Febuary Hobart, AWP, Witness

- February Hobart is up. Stories by Spencer Wise, Katie Jean Shinkle, Jody Brook, John Tway Zackel and Drew Ervin's wonderful interview with Bradford Morrow. Great work all around.

- AWP. Well, well. Much happened. I am home. My head still hurts. Free cocktail hour at our hotel was both the best thing ever and also maybe the worst. So was shouting at friends in bars. And grumpy bartenders. And cheap cabs. And the Hobart flask which made it possible to order a single $8 beer and still get drunk. It's good they put a whole year between these things.

- I stopped by the Witness/Black Mountain Institute booth and picked up a copy of issue XXIV (that's 24 for those of you who can't remember that many super bowls ago), which includes my story "Don't Go." I haven't had a chance to read much of the issue yet, but it's got work by some writers I like a whole lot and am happy to share pages with: Stephan Clark, Viet Dinh, Teresa Svoboda, Josip Novakovich and a bunch of names that are new to me but who I am looking forward to checking out. There are some excellent photographs of Bulgarian and Romanian Roma in camps in Italy taken by Andrea Bruce and a poem by Solmaz Sharif that is really amazing. Like every issue of Witness, this one is well worth picking up. I like this journal a lot because it looks outward without losing any of the personal.

Here's the first paragraph of my story:

In the village of Elmsta, which straddles the mainland and an island about two hours outside of Stockholm, there is an uneven asphalt tennis court, veined with cracks and loosely traversed by a substandard net. It was on this court that Rolf Andersson once played the best tennis of his life. He lost the first set, but came back to win the next three by an average margin of four games. His opponent—an aging former tennis professional whose prosthetic left arm made a swishing whistle whenever he hit from his backhand—twice broke Rolf’s service, but Rolf was hitting well to both sides and ran the former tennis pro to exhaustion. Rolf was happy about this. Who can say how the former tennis professional felt? He had only recently lost an arm.