Chad Simpson's Blog

Just a quick summary of some things that have been going on--or are about to go down in the near future:

A few weeks ago, I published a tiny little story over at WhiskeyPaper. This story, I think I originally wrote it as a 78-word story for some contest that Esquire was having. I'm not sure I ever sent it. Something else about it: Back in the day, Jane and I used to listen to a set of CDs called In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry. There was Whitman and Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein, among others. Including one of my favorites back then, Charles Simic. When I wrote "Dearest Miljana," I was thinking of Simic's Slavic accent. I was thinking of a heavy-voiced older man. Heartbroken and full of longing.

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More recently, I was asked by the good folks at Origami Zoo Press to contribute something to their new series, "Resurrect Your Darlings." If you click over there, you'll see what they're up to with the series, which I thought sounded very cool. You'll also be able to read three excerpts from an old story of mine called "Duplex," along with an explanation of what makes it a "darling" of mine.

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Tonight, after going to see Richard Linklater's Boyhood today, I wrote a short blog post about the film and making art/writing, which you can read here. That film. Man, it slayed me.

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Lastly: For those of you in and around the Louisville, Kentucky, area: I'm going to be reading there on Friday, September 26th at 6:30, along with Leesa Cross-Smith, Eric Shonkwiler, Aaron Burch, Ashley Farmer, and Ryan Ridge. I'm stoked to get to visit bourbon country again--and to get to hang out and listen to such stellar writers. The details:

Celia's Art Gallery, Mellwood Art & Entertainment Center
1860 Mellwood Avenue
Louisville, KY
6:30, 9/26

I've been working for a little while on a book-length CNF project, a memoir. Ten or eleven years ago, I took my first real class on creative nonfiction, and when I was in it, I wrote this essay, "The Perseids," which was later published in the Duck & Herring Co. Pocket Field Guide. Since tonight is the last and best night to view the meteor shower, and since I've been spending a lot of my time lately writing stories that kind of really happened, I'm thinking it's timely.

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The Perseids

Jane and I had been in Southern Illinois less than a week, and we’d spent each of our early August evenings alone with one another, drinking. We were unhappy with but still romanticizing the lower half of our home state—the sheen of sweat on our skin that never seemed to dry, the gas station clerk’s accent—and waiting for our lives to begin. Jane was about to start a job at the university press, a just-above-entry-level publicity position; I was going to graduate school.

And then we read about it in the newspaper, and we had a plan: the Perseid meteor shower. We were going to get up at four in the morning and drive seven minutes to a dark spot outside town on an, I don’t know, slightly sloping hill.

Jane and I are fantastic drinkers, fabulous dreamers. And when we combine the two—when we drink and dream—the world becomes right and just and conquerable. After we read about the meteor shower, we drove to the liquor store in the early afternoon, came home, and tinkered with our plans for the next morning.

We would get up at three, not four. We would make a pot of coffee. We’d pour the coffee into a thermos I had just washed, and take along fruit, too—peaches from a local orchard and Bing cherries. We would take cheeses, and breads, enough food for ten or twelve people. We would make friends.

Our thermos-lid cup would steam in the cool, early-morning air, and we would hold one another, one couple among dozens, on a night-lit hill in Southern Illinois.

Jane logged on to the Internet and printed out a map to our location. Then she downloaded a video of the meteor shower we would see in the morning and called me into the office, and we held sweating bottles of Coors Light and watched the brief streaks of space dust brighten the screen.

We both talked a lot about being writers then but didn’t ever spend much time actually writing, and we were silent as we drank beer and watched the computer screen. I can’t say what Jane was thinking about, but I was thinking about how I could use the experience we were going to have in the morning. I was thinking about a drunken but lovable husband whose wife is going to leave him. On the morning the man’s wife plans to leave, he would wake up hungover but with the best intentions and take her to see a meteor shower at four in the morning. She would be sleepy and uninterested, and he would try to impress her by saying something clever about the sky falling. Or he would know, as I learned from the website with the video, that the Perseid meteor shower is named after the constellation Perseus because the meteors appear to radiate from Perseus’ star-body in the sky. But, the man would explain to his wife, this is an optical illusion, the way driving through a snowstorm with slow-falling, big, white flakes makes the snow seem to come from some unseen spot on the road ahead. He would tell her all of this, not quite understanding what he was getting at, but later, much later, it would seem like an amazing moment the two had shared, one of their finest.

Jane and I continued to drink and make more plans for the next morning’s meteor shower, buzzing with expectation.

For a while Jane disappeared and came back with six lines of a poem that were pure genius. She showed me more pictures she’d printed, too, and we were certain for a little while that our time in Southern Illinois was going to be fine. That the next three years would pass and I would have a master’s degree and three years of teaching under my belt and she would have a total of five years’ experience in publishing. We would leave this place before either of us turned thirty, ready to begin our lives all over again.

A few hours later we were getting into bed, drunk, our words working against one another, but gently.

