Michael Czyzniejewski has taken on the monumental task of reading a short story per day for a (leap) year, and then blogging about it. February 29th, people, just another day to Michael. Anyway, his blog invariably manages to be compelling, even when –especially when–documenting the mundane circumstances surrounding his reading experience–life is always hovering at the fringes of his readings and sometimes interlopes, and this candor only enriches them. Here he took a look at Understories and at “The Understory” in particular, and I couldn’t be more thankful for his thoughtful discussion of the story/book. https://story366blog.wordpress.com/2016/05/13/may-12-the-understory-by-tim-horvath/

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The first longer excerpt from my novel-in-progress, The Spinal Descent, will appear in the Spring 2016 issue of Conjunctions. Considering how much this journal has meant to me over the years, I couldn’t be happier to let the novel run off the leash a bit in its pages. May it find a creek and scamper in and come out sopping and shaking. More information about the issue and my fellow contributors, so many of whom I admire, can be found here: http://www.conjunctions.com/preview.htm.

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Kenneth Nichols, who runs the ever-lively website Great Writers Steal, put the opening page of “The Discipline of Shadows” under the microscope and had some perceptive things to say about it here: http://www.greatwriterssteal.com/2015/12/05/gws-first-page-inquisition-tim-horvaths-the-discipline-of-shadows/

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I’ve got a “Recommendation” on Zadie Smith’s On Beauty in Post Road 29, alongside recommendations by Jac Jemc and many others, plus fiction by Jamie Poissant, in addition to the usual great fare that the journal serves up. You can read the piece at http://www.postroadmag.com/29/recommends/horvath.phtml, or sift through the issue at http://www.postroadmag.com/index.phtml. My piece spotlights the book’s treatment of music and the sheer music of Smith’s prose.

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Take Magazine is a thoroughly snazzy new glossy presence on the newsstand–not the proverbial one but the actual newsstand. I love their look, at once vintage and wholly contemporary, and their knack for sniffing out offbeat stories about New England culture and the arts. I was thrilled to meet writer Janet Reynolds at the Hartford Public Library to talk shop (and forest and conservatory). You can check out the article here: https://thetakemagazine.com/what-lies-beneath/. You can also get an early, morsel-sized glimpse of The Spinal Descent, my novel-in-progress.

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Okay, now I’m going to gush about one of my favorite local entities, the Portsmouth Public Library. They have a top-notch collection that runs the gamut from the big presses to independents like Dalkey Archive, Europa, Coffee House, and Dorothy. They have mahjong every Saturday morning. They run a How-to Festival that this year included how to compost with worms, tie knots, dance the Masala bhangra, and make a firefly(!). And, last but not least, they’ve started their own magazine to capture goings-on, offer book reviews, and profile some of their patrons. Marina Buckler was kind enough to interview me for their debut issue, even though I think I had a few overdue items at the time. You can check it all out, including a literary Mad-Lib, here: (our conversation is on pg. 15): The Parrott Summer 2015.

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What a pleasure to get to write about pg. 116-140 of Norman Rush’s Mating at the Paris Review Daily, the latest installment in their ongoing Mating Book Club. The journal honored Rush with their Hadada Award for a lifelong contribution to letters at their Annual Spring Revel. Here’s a link to my piece, in which our narrator reveals her secret for never being bored, then heads out into the desert with a couple of donkeys: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/27/6-a-craving-for-silence/

 

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The gorgeous new journal The Square (yep, it’s perfectly square–I checked) which focuses on arts and culture in the greater Portsmouth area, published a conversation between myself and my writer friend Katherine Towler. Katie is the author of, among many books, the forthcoming nonfiction book The Penny Poet of Portsmouth, which Publishers Weekly described as “a beautiful portrait of friendship and writing.” We strolled around the Great Bay Wildlife Refuge and talked about writing and other stuff with bulky binoculars dangling around our necks in case of fortuitous bird sightings that only happened in the parking lot. You can read the entirety of the conversation, minus the quavering in the cold, here: http://www.pageturnpro.com/Mclean-Communications-Inc/65380-The-Square–Spring-2015/index.html#28.

 

 

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I can think of few gifts more gratifying than having one’s work set to music, and thus I’m so pleased to be able to share the piece “Internodium,” where composer Sam Nichols takes an excerpt from this story of mine (or maybe it is a prose poem?) and transforms it into something utterly new.

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I was fortunate to be able to interview composer Christopher Cerrone, whose musical adaptation of Calvino’s Invisible Cities sent me reeling in the best possible ways.

The resulting conversation is up at the Tin House blog:

http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/38903/invisible-cities-an-interview-with-christopher-cerrone.html

 

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