Gesture Literary Journal published my short story, “When the Animals Turned on You,” today in their “Monsters” issue, available online here. I wrote it last semester for a class on American Gothic, and I plan to incorporate it into the beginning of my novel.
Yesterday, Gesture invited me to read at their “Monsters” launch party in Fort Collins, Colorado…digitally! It was a strangely lovely experience, reading from my apartment via Skype while sippin’ PBR.
My short story, “Love Letter to Lady Lazarus,” was recently published in Five [Quarterly]‘s Winter 2014 issue, available online here.
I was invited to read for the issue’s launch party this past weekend at MiMoDa Studio in Los Angeles, California. It was my first time in California, and it was badass, I must say.
My list essay on grief, in an effort to resist leaving every piece “untitled,” was published in the December 2013 issue of Gravel.
…except when I’m in the country’s only R-Rated haunted house, of course.
Freakling Bros. “Trilogy of Terror”
My first review for EDGE Las Vegas is live! PS this experience was terrifying (in the best way)!
Perhaps it is because I have never been missed. They have never had the chance to miss me, my neighbors and coworkers and classmates. Two days gone, two weeks gone: nothing. But permanence is at stake, and the threat of life without livelihood. I am unused to being missed by anyone not strictly on the level of close family, a self-selecting club of three. But even they have only had the option to miss for weeks at most; here it has been four months I have lived on my own, two thousand miles from all those folks doing all that missing.
You don’t ask cowboys what they’re running from. Not unless you want ’em to saddle up and move along. Funny, what I miss is the place in which I was most temporary. Ground not yet accustomed to the weight of me, weather still surprising, folks easily delighted, snakecharmer that I am. The itch of boots is no novelty, though, and eventually I will wear through the soles of every space I inhabit.
Telephones house confession boxes and whispered sonnets but poets do not love me. People laugh at how you talk in your new city.
John Wayne compares every city to home and likes the cut of none of them, but home ain’t home no more.
Perhaps it is because my Nana plays hide-and-seek games with the objects I left in my rush to abandon Jonesboro. Or because the hometown I felt unfit for wants me back. There is a reluctance on the part of the tumbleweed to do much other than ramble. It is no ficus.
My most recent review is live on EDGE Atlanta here.
And of course I’m always stoked to be on the homepage! :3
I have often scoffed at the idea of New Year’s resolutions. That they are mimetic in nature, initially robust but ultimately waning. I have considered them lemming-like, in the insistence that one particular day among many can create conditions enough to motivate real change within a habitual human being.
I usually spend my New Year’s Eve appreciating the possibility innate in the turning of the calendar, without making resolutions and declarations about lifestyle changes. Though I participate in the superstitions my Southern family taught me (on New Year’s Day: black-eyed peas for luck, collard greens for cash; of course, spend the first day of the year doing whatever you want to be doing for the rest of the year), I rarely tie myself to public testaments of obligation and life-changing.
This year, however, I am becoming a hypocrite, something my past few years have been full of, which I chalk up to experience and firsthand know-how, and not to a betrayal of the naive values founded in my youth. I am committing to New Year’s Resolutions, not out of an earnest belief in the potential for the magicality of will power on certain annual days, but because of a belief that I, as a human being, am capable of change. Un-static.
My first and chief New Year’s resolution is to write more. To take more time for the intricacies of language, explorer-women I hope to be. This is a love of mine, and any love I’ve ever cultivated has been vicious at times, a relationship that may take work but is so damn satisfying that it’s worth it.
And my second, though I hate to say it, is to quit smoking. I have always known the very real consequences of smoking cigarettes, though I have smoked off and on since I was fifteen. I want to quit for my health and longevity, but also because it’s expensive and makes your teeth gross. This is a constant battle, me versus the Marlboros, though I hope this next year is mine.
kaylamillerwrites.com 