“It’ll be great,” I was saying. “Seeing this. There are a million things like this we can see, you know?”

“We could sleep in,” Jane said. “And go out for breakfast in the morning? We could read the newspaper, eat greasy food.”

“We could,” I said. “That sounds nice.”

“And the meteor shower will be bright two more nights this week,” she said. “I’ve printed out all the best times. We’ll see it. It’ll be great.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It will be.”

A few minutes later, we were sleeping, and a few minutes after that, we were dreaming.

And in a few hours there would be people sprawled on a hill outside town, watching something fantastic. They would be silent with one another, taking it all in, thinking about the last time they laid their hearts bare, or pondering their minute places in the universe, or who knows, maybe something else entirely.

But we would sleep great sleep, Jane and I, pressing our bodies into one another, sweating out the night’s liquor, while all of the night sky’s stars streaked overhead. 

The school year is over, and I have some good news: I'm now a tenured professor. I feel so lucky. For the students and classes I get to teach. For such great colleagues. I've been celebrating for two weeks straight.

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Next week, I'll be teaching a workshop at the David R. Collins Writers' Conference in the Quad Cities. From June 26-28, we'll be talking flash fiction. There are several other intriguing-sounding workshops being offered by a talented crew of instructors, and I think there might still be a little time left to sign up, if you're into that kind of thing. More details here.

On the first day of the conference, I'll also be giving a reading alongside fellow faculty members Kelly Daniels, Adam Fell, Jac Jemc, and Rachel Yoder. It's going down at 7:00 on Thursday the 26th, at the Rozz-Tox QC. There's even going to be music, by LA-based Anna Ash.

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I'll also be doing a QC-area event in July, at the Bettendorf Public Library. As a part of the library's "Summer Shorts" program, I'll be discussing my stories "Peloma" & "Consent" on Wednesday, July 16th at 1:00 in the Malmros Conference Room.

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Two more things:

After I posted my old story "About to Drop" on here a couple weeks ago, Kenneth Nichols wrote a very cool response to it over at his Great Writers Steal blog. You can read it here.

The latest issue of Quiddity is out and contains my story "I Later Learned the Fish was a Gar," which won the magazine's Teresa A. White Award. Quiddity also has an excellent podcast, and if you go here, you can listen to an interview with Katherine Vaz conducted by Amy Sayre-Baptista, and me, reading that little award-winning story of mine.

Ten years ago, in the Spring 2004 issue of Sycamore Review, I published my second short story. I was in grad school then, and it was maybe the third story I'd written during my time in Carbondale.

I'd been having a hard time figuring out story structure, and what makes a story a story. Essentially, I'd spent too many years reading sentences for their beauty and sounds and rhythms while paying no attention at all to what the words themselves in those sentences might be saying.

My friend Ben mentioned that he had kind of "outlined" some of his favorite short stories, so that he could figure out what the scaffolding holding up those stories looked like. I thought this seemed like a fine idea, and one day when I was in the library reading some Donald Barthelme, I decided to map out a little three-page story in one of his collections. Then I started writing what eventually became "About to Drop" by using the same pattern of images Barthelme had used in his story. I thought of it like juggling, in a way. Where Barthelme talked about X, I discussed Y. Only my story became quite a bit longer, which meant at some point I had to start improvising the pattern, or using some variation of it.

It's a story I still like--mostly because it manages to surprise me whenever I re-read it. However, I decided not to include it my story collection when I was sending it out to contests the last two years before it was picked up, for reasons I'll keep to myself for now, so that you can get to the story itself, if you're so inclined.

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About to Drop

My boyfriend Lucas and I were thirty-seven minutes into the trip when our cat Moonshine Eyes shit in his carrier.

The smell in the car was awful. Lucas said, “I think Mooney just grew a second tail.”

We were in Nashville, Illinois, headed north, to visit Lucas’s parents for Thanksgiving. I rolled down the window, told Lucas to pull over at the Amoco. When we stopped, the sky overhead was flat and colorless as a polar bearskin rug. The sky was a dead animal.

I was already a little anxious about the trip. Lucas and I had been together seven years, but I never liked visiting his parents. Lucas’s mother, Deb, wanted to be my sister, my girlfriend, my mother-in-law. Deb wanted me to give her a grandchild.

About a year ago, Deb bought a bird, a cockatiel. She named her Baby, said the bird was the grandchild I never gave her. Baby died two weeks later because she was a female, because she had an egg inside her that wouldn’t pass. Deb knew Baby was sick—she kept falling off her perch onto the floor of her cage—but Deb didn’t know the illness was caused by an egg that couldn’t get out. She came home one day and Baby was lying at the bottom of her cage in her own shit, stiff.

Deb bought a second bird, a male, and named him Baby Too. Baby Too was just like Baby and just like every cockatiel you’ve ever seen: yellow and gray with globes of orange on his cheeks, stupid eyes, an improper and persistent little mouth.

