They woke me up at the crack of dawn.
Looked out my window. Here’s what I (heard and) saw …
On the Wires now live at qarrtsiluni in the ‘Animals in the City’ issue.
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It was early. It was loud. It was the beginning of June and I’d just returned from a trip abroad. I’d spent a full month in Read the rest of this entry »
Not long ago, I wrote about the human practice of assigning homo-sapiens the names of non-human animals.
Now, in a ‘stone’ called ‘Catch & Release’, I offer a cross-species sporting reference to a mate-selection ritual used by some individuals. The 22 words–in all their glory–appear in the U.K.-based web-zineA Handful of Stones. According to editor Fiona Robyn, a small stone is a very short piece of writing that precisely captures a fully-engaged moment.
To read ‘Catch & Release’,
click the fish below:
A note about the image: I captured it while staring through water, looking down at a pond, standing on the bridge behind Festetics Castle in Keszthely, Hungary–the place where ‘Catch & Release’ was conceived.
And a question:
Do you use non-human animal references to describe assorted human activities and practices?
I find contradictions between morality and ethics interesting–those disconnections that sometimes exist between a person’s notions of right and wrong (or good and bad) and their daily practice of living. Another curiosity is the extent to which people shift their morality retrospectively in light of their behavior and decisions. I find these topics even more compelling when the forces of consumer culture are factored in.
I explore these curiosities in a Twitter length story–140 characters or less. It appears in PicFic–a California-based picofiction online magazine.
I’ve written about secrets, and taken photos of paradox.
The challenge?
To combine these phenomena in a micro-story of 50 words exactly — no more, no less.
Not long ago, I observed a secret paradox close to home — it concerns business, humans, nonhuman animals, and eating habits.
The story appears in the weekly New Jersey-based e-zine 50 to 1. Editor, Glen Binger, “posts only 50 word stories and first line inspirational sentences that are meant to get the reader hooked ...”