MORNING SERIAL: PRAIRIE’S END, MANITOBA 5 ~ Conclusion

Episode 5 – Our Finale – Showdown at the ¿Por qué? Corral

DANIELLE OARLESS peeked at her face in the compact mirror, snapped the clam-lid shut and placed it back in her crocodile embossed Downtown Baby Cabas bag. She moved towards her prey now with reptilian confidence, gliding silently over the cheap tiled floor as if it were ermine and she the pampered palm of a princess.

Entering the…

Around Halloween, I sent my freelance Editor, James, a precis for a story that I hoped would be, “a little longer than my usual 3,500 or so.”

He replied that I should not feel bound by the 8,000-word limit I had set in mind. “You’ve more than an 8,000-word outline here, looks to me,” he wrote back.

“Well, we’ve been playing catch with this thing since November and I am now on the brink of the…

It will soon be a year, June 21, 2016, since my first short story was accepted and published by a literary journal. That story was Encountered on the Shore, on CommuterLit.

Since that time I have added 24 acceptances to my credit roll. By now, I am pretty sure I am committed to, “this fiction thing,” as those near me tend to describe it.

It has been hard work. “Ha!” you say, and the old-school,…

Hardworking Old Dude…

I am in the middle – eight hours today… he sighs – of editing a collection of short stories. 200 plus double spaced, TNR 12 font pages of prose from Toews.

As a formality (I thought) I searched for “ly” in Word and to my dismay, TO MY UTTER DISMAY, I found that my manuscript contained 768 ly words. Lots of adverbs like “nervously”, “amateurishly”, “hopelessly”, “f*ckishly”,…

http://bit.ly/RedFezOurGermanRelative

In 2015, I was told this story – parts of it at least – by a resident in a predominantly Mennonite senior home in British Columbia. Some friends and I were there for lunch — the restaurant in the building had famously delicious food. One of the women at our table told us a moving account of incidents that had happened in Russia, during the early days of…

​This week I have two stories appearing on the Toronto-based e-zine CommuterLit. Here’s a link to a 2013 article about this outstanding online publication.

Dec. 7, 2016 Wednesday’s episode:

Dogs that bite and other prejudices. “Gather by the River, ” the first of a  two-part story by Mitchell Toews

Dec. 8, 2016 Thursday’s episode:

Reconsidering the situation.  “Gather by the River,” the second of…

Swingin’ the Can

DURING MY SIXTEENTH YEAR I jumped in my mom’s new AMC Gremlin and drove from Steinbach, MB to Ladner, BC. I went to work on my dad’s cousin’s farm where potatoes and strawberries were grown for McCain to flash freeze.

I learned how to drive a tractor and load a flatbed trailer with skidboxes of potatoes. On the way to BC, in the mountains, a grizzly bear taught me a little about the writing…

So Are They All

INSECURE WORRIER THAT I SECRETLY AM, I feared that my selection as a winner in the Lake Winnipeg Writers’ Group Write on the Lake contest and inclusion in their journal, Voices was, “assent with civil leer,: And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer”1. But far from it – I was well received and thoroughly enjoyed reading aloud from “So Are They All”.

This is the twentieth consecutive…