This woman Deb and I could never be sisters. She’s into her appearance, for one thing. She manicures her nails, paints them the color of blood. She drapes herself in cashmere. And her hips! The woman’s hips are so wide they’re like joke hips, like prosthetic attachments I keep waiting for her to remove.

Plus, Deb does obscene things with that bird of hers, that grandchild I never gave her.

Lucas and I never wanted to get married. Lucas worked in a pork-processing plant, a place that made bacon, but he wanted to be a writer. He had an office where he wrote, behind our house, in what used to be a tool shed. Most of his stories were about men and women who are married and sad. His characters drink too much, work bad jobs, and talk around one another about the lives they would rather be living.

I thought his stories were pretty good. They have these moments of odd beauty, the way real life does sometimes. In one of his stories, an old couple, husband and wife, are about to take their mutt, this real mangy thing, eighty years old or so, a real dog-hero, to be put to sleep. It is winter. They let the dog run around in the snow one last time before their trip to the vet, when an icicle falls from the roof of the house and kills him. The story ends with the old couple trying to break through the snow and ice so they can dig a hole and bury the dog. The old man and woman light a fire on the snow and drink wine, each of them thinking about the other one dying, and eventually, the heat from the fire warms the earth enough they’re able to break through.

Like I said, his stories have an odd kind of beauty.

Not all of his stories are fatalistic that way, though. Another story ends with a man and his daughter on their front porch. The man’s wife has left them. He is drunk and unsure how he is going to parent his daughter all by himself. The end of the story takes place in the fall, at dusk, with the sun setting. The man’s head is spinning and he is imagining all the horrible ways he may screw up his daughter’s life, when he sits down with her on the steps of their front porch and brushes her hair. Lucas does a great job describing the girl’s hair and the way her drunken father combs it with a pink brush and then French-braids it with trembling fingers. The dad says something I can’t remember to his daughter when he’s finished and hands her a mirror that he has dropped and cracked so she can see how beautiful she is.

The story really isn’t bad.

The thing that bothered me about Lucas’s stories was that they all, every single one of them—before the beautiful and heartbreaking parts—begin with a man saying something about his wife.

My wife thinks irrational things about household appliances.

Sometimes, my wife eats spaghetti and meatballs with her bare hands.

You get the picture.

Around the time Mooney shit in his carrier, on our way to visit Deb, Lucas hadn’t been writing much. He was spending a lot of time in his office, but he hadn’t been showing me any pages he’d written. I think he may have been out there talking to Deb about asking me to marry him.

Lucas’s brother, Trent, has a wife. Her name is Traci. Trent and Traci. It’s a little disgusting. Both Trent and Traci are beautiful and intelligent and ambitious—a dangerous combination of traits if you ask me. Trent is a lawyer with a linebacker’s body. Traci’s a pediatrician who looks like an aerobics instructor. She is the most intelligent woman ever whose name ends with an “i.” You know what I mean now by dangerous. They were together only six weeks when Trent popped her the question and Traci said yes. Deb was ecstatic.

Before we met, Lucas used to be quite attractive. I've seen pictures. But by the time we got together he had it in his head to write those sad and beautiful stories he wrote, and he’d begun to sabotage his good looks. He gained weight. He religiously avoided the sun, wore lots of corduroy. He shaved the hair that grew between his eyebrows because he wanted it to come back in fuller. Lucas thought a person needed to be a little ugly to find true beauty. He thought his less-than-perfect looks were an important part of his vision as an artist.

I used to think it was kind of cute. But that Trent—when he wasn’t talking, when he was just sitting on Deb’s couch with his mouth closed—he was something to look at.

I asked Lucas once why all of the characters in his stories are married, why he can’t just write about people who aren’t married but are in relationships, the way we were. I wanted to know why he didn’t write stories about people like us. He told me he wanted to write about real life and that people in real life get married, the same way they find religion, drink too much, and work shitty jobs.

I wanted to ask: Where does that leave me?

Where does that leave us?

I have no family. Lucas was it for me. I was working, though. I taught at the Big Top Early Learning Center, where I was in charge of a group of four-year-olds. My favorite student was a girl named Gully. She was the shortest girl in class, round-cheeked and pigtailed. She dressed in stained little knee-length dresses, dirty white socks, scuffed black shoes. I’m talking adorable.

For the first two months I had her in class Gully wore sunglasses. Adult sunglasses, Raybans, the surfer not the aviator kind, much too large for her face. She wore the sunglasses to school in the morning and left each day with them still attached to her tiny head. She walked around the playground in them at recess, and during naptime, she closed her eyes behind their lenses. At story time, she was there, cross-legged on the rug, the sunglasses dangling crooked and perfect between her pigtails.

Some of the other teachers worried. “It’s a sign,” they said. “That girl is hiding from something.”

