I’ve joined a community of writers at http://cowbird.com where I can post short stories with photos. I know that sounds a lot like blogging, but I’m going to use it to post mostly fictional stories. Thanks to encouragement from college friend Grant Faulkner, who publishes an online magazine 100 Word Story, I’ve been playing around with the form that gives the magazine its name. I think of them more as prose poems than stories, mostly because I’m driven by the form (100 words, no more and no less) and also because the form has constraints but also opportunities to focus on figurative language and key phrases, as well as moments, that resonate beyond the “box” of 100 words.
I’ve been writing about nuns lately, and because I mostly know about them in small pieces and anecdotes, things I’ve heard or read or imagined, I’ve been exploring moments and issues in 100-word pieces. They are all fictional. Grant was kind enough to publish three of them. What I hope for them is that they provide a more complex picture of religious life than most people have.
Joining cowbird.com gives me a platform for another kind of storytelling and an audience. It is still brief, but I’m not held to the 100 word limit. Also, photographs drive whether or not people choose to read them, and I’ve found the ones I think are most arresting are grounded in a good photograph. Also, it’s not just a place for writers. There is much that is affecting there, but not all of it is well written. It’s a collection of shared moments of experience.
I invite you to visit the two sites, which will remain linked on my “poetry” page on this site. Here is a link to a story, more than 100 words, that struck me with great force yesterday when I was writing things for cowbird. I hope to replace the photo with a better one from our actual trip when I can get it in digital form.
A Girl, by Susan Sink