Just a few samples…
Finger Food
Lynx Eye, Fall 2002
We met at that sushi place by the park. I got there first even though parking was a bitch. Janice was late, as usual. I would have been annoyed but I guess I was hoping she wouldn’t show…
Winter
SoMa Lit, March 2007
Nights like this bring all the wild dogs out to play. It’s balmy, rare for San Francisco. We’re at Verdiccio’s in North Beach, at one of the outside tables bathed in traffic sound and the glow of neon light. We’re drinking Silk Panties. I wanted…
Old Jimmy
Flashquake, Spring 2008
I love to light Daddy’s cigarettes. I slide the match along the box ’til it snaps and sniff the sulphur. Daddy bends his whiskered face to my cupped hands, a Camel cigarette between his lips. He touches the tip to my flame and sucks in deep. After he blows out three donut rings, he seems easier… read more
Lilies
Stone’s Throw Magazine, 2009
Jennifer walked the final block, head down into a fierce wind that pulled at her hair. A mouse scurried across her path, but she saw only the cracks break your mother’s back and the lines break your father’s spine in the sidewalk. She squinted up at her apartment building, blinding white in the electric sky then hurried up the steps.
Let Down
Literary Mama, August 2005
It’s her, I tell Craig. I know her jangled ring. He says, “Who else calls at two a.m.?” The phone is cold. She’s hissing in my ear. “You’ve got to throw IT out!”… read more
Oh, Baby
Berkeley Fiction Review, Spring 2005
Sarah comes to the park every day. She tells her husband it’s what good mothers do. He just shakes his head. It helps if she keeps moving. She’s afraid that if she doesn’t she’ll forget to breathe…
Wake
Thin Air Magazine, May 2008
They’re all watching to see how I’m bearing up. But I keep my eyes straight ahead, stare past their faces painted with false grief. Faces that were quick to avert their eyes from the black and blue face that I wore to town too many times…
Borderline
Lynx Eye, Winter 2004
“Are you going like that?” he asks, scanning holey white sweatshirt and leggings with a look of injured surprise.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Why do you have to be so critical?”. It comes out sharp and I see the kids listening, but all he does is shrug and mutter…
Fear of Falling
Peregrine Journal, 2007
Tillie peered at the ground and at the tree’s shadow swaying under her — far, far down. Her heart knocked hard in her chest. She gulped down the dizzy in her throat. If she didn’t stop looking she’d fall…
Selected Nonfiction
Interview With Bruce Machart
Bookslut, April 2009
TBG: You earned an MFA at Ohio State University then returned to the Houston area where you were born. Is the rural setting of your novel familiar to you?
BM: Yes. My father grew up on a cash-crop farm in south Texas, and my grandfather lived for most of his childhood in Lavaca County, where the novel is set. I am a city boy, as you say, but the family roots are still in the black soil of rural Texas…. read more
An Interview with Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion, A Memoir
Shambhala Sun, March, 2010
Dani Shapiro is the author of five novels and the bestselling memoir, Slow Motion. In her new memoir, Devotion, Shapiro takes a literary journey into the essential questions of her life. Finding herself at midlife, she was troubled to realized that she still had more questions than answers. Her questions, and those of her young son — tell me about God, tell me what is true, what happens when we die — propelled her on a quest for what she believes.
Through yoga and meditation, Shapiro explored the questions and answers that haunt her. Devotion gives voice to the bewilderment and painful awareness that comes of middle age, losing one’s parents, reconciling one’s past with one’s present, and the terrifying world of parenting a seriously ill child.
Teresa Burns Gunther: You’ve said this book is from your son Jacob, and because of Jacob. You write with such honesty and openness, yet when Jacob was the subject I felt a protective distance between the reader and your son. How much did the idea of an adult or teenaged Jacob reading this book influence your writing?… read more
Our Children Don’t Know What Kansas Is!
Red Room, October 14, 2009
Growing up, I had a love/hate relationship with The Wizard of Oz. Watching it was an annual exercise in terror, wonder and delight… read more
A Conversation with Sophia Raday
Literary Mama, September 27, 2009
“Love in Condition Yellow: A Memoir of An Unlikely Marriage”, is Sophia Raday’s new book exploring marriage, identity, fear, and peace. Raday’s memoir about marrying “the other” describes the microcosm of our contemporary American dilemma, the schism between left and right, liberal and conservative, and the ways that our society has become divided. Writer Teresa Burns Gunther had just finished reading Raday’s memoir when four Oakland Police officers were murdered in the line of duty… read more
Mothering: An Exercise in Loss
Red Room, September 24, 2009
When my son was an infant, I’d lay in bed at night, my husband beside me warm and lost to the deepest of sleep, while I listened for the sound of our miracle in his crib–was that a cry? I’d tiptoe into his room and slip my finger under his nose to test for breathing… read more
Interview With Hannah Tinti
Bookslut, April 2009
TBG: Your novel, The Good Thief was just awarded the ALA award, as well as the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, and has been selected for the “Best of 2008″ lists by bookstores, newspapers and journals across the country. It has garnered rave reviews from book critics here and abroad. Has this surprised you? Was there one award or review that was particularly meaningful to you?
HT: I’m incredibly grateful that my novel been received so well. All of the reviews and awards have been meaningful. But winning the Sargent Prize might be the most memorable for me, because my parents were able to attend the ceremony, and we had such a wonderful night together… read more
Beginning Again
Red Room, January 13, 2009
It was with a sigh of relief that I packed away my solstice lights, the menorah, then dragged the Christmas tree to the curb. 2008 was an exhaustion… read more
Caroline Leavitt – An Interview
Mary Magazine, Spring 2004
TBG: Your novels have been praised for their readability. In some reviews your novels are described as gripping and as page-turners. Does this kind of praise get confused with a description of work that is less literary?
CL: It’s interesting you ask that because the last review of my book by The Washington Post talked about this. It was this amazingly terrific review that supported the view that a page turner of a novel could also be literature of the highest kind… read more