I liked Gully and her sunglasses. She gave them up, though, and started carrying around a plastic wheel of cheese. The edge of the wheel was orange, its center: sunshine-yellow. Gully found the cheese at the bottom of a box of toys at school. She carried the cheese under her arm everywhere she went—to the bathroom, to the water fountain. She spent nights and weekends at home with it. I imagined her putting that wheel of cheese on the dining room table while she ate, and tucking it under the covers with her at night when she went to bed.

“Something’s going on at home,” the other teachers said. “Something’s not right.”

I loved Gully with that wheel of cheese. I only wish she hadn’t given up the sunglasses.

Gully forgot to take the cheese home with her over Thanksgiving break. When Lucas and I pulled over at the Amoco, the orange-and-yellow wheel of cheese was in the backseat of our car, next to Mooney’s cat carrier.

“At best,” the teachers said, “it’s unhealthy.”

They hadn’t seen Deb and Baby Too. Deb fed the bird bits of celery directly from her own mouth. The bird’s beak would jab between Deb’s teeth, and she would hold it there between her lips. She kissed the bird this way, too, mouth-to-beak, and Baby Too knew and replicated the kissing sound Deb made each time their lips touched. Deb taught Baby Too to say, “Come on, give me a kiss,” and they would say it to one another for hours, kissing off and on the whole time.

Besides that, Deb let Baby Too shit on her, literally. She draped towels over the shoulders of her cashmere sweaters and let the bird drop his ashy-green pellets all over her while he was perched there.

This was the woman who wanted me to bless her with a grandchild.

If I could have been guaranteed a girl like Gully—adorable and individual, a girl who wore shades in the bright blank face of humanity—I might have tried to get pregnant. I might have wanted to marry Lucas.

Lucas and I used to play a game called “The-Baby-Is-Born-With.” One of us would describe a particular baby-deformity and then the other would have to name the child cleverly, taking this deformity into account.

The baby is born with a red splotch on his belly. What do you name him?

Mark.

The baby is born with a ridge on his skull that makes his head look a little pointed. What do you name him?

Spike.

Some of these got a little tasteless. We stopped playing after what Trent and Traci went through.

Trent and Traci would have had a beautiful baby. The baby would have been a genderless, freakish combination of the two, a supermodel with brains and muscles, more dangerous than dynamite.

But Traci couldn’t have kids. They went to specialists. Traci took pills, got injections, prayed, cried. Nothing worked. So they returned to their ambitions—lawyering and doctoring—with otherworldly and heartbreaking dedication.

This devastated Deb. This was the reason Deb was leaning on me, wanting me to be her sister, her girlfriend, her daughter-in-law. This was the reason she wanted me to become her and then marry her son.

I thought about buying a bird, to give Deb and me something to talk about besides grandchildren and to keep Mooney and me company when Lucas was out in his office shining his dark light on the human condition.

I went to the pet store, walked past the lizards and fish, the snakes and the gerbils, and found a cage of cockatiels at the back of the store. I kept my distance at first, and looked at them from across the aisle, my back to an aquarium filled with mice. Each bird looked just like the other. Each bird looked like Baby Too. When I worked up the nerve to approach the cage, one of the birds said, “Shhhh.” The rest replied, “She’s coming.”

The woman working the counter tried to stop me on my way out.

“Can I help you with something?” she said. “Ma’am?”

“No, she isn’t,” I said and kept on going.

Before we even stopped at that Amoco I was worried that Lucas was going to ask me to marry him, that he was going to want babies. I was worried that if Deb could convince a guy who used to shave between his eyebrows to make the hair there thicker—thicker!—to buy into her racket, then there must something wrong with me. I was worried Lucas wanted me to be more like his mother: manicured, pretty, married.

What I wanted to tell him was: No woman my age has hips that big.

For Gully, at the Amoco, I bought a pair of sunglasses while Lucas wiped out Mooney’s carrier. Back at the car, Mooney was sleeping in the backseat in his clean carrier, next to the wheel of cheese, but there was no sign of Lucas.

I put on the sunglasses and wandered around to the back of the building. Out back there was a small chapel, more like a big doghouse, really, with brown siding and a steep little roof, a bronze cross on top. A sign attached to the chapel said something about the best little chapel in Little Nashville.

I heard Lucas call my name from inside the chapel.

The path that led to its door was made of wooden planks. They creaked under my feet. The air smelled like gasoline. I could see Lucas through a small window in the side of the chapel, craning his neck, getting a good look at the place. Gold reflected off his face, as if there was something inside the chapel that glowed.

I imagined Lucas beginning a story like this: My wife and I were married in a chapel behind the parking lot of an Amoco station.

He called my name again.

I realized I wasn’t breathing, my feet were moving in tiny steps.

I still had on the sunglasses, and I wanted to see what the colorless sky looked like through the dark lenses. When I looked up, the sky was alive.

A wave of birds was flying towards me. Grackles, sparrows, I don’t know what kind of birds they were, some species that migrates in winter. The birds looked identical to one another from where I stood, but the shape they made in the sky was beautiful.

There were hundreds of them, thousands, spread out across the sky like one giant living thing.

