Cynthia Flood ~ Writer

8 November 11 Words to astound

admin — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 16:56:42 +0000

A fine Irish writer, John Banville writes “regular” novels (The Sea, The Book of Evidence) as well as brilliant thrillers (Christina Falls, The Silver Swan), and he has a vocabulary so huge that it’s almost a character in his work. While reading The Sea, I kept track of all the words I’d never come across before. And no, dear readers, I did not look them up at the time, because I wanted to get on with the story. . . . Afterwards, I spent a very pleasant hour lying on the sofa with the Shorter Oxford. Just reading words. Here are some of them for your pleasure too: gleet, leporine, velutinous, cinereal, refulgent, horrent, supination, anaglypta, scumble, caducous, mephitic, anabasis. Most as you see are Latin or Greek in origin, but some coarse Anglo-Saxonisms are there too.

26 October 2011 The editor rests. . . .

admin — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 03:25:00 +0000

Sal Glynn, a freelance writer and editor in California, on 12 April of this year noted in a blog-post that, “After a long day of consulting dictionaries and The Chicago Manual of Style, and going back to see if he missed something, the freelance editor gets a good night’s rest by reciting past participles in alphabetical order: arisen, borne, beaten, begun, bent, bet, bitten, bled, blown, broken, brought, built, burst, bought, caught, chosen, come, cost, crept, and on into the night. Only the lame will settle for counting sheep.”

Read more of Sal Glynn’s distinctive and word-loving blog at www.dogwalkeddownthestreet.blogspot.com He’s truly a man of letters — an old term and honorific!

17 October 2011 A definition of a story

admin — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:49:35 +0000

The American writer Barry Lopez has written some amazing stories. I wish he’d write more — I’ve read all that I can find but am still hungry.

His collection Field Notes includes one called “The Entreaty of the Wiideema,” in which the narrator spends a long time with an Australian group of aborigines of that name. I won’t say anything about the plot, because you should read this and Lopez’s other admirable stories yourself! But this is one conclusion that his narrator reaches.

“ And I finally came to see the Wiideema as a version of something of which my own people were a version. What we shared. . .was a sense of danger. A sense that it was dangerous to be alive. . . . Human consciousness beckons us all. My Wiideema companions. . .had not accepted it fully. They didn’t shun knowledge, and it was not that they were never contemplative or curious about ideas or other abstractions. But their hesitancy had led them in another direction. All that they knew, all they believed or imagined, they cast in stories. Stores for them were the only containers for what consciousness, as we have it, might have elucidated for them about life [emphasis added].”

The story as a container for knowledge, belief, imagination — that I can understand.

29 March 2011 A Questionnaire

Cynthia.Flood — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 17:25:52 +0000

FoundPress recently asked all its spring 2011 writers for responses to five questions, for the magazine’s blog. Here’s what FP asked me (paraphrased):

1) What can you tell us about the origins of Addresses?

2) Your story is set in the 1960s but still feels contemporary. Did you deliberately try to make it so?

3) What’s the role of literature in social action?

4) What are the advantages and challenges of writing short fiction?

5) What excites you most about online/digital storytelling?

For my responses, go to http://foundpress.com/blog/?p=149

Answers from Danny Goldman, Kirsty Logan, and Lana Storey, the other contributors to the first issue of FoundPress, will appear on the blog soon.

17 March 2011 Flaubert

Cynthia.Flood — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 04:15:47 +0000

I learned yesterday that Flaubert said, “Prose is like hair. It shines with combing.” A beautiful simile — but what I’ve been doing of late is more like raking.

2011 is The Year Of The Short Story! Who knew? Go to http://www,YoSS2011.ca and find out all about it.