble, published by 34th Parallel Magazine. It’s a dream about alligators, fate, and the corrosive effects of wind and rain. You can buy it at 34thparallel.net/.
From River Babble:
This is the first piece I’ve published in my recent spat of submissions. In fact, it’s my first piece of published non-journalism since Hideosity, which you shouldn’t read on an empty stomach.
Since writing this, I’ve made contact with folks in Providence who also are interested in super-ancient animals. Particularly, Eli Nixon is obsessed with horseshoe crabs, which are so old we use their immune systems to test vaccines. Just so I don’t leave you thinking alligators are so special . . .
A snippet from my bio in the mag:
I am a walker, like the people in the story. I walk everywhere, and in Philadelphia every street I turn on spools up a set of associations, memories, relationships: when these buildings were built, which other parts of the city they resemble, what I have done, said, seen, and felt there, what other streets branch off and how I feel about them, which turns I usually take and which I don’t like to take and which I will today. I moved to Providence and in comparison Providence presents a vacuum into which anxiety and fear flow. The fear is artificial, but the rootless emptiness isn’t. [. . .] Writing can alienate and de-familiarize, but it can also be an act of familiarization, of naming and staking out and layering associations.
This is what I was thinking about.
juliuswrites 