In our ongoing effort to celebrate friends of TBWCYL, Inc. this week, we want to take a moment to celebrate the short story collection This Land Was Made for You and Me by Pete Anderson of Pete Lit blog fame. The stories are all inspired by a series photos like the above that were "originally created under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal-era social program under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt." They are stories about small business owners and migrant farmers, pregnant laundresses and adolescent girls falling in love for the first time. The stories are very much like Pete himself, throwbacks to another time, nuanced, and dignified, with great attention to detail. For more thoughts from Pete himself on how this collection came about, not to mention a bonus excerpt, you can visit his blog here. As you can probably tell, we are big fans of Pete and we really enjoyed reading the collection, and so we were sorry to read in Pete Lit today that the collection was not one of the finalists in the DIAGRAM chapbook contest. We are confident publishers will be fighting over it soon, but In the interim please feel free to bug Pete about running more excerpts and we will pester him to submit either "Man at the bar on Saturday night" or "In front of the movie theater," to This Zine Will Change Your Life.Tuesday, June 17, 2008
This Land Was Made for You and Me.
In our ongoing effort to celebrate friends of TBWCYL, Inc. this week, we want to take a moment to celebrate the short story collection This Land Was Made for You and Me by Pete Anderson of Pete Lit blog fame. The stories are all inspired by a series photos like the above that were "originally created under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal-era social program under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt." They are stories about small business owners and migrant farmers, pregnant laundresses and adolescent girls falling in love for the first time. The stories are very much like Pete himself, throwbacks to another time, nuanced, and dignified, with great attention to detail. For more thoughts from Pete himself on how this collection came about, not to mention a bonus excerpt, you can visit his blog here. As you can probably tell, we are big fans of Pete and we really enjoyed reading the collection, and so we were sorry to read in Pete Lit today that the collection was not one of the finalists in the DIAGRAM chapbook contest. We are confident publishers will be fighting over it soon, but In the interim please feel free to bug Pete about running more excerpts and we will pester him to submit either "Man at the bar on Saturday night" or "In front of the movie theater," to This Zine Will Change Your Life.
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2 comments:
Wow, Ben, I'm flattered and very touched by your thoughts - thank you. I'll probably publish another excerpt on my blog soon, and might even submit a piece to TZWCYL (I happen to be a lifelong friend of your Assistant Flunky, and I'm sure he'll rubberstamp my story directly to your desk).
For anyone who can't wait that long and absolutely, positively has to see more material right now (there might be as many as three such people out there, only one of which hails from my immediate family), please note that "Man at the bar on Saturday night" has already been published (as "Deep in the Northwoods") at Wheelhouse:
http://www.wheelhousemagazine.com/archive/summer07/deep_in_the_northwoods.html
You're welcome, well-earned, and we look forward to the submission, as you know the Assistant Flunky has a lot of pull here at headquarters as well.
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