19 October 2013

reading in milwaukee

Outside of Tokyo, our family lived in a house with a sunroom that looked out over the garden, and that was our playroom. Maybe I was five. In that sunroom, my brother, sister, and I would listen to records, 33s or 45s, and one of our favorites was the 1946 Disney rendition of Sergei Prokofiev's Op. 67: Peter and the Wolf.  You know the one: Peter is represented by the strings; Sasha the bird by the flute; Sonja the duck by the oboe; and the wolf. . . . We must have listened to that record a hundred times, and every time the wolf first appears—all brass and drums—we'd leap, screaming, over the high, arched back of the green couch to hide.

Reading in public is sometimes like that for me. Not that I'll be leaping over any couches anytime soon, but the clench of fear in my chest as I approach the microphone is the same. Every time.

Nerves aside, I am privileged to be reading with some fine faculty and grad students from my new digs at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee: Creative Writing Professor Mauricio Kilwein Guevara, and graduate students Tobias Wray and Elisa Karbin.

Meet me there:
Friday, October 25
7:00pm
Boswell Book Company
2559 N Downer Ave
Milwaukee, WI
 
~ sherri




01 October 2013

new fiction: looking to land

Sometimes I tell stories from my real life—maybe even from those old, bad days—and people don't believe me. Some of my best rejection letters disclaim the believability of my personal stories.

It's fine, really. I'm grateful that my life manifests in a different space these days. Plus, I can't ever imagine running out of material, if that's all to be said for some of my past.

I've learned to mix it up, the real and the imagined. Bank back the fantastic real; expand the fabulist fiction. But every once in awhile, a kernel of raw truth might surface in one of my stories. I leave it up to the reader to guess, as I'm certain I  don't have to say which it is.

That's the beauty of writing fiction.

My short story, "Looking to Land," is published in the newest issue of Spilt Infinitive. My thanks to the editors for including me—I feel like I got to eat lunch at the cool kids' table today.

 ~ sherri