Sunday Stories: “The Storyteller as Mentor”

Pen

The Storyteller as Mentor
(September 2002 to January 2003, Northern Ireland)
by Timothy DeLizza

In the fall after I graduated college, I flew from Brooklyn to Northern Ireland to apprentice under an established Irish storyteller who I’ll call Martha. After paying for my plane ticket, I had something like $1,000 in my bank account—and while Martha had agreed to cover room and board, the apprenticeship was not going to increase that number.

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VCO: Chapter 11

"VCO" image

Chapter 11

I wake up on the floor of Everhet’s kitchen and instantly bring my phone over my face. 

I dreamt that I text Morgen a Homeric epic about how my parents were dead. How they exploded. 

I look at my texts. Wasn’t a dream. Initiate shame blocking sequence.

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What You Can’t Outrun: Colleen Burner on “Sister Golden Calf” and the Joys and Challenges of Writing a Female Road Narrative

Colleen Burner

Colleen Burner’s Sister Golden Calf is a strange, gorgeous debut novel about two sisters, Gloria and Kit, who travel through the desert with their jars full of “invisible things for feeling and knowing.” It’s about grieving the death of a parent, about isolation and longing, and it features an eight-legged taxidermied calf, a ghost town, and a nude ranch. Reading Sister Golden Calf, I was moved by the propulsive, sometimes breathless sentences, and the quiet, meditative moments where Gloria and Kit find space to grieve—a space that is a car, a body, a sister willing to travel to the ends of the earth. 

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A New Riverside Retreat for NYC Poets Debuts in Partnership with KGB Bar & Lit Club

Josh Cottage

It’s the cottage where a New York City teacher named Frank McCourt wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angela’s Ashes.  Since McCourt’s time there in the 1990s, this Milford, Pennsylvania cabin owned by former AMC-TV head and current indie film producer Josh Sapan has served as the periodic retreat – an “accidental art colony” in his words – for creative-minded friends and friends of friends. It has hosted everyone from national book award winner Colum McCann, who worked on his acclaimed international bestseller Apeirogon there, to a bevy of poets, painters, photographers and composers.

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Books of the Month: March 2024

March 2024 Books

It’s March, and the pollen has returned. It’s an interesting month for books — though to be fair, it’s a rare month that isn’t interesting in some way — with everything from experimental horror to incisive takes on pop culture hitting the “new releases” table. What are we most excited about? Read on and find out, gentle reader.

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VCO: Chapter 10

"VCO" image

Chapter 10

With my hands unrestrained I trace the names scratched in the black leather upholstery by former passenger’s fingernails.

The cop opens the door for me to get out. 

He rolls down his window, I can’t see it, but I can hear it. My back to him, I hear him say, “Hey, kid—ub-uh— Mr. Defoe. You, uh. You sure you’re okay?”

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