Trouble Will Save You, a collection of three novellas, and I’m Here: Alaska Stories, will both be published in early and mid 2023 respectively. Trouble Will Save You dramatizes the lives of three women living in interior Alaska, while I’m Here, a collection of a dozen stores published by Red Hen Press, widens its lens on various locations and people within the state.
Neglecting My Little Garden
Once again I post to acknowledge my lack of posting.
I’ve been busy with many things, including family, but also writing, and I’d much rather write stories than post about them.
Lots of stories published lately, but I’ll leave a link to just one of them at the Harvard Advocate. It’s a story about the confusion of grief, Alaskan ice caves, and Jiffy Lube waiting rooms. It can be found here.
http://theharvardadvocate.com/content/that-ancient-lake
In 2022 new stories appearing in The Kenyon Review, Boulevard, and elsewhere. A new collection of novellas, Trouble Will Save You, will also be crawling its way into publication.
All good things during this holiday season.
2020 and Nightmare Logic
I don’t have much wisdom and or insight to impart about where we are as a society in the winter of 2020 except for the usual observations: that we have to become better as a culture, that things have been hard and will probably get harder before it gets easier, and that art making in such a climate is challenging, depressing, and (very occasionally) surprisingly transcend.
A small thought: that some of my favorite stories capture not necessarily revelation but confusion. Increasingly this feels like what fiction should be doing: holding up a mirror to our own human confusion, our fumbling and searching. I don’t find comfort very comforting lately, as much of it feels insincere, backward, complacent. At least as how its expressed in narrative form, whether that be in a book or a speech as seen on TV.
But I’m finding comfort in dream logic, in confusion, in challenges to simple meaning making. It’s been rough going, and I talk to so many writers who just feel stalled. They feel small in relation to what is happening. Unimportant.
Which is, of course, not the truth.
Not sure what the truth is, but it’s not THAT, not now and not ever.
More soon. I promise.
My Neglected Site
I know I have not been updating the site much these days. More important things going on in the world and my energy is going elsewhere.
In the meantime here are some great things to read.
https://nymag.com/strategist/article/anti-racist-reading-list.html
I’m Here awarded Lawrence Prize for Short Fiction
I’m very happy to announce that my story “I’m Here” has been awarded the Lawrence Prize by Prairie Schooner. “I’m Here” is the (kind of sort of) title story for my recent collection of short fiction about interior Alaska.
For more information about the prize or about Prairie Schooner visit Prairie Schooner Lawrence Prize . I’ll be posting a little more information about the story and about the book in the coming weeks.
Angel of the Resurrection in The Gettsyburg Review
I’m happy to report that my story “Angel of the Resurrection” will be appearing in a future issue of The Gettsyburg Review.
http://www.gettysburgreview.com/selections/fiction/
An excerpt (the opening) appears below for your enjoyment. It’s a story about dating, death, and the angel Michael.
This first time, the man she was meeting arrived forty-five minutes late, hands shaking, and ordered a beer before climbing into the booth. He had neglected to wear his Detroit Tigers cap, the one she had seen him wearing in most of the photographs and the one he said he would wear that night, so for a moment she thought another man had pushed himself into the privacy of her small space: her glass of ice water, the article open on her cell phone, and her quiet little fears grown thorny and twisted during almost an hour of waiting.
While she waited, she had shredded her napkin into rice-sized pieces, which she carefully gathered up and gave to the waiter, who took them in two hands as if cradling water. He would not stop looking at her: that same look of pity and judgment she had seen before on the faces of men who liked to think of themselves as kind. Her last eight dates had been with men like that, watery-eyed men, victims of infidelity and divorce and, in one case, an elderly woman going the wrong way on the highway colliding with his wife’s station wagon. Each one was punctual. They’d been waiting for her when she entered.