“You’ve got to come in here,” Lucas said from inside the chapel. “You’ve got to see this.”

And then the birds were directly overhead.

They were like a curtain falling out of the sky above me, a dark curtain made of wings and beaks and feet, a curtain that extended forever across the sky and looked like it was about to drop, at any moment, right on top of us.

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My boyfriend Lucas and I were thirty-seven minutes into the trip when our cat Moonshine Eyes shit in his carrier.

That’s how Lucas would begin the story of the end of our relationship. And he would end it with that enormous wall of birds overhead, with him in the chapel about to propose to me, and with me outside the chapel, just a few minutes from telling him no. The story would be full of implication and things left unsaid, and it would have an odd kind of beauty, just like the rest of them.

And I would want to ask him: Where does that leave me?

Where does that leave us?

One night not long before our trip to visit Lucas’s parents for Thanksgiving I dropped by Lucas’s office. He wrote on a typewriter he kept on one of those little-kid desks, with the slanted wooden tops you can lift up, and he sat in the little-kid chair with his corduroy-clad legs stuffed up against the desk’s metal carriage.

I sat cross-legged on the floor next to his desk. The shed’s walls were papered with the first lines of about a hundred potential stories:

My wife is Illinois’ third-ranked papier-mâché artist.

My wife twitches in her sleep like a wounded animal.

“Lucas,” I said, “how serious are you about being a writer?”

The furry space between his eyebrows creased. “What do you mean?” he asked.

I told him that I thought he should give up his job at the pork processing plant, that if he were truly serious about writing we should move to New York or Los Angeles. “No writer ever came from Murphysboro, Illinois,” I said.

“Aww, Gwen,” Lucas said. He leaned back in his little-kid desk, and its hinges creaked. “There’s nowhere in the world I’d rather be.”

Nowhere in the world.

I thought of it as a place, like New York or Murphysboro, like the Big Top Early Learning Center.

Nowhere.

The truth is, I wanted to end the story of the end of my relationship with Lucas in the same place he would have, with that flock of birds overhead. I wouldn’t have to light the fire that way, to break through the ice.

Not marrying Lucas, it was more than just not wanting to have kids, more than not wanting to become Deb. But naming a fear, saying out loud what you’re afraid of, kind of erases its seriousness.

So imagine, instead, the thing that scares you so much you can’t name it. Imagine it about to drop from the sky, out of nowhere, a thousand birds descending all at once. It’s easier that way. It’s easier not asking Gully, “Why the sunglasses? Why the cheese?” And the truth is, I like easy. It’s the nowhere I would rather be. The place where all those things that are about to drop hang suspended for a minute or two, right before they come crashing.

I spent much of April reading and thinking about poetry, and now it's May, Short Story Month. I try not to be biased, but the short story is probably my favorite literary form.

Way back in 2006, I published what I think was my fifth short story, and the second one I'd published online. The story was called "Estate Sales," and it was accepted and published at juked. A lot of time has passed since then, but in the month of September, 2006, when "Estate Sales" was published, juked also published stories by Mary Miller, Claudia Smith, and Justin Taylor, among many talented folks. I was grateful to John Wang for agreeing to publish my story--and for helping me to make it better. I was also grateful to him for all of the great and inspiring work he was publishing back then.

And to be honest, juked is still publishing stuff I find exciting. It's always worth checking out.

In honor of Short Story Month, here's "Estate Sales" as it appears in my collection, Tell Everyone I Said Hi.

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Estate Sales

My mother-in-law, Amanda, kicked the bucket and my father-in-law, Bill, started going to estate sales.

Bill drives a boxy red Ford truck with a handmade, wood-and-welded-iron bed extending from the cab. He spent two months of his retirement building this truck bed, and it’s a sturdy, monstrous-looking thing. On the highway, he cruises steadily at forty-five miles per hour, and I often pass him in the morning when he is on his way to a sale somewhere in Illinois and I am on my way to the university where I teach. On clear, fogless mornings, I know it’s his truck from about a mile back.

Bill used to be a mechanical engineer, but since his retirement, he’s doing his best to look like a hillbilly—growing his hair and his beard long and brown and scraggly. When I notice his truck’s handmade bed up ahead of me on the road, I sometimes get a glimpse of his brown beard blowing out the open window of his driver’s side door. He looks like something from another era, but he’s a whiz with email, and he carries a cell phone.

Sometimes, when I’m behind him on the road, I’ll call him on his cell phone to find out where he’s headed. He tells me the name of the town, and what the sale is featuring: a hay baler, thirteen years of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, tools. He usually sounds pretty excited, pretty with it for a widower. He’ll ask me about Claire, my wife and his daughter, and about what I plan on teaching that day. For a wannabe hillbilly, he’s respectful of the liberal arts. At some point, I’ll pass him, beeping the cruddy horn of my Prius as I pull up alongside him. I’ll show him the palm of my right hand, in a little wave, and he’ll give me a two-finger deal, a kind of sideways peace sign. I’ll tell him good luck at the sale, and we’ll hang up.

