Guess what magically appeared today? The original draft I had been working on Friday for The Prince. Go figure.

I heard a replay of a marvelous recent interview with author Jim Shephard on Minnesota Public Radio yesterday. I had never heard of Shephard until I read his short story in Electric Literature. I liked it very much so I was primed to like him. He turns out to be one of those writers who is chatty and interesting and humble who you feel like you could sit with and talk over any topic for hours. He gives the impression of being an all around nice guy. He reads books on the oddest topics, like Danish water defenses (apparently Denmark has made huge investments to protect their low lying cities as the ocean starts to rise from global warming) and he manages to turn them into sort of weird but interesting short stories. I didn’t find “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” to be weird, but granted a story about people studying avalanches isn’t something you come across every day.

Anyway, listening to the interview made me want to read more of him.

The interview also reminded me I never mentioned that I loved all the stories in the issue of Electric Literature that I read. There is even one that is an excerpt from a novel in progress by Michael Cunningham. If the whole novel turns out to be as good as the short story, we will be in for a good read.