She Hearts Short Stories

...and writes them, too!

Lindsay Tigue has a short story in the new issue of Bearcreekfeed.  Her story, "Shudder, Click," is wonderful and compact, somehow starting in a photo booth and stretching back a lifetime, and forward, too.

Lindsay blogs about short stories, too, at I Heart Short Stories, also in the blogroll here.  And May is Short Story Month, so 1) give her a visit and 2) read some short stories!

I am celebrating Short Story Month by returning to Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock. I'd started it earlier, intrigued by her introduction about weaving family history and fiction, and then life and other reading tore me away.

Rejoining the book, not sure where I'd left off (bookmark taken out for re-shelving), I started with the stories in Part Two, Home, and loved them. Munro has that ability to just say it, to include everything true and of interest, down to Canadian geography and exploring crypts in an old cemetery.

Now I've returned to Part One, No Advantages, where I'll learn more about family history and people who left Scotland to settle in Canada.

Good that I'm reading it how, as I'm headed to Canada this summer for this, a week of Toronto Pursuits, and specifically this, Strange Bedfellows, for which I'll need to re-read Billy Budd, by Herman Melville, Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann, and "The Turn of the Screw," by Henry James, linked by the marvelous coincidence that they were all made into operas by Benjamin Britten.

This and other fantastic "learning vacations," chances to travel and talk with literary-minded people, are available at Classical Pursuits, the lovechild of Ann Kirkland.

Additional random coincidii here are that the discussion leaders for Classical Pursuits are often also discussion leaders for Great Books Chicago, where short story writer Lindsay Tigue helps it all happen in her job with the Great Books Foundation.

This "full circle" moment is in the twisted shape of the infinity symbol.

Sometimes the travel pursuits go to the Blyth Theatre Festival, with Blyth in the heart of Munro Country. And sometimes Alice Munro stories come to Joliet, Illinois, just up the road from me!