My parents first read me this tragic tale of a sad bunny who endures Christmas Eve alone when I was about four years old, and I never forgot it. Its ability to emotionally move the reader isn’t just due to its profoundly sad subject matter; the language is simple, the tone is childlike, and the messages are clear. There are plenty of ghost stories in the world, but I’ve honestly experienced so few that are as haunting as this little masterpiece.
This is the original hardcover edition–the one from which my parents read me “Barrington Bunny.”
“Barrington Bunny” appears in Martin Bell’s collection The Way of the Wolf: Stories, poems, songs and thoughts on the parables of Jesus, which was originally published in 1970 by Seabury Press. You can purchase the most recent edition of The Way of the Wolf inexpensively at Amazon here.
I got these at Pier 1, mostly for accompanying my Thanksgiving set. I consider these my fancy ones (they’re glass), so I don’t use these much the rest of the year unless I have friends over for a spread of hors d’oeuvres.
Recently, a friend and I spent almost an hour on the phone talking almost exclusively about our passion for accoutrements.
What are those, you ask? Accoutrements are Read the rest of this entry
I spent part of the morning reading interviews of Triangle Shirtwaist Fire survivors. Prepare to have your heart broken. From survivor Mary Mary Domsky-Abrams. Why isn’t this story more known and these men lionized for losing their lives trying to save others?? A group of men made a human ladder of themselves in an attempt […]
via St. Vincent’s Hospital and Triangle Shirtwaist Survivors — Stacy Horn
Riverside Avenue in Fordlandia, which was near the Tapajos River. This image was printed in Grandin’s 2010 book, FORDLANDIA.
If you’ve read my work, you know that settings are something about which I’m passionate. A unique, vibrant setting always makes for a more interesting piece.
I’d always wanted to write a story involving a place called Fordlandia—a city Henry Ford built in Brazil in the late 1920s so he could have his own supply of rubber for his manufacturing; a place that is now abandoned and overgrown. I finally got the chance when I wrote “Attempted Delivery,” which appears in my forthcoming collection, The Shadows Behind.
Never heard of Fordlandia? Lots of people haven’t (when I mention it I usually get “what the hell is that?”) There’s a reason for that. The experiment in a utopia, meant to mirror a factory town in the Midwest—complete with a school, movie theatre, dance hall, church, modern hospital and paved roads (but no alcohol or tobacco)—was an unmitigated disaster.
“The houses sucked for the environment, the food made people sick, the rubber trees wouldn’t grow or just plain died of a strange blight,” notes the marine biologist, Juliane, in my short story “Attempted Delivery.”
That’s the short version. The land was infertile, cargo had trouble reaching the city unless it was the rainy season, and Amazon wood—which Ford had hoped to sell in order to cover costs until rubber trees took hold—had no value. At one point the workers rioted. By 1945, Fordlandia was abandoned, nothing more than a broken dream.
One of the houses that remains in Fordlandia today. This is a screenshot from a 2008 Spanish documentary on the subject.
Today, there are people living in Fordlandia, Read the rest of this entry
I’m thrilled to show off the cover for my forthcoming short story collection, The Shadows Behind, coming from Books and Boos Press on April 30, 2019! The cover’s art is by A.L. Cortez, who had some interesting things to say about its creation. You can read that on the press’ website here: https://booksandboospress.com/2019/03/21/the-shadows-behind-cover-reveal/
This collection, which is foreworded by Damnation Island author Stacy Horn, contains six long out-of-print favorites, among them “Doors” (Carpe Articulum, 2010), as well as four featured in various, esoterically-themed anthologies (which, if you didn’t buy those anthologies, you probably haven’t read).
What’s most exciting are the seven new Read the rest of this entry
This old memo book reeks of mildew, but that’s part of what makes it magical for me–it smells like my dad’s old den.
It’s spring, and for many of us, that means the deep clean: dusting the baseboards, washing the curtains, Q-tipping between the floor tiles. For me it means cleaning out junk, too, especially in my basement, which seems like a never-ending project.
