Holy Smoke

The real surreal

Often for me, the too close to home is too close to write about.

That’s when Surreal and close friend Absurdity tend to cross path with Reality.

The everyday incident revealed in my story Holy Smoke serves to motivate the ever watchful, the ever cautious to string car keys on a self-defense key ring and carry those keys in hand while walking from a store to the parking lot.

The possibility of what might happen could very well occur.

Holy Smoke was published online at The Wild Hunt (7/28/2020). Many thanks, Ariell Cacciola, founding editor, The Wild Hunt and publisher of Wild Hunt Books.

Read the story here.

Photo by No Revisions on Unsplash

Holy Smoke was listed at Zouxzoux, Flash Fiction Hot Reads as one of “7 Flash Fictions” (9/17/2020) “…that’ll knock your socks off.”

Thank you, Charlotte Hamrick, “ … founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief at SugarSugarSalt Magazine, Features Editor at Reckon Review where she also pens The Nitty Gritty column, and was the former Creative Nonfiction Editor for The Citron Review and Barren Magazine.”

Read all seven flash fictions here.

Photo by Shivam Tiwari on Unsplash

Flannery O’Connor and her birthplace, Savannah, Georgia both influence my writing in beyond wild wild ways.

I’m talking -

Large. Abstract. Peacock. Strokes.

Yet, oddly once upon a time, not so so long ago, I had no notion of Flannery and her work or her peacocks.

During a visit to the oldest and likely most haunted city in Georgia if not the United States, I experienced a life-changing visit.

I’ll drop this true story in your trick or treat bag.

Photo by Anderson Schmig on Unsplash

What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?

“I once booked a flat for cheap on Lafayette Square in Savannah. There, I got trapped in the bathroom. The door wouldn’t budge. I yelled for my kids. No response, likely busy photographing orbs. I considered going out the window, but the sharp fence two stories below made me think twice. Next door, I could see a stone statue of a saint centered in a small garden. A voice interrupted my thoughts. Try the door. It opened. Later, we noticed a historical marker in front of the saint house. Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home. My accidental FOC pilgrimage.”

--Sheree Shatsky

Read more Back Porch advice at Wraparound South. (Many thanks, editors of Wraparound South, Georgia Southern University (4/14/2021).

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What I’m reading

Is Mother Dead

-Vigdis Hjorth, author