Midnight Impressions

A WRITER'S WIT
From the happy-go-lucky days of oil exploration and drilling, when a lot of easy sources were being found and easily managed, we've gotten ourselves into this sort of apocalyptic time. We're willing to destroy almost everything, risk almost anything, and go ahead with techniques for which we have no way of responding to the known problems.
Carl Safina
Born May 23, 1955

Check out my newest story, "Delia's Reunions," published in the most recent issue of VCU's distinguished journal, Blackbird!

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Jason Holley

May 23, 2016, Lauren Groff, “The Midnight Zone”: The Florida spring break vacation for a family of four is disrupted when the father is called away, and the mother falls and splits her head open. ¶ At this point the first-person narrative from her point of view becomes even more inward: lantern batteries that burn out, increased rainfall, the night lengthening to an eternity, and scores of other impressions that the woman accumulates flat on her back waiting for her husband to return from what he projects to be a forty-eight-hour trip. It isn’t. When he finally does show (a woman has jumped from the building he owns), the mother and two children and dog are lumped into one bed:

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My husband filled the door. He is a man born to fill doors. I shut my eyes. When I opened them, he was enormous above me. In his face was a thing that made me go quiet inside, made a long slow sizzle creep up my arms from the fingertips, because the thing I read in his face was the worst, it was fear, and it was vast, it was elemental, like the wind itself, like the cold sun I would soon feel on the silk of my pelt (73).

Goff’s impressionistic writing is rife throughout the 4,250-word story. One wants to underline most of it, to recall its at once soothing yet unsettling lines. Another one of the her fine stories appeared in the magazine in 2015, and her third novel, Fates and Furies, came out in September.
Illustration by Jason Holley.

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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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