Andrew Roe

“Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We’re talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experience in economical ways: Let’s not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.”

Don DeLillo, from a Paris Review interview

I have another new story out in the world this week (yes, it’s been a good week).

This one is called “What I Say to Myself.” It’s in the latest issue of You Must Be This Tall to Ride.

Edited by BJ Hollars, the site focuses on coming-of-age stories and is a continuation of this anthology.

The new issue also features work by Cyn Kitchen, Kate Flaherty, William Lusk Coppage and Chris Wiewiori.

Enjoy!

That’s the title of a new story that appears in the current issue of the Foundling Review.

Here’s how it begins:

“There is a husband across the hall who looks at me. Two doors down, to the left, opposite side, near the emergency exit, with a wife I never see, yet I know she exists because there have been periodic sightings over the years, like the sightings of a rare, delicate, beautifully named bird.“

Like all the stories I’ve been writing lately, this one is pretty short.

The issue also features commentary by Randall Brown.

“A good [short story] collection has a deep coherence buried inside. I think the way one story plays off another, the way a collection adds up to a single vision is a deeply complex thing, one that hasn’t been addressed enough in criticism. I’m a big fan of original collections. I love the way the stories line up in a book like Hemingway’s In Our Time, or George Saunders’ Pastoralia, or Christine Schutt’s Nightwork. You feel a small thread weaving through them, almost invisible, maybe simply a thread made of the fact that they all have some deeply complex nuanced style and a concern passing from one story to the next. As a reader, you’re moved from one completely individual unit to the next, and you know that they’re not linked and that they can stand on their own, but you still have a kind of sense, in the end, that you’ve been through an experience that comes from the complete entity. (I’ve said this before, but it’s akin to listening to something like Radiohead’s OK Computer, or, better yet, Bach’s French Suites.)”

David Means, from an interview with Tom Barbash