A few years ago I told a story at Story Oly, Olympia’s monthly story slam, about my adventures and misadventures while hitchhiking to New York from Mississippi in 1973. Folks laughed a lot at the story, so I wrote it as a short story for Creative Colloquy and read it at a couple of their … Read more
Ricker Winsor is a painter, writer and world traveler. He has worked as a photojournalist, cabinetmaker, teacher, and as a Delta blues musician, guitar and vocal. Ricker is an expatriate living in Surabaya, Indonesia with his Chinese Indonesian wife, Jovita. His essays and short fiction have been published at “Reflets du Temps” in France and … Read more
To use a comma or an exclamation point or no punctuation at all, that is the question. Less punctuation is a trend that is popular with modern writers. Quotation marks are becoming obsolete. Editors slice superfluous words, including words they think are superfluous but might not be (Microsoft Word’s grammar check is notorious for this). … Read more
Lynn Savage is the author of Mr. Klein’s Wild Ride. Mud Flat Press sat down with Lynn (via email) to question her about the book. MFP: Gary and Summer Klein’s lives are shaken when Gary is offered the job of publicizing “Panerotic,” the new “Disneyland of Sex.” Beyond that basic description and avoiding spoilers, … Read more
In a letter to me sometime around 1980 the poet Harry Calhoun raved about Flannery O’Connor’s short stories so much that I ran out to the local bookstore and bought Flannery O’Conner the Complete Stories. As well as I can remember, the only thing I had read of hers at the time was “A Good … Read more
My reading and book talk at Panorama, a retirement community in Lacey, Washington, went well. Much of the discussion centered on race, as it often does when talking about Tupelo. I said that although race was an underlying theme in the book, it’s really about much more than that. It’s about Kevin Lumpkin and his … Read more
From Ricker Winsor: “I am out drawing in ink with my portable table. It is easier now than with all the oil paint and I think my ink drawings are my strongest expression in any case. I am in Surabaya not far from home, in an area called Kenjaran which has a huge golden Buddha … Read more
“Hell can’t be no hotter than a Mississippi July. The heat don’t bother a kid, though. Not the heat nor the scratches nor the bugs. She don’t know how it is killing her. It takes all of the flexibility out, it scrapes you like scraping a plate to the dogs.” – Jack Butler, “Country Girl” … Read more
I have no formal education in writing other than a single class, which I vaguely remember as being called Creative Writing 101. Students wrote short stories; teacher critiqued them. I recall writing one story that wasn’t too bad and one that was terrible. My first attempt at novel writing came between undergrad and grad school. … Read more
