Showing

2011 was my year of finding homes for difficult stories. “Showing” didn’t get rejected by as many journals as did Open Every Womb and Summer Rotation, but it still took a few years to find its perfect home.

That home, it turns out, was with The Packinghouse Review. You can get a copy of volume 2, #2 here.

This story grew out of two places and some drawings. The first place was the Godschalx Gallery at St. Norbert College, a small space in one of the campus buildings that shows both student and professional works. The second was the Riverview Café, a neighborhood coffee shop that frequently hangs interesting art (a little bit of the Blue Moon slips in, too, another great neighborhood spot). And the drawings were sketches my father sent to me from Vietnam, when I was two and he was flying helicopters. The rest of the darkness in the story–and on reflection, it is rather a dark story–came from somewhere else, probably the same place that delivers up such cheer as Among the Moabites and Ichthyology.