This morning, I see the enormous bed of Bill’s truck ahead of me on the road and a ribbon of his beard streaming out his open window. I whip out my cell and call him, and the phone rings four or five times before he picks up. “Gabriel,” he says. He never calls me by my full name. It’s usually “Gabe,” sometimes just “G.”

“William,” I say back.

Bill sighs into the phone, and something inside me makes my foot tap the brake a couple times to slow down the car.

I wait for him to say something, to ask me about Claire, or what story I am going to teach that day, and when he doesn’t speak, I get nervous and break the silence. “On your way to a sale?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “I’m out in the woodshop, stripping an old school desk.”

I can hear the wind blowing through his window, and the same NPR station I’m listening to playing behind his voice. I wonder if he can’t see me yet in his rearview mirror, and I slow my Prius down even more.

I could call him on the lie, try to make a joke out of it. “Really, William,” I could say. “That isn’t your Ford I see half a mile ahead of me? That’s somebody else’s beard I see fluttering out the driver’s side window?”

Bill’s hairy cheeks would flush pink up there in his cab, and he would chuckle a little. “Well, actually,” he would say. And then we would reconcile the thing, just like that.

Instead, I sit here listening to the wind coming through his window, to the radio. I think about how since Amanda passed, Bill’s spent hours wandering through dead people’s houses, looking at their paintings hanging on the walls, and their televisions, and salad spinners, all of it for sale. I think about all the times he’s loaded the monstrous back end of that truck with other people’s stuff and how, once he gets home, he piles it all up in his garage, and woodshop, and living room. Lately, when Claire and I go to visit him, it’s like walking through a junk shop, just trying to get to the bathroom or the refrigerator. It’s something I could probably make fun of him for, or at least offer to help him get organized, but I keep quiet. Maybe someday I’ll wake to find Claire not breathing in bed beside me, and things’ll change.

For now, I reach up and turn the volume of my radio down all the way, and I hear Bill’s voice. “Gabe?” he says. “Gabe. You there?”

I wonder how long he’s been saying my name, how long I’ve been imagining myself inside his house.

Up ahead, I see his brake lights flash two times, and I worry I’m caught. I tap my own brakes again.

I’m doing about twenty-eight. I’ve never seen the highway at this speed, and it’s no more majestic: row after row of corn and soybeans; a few pine windbreaks between the homesteads.

“Yeah, Bill,” I say. “I’m here.”

“So you on your way to school?” he asks.

“I’m just getting ready to leave the house,” I say, and for a second I am back in my own house, kissing Claire on the cheek, gathering my briefcase and cup of coffee, my keys. I get a feeling inside me I’ve never actually had when leaving the house in the morning. Even the soybean fields look a little different, greener. “Good luck with that desk,” I tell him.

“Oh, it’s being a bear,” he says. “Some clucks painted the thing white.”

“Some clucks,” I repeat, and we tell one another goodbye and hang up.

Without the radio going, I can hear the zipping sound my tires make on the road. I see Bill’s brake lights flash again, and I tap mine just the same.

I set the cruise control at twenty-five, let him widen the gap between us.

I took the above photo about thirty minutes ago. I like when melted snow reveals things that have been hidden for weeks, months.

I have a few brief things to cover here. Up first is the obligatory AWP events schedule run-through:

Thursday, 2/27 at 10:30
Willow Room, Sheraton, Seattle

How Many Readers is Enough? (Valerie Vogrin,  Kelcey Parker,  Allison Hedge Coke,  Chad Simpson,  Kellie Wells) Using this provocative question as a starting point, panelists at various stages in their writing lives will examine the idea of the writer’s career. In a world that tends to value completed, marketable products—the success of which is measured in terms of sales figures, Amazon rankings, and the awarding of prestigious prizes, etc.—how do we view our own ongoing creative work? How do we maintain our affiliation to the less tangible incentives for writing, such as connecting with readers?

Friday, 2/28 at 3:00
AWP Bookfair

Marie-Helene Bertino & I will be signing copies of our books. Come by and say hi.

Saturday, 3/1 at 10:30
Room 304, Western New England MFA Annex, Level 3

The Short Story is Dead, Long Live the Short Story: A Reading from Prize-Winning Story Collections. (Xhenet Aliu,  Marie-Helene Bertino,  E.J. Levy,  Hugh Sheehy,  Chad Simpson) Join the winners of three prestigious short story awards, The Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, as they read selections from their debut collections and discuss publishing via the contest circuit rather than through traditional publishing channels.

Jane's making the trip to Seattle, too, and we also have plans to visit the Seattle Art Museum, and Bainbridge Island, among other places. If you have any suggestions about things we should check, holla at me.

