You can keep family secrets to yourself and let them press on - but not still - your worried, urgent heart, or you can publish painful, exquisite pieces like this, or this, and let us know what no one else but you can tell us.  

Untitled, 2006.

My friend, Nicole Charbonnet, has a show up at Arthur Roger Gallery titled "The Truth About God." The title is taken from a poem by Anne Carson whose writings deal with love, life, loss and religion. (The poem's first line: "My religion makes no sense / and does not help me / therefore I pursue it.") Nicole rode out Katrina in her New Orleans home, and only left when the city started to take on water.

From her artist's statement: "Whether painting images or abstract gestures, my paintings are textural and built up with layers over time. The superimposition of textures, images, collage, words and paint create surfaces that retain or reveal a memory of preexisting stages, resulting in a palimpsest in which some images, shapes or words are obfuscated, while others remain visible however shaped by previous or subsequent gestures and events."


Architect Dreams  

I read one of my stories for the first time in front of my 16-year-old son, in Portland, at a reading that Kevin Sampsell was kind enough to put together. The piece is rough - about a woman who gets her hand cut off and is left for dead in the NM desert, but it's all fiction, and I figured it'd be a gentler way to expose him to my stories. The reading was at Tour Des Crepes, and A ordered fresh lemonade and a nutella and banana sinfest, and sat in the back with his dad at a tiny round table. I was nervous, but proud in a kid-reading-for-her-parent way. A strangely comforting role-reversal. A had concerns about the ending and we talked about forgiveness, the arrogance of the woman's blessing which he saw as a necessary thing, on the drive to the restaurant where we met friends for dinner. But a discussion opened up over the next few days about what my family will think of my first book, (I'm not sure), and if they'll be upset when some of the details looks familiar, (I'm not sure), if they'll be proud, (I'm not sure), or angry, (possibly), and how a writer can't hear footsteps when you're fifty yards down the field and some story's thrown you not the truth, but its truth.  

Ellen Meister's first novel has been released into the world. You can hold the book in your hands, or let Lisa Kudrow (who mentioned Ellen's book the other night on Jay Leno) read it to you.

Here's an on-going interview with Ellen, and links to some of her no-punches-pulled stories.  

Editor Jim Whorton:

"The idea for this issue of Mississippi Review Online came out of the hubbub following the revelation that a certain memoir, made famous by Oprah, was partly made up. Credulous readers who'd swallowed that story whole were unhappy; literary types, connoisseurs of genre confusion, were delighted.

We talk about the various narrative genres?novel - memoir, short story, straight journalism - as though these categories have a separate existence from the particular works they describe. Credibility does not reside in the genre, however, but in the person of the writer. Books don't lie to us, people do: we've been lied to by neighbors, Presidents, and novelists alike, and skepticism will never be made obsolete by any refinement of the literary categories. It will always be indispensable both to citizenship and to literacy.

Around 300 writers submitted work to this issue of MR Online, and it was difficult to choose 17. The result includes stories about a lost child, a lost shoe, and a boy's first gun. One unclassifiable piece collects and meditates upon some memories, both true and invented, of Robert F. Kennedy; another adds to the fascinating legend of Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis. The thing they all have in common is that, pretty much, I believed every word."

Here they are.  

Jim Tomlinson's debut short story collection Things Kept, Things Left Behind is collecting them. Soon, his beautiful work will be in my hands.