So this one was different right from the start. Just a few weeks earlier, her pocketbook had been snatched out of her arms by a blurred shape in a black hoodie, and she had been knocked to the concrete, her bloody palms gritty with dirt. She thought of that pain again, the violation, and she raised her hand to defend herself. It took him saying, “Hi, I’m Daniel,” for the configuration of features to organize itself in her memory. Yes, it was him, but thinner and older than in the photos, his hair flecked with gray but his pale handsomeness still present in his hard jawline. He looked like an actor, one of the ones you saw in bad movies, untalented but with good looks, a square jaw and a casual grin. Something of the politician in that smile. In fact, he seemed ready to shake her hand vigorously across the table.
Most of them were actors and politicians anyway, the men who smiled, the ones who didn’t.
“The Blurred Person”
I haven’t posted a sample of a work in progress in a while. After all, the splintering cracks in our democracy have seemed more important. But here’s the opening of a story called “The Blurred Person” inspired by a recent conversation with Jonathan Dembling and Michael Parker. Don’t think of this as a reaction to our current circumstances. It’s more of a spasm in reaction to them. I guess there’s a difference.
He’s watching it happen. But he’s also making it happen. He’s the one with his palms on the hood of the silver Hummer, raising up his arms, bringing them down again. He’s slapping at it as if it’s an animal he’s trying to shoo backwards into the flow of traffic.
He’s yelling something, something crazy, something stupid. And he’s yelling it anyway because he can’t help himself. He can’t help it as he comes around to the window and stares in at the driver. But he’s also far away, staring it down with a bystander’s detachment. And even judgment. Who is this nut coming around the car, scratching at the driver’s side window? What’s going to happen next?
He’s wiping the water away so he can see inside. The driver’s head comes into view. The face softens, blurs. He’s pushing his own face close to the glass, but all he can see is bad photograph, a person with the barest suggestion of nose, eyes, mouth, hands still grip the steering wheel.
The driver must be young, under thirty, and must be heading home from work. He’s concerned about being late because he has all sorts of plans for the weekend. He’s going to climb a mountain and when he gets to the top, in the view of nobody but God, a new idea will occur to him, an elegant solution for a problem his team has been struggling with for months.
He’s the kind of person who gets his best ideas on the tops of mountains, in boats on rivers, while playing sweaty games of racket ball. And he’s in there, faceless. The man peers into the pocket of stillness.
But he also sees this from far away as a pause in the action. This could be the end of it. They could separate. The blurred man could slide back into his car and drive away. The other driver, the one in the Hummer, would gather his thoughts, breath deep. Nothing even has significance yet: just a story to share with his girlfriend as they slide onto the highway and leave the city behind.
It’s raining and the blacktop glows wet in the street light glare. He’s dimly aware of its beauty, its rarity, because it hardly ever rains this hard and when it does he’s usually in his office and he only finds out when he steps outside at the end of the day. If circumstances were different he’d dwell on the way the light turns the road’s imperfections into shimmering pools catching both water and light, but another driver is sounding a horn.
Stupid Kid in Newfound
I’m very happy to report that my story Stupid Kid has just been published in Newfound Magazine. The story will appear in paper form later on, but it is currently available online at https://newfound.org/current-issue/fiction-david-crouse/
Newfound is a wonderful young magazine with great editors and interesting new ideas. I’m very happy to work with them and bring this very long piece into publication.
Stupid Kid is one of my recent Alaska stories. Hope you enjoy.
Boom!Squad Graphic novel
I’m very happy to announce that my new graphic novel, Boom!Squad, will be published in the May 2017. The book will be available through Amazon and bricks-and-mortar bookstores.
I’ve been a lover of comic books since my childhood and Boom!Squad is an attempt to resurrect some of those simple joys of reading 25 cent comics while also adding something new to the genre. It’s full of super types, sexist robots, slacker kids with ambitions of super stardom, and nefarious coffee chains bent on world domination.
Equipment
A new story “Equipment” has been published in the Exhibits Anthology issued by Old 67 Press. For more about the anthology visit http://www.old67.com/.
Equipment is about BDSM, aging, and illness. It began as an exercise: take a sex scene and try to turn that one scene into a fully realized story. Then, as with most of my stories, it became something else entirely–it surprised me.
I’m hoping that Equipment finds its way into my new collection of short stories, but I’m not exactly sure if it fits the themes of the book.
david nikki crouse 