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Quiddity International Literary Journal and Public Radio Program has posted Episode 7.2 over at their website. Here's the description of the program:

Finding Place in the Placelessness: Chad Simpson and Monica Berlin talk with assistant editor John McCarthy about the under-appreciated, rich culture and beauty that is thriving in the Midwest in part one of this two part special celebrating what it means to be Midwest. This show was done in collaboration with Museum of Americana as part of their Midwest-themed issue.

It was a lot of fun driving down to Springfield with Monica and hanging out with Jim & John, who are both pretty awesome. And a bonus: For some reason, I don't hate the sound of my voice in this. Maybe I'm just getting more used to it.

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And speaking of that Midwest-themed issue of Museum of Americana: It's live and it features work by all kinds of people I've known and admired over the years, including Monica Berlin, Curtis Crisler, and Steve Trebellas. While you're over there, be sure to check out the art & photography section, too, which features great work from Daniel Farnum, Andy Mattern, and Susan Moore.

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Lastly: Issue 2 of Winter Tangerine Review is out and contains my story "Resources." I'm still waiting on my issue to arrive, but it looks like it's going to be a good one. Plus, the editors have kindly nominated "Resources" for a Pushcart Prize.

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I think that's everything. If it's not, I promise, you'll never know what you might have missed.

Last October 1st, Jane and I ate cake and drank Prosecco to celebrate the release of Tell Everyone I Said Hi. The last couple weeks, I've been wondering what it means for a book to turn one year old. Specifically, I've been wondering what that number might amount to in human years. It might be argued that literature lasts forever, that this book of mine is but an hour or half a day old, but I think we all know that's not really true. Still, it's been a fun year. I kept my expectations low, and they were exceeded times roughly a million.

Since I last updated this blog, a few things have happened. But first, a little story: Before I went to graduate school, I was working as a juvenile probation officer. It was a tough gig, and I was pretty good at it. Most of the hours I spent away from juvie, I was reading and writing, trying to get better at this thing I loved. This was a while ago, 2000-2002. Jane and I were living in Champaign-Urbana. During that time, I found Dan Chaon's book Among the Missing at the local bookstore. I'd never heard of Dan Chaon, but I saw that it was a collection of stories, and I checked out the blurbs. The blurbs, and this was when the book was in hardcover, were amazing. I think Lorrie Moore wrote one, and Michael Chabon, and Jean Thompson. All of these writers I loved and admired. I bought the book and started reading it that night when I was on break at the detention center. It blew me away. I mean, it filled me with envy. I wished I'd written each and every one of that book's stories.

Later that week, my friend Aggie Zivaljevic told me about a book she'd just read called The Esther Stories by Peter Orner. Aggie had read a few of my early attempts at writing, and she saw something in Orner's work that she thought I might appreciate. I made another trip to the bookstore, grabbed a copy, and began reading, again, that night on break at the detention center. And again, I was just blown away, filled with envy and awe. I don't think I've ever again read two books back-to-back that impacted me so deeply.

Fast forward a dozen or so years, and I'm working as a professor. One of my colleagues just so happens to be pretty good friends with Peter Orner, and Peter, well, he has a new book out, a collection of stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, so this colleague of mine was bringing him to campus. This was a couple weeks ago. Here's a picture of Peter. Peter was coming down to Galesburg from Ann Arbor, and he was running a little late. The crowd had gathered, and one of my colleagues asked me to read something of Peter's to fill the handful of minutes between when people might start to get restless and Peter would arrive. I picked up a copy of The Esther Stories and read the first piece. Halfway through it, I was feeling the pull of the past, the duplex Jane and I had once inhabited in Urbana, the raw desire I had back then to string sentences together into story. I couldn't believe that I was standing before a room filled with people and doing this simple thing, reading a beautiful story out loud to them. The moment was powerful, somewhat crushing.

Fast forward a couple of weeks from that, and Jane and I were headed back to Champaign-Urbana for the Pygmalion Music Festival & the Pygmalion Lit Fest. This was just this past weekend. We arrived on Thursday, had drinks, saw some music. On Friday, Jane had to travel to Springfield for work, and I stayed at the hotel to work on the novel she and I have been writing together. That night, I read from that novel in a space just one block away from the coffee shop I used to write at in Urbana on my days off from the detention center. Later that night, I saw some more music, listened to other great writers read their stuff. Then, the next day, I was sitting in a beer garden in Champaign, and who was taking the stage? Dan Chaon. He read from his novel-in-progress, and that moment was not unlike the one I experienced when I was holding Peter Orner's book in my hands and reading from it to my colleagues, to strangers and my students.

All of which is to say, this life I've been living has felt somewhat charmed lately. In certain ways, it's felt unbelievable. And now this book of mine, it's turned one. This last trip we made to C-U, Jane and I didn't even drive by the detention center. We probably should have.

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In other news: I really dig Story Swaps, and earlier this summer, I contacted Scott Garson to see if he'd want to swap stories. He was up for it, so we got in touch with Faith Gardner, and she was game, too. I love the story of Scott's I read, but I'm not sure I did it justice. Scott, however, knocked my story out of the ballpark. I might never be able to read that thing again.

