from the top of a rock

A year ago, I spent my Christmas "bonus" on groceries and the 3-day New Year's holiday applying for work anywhere possible. This year, my objective is less frantic as I am happy in my current job and can actually enjoy the holiday with time off to visit family and appreciate a bit of space and time.

The "new" year seems arbitrary in a larger, universal timeline. But perhaps closing out a year and starting anew satisfies our human need to count and account for things. A time to climb up on a rock out in mid-stream and look back over our shoulder to mark progress, such as it is.

2008 has provided a number of publication opportunities and additional recognition for my short stories, for which I continue to be appreciative. My thanks to any and all readers who have taken the time to read my pieces. Writing is made that much more satisfying by its readers.

Publication has proven to be about the cumulative effects of long-term sustained efforts - to write, to edit, to submit. Even the smallest effort contributes to the greater, long-term outcome - that universal timeline that does not need or recognize a new year.

With more publications, the number of short stories in the coffer are fewer as more of my time has been spent working on the novel, its own timeline stretching to completion later this year. So I continue those late-night, early-morning writing sessions, too much coffee, handfuls of post-its jammed in my purse, scraps of paper and scribbles on the backs of receipts to tell the stories of the Wildish boys that push forward in my thoughts at the most inopportune moments of departmental staff meetings, workshop trainings or random conversations.

Here's to the new year.

Sherri

black bird is editor's choice

My short-short Black Bird is released in print this month in the 2008 Very Short Story Anthology by Lunch Hour Stories. The anthology is a collection of the winners of their annual Very Short Story contest.

Black Bird was first awarded the Whidbey Writers Student Choice award in October 2007 and remains online in their Winner's Archives (10/07). This story was written especially for their Halloween contest that was going on at the time. Then in Spring 2008, Black Bird was awarded the Editor's Choice Award by Lunch Hour Stories.

You can purchase your copy of the 2008 Very Short Story Anthology online at www.lunchhourbooks.com. My copies arrived today, and I am thrilled to see it in print. My thanks to the editors for the recognition.

Sherri

songs of geese

Migrating geese fly low over my house, their noise a jumbled clamor that belies the orchestrated flight. After a flash of sunlight and warm rain last week, the cold season has settled in with morning fog and frost on the rooftops. Yesterday there was winter rain, a soaking mist that chills you straight through.

It took at least five winters here in the Pacific Northwest to acclimate from the dry bluster of the high mountain desert. As a result of a military father and my own unsettled youth, I grew up without a geographic identity and did not expect to stay when I first landed in Portland, the city lights out the window of the plane that night reflecting off so much water I thought was surely the sea.

More than thirteen years and change that has occurred for me at a deep and fundamental level has also given me roots. Even as I have been blessed with abiding friendships from around the world and recent opportunity to travel to the beautiful UK and distant reaches of the North American continent, it is the myriad of grays in the skies of Washington that I mean when I say home.

I continue to write with gratitude for the experiences that contribute to my vision so that those odd, endearing details that make us so very human might reveal the order to our own cacophonous song.

Awareness is a gift from the universe. To translate it to words is an ongoing challenge.

Sherri