What’s cool, though, is when I find something I’d forgotten I had that I can still use. Back in the late 1990s, I was buying Read the rest of this entry
Some wonderful thoughts about writing in the in-between–no matter what your in-between is.
I haven’t written on this blog in more than four years. The last post is about joining Storyful, and I haven’t worked there in months.
I was laid off last summer, one of the casualties of what has been a hard few months for the news industry as a whole. It’s been a hard topic to talk about on social media as you fight to find your next adventure, though the in between has been its own adventure too. How do you talk about this thing that has been making you feel horrible because everyone feels horrible when they’re laid off? How do you promote yourself when you’re not feeling good about yourself?
And that brings me to writing on this blog, something I’ve wanted to do for awhile but wasn’t quite sure how to do it, especially with the thing weighing heavy on me. What do I write about?…
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Manzino in the smoking jacket, A Christmas Cocktail, December 2002.
My dear friend of twenty-three years, Steve Manzino, lost his battle with cancer on December 4, 2018. I am absolutely devastated, and my life will never be the same, but here is how I choose to remember him.
Steve Manzino—I called him Manzino, though, everyone in our group of friends did—and I used to have the strangest and most entertaining conversations, especially when we were prepping in our dressing rooms for whatever show it was we were acting in at the time.
“When I die, I just want people to get up and tell the truth about me.” He shrugged into the tweed jacket he was wearing in his role as Frank in Educating Rita. “Because I hate Read the rest of this entry
Recently, a friend and I were going to spend some time in the car driving to an underwater archaeology lecture at a nearby college. We had just seen Bohemian Rhapsody and were dying to listen to Queen.
The only Queen music we both owned was still on cassette, believe it or not.
“So…how are we going to listen to it in the car?” she asked.
I went through a whole thing about streaming on the phone and hooking up the Bluetooth and all of this other complicated stuff. And then it occurred to me, for the first time in probably years, that I could just go to the mall on my lunch break and get a CD!
Then I thought…wait, who still sells CDs around here? FYE is gone, Best Buy’s selection is nil if it even still exists at all, and there are no more specialty stores like Record Town (remember THAT?) or The Wall. I called my housemate Charles, but he really didn’t have too many ideas either—except for Gerosa Records. That was probably worth a shot, but it was too far for me to go on a lunch break.
In the past few years, I haven’t really missed being able to just run out and buy a CD; I’ve gotten incredibly used to Amazon Prime and having them arrive in a day or so or downloading an MP3. I like the new way of doing things: yes, there’s instant gratification, and yes, I can simply purchase only one song and not all of them (there were singles and Cassingles, but most of those were for the popular tunes only. You wanted something that wasn’t released as a single? You had to buy the entire album). But it’s not the same as getting into your car, unwrapping that cellophane and inhaling that plastic and new disc smell, slipping it into your stereo and mmmm.
What did I end up doing? I dashed home after work, downloaded some MP3’s, and burned them to a CD. But I gotta tell ya—nope, just nope. Nothing would have been more magical than to go to a record store at lunch and pick up exactly what I wanted.
Bummer.
Nothing says Black Friday like a ghost story, right? If you missed the opportunity to read my novella “Splendid Chyna” – perfect if you like Asian Horror (i.e., The Ring, for those of you not familiar) and abandoned theme parks – the Kindle version is on sale for 99 cents through Thursday, November 29!
“Splendid Chyna” appears in the collection Three on a Match with two other novellas, “All’s Well that Ends” by G. Elmer Munson, and “Thicker than Water” by Melissa Crandall. These shorts are just the thing to be reading in between season busy-ness.
You can get it here, and happy holiday shopping!
The anniversary of this tragedy was just last week (March 25). This is a post Stacy Horn wrote about the survivors a couple of years ago, but I’m reposting it here because I think what she wrote is beautiful.
