Check out Myopic Books this coming Saturday to hear Sherrie Flick, Molly Gaudry, Timothy Gager, and Steve Himmer read.
Sherrie Flick's novel, Reconsidering Happiness, has a bakery at the center of the plot. What more could one ask for? Here's a blurb about the plot below:
The two silent Ss of Des Moines beckon twenty-three-year-old Vivette with a
sexy finger, a promise. So, in the mid–1990s, she convinces Grandpa Joe-Joe
to sell his Buick for twenty dollars, leaves behind her friends, her job at a hip
New England bakery, and an affair with a married man, and moves to Iowa.
Margaret, who left the same bakery years earlier on her own restless quest,
offers pointers from her cautiously settled Nebraska life
In a story of lust and longing, love and loneliness, disappointment and
desire stretching from the East Coast to the West, these two pioneering
women navigate through secrets, lies, decisions, and compromises shared
over pool tables, postcards, and shots of whiskey. Starting up, starting over,
slowing down, they crisscross each other’s lives like highways on a map, always
escaping, flying toward a dreamt future, and trying to avoid the charted course.
The book is being published by University of Nebraska Press (
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/)
Gaudry's novella (or novel(la) as the mud luscious press site writes it) is titled intriguingly, We Take Me Apart. As memorably described by mud luscious: "Its sad memory-tropes come from fairy tales & childhood books. With language, Gaudry is as loving & careful as one is with a matchbook . . . when wishing to set the whole word on fire." Here is an excerpt from the
mud luscious site below:
long ago
in a different version
it was not a glass slipper but a glass dress
it was not beautiful
it was not flowing like a stream
it did not have a train wider than an acre
in this version everyone could see everything
nothing was left to the imagination
due to the drought
all the people in the town
children too
used their spades to uproot the vegetable gardens
day after day
after day
the day finally came when all they could do was look into the cloudiness & pray
disgraced
for why else would the gray lining of their clear sky withhold unless it had been
decided that the only useful thing was for them to suffer
there was not so much as a cabbage leaf that year
cold came to be known as night
heaviness was no longer a worry
the town turned to violence
a rich man's cook was discovered making sauce in the heart of his house
as everyone knows that food does not smell until it boils
until it sweats
the people still there
who had not yet gone away
their bellies round with malnutrition
tongues useless calluses
detected that woman's sauce
came for her with a knife
the first ingredient they added was her toe
cut at a neat incline
they called it butter
they added her bottom half
called it custard
her top half
they called tea
when she cried they heard only the whistles of their stomachs filled with her
they raised their glasses
toasted
*
It his is the story Mother told to get me to behave
tucked into my bedding
I once asked BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GIRL IN THE
GLASS DRESS & Mother's answer was JUST COUNT
YOUR LUCKY STARS YOU'RE SAFE IN BED & NOT A
COOK FOR A RICH MAN
the way he made her feel
the way he looked at her
she left nothing to the imagination
