Teresa Tumminello Brader: Late Wife

published today at Bare Root Review, Spring 2008, Issue 6.

Just under 430 words, written last Oct/Nov.

Fiction in print

"Maintenance or How to Spend the Perfect Night in New Orleans" in You Don't Say by Ink Monkey Press
"Barren Waters" in Coming Home: a 2010 Main Street Rag Short Fiction Anthology
"The Mexican Skirt" in From the Porch Swing by Silver Boomer Books
"Silvery Blue" in hoi polloi III by Dog Days Press
"Age Appropriate" in Families: The Frontline of Pluralism by Wising Up Press
"Affirmation," "Cold Turkey," "Barren," "Subdivision," "Why Tell Me Now?" and "Entr'acte" in Six Sentences, Volume 1

Quotes on writing

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. -- Oscar Wilde
There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing. -- Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose (She used an Alice Munro story as an example.)
... a man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not at all responsible for his vision -- he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty. To keep close to this personal honesty is my supreme ambition. There is a sublime egotism in talking of honesty. I, however, do not say that I am honest. I merely say that I am as nearly honest as a weak mental machinery will allow. This aim in life struck me as being the only thing worth while. A man is sure to fail at it, but there is something in the failure. -- from a letter written by Stephen Crane

Quotes from literature

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient. -- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
It was one of those afternoons in early March that make one wonder how the rest of the world avoids emigrating to Louisiana in a body. -- The Grandissimes by George Washington Cable
... no emergency was ever dealt with effectively by democratic process. -- Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end. -- The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
... it was that happy/sad, sweet-and-sour feeling you can get when you look at baby photos of your grown-up kids. ... When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories come to pretty much the same thing. It's all just emotion, in the end, and any of it can make you weep. -- "Not a Star", a short story by Nick Hornby
I had considered how the things that never happen are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished. -- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
With one's children everything happens in a flash; there's never a now, only a then, after which you're left wondering what took place and trying to imagine if it can take place again so's you'll notice. -- Independence Day by Richard Ford

Teresa Tumminello Brader