from-the-remnants-blog

[from-the-remnants-blog]

“Before I was a writer, I was a reader. I was never ashamed to call myself that. There was so much love there, so much drive to understand how the writers I so admired had crafted narratives that shot through that spot in my heart nothing else could access. I wanted to do that. I still do. I wasn’t a loser. I was a little writer with a little book swirling around in her head. That was all. I loved stories in a big way. I always have. I let that love carry me forward.”

— Bethany Marcel, How To Say “I’m A Writer” And Mean It” (via carumens)

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Latest short story installment, “The Bitter Oranges of Jacob Breslin”, is on our website!

February’s short story installment, “The Bitter Oranges of Jacob Breslin”, is up on the Cross-Stitch website! For those who don’t know yet, Cross-Stitch is a collaborative writing project we are working on for the duration of 2019, taking it in turns to post a new short story inspired by the other’s work every month. Read Amber’s first story at https://cross-stitch.blog . If you havent already read Chase’s story, “Goose”, be sure to read that one first to see how the themes of his story inspired my own.

-Chase and Amber

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“When I’m tired, anxious and mentally exhausted I turn to silence, night air, poetry, and the stars. Some simple, sad things to remind me that at the end of the day, what really matters is the peace I hold within myself to be well rested for the next morning.”

— Juansen Dizon, Replenish

[from-the-remnants-blog]

This week’s cover, “Winter Garden,” by Tom Gauld. 

[from-the-remnants-blog]

A Cubist Painting of God

I see the face of my Lord in

A half-eaten apple

Core split open on the Earth.

    Those, your eyes! Looking up at me

    Like seeds–the verdant stem

    Your Omnipresent Runny Nose;

    You cannot think to hide your left ear

    In decay and white flesh!

If you see the Christ on the street, kill him.

Gather up the leftover fragments, that nothing may be lost,

    whispered the Lord,

Held by the stem and eaten,

Bottom-To-Top,

Through cavernous membrane.

[from-the-remnants-blog]

Goose / Chase Boisjolie

“The trees look funny,” said Laura North, who was struggling to keep up with her mother as they walked downtown. “Why do they look like that?”

“I told you, baby. It’s fall. They do that every year. They did it last year, and they’ll do it again next year, too. Now please stop asking me that, it’s driving me––

Read the full story here: https://cross-stitch.blog/?p=106

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Cross-Stitch: A Collaborative Writing Project

Chase Boisjolie and Amber Gallant met as students in the University of California, San Diego Writing program in 2016. Having been in a fiction workshop that winter, the two writers became quickly and closely acquainted over a shared love of literature and mutual pretentiousness. Although their writing often differs in narrative style (Chase’s penchant for dialogue and Amber’s ornate exposition), the two frequently find inspiration in each other’s work, albeit sometimes provoking an inferiority complex over one’s apparent lack in the other’s forte.

Throughout 2018, two Swedish songwriters (Jens Lekman and Annika Norlin) undertook a project in which, on a monthly basis, they wrote the other a letter in the form of a song. The playlist chronicles a year in the life of the two artists and tells a breathtaking story of loneliness, jubilation, grief and faith. Even the form of this introduction, timing, and structure of the project, are based on their original work. (You can listen to the playlist at http://c-o-r-r-e-s-p-o-n-d-e-n-c-e.com/).

CHASE: I remember coming across the “Correspondence” playlist on Spotify and thinking, Amber is going to love this. We took a road trip through central California to attend a wedding in November 2018 and just could not resist the urge to listen to all of the songs on repeat for 8 hours as we drove from one end of the state to the other. That’s when we got the idea that we could pay homage to their form of a call and response narrative, but using short fiction instead of music.

AMBER: There’s a great interview in which Jens Lekman called his musical style “finding a narrative within fragments”. I found that after listening to the playlist over and over while driving through the Grapevine and Fresno and Bakersfield, and it struck me that his idea of finding “a narrative within fragments” could refer to so many different feelings. The patchwork nature of the Central Valley itself, our entire writing education at UCSD, and the nature of a correspondence itself, which used to take so long before modern methods of communication that you’d lose the thread of the life of the person on the other end only to pick it up months later with delight in their handwritten letters. And, of course, the nature of our friendship- we’ve been there for the other in some of the best, and conversely, most difficult moments in our young adult lives. Those moments are disparate and lovely, ranging from late-night games of Catan to making paella to showing off the latest additions to our crazy-sock collections.

Beginning January 1st and ending in December, we will be uploading one story per month, each of which is to be loosely inspired by the previous. The aim of the project is to create a single cohesive work of self-contained narratives. We hope you enjoy this experiment – after all, these stories are simply fragments that we hope will seed and grow into a harmonious collection.

Tune in each month at https://cross-stitch.blog

Vancouver, Canada / December 31, 2018 Chase Boisjolie

Encinitas, California / December 31, 2018 Amber Gallant