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A couple weeks before the Pygmalion Lit Fest, I traveled down to Macomb to give a talk and read some fiction at Western Illinois University. Barb Harroun was an amazing host, and I loved getting to meet and talk with some of her students. The talk I gave was on the impact place has had on my writing. I'm thinking I might post it here on this blog sometime.

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The week before I traveled down to Macomb, Jason Braun came up to Monmouth to interview me for his radio show, Literature for the Halibut, which airs on KDHX, out of St. Louis, about my upcoming talk. You can listen to the first part of the interview here.

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Lastly: I have a new story coming out in Winter Tangerine Review. It's called "Resources." I like this one, though it's encountered some resistance in the world. I'm glad it's finally found a home at WTR, and that they've given it some editorial attention, some care and love. I'll let you know when the issue has made its way into the world.

It's September, which means the grass here in Illinois is long dead. Soon, the leaves will change. Just yesterday, first-year students at Knox moved into the dorms. I met with seven of them and took them out to dinner to welcome them to campus.

It's September, and I haven't updated this blog all summer. A year ago, I was three weeks from TELL EVERYONE I SAID HI's officially dropping. Those were exciting times. Soon, the book is going to celebrate its first birthday, and to be honest, things are still pretty exciting.

Back in July, I was something of the writer-in-residence at yeah write!, an online writing community full of lively and engaged folks. Here's a link to the last post I wrote for them, which includes links to the first three.

More recently, Fourth River, the literary magazine of Chatham University, ran an interview I conducted with Abbey Hood. Abbey asked some great questions, was a real pleasure to correspond with. (Please ignore the photo posted with the interview. I've never liked it, and thought I'd had it scrubbed forever from the Internets. But I was wrong. And, yes, I'm a little vain. I apologize.)

A few reviews continue to trickle in. Here's one by R. Jess Lavolette that was published in the Notre Dame Review. Reviews unavailable online have also shown up in recent issues of Mid-American Review & Sycamore Review.

Lastly, I have some pretty cool events/readings coming up. The first one, soon, is in conjunction with this exhibit at the Western Illinois University Art Gallery. Jane and I traveled down there on Thursday for the exhibition's opening reception. Here's an Instagram pic from the event. I'm grateful to Barb Harroun & Ann Marie Hayes-Hawkinson for asking me to be a part of it all. On the 16th, I'll be giving a gallery talk at 12:30, talking about the impact of place. On the same day, at 4:00, I'll be giving a reading, doing a Q&A.

And there's more goings-on, including an upcoming trips to Champaign & Columbia, Missouri. Details can be found on my Events page, which I just updated.

I also spent some time tonight updating my Books page. Maybe check it out?

And speaking of books: I spent much of the summer co-writing a novel with Jane. So far, we think it's pretty good. If the whole thing doesn't blow up in our faces, we hope to have a working draft done by the beginning of the new year. Keep your fingers crossed for us?

The above video doesn't have much to do with anything, I suppose. Or maybe it has to do with everything.

The writer Andrew F. Sullivan, author of the June 2013-released story collection All We Want Is Everything (look at that cover!), from Arbeiter Ring Publishing in Canada, tweeted something at me today that went like this: A good recipe for sorrow: "Hold on Magnolia" from Songs: Ohia paired with a heavy dose of Chad Simpson's story "Tell Everyone I Said Hi."

I'd never heard of Jason Molina/Songs:Ohia/Magnolia Electric Co, but I read about him while listening to "Hold on Magnolia," and holy shit. My heart was breaking all over the place. And then there was that gorgeous footage in the YouTube video of the demolition derby in Columbia, Missouri.

Man.

I still don't know how I missed Molina for so long--and during all of those years when I was listening to Uncle Tupelo & Wilco & Son Volt & Jay Farrar & Whiskeytown & Ryan Adams. I'm going to buy the Songs:Ohia album right now.

But back to the reason for this post, which was just supposed to be my touching base, catching y'all up on things now that school's out and I have the time:

Right around the time I wrote my last blog post, an excellent review of Tell Everyone I Said Hi, written by Alexander Lumans, a guy who writes some pretty great stories himself, appeared in The Collagist. I really love this one. I mean, the dude quotes Mary Ruefle.

A little while later, I was interviewed by Sarahana Shrestha for The Short Form. She asked me some great questions, and I was grateful for her insights into the book. It's always a pleasure to talk with people who are smarter than you are, especially when they don't hold that kind of thing over your head. Plus: That website! I love the look of that thing.

And then a review of TEISH appeared in the PANK blog. This one was written by Dawn West, another great writer/thinker. I didn't think I could like a review as much as the one that Alex wrote for The Collagist, but this one is right up there with it, for sure.

I think that's everything for now. I'm entering summer mode--hunkering down to get some real work done. And I've been making some plans to give readings and visit classrooms come Fall & Winter. In case I haven't been clear: I'm still feeling pretty lucky about all this.